![]() American Pastoral (American Trilogy #1) (Movie Tie- in Edition) by Philip Roth, Paperback. The Swede. During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city's old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair- complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep- jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue- eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov. The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first baseman in baseball. Only the basketball team was ever any good- twice winning the city championship while he was its leading scorer- but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn't matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all else. Physical aggression, even camouflaged by athletic uniforms and official rules and intended to do no harm to Jews, was not a traditional source of pleasure in our community- advanced degrees were. ![]() Nonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war. The elevation of Swede Levov into the household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews can best be explained, I think, by the war against the Germans and the Japanese and the fears that it fostered. With the Swede indomitable on the playing field, the meaningless surface of life provided a bizarre, delusionary kind of sustenance, the happy release into a Swedian innocence, for those who lived in dread of never seeing their sons or their brothers or their husbands again. Plot Summary: Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Philip Roth novel, 'American Pastoral' follows an all American family across several decades, as their idyllic. In the powerful trailer for the drama American Pastoral, a post office owner steps out to raise the American flag as dawn approaches. It's like any other day in rural. And how did this affect him- the glorification, the sanctification, of every hook shot he sank, every pass he leaped up and caught, every line drive he rifled for a double down the left- field line? Is this what made him that staid and stone- faced boy? Or was the mature- seeming sobriety the outward manifestation of an arduous inward struggle to keep in check the narcissism that an entire community was ladling with love? The high school cheerleaders had a cheer for the Swede. Unlike the other cheers, meant to inspire the whole team or to galvanize the spectators, this was a rhythmic, foot- stomping tribute to the Swede alone, enthusiasm for his perfection undiluted and unabashed. AMERICAN PASTORAL follows Seymour 'Swede' Levov, a legendary high school athlete, who grows up to marry a former beauty queen and inherits his father's business. When does American Hustle come out on DVD and Blu-ray? Release date set for March 18, 2014. Also American Hustle Redbox, Netflix, and iTunes release dates. Movie News: See a New 'Transformers: Last Knight' Robot; Watch First Trailer for Ewan McGregor's 'American Pastoral'. Read this and other movie news, reviews, and. ![]() The cheer rocked the gym at basketball games every time he took a rebound or scored a point, swept through our side of City Stadium at football games any time he gained a yard or intercepted a pass. Even at the sparsely attended home baseball games up at Irvington Park, where there was no cheerleading squad eagerly kneeling at the sidelines, you could hear it thinly chanted by the handful of Weequahic stalwarts in the wooden stands not only when the Swede came up to bat but when he made no more than a routine putout at first base. It was a cheer that consisted of eight syllables, three of them his name, and it went, Bah bah- bah! The candy store owners we boys pestered called the rest of us . Parents smiled and benignly addressed him as . The chattering girls he passed on the street would ostentatiously swoon, and the bravest would holler after him, . Contrary to whatever daydreams the rest of us may have had about the enhancing effect on ourselves of total, uncritical, idolatrous adulation, the love thrust upon the Swede seemed actually to deprive him of feeling. In this boy embraced as a symbol of hope by so many- as the embodiment of the strength, the resolve, the emboldened valor that would prevail to return our high school's servicemen home unscathed from Midway, Salerno, Cherbourg, the Solomons, the Aleutians, Tarawa- there appeared to be not a drop of wit or irony to interfere with his golden gift for responsibility. But wit or irony is like a hitch in his swing for a kid like the Swede, irony being a human consolation and beside the point if you're getting your way as a god. Either there was a whole side to his personality that he was suppressing or that was as yet asleep or, more likely, there wasn't. His aloofness, his seeming passivity as the desired object of all this asexual lovemaking, made him appear, if not divine, a distinguished cut above the more primordial humanity of just about everybody else at the school. He was fettered to history, an instrument of history, esteemed with a passion that might never have been if he'd broken the Weequahic basketball record- by scoring twenty- seven points against Barringer- on a day other than the sad, sad day in 1. Flying Fortresses were shot down by Luftwaffe fighter planes, two fell victim to flak, and five more crashed after crossing the English coast on their way back from bombing Germany. The Swede's younger brother was my classmate, Jerry Levov, a scrawny, small- headed, oddly overflexible boy built along the lines of a licorice stick, something of a mathematical wizard, and the January 1. Though Jerry never really had a friendship with anyone, in his imperious, irascible way, he took an interest in me over the years, and that was how I wound up, from the age of ten, regularly getting beaten by him at Ping- Pong in the finished basement of the Levovs' one- family house, on the corner of Wyndmoor and Keer- the word . A Ping- Pong ball is, brilliantly, sized and shaped so that it cannot take out your eye. I would not otherwise have played in Jerry Levov's basement. If it weren't for the opportunity to tell people that I knew my way around Swede Levov's house, nobody could have got me down into that basement, defenseless but for a small wooden paddle. Nothing that weighs as little as a Ping- Pong ball can be lethal, yet when Jerry whacked that thing murder couldn't have been far from his mind. It never occurred to me that this violent display might have something to do with what it was like for him to be the kid brother of Swede Levov. Since I couldn't imagine anything better than being the Swede's brother- short of being the Swede himself- I failed to understand that for Jerry it might be difficult to imagine anything worse. The Swede's bedroom- which I never dared enter but would pause to gaze into when I used the toilet outside Jerry's room- was tucked under the eaves at the back of the house. ![]() With its slanted ceiling and dormer windows and Weequahic pennants on the walls, it looked like what I thought of as a real boy's room. From the two windows that opened out over the back lawn you could see the roof of the Levovs' garage, where the Swede as a grade school kid practiced hitting in the wintertime by swinging at a baseball taped to a cord hung from a rafter- an idea he might have got from a baseball novel by John R. Tunis called The Kid from Tomkinsville. I came to that book and to other of Tunis's baseball books- Iron Duke, The Duke Decides, Champion's Choice, Keystone Kids, Rookie of the Year- by spotting them on the built- in shelf beside the Swede's bed, all lined up alphabetically between two solid bronze bookends that had been a bar mitzvah gift, miniaturized replicas of Rodin's . The drawings seemed conceived out of the dark austerities of Depression America. Every ten pages or so, to succinctly depict a dramatic physical moment in the story- . He is unglamorous even in a baseball uniform; if he is the pitcher, his gloved hand looks like a paw; and what image after image makes graphically clear is that playing up in the majors, heroic though it may seem, is yet another form of backbreaking, unremunerative labor. Soon to be a major motion picture! As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all.![]() The Kid from Tomkinsville could as well have been called The Lamb from Tomkinsville, even The Lamb from Tomkinsville Led to the Slaughter. In the Kid's career as the spark- plug newcomer to a last- place Brooklyn Dodger club, each triumph is rewarded with a punishing disappointment or a crushing accident. The staunch attachment that develops between the lonely, homesick Kid and the Dodgers' veteran catcher, Dave Leonard, who successfully teaches him the ways of the big leagues and who, . He rides the bench for the rest of the year, pinch- hitting because of his strength at the plate, and then, over the snowy winter- back home in Connecticut spending days on the farm and evenings at the drugstore, well known now but really Grandma's boy all over again- he works diligently by himself on Dave Leonard's directive to keep his swing level (. On the last day of the season, in a game against the Giants, who are in first place by only half a game, the Kid kindles the Dodgers' hitting attack, and in the bottom of the fourteenth- with two down, two men on, and the Dodgers ahead on a run scored by the Kid with his audacious, characteristically muscular baserunning- he makes the final game- saving play, a running catch smack up against the right center- field wall. That tremendous daredevil feat sends the Dodgers into the World Series and leaves him . There was a clap of thunder. Rain descended upon the Polo Grounds. I could not believe it. The reprehensible member of the Dodgers is Razzle Nugent, a great pitcher but a drunk and a hothead, a violent bully fiercely jealous of the Kid. And yet it is not Razzle carried off . Needless to say, I thought of the Swede and the Kid as one and wondered how the Swede could bear to read this book that had left me near tears and unable to sleep. Had I had the courage to address him, I would have asked if he thought the ending meant the Kid was finished or whether it meant the possibility of yet another comeback. Was the Kid killed by the last catch of the year? HWY: An American Pastoral - Wikipedia. HWY: An American Pastoral is a film by Jim Morrison, Frank Lisciandro, Paul Ferrara, and Babe Hill and stars Morrison as a hitchhiker. It is a 5. 0- minute experimental film in Direct Cinema style. It was shot during the spring and summer of 1. Mojave Desert and in Los Angeles. In the informal 1. Morrison gave to Ben Fong Torres, Morrison states the film . He proceeds to walk up the mountain from the pond. He starts walking down the highway and a voice- over of Morrison talks about his incident with dead Indians as a child. He is shown emerging from a car stuck in the sand. He successfully tries to pull a car over. The next sequence shows landscape and then turns to a clip of the hitchhiker looking for a book with the car parked outside a gas station (visible through the window). The hitchhiker is shown back on the highway together with two other people and a police officer. He gets into the car and drives off. He looks for directions on a map at night. The cars are shown driving into the sunset. Finally, the hitchhiker makes a phone call to American poet Michael Mc. Clure and explains with disimpassioned voice why the original driver was not with him for much of the journey. The hitchhiker killed him. The final shots show the hitchhiker at The Whiskey A Go Go on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Screenplay, production and public screening. The film was based on Morrison's experiences as a hitchhiker during his student days. As a college student Morrison had regularly been commuting as a hitchhiker from Tallahassee 2. Mary Werbelow in Clearwater. The production of HWY was supported by Morrison's friends Paul Ferrara, Frank Lisciandro and Babe Hill. The soundtrack was produced by composer Fred Myrow; with additional material from ethnic and world music recordings. Parts of the movie were meant to be used for fundraising purposes in order to complete the whole project. Morrison showed HWY during his second stay in Paris in early 1. The film was publicly shown only once in Vancouver in 1. Paris in 1. 99. 3. An audio sequence from the film was published on The Doors' spoken word album. An American Prayer in 1. It has been suggested that the inspiration for the Protagonist in the film, played by Morrison, with the script name 'Billy' was inspired by the very real Hitchhiker serial killer Billy Cook who murdered six people on a 2. Missouri and California in 1. However, the complete film was not included in the Special Features on the When You're Strange DVD, and there have been no further announcements regarding a DVD release for the film. Bootleg copies of the film (with a visible timecode at the bottom of the screen) can be found on the internet. Production history. In: The American Night. The Writings of Jim Morrison. Viking, London 1. HWY: An American Pastoral April 2- 6, 1. Ben- Fong Torres & Jim Morrison 1. Interview. In: The American Night. The Writings of Jim Morrison. Viking, London 1. Jim- morrison. livejournal. Gotham, New York 2. The American Night. The Writings of Jim Morrison. Viking, London 1. ISBN 9. 78- 1- 4. HWY: An American Pastoral April 2- 6, 1. HWY: An American Pastoral BY JIM MORRISON, FRANK LISCIANDRO, PAUL FERRARA, BABE HILL^HWY: An American Pastoral BY JIM MORRISON, FRANK LISCIANDRO, PAUL FERRARA, BABE HILL^https: //myspace. JIM MORRISON: BALD MOUNTAIN.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |