Category: You Have Got to Check This Out

Song written by David Ackles
Performed by David Ackles

Anyone who has ever scanned through old photographs knows the power of the frozen moment from the past, but no other art form elicits loss, reverie, and longing quite like the combination of lyrics and music. Certainly, a beloved tune from our youth will always take us back, but that song that can make you feel someone’s loss and pain- that is empathy that builds our interconnectedness and our humanity. More than that, a song which creates fellow feeling for the disenfranchised must be acclaimed in any democratic society.

David Ackles was a master songwriter with a wicked way with words- just check out the rest of his debut eponymous record. I probably should not have selected only one song, but Down River is one of the great songs of loss and regret from the past half century. The accomplishment leaves many in the dust. Try listening to it on a long car ride late at night when your copilot is nothing but ghosts. Try singing along and just fight back the slow cracking of a polished exterior.

Record labels seemed to seek out great singer songwriters in the Sixties and Seventies whether or not they worked in the folk vein: Elton John and Carole King became famous, while Laura Nyro and Leonard Cohen had their followers, but they remained short of the top charts. Of course, there were Jackson Brown and Warren Zevon… and David Ackles. Did you ever see a David Ackles recording in a college dorm? Would you remember it?

When we hear one combination of sounds, we may recognize it as musical while another array becomes mere noise. Certainly, some of that is structure imposed on sound, but beyond structure is the recognition that a certain pairing of notes works while another pairing does not. Ackles version of his own song is a tremendous display of arrangement and production. Spooky Tooth covered the tune with a vocal drenched in echo and sung too high, though let’s focus on the gifts offered by the original. And I dare say that any particular affinity is always subjective to the observer in the given moment. When enough people agree that a given pairing is successful, then that consensus becomes popular appreciation. On the other hand, popular appreciation has not always followed great art. Hmm…

The trope of encapsulating one side of a conversation in lyrics is not terribly unique, but difficult to pull off without deteriorating into self-parody. Bruce Springsteen began plumbing it admirably from the very beginning of his recording career, but few could emulate his songwriting skills. It is a style that invites the listener in and almost demands that you take a side, either as the speaker or the responder. Moreover, the best of this format demands that you look at both sides of the conversation. Rosie is not wrong or right. She got on with her life. Our sympathies may lie with the speaker as his point of view is most clearly represented, but the brilliance of Down River is that you can feel his ambivalence. He knows that she made a good decision, even so far as not writing once he was sent away. Lest we forget, there is also that third party involved in their troubled relationship.

This is the poetry of pain and encapsulates the very difference between prose and poetry. Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants skirts poetry, but settles ultimately on the side of prose. By doing so, Hemingway places its tension squarely in the philosophical. We can feel that couple’s pain, but it is muted. The ex-con in Down River, on the other hand, takes us straight to the heart of loss. The combination of the music and the words creates that poetic moment, that emotional sustenance that can speak directly to the core of our beings. Prose allows that one step of removal from having to feel. We can view and judge based on that pause in synaptic response. The writer may have placed their heart on the page, bled the ink, but they also placed thought before feeling with the distancing mechanism of commentary. Poetry places heart before brain. Then combine that poetry with music and you mainline emotion.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 293 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Movie directed by Sidney Lumet
Screenplay by Frank Pierson

This film was released just over three years after the attempted theft that inspired it. P.F. Kluge wrote a magazine article about the bank robbery. Those participants in the actual event who survived were available to the filmmakers. But this is not a documentary- not reportage. Yet it emphasizes the truth of the created world within the story, the validity of its themes as commentary on the world that we all share.

Why is this movie not more ridiculous? At every possible turn of events, the plot precariously dances along the edge of the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Assuredly, the story started as real life, but how often real life falls into parody in the hands of film makers. Parody, in and of itself is not a bad thing, but the fact that Dog Day Afternoon does not take that path is a testament to the sincerity of the vision shared by everyone involved.

Watching the movie again, one is struck by the solidity of the presentation. The bank feels like a crappy edifice built around a central safe, just like so many bank branches. The employees are all distinct individuals, coping with a situation vacillating between the terrifying and the absurd. They care for each other and for their jobs about as much as any of us care for our co-workers or our places of employment. The thieves are not brilliant or unusually brave. They are not heroic. The police behave admirably in their effort to avoid unnecessary violence, but the situation is no model argument for negotiation. The shear weirdness that develops as negotiations proceed demonstrates the uniqueness of the situation. If anything, the film argues for the individual treatment of desperate occurrences. Circumstances always defy expectations, especially yes/no decision-making under duress.

Dog Day Afternoon plays like an epic, though far shorter than three hour period pieces. It is most certainly of its time and not just the decade, but the season. This is New York before AIDS, before cell phones, before Giuliani. Sure, the film explores themes of media exploitation and misplaced moral outrage, but these all develop within the confines of a small bank branch on a commonplace block. The protagonists are just some average bank robbers that would not have merited more than a sidebar buried deep in the pages of the dailies if they had succeeded in their initial escape. What started with Arthur Miller, among others, on stages tears the crime film here, Al Pacino as Willy Loman as bank robber, just as caught out in his indiscretions, though far more publicly. In the end, he is no more mourned.

American film in the Seventies brought a furious list of anti-heroes, protagonists for an angry nation. Many were id run rampant, like Dirty Harry, allowing communal purging of all that disillusion, confusion, and anger. Dog Day Afternoon presented someone more sympathetic for the doomed foreshadowing apparent the moment his co-conspirator runs away. He is no hero, but he is a human being. Any art that is willing to show us humanity in all its myriad forms cannot be, should not be dismissed.

More than all that, Dog Day Afternoon requires us to decide where our sympathies lie, much as the radio and television audiences within the film itself must decide. Their loyalties shift as the crime carries on and they become familiar with the criminals’ backgrounds. Like them, we also only have hints about their real pasts as low level thugs. Instead, we see desperation, love, and confusion. Arguably, the law stationed across the street is as much audience (Greek chorus if you will) to the bank robbery as we are. Their reactions offer a point of view that ultimately makes the final act of brutality more than inevitable- rather understandable as another footnote on our path toward a world view.

An important side note: no actor has the career batting average of John Cazale: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Deer Hunter, and the present piece under consideration. That’s it- not a drop in quality in the lot. Like Lou Gehrig, he died too young, but left greatness to be remembered and studied. While his character was inspired by a youth half his age, more than anyone else in the cast, he gave body and soul to someone more of fiction than of fact.

An odd side note: at its best, the Netflix series Bloodline feels like the machinations of Game of Thrones scaled to the reality of Dog Day Afternoon.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 294 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Poem written by Clive James

Clive James has opinions, well-considered opinions written entertainingly. Cultural Amnesia is a fascinating review of the movers and shakers of the twentieth century. He calls the villains on their crimes and surfaces brilliance in places that beg further research. In the UK, he is memoirist, poet, novelist, and television personality (I will have more to say about Peter Cook some other time, but enjoy the sight of Dame Edna Everage sans drag in the person of Barry Humphries enjoying the story). Most of James’ activities have not translated across the pond, so we make do with limited offerings.

Here however, I want to talk about his poetry, which is an art that James has practiced at a high level for a long time, though it took most of his life to get a collection published here. Of all the literary forms, poetry seems very heavily influenced by the personal taste of the reader/listener. Shakespeare and the Book of Psalms have had significant staying power with wide appeal. After that, Chaucer, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Merwin, Longfellow, and so very many more are names honored more in the high school classroom than elsewhere. Every poet is an acquired taste, which is probably the dirty little secret. Ask anyone who has run screaming from the room when their uncle starts quoting Ogden Nash.

On the other hand, who does not love a good rivalry, a biting comment? Jack Benny and Fred Allen did it for laughs. Every single radio talk host seems to have multiple arch-enemies. We all enjoy that negative pithy review; unless it is directed our way (although time may heal even those wounds).

Through meter, page arrangement, and word choice, The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered raises the pithy comment to the level of great art. Something in James’ braggadaccio feels modern. That schadenfreude he describes is universal and, once acknowledged, we feel almost as clever as the poem. When I say that the poem accomplishes much, I mean that it operates at another level beyond the surface condemnation of the enemy, but rather it touches on the reasons why that person is the enemy. They are our competitor for scarce resources- in this case, readers. Like comics backstage at the comedy club, they share much in common, but still fight for the perfect time slot.

How do we make our peace with the enemy?

We write about them with pithy remarks. If we are blessed and the writing goes well, then we might consider a world in which we continue to live with them. Perhaps we see ourselves looking back through their eyes. Maybe they are a risible jackass. Maybe we have a bit of the jackass in us which is where understanding comes. Shakespeare, Keats, Browning, Angelou, and all the rest transcend meter and word choice to illuminate the human condition. Clive James, for a few lines, holds up a mirror to our insecurities, gives us a laugh, and a nod of recognition.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 295 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.