Books and Arts

Fifty years ago this midsummer, a ramshackle convoy of vehicles — cars, minibuses, motorcycles and the odd hippie caravan — could be seen wending its way through the western counties of England in search of a patch of agricultural land near Shepton Mallet called Worthy Farm. There had already been several Sixties-era tribal gatherings in the fields beyond Michael Eavis’s now legendary homestead, but this iteration, widely advertised in the countercultural press, came billed as the very first Glastonbury Festival.

If you’ve been involved in the production of a film, you know how intoxicating it can be. The prospect of seeing your work projected in a theater is reason enough to put up with a nightmare of unrelenting stress — for some people, anyway. Others might struggle to understand how an entire town (Narrowsburg, an admittedly very small town in Upstate New York) could be so easily swindled by a cartoon mobster and a mysterious woman with a French accent who tells people she’s from South Africa or Normandy, or descended from French royalty. Then again, Richard Castellano did appear with Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro in Analyze This, and Jocelyne Castaldo, well, who in America wouldn’t be charmed by such an accent?

The history of late-20th-century Japanese pop music can seem like an impenetrable forest to western minds. But stare past the trees and there is light from a parallel universe. The Japanese Group Sounds records of the mid-Sixties (the Spiders, the Tempters and er, the Mops) were heavily influenced by the original moptops’ Budokan Temple show of 1966 and surf bands such as the Ventures. The university campus hard rock of Tokyo’s late-Sixties freak scene — Les Rallizes Dénudés, Flower Travellin’ Band, Speed, Glue and Shinki — and the lysergic rock soundtracks to Shuji Terayama’s revolutionary theater plays by the great J.A.

‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ Maxwell Scott announces in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Something like this seems to have occurred with the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. Other members of the West Coast jazz scene such as the great saxophonist Art Pepper were often in dire straits, but Baker has come to personify the romantic figure of the tragically doomed jazz artist. Once heralded as the ‘prince of cool’, Baker’s self-destruction was lucidly chronicled by Bruce Weber in the 1988 documentary Let’s Get Lost. Even his album covers, where he gazes broodingly at the viewer, underscore his vulnerability. His meditative, halting solos formed the antithesis of the frenetic bebop movement emanating from jazz haunts on the East Coast.

Would you sign up for a screening streaming service that only had a dozen movies? A handful of series, and no classics? You might pause and ask if it’s worth it, compared to the range of options on other streaming providers. But if you’re like many of us, you might decide to pony up — after all, it’s only $5. Of course, I’m describing Apple TV+. It’s cheaper than Netflix or Hulu. But what you get, at least for now, is pretty limited. That’s not to say what they have isn’t good: they’ve pumped in a massive budget to lure creators like Oprah and Werner Herzog to this enterprise. Their movies have major stars. There just aren’t many of them. But they could have gone the other way.