Watched and Read - March 1, 2026

My 100th blog posting!

Here’s what I watched and read…

MOVIES

Rolling Thunder Review: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019) is an enjoyable documentary about Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour in the mid-1970s. I wish it did a better job of contextualizing the tour at the outset, but I really enjoyed the performances. I was also surprised to learn that the great guitarist Mick Ronson toured with Bob Dylan. I mostly associate him with David Bowie. Definitely worth checking out.

The End of the Affair (1999), directed by Neil Jordan, was a second viewing for me. The first time I saw it when it was released on video, and I didn’t care for it. I decided to give it another try because I like some of Jordan’s films, such as Mona Lisa and The Crying Game. I appreciated The End of the Affair more this time. There are strong performances, especially by Julianne Moore, but the film still didn’t fully connect with me.

Raging Bull (1980) is one of Martin Scorsese’s best films and certainly one of the best of the 1980s. It offers an intense portrait of boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro) that is hard to look away from. One of the most powerful moments occurs when Jake tries to fix the television while questioning his younger brother Joey (Joe Pesci) about what happened at the club with his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty). The scene erupts into one of the film’s most violent sequences, and the television remains unfixed—a striking parallel to Jake’s distorted inner reality. I still can’t believe Scorsese didn’t win the Oscar for Best Director.

Clerk. (2021), directed by Malcolm Ingram, is a very good documentary about indie filmmaker Kevin Smith. I was in film school when Clerks was released and remember classmates talking great things about it. The early ’90s were an exciting time for independent cinema, and I enjoyed learning more about Smith’s artistic journey. Some of his films haven’t connected with me, but I think the three Clerks films are excellent, and I’ve always loved Mallrats.

EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025), directed by Baz Luhrmann, is a terrific concert film capturing Presley when he returned to live performance after focusing on film acting. It’s the kind of experience that demands the big screen to fully appreciate what a dynamic performer and musician Elvis was. Highly recommended.

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TV

Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Redemption,” Parts I and II, is a great conclusion to a narrative that began in the third-season episode “Sins of the Father,” when Worf accepts discommendation for his father’s alleged involvement in the Khitomer massacre. “Redemption” brings that storyline to a satisfying close. Really strong writing throughout.

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BOOKS

I’m currently reading Chocky by John Wyndham, and so far it’s very good. I’m also reading The Amplified Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael Azerrad, which I’m really enjoying as well. It’s such a great deep dive into the band’s history and creative process.

 

Victor Turner - The Anthropology of Performance

In Victor Turner's essay "The Anthropology of Performance," he argues that change involves a re-adjustment, and that this re-adjustment is ceremonial, what he sees as being theatre or performance. 

 

Turner breaks down four phases of public action:  Breach, Crisis, Redressive Action and Reintergration. For Turner, change within a culture occurs when a threshold has been crossed.  As he notes, "From the standpoint of relatively well-regulated, more or less accurately operational, methodical, orderly social life, social dramas have a 'Iiminal' or 'threshold' character. The latter term is derived from a Germanic base which means 'thrash'  'thresh,' a place where grain is beaten out from its husk, where what has been hidden is thus manifested" (92)

This passage from Turner is very similar to Roland Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice.  For Barthes, the grain of the voice, which he argues in "The Pleasure of the Text," (which happens to be the subject of my video essay) is when the voice aligns itself with the flesh or body. It is at point where meaning is shifted to the energy of the performer. It is when the body becomes the voice.   

Musicologist such as Simon Frith and Richard Middleton have tuned into Barthes' notion of the grain of the voice for its political implications in music. For example, Frith interprets Elvis Presley's body and hip shakes in his early performance on television in the 1950s disturbing and disrupting the status quo. Here, Turner's conception of performance fits well with Barthes' grain of the voice. Elvis' transgressive body language shook up the way we think of the performer and performance.