Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Rasputin the Mad Monk

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Finally saw Christopher Lee’s take on Rasputin. Rasputin the Mad Monk is a Hammer flick, a minor classic really, yet not as well known as their horror flicks. Rasputin was a historical character, after all, not supernatural. Yet Lee’s Rasputin is almost as creepy as his Dracula. Thoroughly over the top, sure, but a subtle, chatty French art film of a Rasputin would seem unbelievable. That’s the thing about Rasputin, nothing about him seems real. I can’t even think of another character in recent history as surreal as Rasputin. He’s thoroughly evil, sprung from a Russian fairy tale. You can put your finger on what makes Hitler or Charlie Manson so damn rotten. They are historically and scientifically explainable. But Rasputin? Really? You expect us to believe that? Well, yes. There are pictures, film, memoirs, witnesses. Rasputin existed in twentieth century reality and was documented thoroughly. He existed. Go figure.

Christopher Lee seemed made to order for the role. He certainly had Barbara Shelley’s number. As crazy and ridiculous the story is, it’s unnerving how much of the plot is based on reality. In fact, it stays clear of the really weird facts. You’d need an epic film for that, and David Lean was busy with Dr. Zhivago. A brilliant film, Dr. Zhivago, one of my favorites (I can hear the damn theme in my head as I type), but face it, it cries out for Rasputin. Rod Steiger could have done a great mad monk. A little chunky, maybe, but intense. Oh well. It wasn’t workable. You wouldn’t want a Rasputin pawing Julie Christie. It was unnerving enough with Barbara Shelley. She played a lady in waiting. She kept an eye out for little Alexei, the heir, famously hemophiliac. Those recessive genes kept popping up throughout the royal families of Europe, after fifty generations of cousins sleeping together. Alexei’s bleeding was Rasputin’s ticket into the Hermitage, the imperial residence. The Tsarina worshipped him. Did he bed her in real life? Probably not. There were plenty of others though. Duchesses and cabinet wives, ladies in waiting and silly rich girls. Rasputin got around. St. Petersburg was his paradise. The Great War put him right in center of power. As Russia’s armies were beaten on every front, the Tsarina would consult Rasputin, and she passed on his wisdom to the Tsar. A lot of prayer, a lot of spells. A lot of perks and feats and ambassador’s wives. A well hung man can go far in this world.

At last a couple princes figured with the Russian Empire on the verge of disintegration, it might be time to do in Rasputin. They made a sloppy job of it, poisoned him, shot him, beat him, tied him up and tossed him in the icy Neva River. He fought like a tiger to the end, and unnervingly took forever to die. They recreate much of this in the film, and Christopher Lee is fabulous as an outraged, dying, crazy violent Rasputin. The last we see of him is his corpse sprawled on the ice. The last we see of the real Rasputin is that corpse lying on a sledge, frozen solid, full of bullets, cyanide and legend. Word has it that part of him is in a jar in an erotic museum, but I find that too hard to believe.

Ahem.

Rasputin.

Rasputin. Neva say die.

The Informant

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The Informant (1935) is on, with Victor McLaglen in the title spot. One of the all time great big guy on celluloid performances. This is one doomed, dark, depressing, taut film. John Ford was about as far from Monument Valley as you can be. I love these flicks about The Troubles, I was raised hearing these stories and loathing the black and tans before I remember loathing anybody. The British machined gunned the people in the streets they told me. Grandpa put money in the hat at the bar. The queen can kiss my Irish arse, he said after a few too many. No one talked much about the IRA, too many bombings. But you knew where the sympathies were. I remember how he smirked when Mountbatten was blown sky high. Up the Republic, my grandfather would say, and sing the Rose o’ Tralee. His voice cracked where the melody soared. I still stop what I’m doing when I hear the song. I did tonight, early in The Informant, when the lad in the street sings it sweetly, almost spooky. The night is foggy and full of black and tans. They pat him down and he never misses a note. Black and Tans. I taste bile saying the words. When Wallace Ford takes down four of them before they he, Una O’Connor screams, but I cheered. Good boy I said. Up the rebels. Then I trailed off into more memories. Back East. Ribbons of green on St Patrick’s Day. Drunken little jigs and a little bit of heaven. There was no wearing the orange in Grandpa Nelligan’s house. He made me promise. I promised. I still don’t. If you swear it once, you swear it forever. A man is only as good as his word, he told me. I nodded childlike, sagely. Up the Republic he said. Up the Republic.

Victor McLaglen as Gypo Nolan.

Victor McLaglen as Gypo Nolan.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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Finally saw The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie last night. Maggie Smith, gorgeous locations, etc. It seemed a rather nothing story about an incredibly irritating Scottish teacher and her perfect little students. La creme de la creme she called them. She worshipped beauty, art, perfection, punctuality. It began to get more interesting. A few plot twists and character revelations developed–lust, weirdness, disturbing intimations of a warped sexuality. Then slowly she revealed a fascination for fascism. First in hints. A mention of Mussolini. A true Roman she told her students. The romantic definition of hero, the Shining Hero, something long since lost to us viewers in war and compromise and threats of nuclear annihilation. Finally she revealed herself as an out and out Fascist sympathizer. She showed the class slides of a holiday in Rome, a plaza full of uniformed Fascisti. She mixed with them, she said. They had excited her. She nearly panted at the memory. She remembered exactly what she’d been wearing. Somehow her own perfect attire had matched their perfect uniforms. That startled me. Fashion and fascism. How her personal Romantic ideal and the massed Fascist Ideal blended perfectly. Their muscularity and her femininity. Her sex, their power. Etc, etc. Come the Spanish Civil War the man of the hour became Franco. Oh she could go on about Franco. Near to swooning. I felt an automatic revulsion. We forget now that as many westerners supported the Nationalists as supported the Republicans, people like Evelyn Waugh, J.R.R. Tolkien, Salvador Dali, Wyndham Lewis and (of course) Ezra Pound. Even Gertrude Stein. Miss Brodie’s sympathies would not have been so shocking back then. Perhaps not really shocking at all. No more shocking than those enraptured by Stalin, perhaps even less so. Communists promised revolution and purges. Il Duce promised order. Brodie, we are told (by one of her skeptical students), was quite vocal about her sympathies. It became part of her curriculum. The humanities and fascism blending seamlessly. Her creme de la creme becoming perfect little fascists, she hoped. They didn’t, except for the simple, suggestible one who, swept up in Miss Brodie’s excitement, made for Spain to join her brother fighting for the Nationalists. The poor thing was machine gunned at the French border. Miss Brodie showed little remorse, as the girl had died for the cause, for the new order. A silly eighteen year old girl meeting a glorious death. A heroic death. Hints of ancient Greece. You and I know it was a squalid ugly death, terrifying, an utter waste. In my head I heard her screams. Miss Brodie’s other students, the poor girl’s friends, knew better as well. (Indeed we find out later that the dead girl’s brother was fighting for the Republicans, something that had never occured to Miss Brodie.) By this point the movie had slowly, subtly turned creepy, a fascinating look into just how high minded intellectuals bought into the Fascist ideology. How Mussolini and then Hitler had so many admirers in England, in Europe, throughout the Western world. And just how insidious a thing it was, this fascism, how it could mix with art and poetry and perfection, co-opt Romantic ideals, send middle class kids off in shiny uniforms to conquer and gas and execute and massacre without compunction, leaving tidy notes of how many were killed that day, how many men, women and children, and the inventory of what they left behind, hats, hair, overcoats, gold teeth. We think of Nazis as brownshirted thugs, but the SS took the best and the brightest. There were more brilliant minds in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt than ever joined the German resistance, many times more. Fascism in all its forms–Italian, German, Spanish, Romanian, Hungarian, English, all of it–was fundamentally an intellectual movement. A middle class movement, rooted in universities. Indeed, deep down it had begun in poetry and art. Italians shocked into a new reality, hard and unyielding, by the lunacy of the Great War. As the old world destroyed itself then, empires fell, monarchs executed, tradition and history tossed out the window, the world seemed  divided between the deary proletarian future of Bolshevism or the beautifully limned and muscular Fascism. I can’t fathom the appeal at all, that thing that sent chills up young fascist spine, made the hair stand up on their arms, rushed the blood to the brain and loins. But you can see it in Miss Brodie, in her prime, remembering the musk of young rippling fascists on parade and taking unsaid fantasies with her to bed that night on a Roman holiday.

It took total annihilation to rid the world of Fascism. We lopped them off like a gangrenous limb. We hung the thugs and the intellectuals by the neck until dead or pulled their lifeless heads out of their kitchen ovens. We shot down Hitler Youth in their suicidal charges. We jailed nazi functionaries for years and put Ezra Pound in a cage. The trials were endless and humiliating, The denazification more so. Hitler shot himself in his bunker to avoid Mussolini’s fate dangling from a meat hook. Only Franco, smart enough to stay out of the War, survived the collapse of fascism, isolated and silent. Fascism as a living, growing ideology was dead.

Or so we thought. Some Nazis escaped and helped keep the idea alive in South America. Peron seemed fascinated by fascist demagoguery, Pinochet goose stepped with the best of them. But that was a more Latin American thing, more Franco than Italian, devoid of Nazi racial theory and efficiency, their armies incapable of anything but parades, torture and repression. But it’s the idea of fascism that remained in Europe. Some strangely replicating meme that grew from the wreckage of fascist empires. That weird, warped romance, the thuggish hero, the big black shiny boots. The websites full of hate and purity and uniforms and alternative history, A reich that will rise again. There aren’t many of these new fascists–they’ve come nowhere near to seizing power anywhere–but they are there, vocal and obvious and scary. In milder form they’ve influenced elections in France. In savage form they’ve made headlines in Greece. They’ve infected football crowds in Italy and even, shockingly, held rallies in Moscow complete with placards of Adolf Hitler himself. I ask myself just how warped a Russian must be to idolize the very man who tried to exterminate them. Now we’re told that nazi sympathizers pitched in and helped depose the old communist regime in Ukraine, much to the delight of Russian propagandists. If so, that would be the first constructive thing that fascists have done since their post war re-emergence. And what does that mean? I wonder if we’ll ever rid ourselves of the romance of fascism, if it will ever go away. Will it take a generation or centuries? Perhaps,like cancer, it’s built into the very DNA of European civilization, and it will never go away. Perhaps it will even come into intellectual fashion again, with Miss Jean Brodies teaching it to the creme de la creme.

Oh, the movie. It was good. It really was. I thought I was going to hate it, but I couldn’t tear myself away. Maggie Smith was splendid, of course. So were several of the girls. And the artist, though his lechery has not aged well since 1969. The scenery was gorgeous. And if the dialog was oh so precious in too many places, perhaps it might not be to a viewer in Great Britain. At least I told myself so. And yes, it’s utterly ridiculous to reduce a movie review to a tangent on fascism. There was much more going on. I certainly missed the point of the story. But I hadn’t really. It’s just that it was Miss Brodie the fascist that bothered me as I watched the movie. And still bothered me this morning as I drank coffee and listened to the rain, bothered me enough to write this. What an oddly horrible world it must have been where teachers taught fascism with art and etiquette and knew in their hearts they were right.

Raymond Chandler

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(2013)

Damn, man, I forgot.

I was gonna pass by Raymond Chandler’s place in Silverlake. Just drive by it. Slowly. Pass by slowly and think that Raymond Chandler used to live there. It was his birthday. He’d have been 125. People don’t get to be 125 years old. Not yet. And certainly not writers. Too many vices. Too little money. Too much truth, and lies. A lotta lies. But if you’re good no one can tell you’re lying.

He lived on Redesdale, on the eastside slope of Micheltorena Hill, maybe a third of the way down. The streets are like switchbacks there, the way they wind, and they send you back and forth, never really getting anywhere. You can get stoned and be lost forever up there, wending your way this way and that, at random. If you get to the top of Micheltorena Hill you can pull over. It’s dark there, with a view that goes all the way to Japan almost. The lights are intoxicating, scattered across the city’s plain, over that vast flat expanse of one story houses all the way to the beach. There would have been less lights in Raymond Chandler’s time. Less houses then. Less trees. Less cars. Less people, too. But the ones there were, what a lode of characters they must have been.

I started this a long time ago. I was gonna write about Raymond Chandler’s procrastination. But I waited so long I can’t remember just what I was going to write about. So now I’m never going to finish it. They call that irony. Like those pretty orchids reeking of corruption. Me, I like orchids. But I don’t write hungover.

The wife drew open the drapes and the sun is pouring in through the windows. There’s ten feet of window across, I think, another six feet high. You could see the whole city all the way to the ocean but for that ridge in the way. Because of it the rest of the world besides our hill and that hill and the little valley in between appears cut off from the rest of the city, the state, the planet. There’s just us and it, that ridge. It’s steep and green and cluttered with houses that go back to the late thirties and through the war years. We breathe art deco around here, scarcely notice it. The slightest little shop is deco, the fronts of houses, even an old gas station they just tore down and left an empty lot. Famous architects went nuts around the lake, building crazy wild modern homes for the moneyed hipsters of the day.  A lot of movie star money here once, long ago, a lot of industry people. A couple guys–now dead–told me about the old days. The castle across the way–it has multiple floors and a turret, and while it looks like a house from the front over there, it looks like a castle to us over here–would throw huge parties, with orchestras, and Judy Garland would sing into the wee hours, echoing everywhere, keeping people awake. Drove them nuts.

Raymond Chandler was gone by then, dead, unfinished. A little forgotten. Drunken writers, I mean the truly sodden, generally have to wait a generation to be discovered again. The people that knew them die, the fumes dispel, the sad later years are forgotten. Kids read the books, the wonderful classic books, and try to figure out what the hell is going on in The Big Sleep (I’ve watched it a dozen times, easy, and still I’m lost by the time he leaves the bookstore) and they marvel at just how good a writer Raymond Chandler was, and how he shaped in many ways who we are. You don’t live in Hollywood and thereabouts and not have your Philip Marlowe moments. The dame wraps her stems around the barstool and no way you’re not gonna answer her look, buy her a drink, take her up on the smoke. You might not even smoke cigarettes but there you are, looking cool, smoke wreathed around your head, thinking of detective novels and jazz and sex. I told a little prick off once, he was being an asshole to a couple dames next to me at the bar. He scuttled off, scared. I let him go. He gave me the eye. I laughed. The women laughed. He stumbled backward, fell. I reached out and helped him to his feet. Careful fella, you can break a leg that way. He laughed nervously and thanked me and came back to the bar. Scene ended. Just one of those things. Phil Marlowe wouldn’t have handled it that way at all. Phil Marlowe would have socked him one, the little wop, and the punch would catch him straight on the chin, knock him out cold. Glass jaw. The barroom beef would drag his crumpled form out and dump him on the sidewalk. The cops would pick him up. He’d come to, spluttering, say the wrong thing, get the hell beaten out of him. Thirty days. Later he and his paisans would come looking for revenge. Vendetta   A rough town this place used to be. Nothing hippie about it then. Men were men. Women women. They’d fight and fuck and cheat and fall in love. That took care of everything by the end of the book or the closing credits. The sad divorce tales were a generation in the future. Lana Turner. Mrs Robinson. One word: Plastics.  But for now, two words: It’s Chinatown.

Raymond Chandler didn’t write Chinatown, of course. Getting way off track. Free associating made up stories. They didn’t free associate in Raymond Chandler’s L.A. That was far in the future. Things were too tough to wander off into random connections. Stories needed structure, narrative, had to make some sense. Even The Big Sleep‘s screenplay pretends to follow a narrative. Bogart pulls it off. The breathless pace that allows it to work. Had they stopped still for a couple scenes, the unconnected dots would stand out, drive you nuts, ruin the movie. But they don’t. You blow through that like Illinois Jacquet blowing through Flying Home in 1946, the Basie band a great roaring machine behind him, unstoppable. That’s Bogie in The Big Sleep. Unstoppable. But you couldn’t fool Raymond Chandler. He sat in his upstairs studio office, smoking, pouring rye after rye, wondering if he could ever write a good story again. The secretary walked in, said something, walked out. He watched the seams disappear up the back of her legs. She swished, each step perfectly placed, like choreography. He wondered if her lipstick tasted like apple or strawberry. He wondered, wandered, stared out the window, and a story disappeared, forever.

Raymond Chandler’s pad, on the left hand side, in 1934. Great view of the Silver Lake reservoir…which he called Gray Lake. “The last time I had been in the Gray Lake district I had helped a D.A.’s man name Bernie Ohls shoot a gunman named Poke Andrews. But that was higher up the hill, away from the lake…. [The house] stood on a terrace, with a cracked retaining wall in front….” (The Goldfish, 1934)

Jax

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Jax in Glendale has shut down. I don’t think they had booked much in the way of jazz in years, though they certainly did at one time. I loved the place back then, tables so close you could stare right up into a horn’s innards and had to duck the spit valve. Saw moments of jazz brilliance there, incredible things. Wrote up a lot of Jax gigs in Brick’s Picks too, even filled the place on a couple occasions. Last night we were just remembering all those Thursday Nights with Jack Sheldon. Where do you start, Jack would sing, how do you separate the presence from the past? How do you deal with all the things you thought would last, that didn’t last? He’d lift his horn to his lips and solo, a beautiful take on the melody, exploring the tune, the room, his trumpet at last fading into air, just air, and then nothing. Outside Glendale was deathly still at 2 am, unaware that anything had happened at all. Jazz is a music of the now, improvised, unrecorded, leaving nothing but memories. Then the joints shut down and you drive past and remember. Where do you start?

Jax

Portrait of the writer as a young drummer.

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Thunderclap Newman

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Alas, Andy Thunderclap Newman has passed on. What a strange thing his namesake Thunderclap Newman was, and even stranger what a thing that Hollywood Dream LP was. I remember playing it in the car as I drove down Hollywood Blvd right after moving here in 1980, blasting the title cut out the window and thinking wow, I’ve made it. I wish there was a Hollywood, I sang along, just like there used to be, with long black cars and paper hoods and a film star on my knee. Except that my canary yellow (with grey primer) Buick Opel didn’t have a cassette player when I first moved to Hollywood, it had an AM radio, and unless KHJ was playing Something in the Air, Andy Newman’s unhurried piano never saw the inside of my beat up little car. Now, as I mash together memories, formats, and automobile sound systems I’m listening to an Accidents (long version) that I copped off the internet. Andy takes a wonderfully ancient solo like we’re watching Buster Keaton chasing his hat in a windstorm, so unhip it hurts. “I see Jimmy climbing on the milkman’s van, laughing,” sings Speedy, “on his feet were a pair of granddad’s shoes / Then I looked around / And he was gone / Are we to lose?” Then a melodic solo by Jimmy, a penny whistle, and more of Andy accompanying Buster Keaton. I recall how unpopular a party album this was at our pad. It was an acquired taste, like an aged but weird wine. Andy himself, I always thought, was even better on a b-side of Something In the Air called Wilhelmina that one can safely assume probably did not get as much airplay as the a-side. He sings nothing like Mick Jagger over a barrelhouse piano nothing like Keith Emerson and though Jimmy McCulloch does a very nice psychedelic fill it’s as unrock’n’roll a thing as you can imagine. I love it. Now Andy Thunderclap Newman is gone, following Jimmy McCulloch and Speedy Keen, and the band is gone too. Life is just a game, you fly a paper plane, there is no end.

Thunderclap Newman

Speedy, Andy, and Jimmy on the cover of Tiger Beat.

Hearing the music from inside

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Man, we were out late last nite–saw four great loud bands at Cafe NELA, the hangue de la hangues, to quote Le Figaro–and then got up this morning in time to trek down to the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. The Hermosa Beach Pier is probably as far as you can drive within Los Angeles County from our pad in Silver Lake without crossing any serious topography, but it was an easy enough drive, and there were 69 available spaces in the parking lot (according to the digital sign out on Hermosa Avenue), which is much cheaper than parking in Glendale, seriously. Plus the Lighthouse had no cover, cheap eats, good bloodies and a band so goddamn good I nearly burst into tears when they burst into Monk. It was Chuck Manning‘s gig, and he is one of those cats whose tenor chops just get better and better, and he had with him Theo Saunders on piano who was on fire, especially this stunning, extended solo on Footprints that is simply beyond my writing chops to describe. Just profound shit. It certainly put the heat on whoever followed it, but Sal Marquez came in with a beautiful, searching almost spooky solo on trumpet. Hell, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a solo like that before. Maybe I just haven’t been around enough, or maybe it was really that special. I can still hear it as I write this, the notes floating in the mental ether, hardening into long term memory. Chuck followed, roaring, getting the crowd riled up and yelling hey’s and alrights on this, the sabbath of all sabbaths. Then bassist Chris Conner laid into another of his superb solos. His ax is like three hundred years old, a lovely thing, and the ancient warmth of its sound seemed to double in that room. No one ever talks over Chris’s solos, everyone listens and breaks into applause. I did, loudly, probably too loudly. Then Joel Taylor, on drums, came in behind him, first under and inside Chris’s solo, and then in his own tumbling interpretation of the tune that was exciting to watch. Finally all came back in on the head and played it out, swirling and melodic, the melody shining. Amazing how much music you can find in such a deceptively simple little tune. The audience was ecstatic. The set was over.

We only caught the last set and a half, but it was perfection. It was real. It was jazz, genuine jazz, which I’d been craving like you cannot believe. A room full of old pals, too, refugees from better times, we sat and listened, eyes closed, hearing the music from inside and wishing it could go on forever.

Frank Sinatra, Jr.

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Frank Sinatra, Jr. has died.

He was the nicest guy, everybody said, and that means a lot in a business where not everybody is the nicest guy. He used to come to Catalina’s every once and while, the jazz spot in Hollywood, with his excellent orchestra and fine arrangements. He always got great reviews. It’s a great band, Don Heckman told me, and he’s a great guy, you should interview him. But I managed to miss him every time. Still, I figured the next time around I’d get an interview with him. Not talk about his dad, either, not the usual thing, but to talk about him, Frank Sinatra, Jr. Write up a nice story for the LA Weekly. But then there was a new editor, and he probably had no idea who Frank Sinatra, Jr. even was, and I was burnt out and didn’t feel like fighting with another new editor. So I split the gig and the interview never happened.

Now it’s too late.

I hadn’t actually remembered any of this until now. That’s probably the way it usually is, though, you never remember till it’s too late. I wonder how many of life’s potential happenings slip by like that, things that never bothered you much until you realize they can never happen. It’s not like you screwed up, really, it’s just that you never got around to it. Something always got in the way, and then it’s too late, and you dwell on it a little too much, and it becomes much better than it ever really was. A half assed notion becomes a tragedy, something to talk about half sloshed before your wide eyed friends, like a Frank Sinatra song a few drinks into the chorus, a little story I think you oughtta know.

So rest in peace, Frank Sinatra, Jr. It was a long and musical and quiet career. The public scarcely even knew. That was fine with you. No riding through desert towns with Ava Gardner, shooting out store front windows with a .38. Instead you buried yourself in music, working three times as hard as the guy off the street, singing, conducting, writing, being yourself. A life of pure big band creativity. A good thing.

I wonder if you’ll wind up out in the desert anyway, though, if they will lay you down by your old man. The desert is beautiful, hushed and spare, a dry wind blows through the poppies and the keening of far off coyotes can sound like horns in the night air.

Dances With Wolves

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The wife is watching Dances With Wolves. Russell Means nearly ruined the movie for me in an interview I read several years ago. Apparently Kevin Costner hired a Lakota Sioux woman to teach Lakota to the cast, only one of whom was a fluent Lakota speaker. Apparently no one told Costner that in Lakota, there is a male gendered form and a female gendered form. (I believe the technical description is “gender determined dialect variation”.) They are not radically different, it’s just that after some verbs, the men use one ending (or enclitic particle, to be technical), the women another. Imagine a verb suffix, but men use one suffix and women another, and though both suffix variants mean the same thing, it can sound funny when a man uses the feminine variant. Think of actor and actress, but instead of the terms meaning a man or woman who acts, an actor would be a man’s word for a person who acts, while actress would be the women’s word for someone who acts. But since, I believe, Lakota uses these gender specified enclitics in verbs but not nouns, a man would not say acting but actoring, and a woman would call acting actressing. These are all theoretical examples, since I have no idea what how to say acting in Lakota, and besides, Lakota is an agglutinative language, which means (oversimplifying to the point of absurdity) that you can have one word that we would have to write out as a sentence in English. For example, where we use whole words in a Sioux language you can use what linguists call particles, like how the syllable “ai”, added to a word, means smallness, so that there is a tribe named Yankton, meaning “Village-at-the-end” and a related tribe Yanktonai meaning “Little village-at-the-end”. I’m trying to describe why something would be funny in an agglutinative language by describing it in English, which is not agglutinative. Considering this is a one joke story, this seems like a ridiculous amount of work for nothing, and I am tempted to stoop to the methods of the radical hippie linguists in the late sixties who would spice up dry transformational grammar with obscenities, sex, drugs and rude jokes about Nixon. [Spiro Agnew][‘s] [Tricky Dick][‘s] [slick] [dick trick] [fix] [nix][ed]. I guess you had to be there.

Anyway, you could see how odd it would be for a man to say someone (doesn’t matter what sex) was actressing if actressing was a word that, by grammatical rules, was supposed to be used by women. It’s not a concept easy for English speakers to grasp, for one thing English has almost no clitics whatsoever–I’ve is one, and we’ve–and if there are gender specified words that mean the same thing, I can’t think of any. But imagine if women called any shirt a blouse (which came from the French, via the medieval ruling class) and men called a blouse a shirt (the Anglo-Saxon peasant’s term). It’s true that women sometimes call a blouse a shirt (my wife, for instance, who I believe is descended from a long line of Sioux contraries), and men will sometimes call a blouse a shirt. But a man will not call his shirt a blouse. If I showed up at the pub bragging about my new blouse, the guys would laugh and the women would correct me. (This is actually a joke in Slap Shot, by the way, the French Canadian goalie player losing at poker says fuck, I lose my blouse. His teammate says no, it’s shirt, shirt.) But I can’t think of any English verbs like this, men using one and women the other though they mean exactly the same thing. Or a verb followed by, say, a preposition that differed depending if a man or woman was using it. For instance if a man said he danced with her, but a woman said he danced at her, and they mean the exact same thing, it’s just that the man says dance with and the woman says dance at. Which, I think, is a better approximation of how these gender defined enclitics work in Lakota, and it’s part of official Lakota grammar, and Lakota grammar nazis would get all over my case if they heard me, a big gnarly dude, say she danced at me. And while that example does not explain how enclitics actually work (it gets really complicated), but it helps describe how awkward it could be if you used the wrong gender enclitic. Awkward and funny.

It’s not like there’s a lot of these gender separated enclitics in Lakota, just a handful, and I suppose the instructor figured that teaching something as complex as Lakota to English speakers (even English speaking Indians) was hard enough without getting into the finer points. And they are subtle–I don’t even think you’d notice the difference if you were a Yankton Sioux speaker, which is so close to Lakota as to be mutually intelligible, like Irish-English and American English. Lakota is unique, among the five languages of the Sioux language family, in having some enclitics for men and some for women. So, either because it was easier, or in an unheralded act of First Nation feminism, the woman instructor taught all the men the women’s endings. Any Lakota speaker could understand what they were saying, as the meaning was the same, and apparently men and women sometimes use each other’s verb suffixes and no one thinks anything about it. And it’s not like they came up in every line of dialogue.

But then it’s one thing to use the occasional female variant of the verb ending (or enclitic, suffix, whatever) and quite another to be dressed up in war paint and using only the female variants. So the actors playing fearless Sioux warriors would suddenly, mid-sentence, be talking like a woman. Talk about code switching. Russell Means and a bunch of his smartass Lakota buddies went to see the movie together and couldn’t stop laughing. Means didn’t like the movie anyway (you remember Lawrence of Arabia, he aaid, well this was Lawrence of the Plains), and sitting through three hours of something you don’t like would be bad enough even without all these actors from other tribes portraying Lakota Sioux men talking like women. And while Plains Indians may be stoic, just like in the movies, they are also funny as hell. You can imagine Russell and his buddies snickering the first couple times, then giggling, and finally laughing out loud, just waiting for the next feminine verb ending. It was like Some Like it Hot, Kevin Costner style. But only if you actually speak Lakota, which about six thousand people do. Not me, though. I just read the subtitles.

And yes, I know I never mentioned the storyline once but I stopped paying attention to the story an hour ago. It’s a good story, well acted, beautifully shot, but instead of watching I’ve been writing this and listening to the sound of Lakota Sioux, the phonemes like notes and every sentence a melody.

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