The Intense Now

-- By Tom Phillips 

Paris, May 1968

“In the Intense Now” is a pastiche of home movies, travelogues and documentaries, from 1968 and the time just before that climactic year. It includes snips and clips of revolutionary struggles in France, Czechoslovakia, China and Brazil, with a moody voice-over by a Brazilian film-maker, Joao Moreira Salles, who refrains from trying to pull it all together.  It is diffuse, digressive, and at least a half-hour too long, but I’m glad I saw it, because the heart of the film is a clash between two charismatic geniuses – “Danny the Red” Cohn-Bendit, leader of the student uprising that convulsed France in May 1968, and General Charles de Gaulle, President of the Republic, the great preserver of bourgeois order. The outcome is foreordained; the struggle is elemental, ecstatic, elegaic.

The Road to Dotage 3: My Back Pages

                                  
                                   “I got no future, baby, I know my years are few.

                                    The present’s not that pleasant; just a lot of things to do..” 

                                                                                    L. Cohen  

Every summer you learn something about yourself.  It’s the time of year when structure breaks down, when you drift off to different places, some boring, some exciting; you do new things, you do the same old things, but sometimes they come out different.   This summer I learned that I can no longer dance every day and night.  

I’ve been going to dance camp with the Country Dance and Song Society nearly every summer since 1976.  The first year it was American Week at Pinewoods Camp in Massachusetts.  We did Appalachian clogging, contras and squares, plus I took a fiddle workshop and sang early American hymns.  This took place in the woods and went on all day and half the night.  It was the total opposite of my life in the city, working in a tense newsroom, visiting my children on weekends in a broken home.   

I got so high at Pinewoods – on nothing but dance, music, women partners, a black pond and country air – that I could hardly sleep.  I would stand outside my cabin in the dead of night and vibrate in the wind, shaking with a continual attack of energy, howling silently through the trees.