Alice’s Restaurant

Watched “Alice’s Restaurant” the other night. I was too young to see the movie when it came out and then my general disaffection with hippydom (which mutated into vapid discodom) combined with having heard the film wasn’t very good, meant its falling off my radar.

I’ve also read some reviews of the movie and a couple interviews with Arlo and Alice Brock–and it strikes me that much of what people didn’t and don’t like about the film are precisely the reasons it works.

The reviews I read can be accessed at IMDB.

Here’s one..

Here’s an NPR interview with Arlo from 2005 that I listened to.

It’d be difficult for me to briefly clarify now how I felt in the mid 70s as a teen who’d just missed the hippy boat except that my eye, viewing the remains, was rather jaundiced, wondering where had gone purposeful action, instead taking in a good bit of confusion, like a typhoon had blown through and thrashed the scene to rags and a certain self-conceit was fine and dandy with leaving the garbage where it lay, simply transferring the party from one house to another with some retooling. Or so it seemed to me at the time. What was left was fashion, as you say. The clothes. (“The drugs, the music,” Marty chimes in behind me–which is not to denigrate some of the brilliant creativity of the time.) And the garbage.

So, I was among the dazed, confused and angry whose sensibilities aligned with the emerging punk movement, but not punk as it was quickly marketed for the masses, becoming, again, a matter of fashion and the conceit of who was where when. In review, I think if we felt left outside, it’s because the various centers had been blasted to hell and in our early teens we were too young to fully comprehend the marketing process and the capitalizing hunger for dollars and that what we were being left with was the proverbial candy-coated shell with no chewy interior. Which is also a really good way of obliterating political effectiveness, too, so there’s that end to be considered.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *