"Have You Seen ... ?" (David Thomson): 1000 films to argue over

The passing of 79-year old Elizabeth Taylor this week re-ignited the endless, and endlessly fascinating, debate about the quality of movies past and present. Ms. Taylor, product of a vanished Hollywood star system in her teens, was one of the last in a generation of actors for whom the word "legendary" still applies. It will be difficult to think of such a term being applied to our current generation of actors, but time will have a way of deepening even contemporary Hollywood's shadows on the screen.

The movies may have changed, but we still view all of them, old or new, through our own expectations. David Thomson's Have You Seen ... ? is one of those doorstop-sized list books that some moviegoers will read and argue over, and not necessarily for what Thomson leaves in or out of his survey of a thousand of his chosen must-see films.

The British film writer for Film Comment, The New Yorker, and Salon lays his intentions on the line in the book's subtitle, A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films: it's a number meant to impress, in this age of lists, and the reviews are one-a-page, so even the most casual moviegoer familiar with, say, Jaws, will at least glance at it's opposite-page mate, La Jetee, Chris Marker's 29-minute film about life after a Third World War.

Or maybe not. These essays are written in that certain telegraphic newspaper style of film criticism -- with an assumption that the reader shares a common knowledge of, and admiration for, what goes on the screen, as well as behind it. A lot is written about the struggles and disappointments of directors and scriptwriters -- the films that could have been.

Those who know director John Ford from John Huston, and John Carpenter from John Boorman, will enjoy the back-stories of classic films, if they don't know them already; others less interested may find such details distracting in essays -- sketches, really -- that run only 750 words in length. And as might be expected, most of Thomson's list draws heavily from films before 1970. As he writes in his introduction:

"Films are not what they were. Far fewer of us go to see them. Young people coming to this book are being asked to bear with 'restrictions' that they resist in the marketplace -- silence, black-and-white, a lot of smart talk, a sense of morality, etcetera ... Of course, the latest films do not fare as well in this book as pictures from the thirties and the forties. Too many new films are gestures trying to capture the interest of kids set on war games and PlayStations. We are so ready for shallow amusement that it may be harder to enjoy profound entertainment ... This book may come off as helplessly nostalgic -- a tribute to an age that is not coming back."

In other words, Thomson reviews these films secure in the knowledge that he thinks they're great (and they undoubtedly are, most of them) but his enthusiasm for old Hollywood mostly misses the mark: as an introduction to movies, he tells us names and dates and stars (what makes the movies tick) but never really communicates what would make these films exciting to a first-time viewer. Young movie fans are missing in Thomson's book, unless they have an interest in exploring older films on their own. And without a younger audience of readers interested in movies, Have You Seen ...? loses is point, even as it tries to be entertaining.

That observation may sound uncharitable, but consider: Thomson begins his alphabetical list of reviews not with his original first choice, Abe Lincoln in Illinois ("trapped by alphabetical order," as he writes) but with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, so as not to open the book with a film that "would depress the ordinary heart." That's odd: the book is Thomson's personal introduction ... but he's talked into this choice by a Sony Pictures representative, who at least had the grace not to suggest one of his own company's films.

A reader supposes there's room for Abbott and Costello in such a long list. Paying nearly $4o to read that "the movie becomes about Lou's jitters and romantic self-absorption" doesn't make the cut'n'paste of Universal Pictures' horror and comedy franchise stars a more classic film. Or even much worth the time of its 83-minute running length, considering there are 999 more films to watch. For a film buff such a marketing ploy throws the rest of Thomson's reasoning into a questionable realm.

There are great choices in the book of course, but the sheer number of titles dilutes the power of truly great films deserving to be seen (F.W. Murnau's Sunrise) and elevating some that are less than mediocre (The Incredible Shrinking Man). What is surprising is that Thomson takes aim repeatedly at some directors whose reputations are secure at this late date: Kubrick ("strange," "straining," "pretentious") and David Lean (in Lawrence of Arabia "the sun shines over the shell of an empty film") are just two examples, and John Ford (How Green Was My Valley) receives several backhanded slaps apparently for not attempting to be a better director than Carol Reed (The Stars Look Down).

David Thomson

Thomson gets down to explaining his view of Kubrick in a March, 2009 interview from Stop Smiling magazine while promoting the book. It's a shame he wasn't this forthcoming in his reviews of Kubrick's films; it would have added some context to his criticism.

"I think there’s something tremendously dotty and appealing about Kubrick the American giving up America. About the space traveler giving up travel. About the man open to the wide world becoming a hermit, nearly. About the man with a rather limited private life making studies about rich emotional lives. He’s fascinating. The ambition alone is awesome. In my book he’s made two masterpieces, and for me, if you make one masterpiece you’re of major importance. Some of Kubrick’s work fails, badly. But I’m not put off by bad failure. I think it’s all fascinating. It’s quite true that I’m extremely critical about many of these films, but I watch them over and over again. There is a sheer pleasure and fascination in watching Kubrick fill the screen. When he’s on, he’s amazing, and one of the great life stories in film."

You won't find this kind of explanation presented anywhere in the book, unfortunately. Since the Kubrick, Lean and Ford movies are included in the book at any rate, Thomson's judgements seem awkward and arbitrary, and the reviews don't achieve any critical depth. As with any book of lists, the reader is free to agree or disagree with Thomson's broad generalities employing one's own standard of disbelief.

Favorite films are a personal choice, and the brief reviews of Have You Seen ...? would be a great, drowsy beach read in a hot sun. It's doubtful Thomson's book will spark any serious debate; it's not scholarly, and it's meant to be an introduction to movies that, by far, are not even making the rounds of art houses any more. More than likely it will be a handy, hefty guide next time you're rearranging your Netflix queue on lazy Saturday afternoons.

"Yoko Ono: Reality Dreams" film series begins this weekend in Atlanta

from Bed-In (1969)

“A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality” Yoko Ono Lennon

Atlanta's Film Love organization, curated by Andy Ditzler, begins a series of films by Yoko Ono, John Lennon, and the Fluxus group tonight March 25th. The screenings at the Plaza Theater and other venues this weekend and next offer a rare chance to see these experimental and provocative films directed by the Lennons and others, as well as films directed by Jonas Mekas and the Maysles Brothers. From the Film Love website:

Poetic, absorbing, humorous, unsettling, engaging and unique, the experimental films made by Yoko Ono and John Lennon in the 1960s and 70s follow no rules but their own. Some of the most talked-about works in avant-garde cinema, they remain unavailable on video. Film Love presents five screenings of these rare, important and highly original works.



One: Smile John
Friday, March 25
7:00 pm at the Plaza Theater
Two films, Happy Birthday to John (directed by Jonas Mekas, 1972, 24 min) and Film No. 5 (Smile) (Yoko Ono 1968, 51 min.)

Two: Sky Bed Peace
Friday, March 25
9:00 pm at the Plaza Theater
The classic Bed-In documentary (1969, 61 min.) and John and Yoko's luminous short film Apotheosis (1970, 19 min.)

Three: A Falling Position
Saturday, March 26
8:00 pm at Emory University
Two films: Cut Piece (directed by Albert and David Maysles, 1965, 8 min.) and Film No. 5 (Rape) directed by Yoko Ono (1969, 77 min.)

Next weekend's schedule:

Four: Flux Fly Body Music
Friday, April 1
8:00 pm at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
Selections from the Fluxfilm Anthology, including:
Disappearing Music for Face (Fluxfilm 4) (Chieko Shiomi, 1966, 10 min.)
Four (Fluxfilm 16) (Yoko Ono, 1966, 6 min)
Smoking (Fluxfilm 18) (Joe Jones, 1966, 6 min)
Freedom (Yoko Ono, 1970, 1 min)
Fly (Yoko Ono, 1970, 25 min)
This Is Not Here (Taka Iimura, 1972, 18 min)
Film Script #3 (Yoko Ono 1964)
Film Script #3 is presented with the kind permission of Yoko Ono

Five: Bottoms
Friday, April 8
8:00 pm at Emory University
Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (Yoko Ono, 1966, 80 min): no bottom perfect, no two alike. A joyous film, and one of the great conceptual works of the 60s avant-garde.

YOKO ONO AND JOHN LENNON is co-sponsored by the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and the departments of Visual Arts, American Studies, Film Studies, and Women's Studies at Emory University. For more information, venue locations and driving directions, contact the Film Love site.

"Buffalo Lockjaw," Greg Ames (2009): emotional freeze-out in American Siberia

The phrase upstate New York has become artistic shorthand for a kind of American emotional exile, a place where it seems the weather, the economy, and alcohol combine to defeat the hopes of successive generations of Irish and Italian families.

When the lake effect snow starts piling in off Lake Erie, usually early in a cold and gray November, it does not seem too harsh to compare upstate's present condition to an American Siberia, where the only real currency of the young is the hope of getting out before they put in thirty years on third shift at the bottle factory or the bar next door to it. Bottle Factory, come to think of it, would not be a bad name for one of the beer joints in Greg Ames's debút novel, Buffalo Lockjaw (Hyperion).

The title refers to the facial condition achieved out-of-doors during an upstate New York winter, but it's equally as effective in describing the spiritual condition of the novel's main character, James Fitzroy, a still-young (or young enough to care) member of one of those families facing hard choices in hard times. There are traces of paralysis throughout this story in many of Ames's characters, and not a slight tilt of alcoholic haze to their perception of the way things are or ought to be.

Reading Buffalo Lockjaw for moral or spiritual uplift will be hard for those who haven't spent a dark night of the soul buzzed and freezing on State Street, in Buffalo or any upstate New York town. The experience of just "living through it" -- whatever the difficulty may be -- is enough for these characters.

In other, less bleak settings, much would be made of that current pop-psychology catchphrase, "seeking closure." Characters would have options. Fitzroy and his family don't have the luxury, or the money, to see it that way. Nor, at the end of Buffalo Lockjaw, does anyone claim to be a "survivor" of anything. It's just what people do, every day, after the bars close. Fitzroy tries to convince himself of ideas that sound as though they could come from any chipper and well-meaning self-help book, but here the practicalities of achieving those life-affirming goals seem still beyond his grasp:

"Start living, I tell myself. That seems to be the only moral in this fable. Live now. Don't wait for a future that might never come. Don't trade this moment for a false promise of security, or a pension, or an afterlife. But saying 'live now' is about as practical as telling a depressive to 'just be happy.' How do you actually do it? Maybe what it requires is a shift in perception. Okay, fine. And how do you bring that about? Because if you're thinking about being in the moment, you're not in it."

Such circular reasoning is self-defeating pop-culture speak, ideas reflected in fun-house mirrors pretending to be thinking. But it's a very contemporary and American approach to life -- 21st-century upstate New York really isn't 19th century Siberia after all -- which makes the desperation and hesitation in Buffalo Lockjaw familiar to anyone facing difficult family issues like illness and aging.

The novel's story is set against the barren landscape of drugs-and-alcohol and tells the very personal struggle of families in the process of losing their battles with time, with hope, and with each other. Fitzroy describes seeing his 56-year-old mother with the effects of early-onset Alzheimers in the senior-care dayroom of "The Elms": the disconnect between the facility's elegant-sounding name and Ellen Fitzroy's appearance is heart-breaking and sharp.

"Today she's wearing baggy gray sweatpants and an oversized rainbow T-shirt that belongs to someone else. Where are all her sweaters? She's in a line-up of wheelchairs near the door: a motorcycle gang whose members all ran out of gas at the same time ... my mother looks at me, blinks. She's wearing her spare glasses today -- the good ones must be missing again. The fingers of both her hands are interlocked, as if she's playing a silent game of 'here's the church, here's the steeple.' Around her neck she wears a crumb-crusted harness , a padded horseshoe, so she can lean her head back and snooze, just another weary traveler on a cross-country flight."

Greg Ames

The self-aware narrator Fitzroy, nearing thirty, seems to know that at The Elms, as well as in his own family, the unwritten future will bear a frightening resemblance to the too-real present as well as the long-gone past. There are echoes of Russian writers -- Chekov, maybe -- whose harsh landscapes loom as shaping and inescapable forces. How does one escape fate in a place where time itself seems frozen? Self-awareness only makes the knowledge more painful:Where can I find beauty in this situation? Fitzroy muses early on. I read somewhere this is a good exercise for cynics.

Ames found the same dilemma in writing Buffalo Lockjaw. In a recent Artvoice interview the Buffalo native outlines the struggle he had writing and re-writing the novel, trying to find the proper story to tell. He found his solution by focusing not on the plot, but on the characters: "I think that Buffalo Lockjaw is sort of about the passage from selfishness to selflessness. James is certainly not selfless, but I thought of it as this Buddhist idea: I wanted to write an entire book about a guy who takes one step. After 275 pages, he takes a single step toward being a better guy."

Much is made about the south as a regional influence on its authors. In Buffalo Lockjaw, Ames, who left upstate for New York City ten years ago, has written of upstate New York a kind of "northern Gothic" also centered on family and fate, death and survival, dissolution and resolution. It's a first novel that captures its woozy characters as they are, and sometimes even as they see themselves. Just as satisfying as finishing a story of an unsettling adventure in a Southern town populated by its ghosts and ancient widows, after the last pages of Buffalo Lockjaw the reader is one of the few who get to leave. The novel's characters aren't that lucky.

"Old Riverside Oak," Bob Ambrose, Jr.

"Old Riverside Oak"

(Bob Ambrose)

It was early March then,

a year and eternity past,

we brought Dad home.

From his old blue chair

he peered through new

windows, not his own

as snow blankets froze

our Southern woodland

into hard white silence

and gray flows flooded

the shallow river shoals

with an icy hush.

Do you remember

that dark night’s cold

when bitter winds descended

from bleak polar plains,

showering limbs and ice

over frozen foundations

of our beleagered home?

Powerless, huddled

in a house leaking warmth

we covered this fragile,

this gentle-souled man

with blankets and love.

Strong against the night,

but in strength unavailing

over softening banks,

the old riverside oak

surrendered itself to swirling gray

and lodged in downstream shallows.

A year now it’s been, a year

of great loss, a year nurturing

growth, and senescence

and the canopy fills again

closing gaps with lacy green

softening the void

now filled with light, but

still, the void.

Springtime truth emerges

from emptiness

with whispers of hope.

Mortal life, though dust

is forever redeemed

for we function within

a greater whole

which cannot quite be

resolved in the fun-house

mirrors

of our dim perception.

So we see now in part

but miss the unity beyond

that surrounds the void

in a cosmic embrace

apprehended, if at all

in a place beyond words

expressed in the silence

that speaks to the heart.

The old oak, which served the sky

still provides structure.

On trunk and limb

where hawk pairs once nested

mud turtles bask

gleaming in bright sun

over fresh spring flow.

Bob Ambrose Jr. retired from a career as environmental engineer at the Environmental Protection Agency in Athens, Georgia. His blog of original work is Reflections in Poetry. "Old Riverside Oak" also currently appears online at the Word of Mouth website.

Tonight in Decatur: Randall Fuller discusses "From Battlefields Rising"

Tonight at 7:15 p.m. in Decatur, Randall Fuller will be discussing his new book From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature.

The free presentation is at the Decatur Recreation Center next door to the Decatur Public Library on Sycamore Street.

From Battlefields Rising examines how the issues of the war shaped the lives and works of many contemporary authors that included abolitionists, theologians, and philosophers as well as poets and novelists. The young country's optimism and the developing convictions of the Transcendentalists were both severely tested after the war's first years of horrific battle. Below is a brief description of the book from Oxford University Press; contact the Georgia Center for the Book for more information about tonight's event.

When Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Walt Whitman declared it "the volcanic upheaval of the nation"--the war that would dramatically alter the shape and character of American culture along with its political, racial, and social landscape.

Prior to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it forced them to witness not only unimaginable human carnage on the battlefield, but also the disintegration of the foundational symbolic order they had helped to create. The war demanded new frameworks for understanding the world and new forms of communication that could engage with the immensity of the conflict. It fostered both social and cultural experimentation.

From Battlefields Rising explores the profound impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. As the writers of the time grappled with the war's impact on the individual and the national psyche, their responses multiplied and transmuted.

Whitman's poetry and prose, for example, was chastened and deepened by his years spent ministering to wounded soldiers. Off the battlefield, the anguish of war would come to suffuse the austere, elliptical poems that Emily Dickinson was writing from afar; and Hawthorne was rendered silent by his reading of military reports and talks with soldiers.

Randall Fuller

Calling into question every prior presumption and ideal, the war forever changed America's early idealism-and consequently its literature-into something far more ambivalent and raw.

Sketching an absorbing group portrait of the period's most important writers, From Battlefields Rising flashes with forgotten historical details and elegant new ideas. It alters previous perceptions about the evolution of American literature and how Americans have understood and expressed their common history.

"The Cat Inside," Burroughs: "You don't buy love for nothing"

"My relationship
with cats has saved
me from a deadly,
pervasive ignorance."

(William Burroughs,
The Cat Inside)

This weekend I became the property of a fourteen-year-old cat, Dylan, who has returned south after some length of years spent in Brooklyn's cozy and green corners. As time goes on I will perform the duties of being his human. I join the ranks of some famous folks who have had their otherwise irascible public reputations dangerously undermined by an attraction to the care and feeding of cats. The unlikeliest of these may be that old literary sleight-of-hand man, William Burroughs, himself.

For all his tales of the debauched human condition in a score of books (among them: Naked Lunch, Place of Dead Roads, Nova Express, The Soft Machine) Burroughs in his later years claimed a cat-spirit as his Familiar and became friends with a succession of lean and hungry strays, dedicated hangers-on, and occasional visitors to his home in Lawrence, Kansas. Some of these were cats, apparently. Who knew that old and rusted, corrugated tin woodsman had a heart after all?

Burroughs's affection for Ruski, Calico Jane, Wimpy, Fletch, and Ed is a sentimental turn in a career made famous by the routines of Doctor Benway, Clem Snide, and Danny the Car-Wiper (who finds a suitcase stuffed with a human leg in it, on Christmas Eve, only to discover that he can't sell it to score). Even cats have their routines, though, making them the perfect sidekick in the Burroughs universe. As Burroughs puts it, "Of course he wants food and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing."

Brion Gysin's original cover artwork for The Cat Inside

This slight book, originally published in a limited edition in 1986, is a series of scenes, dreams recollected, and cat comings-and-goings at Stone House, as he called his home outside Lawrence. At first Burroughs seems shocked at his own unrecognizable self in the diary pages: "I am absolutely appalled. So often, looking over my past life, I exclaim 'my God, who is this?' Seen from here I appear as a most unsightly cartoon of someone who is awful enough to begin with ... simpering, complacent, callous." Of course, much of his observation soon comes to reflect on the nature of man and beast, and what they learn from each other:

The white cat is "the cleaner," or "the animal that cleans itself," described by the Sanskrit word Margaras, which means "the hunter who follows the track; the investigator; the skip tracer." The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon ... you can't shake your white cat because your white cat is you.

"Someone said that cats are the furthest animal from the human model. It depends on what breed of humans you are referring to," Burroughs writes, "and of course, what cats." For someone whose writing has always delighted in the shock of recognition -- the varieties of human depravity are familiar, yet boundless -- Burroughs' observations throughout The Cat Inside are surprisingly forgiving. He writes that the book is an allegory in which his past life is presented in the form of a cat charade; and in many instances the ways of cats reflect the pure animal instinct for survival. This quality Burroughs finds unjudgemental in cats, but is abhorred by finding it, increasingly, in man -- and his dogs.

I am not a dog hater. I do hate what man has made of his best friend. ... A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with a pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. But a dog's snarl is ugly, a redneck lynch-mob Paki-basher snarl ... snarl of someone (who's) got a "Kill a Queer for Christ" sticker on his heap, a self-righteous occupied snarl. When you see that snarl you are looking at something that has no face of its own. A dog's rage is not his. It is dictated by his trainer. And lynch-mob rage is dictated by conditioning.

One aspect of a cat's life which must have intrigued Burroughs is the cat's ability to adapt quickly and thoroughly to the human routine for food, shelter, and survival. With his keen hobo's eye for confidence-games and trickery, Burroughs can appreciate the many wiles of a conniving cat in need of dinner or a warm place to stay in winter. He even remarks, in hobo style, of the secret language dogs and cats might use to indicate an easy target:

WATCH OUT FOR DOG.

STAY AWAY FROM THIS PLACE. OLD NUT WITH GUN.

FOOD, CLOTHES, MONEY & SMOKES. A PRINCE.

CHOW AND DRINK. A KING.

When Burroughs noticed that no dogs came around the Stone House, he added another:

F--------- CAT HOUSE!

This isn't Ol' Possums Book of Practical Cats, by any means, and Fletch is no Rum-Tum-Tugger. But it's easy to see in these notes the old sharpshooter found it comforting to view cats as kindred spirits. Ruski and Wimpy, Ed, Fletch and Calico Jane (named for Jane Bowles) shared a certain, knowing acceptance of human faults, even if it's just as long as there's a nearby tin of cat food, and someone -- their human -- to open it at dinnertime.

"The Work of Joe Webb": the photography of Reuben Cox

Mention the phrase photography in the south and a certain imagery of decay and age leaps to mind: steel-gray clouds in a black-and-white sky, weather-beaten clapboard, the forgotten faces of Appalachia -- as though the ghosts of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were still documenting the slow turning of the human soul south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Or perhaps it's here that William Faulkner's "the past isn't really dead" is more truth than aphorism; maybe the inexorable and ultimate reconstruction that progress brings hasn't yet removed all traces of the past that linger in the south, and which Reuben Cox is drawn to capture.

The North Carolina artist whose website offers a welcome and a request ("welcome to my mosque ... please wipe your muddy mind before entering") is a photographer, luthier, portraitist; his photo subjects range from the ephemera of the soul to whorls of river water to the graffiti-plastered walls of the now-closed CBGB's, documenting the passage of the temporal in sharply-rendered images of both beauty and clarity.

image from Record Shack collection, Reuben Cox

His human subjects challenge the camera's eye, rather than divert their attention from it. Their assurance in the captured moment is a personal statement, even in the seemingly offhand way Paul McCartney plays an upright piano and the potter Georgia Blizzard sits in window light loosely holding a carved Buddha in her lap.

image from The Work of Joe Webb, Reuben Cox (2009)

His book of photographs The Work of Joe Webb: Appalachian Master of Rustic Architecture (Jargon Books, 2009; distributed by the University of Georgia Press) is work that celebrates the craftsmanship of the Highlands, North Carolina woodworker and builder who created nearly thirty log cabins in the 1920s and 1930s.

Cox's contemporary photographs -- taken with a large-format field camera -- reveal the houses in current states of repair, disuse, or unrecognizable renovation: a review in Blueprint calls the images "hallucinatory ... balustrades of thick, twisted twigs minimizing thickets; staircases constructed with random patterns of interlocking laurel or rhododendron branches."

Though Cox's photographs of log cabins are beautiful documents of a physical past rapidly disappearing, his website offers other work showing Cox's interest in the metaphysics of belief. Everybody Wants to go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a series of evocative C-print photographs -- smoke evaporating into air, explosions caught in the moment of combustion, as if the human spirit had suddenly ignited and caught fire -- in settings of fall woods, in the dark of night, or against blue skies and skeletal trees.

image from "Everyone Wants to go to Heaven, But No One Wants to Die," Reuben Cox

Cox created these fleeting moments of flash and fire by experimenting with available light, gunpowder and shutter speed, and the results are unrepeatable instants captured reflexively on film. The ghostly and beautiful images can be unsettling reminders that life is momentary, that the nature of spiritual belief is a matter of individual faith and doubt, and that human nature is changeable as smoke even as the artist tries to capture man's nature against the impermanence of time.

The Jargon Society remains a valuable asset to the continuing memory of its founder (the "visionary coach and, at times, crank") Jonathan Williams, and now in the capable hands of Thomas Craven. Its stated goal is still "dedication to the care and preservation of the singular, the personal, the local, the individual. ... What other press would devote equal effort to White Trash Cooking and the collected poems of Lorine Neidecker at the same time?"'

Williams's boundless energy in promoting the vast and largely unheralded wealth of American creativity was expressed in an interview with Leverett T. ("Sneaky Fast") Smith and posted at the Jargon Society website: in it, Williams declares “'There is no end to desire.' But, perhaps, there is an end to energy? I will try to go to the well as long as I think there is a drop of water in it."