Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Elegant while Straight and Giddy at the same time: Appreciating Terry Southern
I am starting to write this while listening to a duet of Bobby Darin and Judy Garland.
It is actually perfect for the holidays and I bet if Terry Southern could hear it today he would say something like "This is perfectly droll" in such a way that the vibrato would spice that on some level he kind of digs it. I bet Lester Bangs would scurry around his medicine cabinet after inflicting himself with "Look up and see your maker when Gabriel blows his horn." All-star variety numbers on holiday specials make me nostalgic for a fire and my parent's basement.
...Meanwhile, the reason I decided to blog about Terry Southern is because he is the answer to a question that came up: What rebels do you have a soft spot in your heart? My answer was Terry. He was the Texan that you were convinced was English. I look at him as being as a kind of smarter hipper Uncle who was really to old or ornery to be a hippie and even though he gets lumped in with the beats, his bandwidth was darker than hip straight up. There were rocks and you banged around on them sometimes with him, especially when he comes of as a straight, non-gothic kind of WS Burroughs with a adolescent arrested development and more of a sense of mischief and play.
There has been arguments about authorship in Southern's screenplays. It kind of baffles me because his genius is something well-defined. It really doesn't take a freaking Mensa member to see what is his and what is Kubrick's in Dr. Strangelove or which parts aren't Hopper or Peter Fonda's in Easy Rider. And it shouldn't be that hard to guess what parts of The Cincinnati Kid are less Ring Lardner Jr.'s than Southern's. Or even parts of The Loved One belonging more to Southern than Evelyn Waugh.
Southern, Marianne Faithful, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Mull, Michael J. Pollard
Nelson Lyon, Jonathan Winters Sandra Bernhard Taylor Mead Michael O'Donoghue are all on an album which mostly consists fully realized productions of excerpts of Southern's fiction complete with music, sound effects and Hal Wilner's production qualities entitled Give Me Your Hump" (the title is from Candy.) Easy to get if you are an emusic subscriber. Another great resource to check out is his anthology, Now Dig This! I never read Candy but the film is to be avoided. I think his masterpiece must be The Magic Christian and it is one of my favorite films. I never read Candy, but can tell you for sure, the film is to be avoided. I also have fond recollections of one of his last published works, Texas Summer. The biography A Grand Guy by Lee Hill was interesting, but I felt empty afterwards. Southern is someone of whom I would prefer to get closer to the legend of rather than the true mortal.
And it doesn't get much legendary than being the guy who wore the sunglasses on the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. The Wikipedia entry has many memorable quotes by and about Southern, but the best of all has got to be by Kurt Vonnegut who said Southern was "the illegitimate son of Max Sennett and Edna St Vincent Millay." How could one top that? Perhaps only by another viewing of the Bobby and Judy travel medley.
posted by well-executed buffet at 6:02 PM
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