Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
For reasons too convoluted to divulge here, I recently found myself engaged in conversation with a work colleague on the subject of pinball. Later that evening, I remembered a song that I hadn’t thought about in years entitled, yes, “Pinball”, a (sort of) one hit wonder from 1974 by Brian Protheroe, a British singer, actor, and, most recently, narrator for Channel 4 reality TV show First Dates.
I was first alerted to “Pinball”—this week’s quick rec—by a close family member with a special skill for telling me about cultural artifacts that just must be made-up, but turn out not to be. (It was he who first told me that former England manager Terry Venables had once co-created a series of novels and a TV drama about a private detective called Hazell. A lie, surely? Wrong.) Anyway, this “Pinball” song sounded fishy, with its promise of cat’s miaow sound effects and florid descriptions of mental turmoil. But it’s real, it exists, it troubled the upper reaches of the British charts despite essentially being chorus-free jazz-folk, and it has some of the best opening lines ever committed to tape; an in media res meltdown of epically dismal proportions:
And I’ve run out of pale ale
And I feel like I’m in jail
And my music bores me once again
And I’ve been on the pinball
And I know longer know it all
And they say that you never know when you're insane
Enjoy (and keep a very close ear out for that cat sound effect!)
If you’re a regular reader of this letter, you’ll know that I sometimes use the space to surface old work that hasn’t been published online. I’ll often do this on weeks that I happen to be very busy or, in this case, on weeks when the Queen dies, so they cancel all the weekend’s Premier League football, and I’m so apoplectic as a result that I can’t get my anger sufficiently under control to write anything new. Here, then, is a piece that was originally published in Sight & Sound Magazine’s January 2017 issue. It was for the mag’s regular “Endings” column, and the subject is the final scene of Charles Burnett’s brilliant 1990 film To Sleep With Anger, starring Danny Glover, Paul Butler, and the late, great Mary Alice. It goes without saying that if you want to avoid knowing exactly what happens at the film’s conclusion, you should watch the film first! (It’s streaming in multiple places, and available on DVD and Blu-ray via Criterion.)
In Charles Burnett’s films, you always have to keep an eye on the kids, who are rarely main characters but play pivotal roles nonetheless. Consider his brilliant debut Killer of Sheep (1977), a neorealism-inspired drama of everyday life in LA’s predominantly African American Watts district. Its unforgettable first scene depicts a small, cowed-looking boy being lectured by a stern offscreen father-figure on the importance of fighting back against bullies in order to be a real man. After this bracing opening, we don’t see this moon-eyed lad again—we never even find out who he is—but the point is sharp enough: innocence rarely lasts long for black children in this impoverished suburb, scarred by residential segregation, racist police brutality and the violent uprisings of 1965. In the rest of Killer of Sheep, children—playful sprites full of hope and humor—pepper the landscape. They are poignant counterpoints to the drudgery-stricken adults; funhouse mirrors of their own sad futures.
In Burnett’s third feature, the majestic and enigmatic To Sleep with Anger (1990), children are again crucial in a film ostensibly about adult relationships. The main narrative centers on Harry Mention (Danny Glover), a charismatic visitor from the Deep South who arrives one day on the doorstep of a middle-class, church-going family in South Central Los Angeles. Mother Suzie (Mary Alice) and father Gideon (Paul Butler) welcome their old friend in, but it’s not long before his uncanny presence, steeped in the folkloric southern traditions Suzie and Gideon have for the most part left behind, begins to cause severe ructions in the family fabric.
Gideon falls gravely ill, while Harry’s insinuatingly macho behavior has a particularly influential effect on Suzie and Gideon’s grown-up youngest son, the petulant twentysomething Babe Brother (Richard Brooks), accentuating the animus between him and his older brother Junior (Carl Lumbly), and turning Babe Brother against his wife Linda (Sheryl Lee Ralph). Babe Brother and Linda’s young son Sunny (DeVaughn Walter Nixon) doesn’t say much, but he’s quietly present in many scenes of tension and menace. He’s also the only character able to dent Harry’s swaggering confidence, when he accidentally brushes Harry’s foot with a broom, a superstitious no-no that sends the visitor into paroxysms of uncharacteristic panic.
It’s fitting, then, that Sunny is the architect of Harry’s downfall. Shortly after a huge confrontation between Babe Brother and Junior has ultimately brought the family closer than ever before, Sunny accidentally kicks over his tin of marbles in the kitchen. Harry trips over the marbles, falls to the floor, and suffers a fatal cardiac arrest. In a quietly ghoulish, politically charged postscript, Harry’s dead body is left in the kitchen, covered only by a sheet. The medics won’t take him away, and the coroner is nowhere to be found. “If he was white, they’d have had him on his feet and out of here,” comments one family friend.
But there’s another child in To Sleep with Anger: an unnamed boy (played by Burnett’s son) who blasts incessantly and tunelessly on his trumpet. His unappealing peals ring across the neighborhood, at one point causing Suzie to drop an egg on the floor, at another distracting Harry as he’s about to bring down an axe on the neck of a chicken. Midway through the film, Suzie, concerned about Harry’s sinister behavior, questions him about the quality of his friendship. Harry retorts with a riddle: “Like that boy next door playing his horn. If he was a friend, he would stop irritating people. But if he stops practicing, he wouldn’t be perfect at what he does someday.”
In an interview in July 2016, I asked Burnett about the boy trumpeter, and he replied: “I used to play the trumpet when I was a kid, and I used to just drive the neighbors crazy. So that’s where that came from. I used to intentionally leave the window open and just blow as loud as I could out of my room.”
There’s something autobiographical, then, about the film’s spine-tingling coda. Following a shot of Harry’s body still festering in the homestead, Burnett cuts to a shot of the boy honking away tunelessly. After a few bars, however, his awful playing magically, seamlessly becomes perfect—a soulful lament which provides the melody line of the song that scores the end credits. It’s the sound of a modest yet brilliant filmmaker slyly announcing the perfection of his own craft.
Before I go, another very quick rec for my old pal Sierra Pettengill’s terrific film Riotsville USA, which opens theatrically this Friday, and will presumably enter the streaming space in the not too distant future. It’s an exceptionally smart and slyly powerful archival documentary about the US government’s historic militarized response to domestic protests—the title comes from the bizarre-but-true fictional towns built in the 1960s by the US Army to practice quashing civil unrest. It is of course about Right Now, too, but never in a didactic way. It trusts the audience to make the connections, and there’s also a nicely poetic narration written by the critic and scholar Tobi Haslett. Some of the archival footage is astonishing, and the way it’s threaded together is hugely impressive. Here’s the trailer.
Until next week!
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