In The Company Of Glenn

My verdict on the so-called 'Jimi Hendrix Sex Tape,' in case you're interested

Hendrix by Pennebaker, Jimi Plays Monterey, The Criterion Collection

Short version, in case you're not interested in the squalid details:

Boy, that guy is so not Jimi Hendrix that it's almost funny.

Long version with squalid details after the jump.

This is a thing I've never known before...

...it's called Easy Living.

Sorry. I've been holed up all day, watching Blu-Ray discs for May's High-Definition DVD Consumer Guide, and this is the best I've got.

And by "best I've got," I mean the facile linking of a classic Mitchell Leisen film, scripted by Preston Sturges and starring Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold, to one of the most lumpen dumbfuck (and incidentally, when I say "dumbfuck" I really mean, um, "dumbfuck"—seriously, these yoyos made Deep Purple look like the Arditti String Quartet) hair-rock combos of the early 1970s, to wit:

Like I said. Best I've got. The Leisen film is one of Universal's latest four (the other three are Leisen's Brackett-and-Wilder-scripted Midnight, She Done Him Wrong, and Wilder's directorial debut The Major and the Minor) in its one-time "Studio Classics," now "Cinema Classics" editions, and it looks great, and you should get it.

The cinephilic Stones

From Godard's One Plus One, 1968

My review of the enjoyable Scorsese/Stones concert picture Shine A Light will post on the Premiere home page later today (UPDATE: and here it is!); therein I grapple with the question of whether every decade gets the Stones picture it deserves. (A feature on the picture is already up, here.)

One thing's for certain: no other rock-and-roll band has aligned itself with more great directors than the Stones. Yeah, the Beatles had Richard Lester, and then...Bernard Knowles. The Who had, um, Ken Russell. (That didn't really work out.) The Dave Clark Five had John Boorman. (An inspired one-off.)

The Stones, on the other hand, had inspired documentarian Peter Whitehead for '66's Charlie Is My Darling; Jean-Luc friggin Godard for '68's One Plus One (renamed Sympathy For The Devil by a producer who insisted, over Godard's objections, on including the finished title song in that cut); another pair of inspired documentarians, the Maysles Brothers, for '70's Gimme Shelter; epochal photographer Robert Frank for the notorious and rarely-seen '73 Cocksucker Blues; an off-his-game Hal Ashby for '83's Let's Spend the Night Together; and now, a very-much-engaged Scorsese for Shine A Light.

I'm still pretty big on One Plus One, the making of which ended with considerable enmity between Jagger and Godard. The director had initially approached John Lennon about his starring in a biopic of Trotsky, but Lennon didn't like where Godard was coming from one bit, so Godard turned to the Stones.

Aaargh! A Dylan persona Todd Haynes didn't explore...

I just picked up a nice reissue of If You Saw Thro' My Eyes, the debut solo album by British folk-rock crooner Ian Matthews. For the most part Matthews is a tad on the wet-noodle side for my tastes, but this 1971 platter was made right around the time he split from Fairport Convention, one of my all-time favorite bands (and one to which he made some very fine vocal contributions), and Eyes features multiple contributions from a couple of not-undistinguished former bandmates, the late great Sandy Denny and the ever-great Richard Thompson. (The estimable pianist Keith Tippetts makes a couple of appearances as well.) Anyhow, the collection is largely a bunch of, um, sensitive Matthews-penned tunes, plus two by Richard Farina, the musician and novelist, husband to Joan Baez's sister Mimi Farina, friend to Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan. Farina died in a motorcycle accident in 1966, not before composing a poison pen letter in song to erstwhile pal Dylan, a ditty called "Morgan The Pirate." (This is just the sort of nugget the Dylanologists of Fairport, who once committed a French-language cover of "If You Gotta Go, Go Now," delighted in digging up.)

This kiss-off is one of the earlier portraits of Dylan-the-postmodern-shape-shifter, but where I'm Not There director Todd Haynes finds the reinventing quality salutory (up to a point), Farina...does not.