1. More out of a yearning to return to Greenwich Village and Washington Square than anything else, I watched the documentary, Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation. The interviews and archival footage brought the history of Greenwich Village alive, but as I find often happens when people involved in a counter cultural movement talk about it, it wasn't difficult to know ahead of time basically what the people interviewed were going to say. Maybe it has to do with so much already having been said and written about the Village fifty or sixty years ago and then forward from there. Maybe it has to do with most of the people involved in this place had all agreed, maybe unconsciously, to a particular way of talking about it and they still do. There just doesn't seem to be much original to say.
2. For reasons I don't totally understand, I watched Apocalypse Now again. It's been many years since I last watched it, but this was probably my fifth or sixth viewing. I love this movie. I was struck by how much of it remembered really well, how I was anticipating much of the action and significant pieces of the script. I remembered back to 1985 when the the older sister of my girlfriend back then asked me what my favorite movies were and I told her The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II, and Apocalypse Now. She replied, "That's sick." Her response pissed me off and I've spent a lot of time ever since ruminating upon Apocalypse Now, its madness, its chaos, its very dark beauty, and how I regard my love for the movie as healthy. The movie unsettles me, frightens me, outrages me, moves me, and it helps me understand war's absurdity, both in general and the particular war in Viet Nam. It's not a documentary. It's a study of madness. It's a study of horror. We, as viewers, live the deeper truth of horror and and madness in war, whether the details of the movie are historic or not. The horrors are manifold. The madness is exquisitely portrayed. The whole movie plays out as if the heath scene in King Lear were over two and a half hours long. It is Moby Dick on a river in a jungle rather than at sea. It's Homer. It's Yeats' vision found in "The Second Coming". The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. This is not sick. It's illuminating.
3. I had planned to go to one or two movies at one of the Bijou theaters tonight, but the Deke got into a groove after work grading papers and sipping some wine and returned home with the car a little late and that was fine. So I watched Francis Ford Coppola interview John Milius, the primary screenwriter of Apocalypse Now. Then I went to YouTube and found the first documentary film I ever watched about Vietnam, Hearts and Minds and watched the first part of it before I turned in and went to bed, about 8:30. That movie had a strong impact on me my senior year at Whitworth and then then again when I returned to Whitworth in 1982 and I was enjoying reliving those years and seeing this movie again. I'm sure I'll finish it before too long.
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