The Enemy of Penguins

 He was an enemy of penguins. His eccentricity became too unpredictable for any completion bonders to consider because going over budget was something KR only dealt with when the time came (which was, in the later films, more likely to happen before the most complex scenes were shot because he would have come up with some mad idea before the shots could be marked). As his agent Bobby Litman once said to me via telephone “I’m sorry, but Ken Russel’s imaginative genius does not conform to the pedantry of your fiduciary concerns.” He was a funny guy, and he was not a polygamist to success and his muse. He stayed very honest and crafty that way.
He saw deep into the depths of raw talent of Oliver Reed in a way no one else ever did before 30 pints a day did him in. The Devils is so unreal. The wrestling scene between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Women in Love was, at the time it came out, one of the most mind blowing stretches of film I had ever seen. I think that is what KR was good at, hitting a groove in a part of a film that was just…smashing. An English original is hard to come by, at least one that doesn't need footnotes in English below the dialogue so that even people in Wales can understand the dialogue. His love of music informed most of what he did and his love of the lake district and poets thereof. Like Nicholos Roeg he didn't let making sense get in the way of making a cinematic impression. It must have been something when he threw in with Yuri Geller; I'm sure he drove him mad!
He took camera and film with him almost everywhere he ventured. Miles of stuff left behind - probably none of it a "movie", but I am sure some of it is an absolute riot.

***

Tripping introduced to the supposedly Suzy Creamcheese while the looking for Cousin Jimmy not wanting to be part of any scene because in the end all is ruled by the big Phony. Only because we had liberated more than 20,000 hits of orange sunshine from an evidence locker somewhere in the treasure state. Gary said he knew the CIA guy since he could recognize them since his brother was basically one of them having gone from the Montana smoke jumpers to do the secret war in Laos with the Hmong and it was his bogus pokus in Amsterdam during some big protest against the fascist or was it the communists when he blabbed the wrong thing to the wrong plant. He told me that when I looked in the mirror and recognized my face but not my skin that it was natural as was when I recognized my personality but rejected my identity.

But Cousin Jimmy had said he had found a way out from revelations made at the Round River experiment that included time travel and conscious transmigration through the proper reading of John Milton’s “Samson Agonistes hah hah”. Everything was insane everything was coming off the hook but what was being revealed beside the hideous nature of civilized hierarchy was the possibility of something else which the Big Phony caught on to right away. Cousin Jimmy said elevating rock and roll over jazz was the first step in the crush of the revolution and that he himself had foiled the plot to assassinate Herbert Marcuse.

I was with him and KL when they threw all those guns and boom boom off the Aurora Bridge and KL predicted crips crack and bloods splish splash bath of blood. And as they fell and splunked to the same place where the only leaper who had ever survived (a catholic nun of the Blessed Virgin Mary) he said, ‘don’t trust anyone who says it’s all about the music, cause it isn’t, it fucking isn’t.’

Looking back I don’t think she was really Creamy SiouxCheese and we never so much as unloaded anything as we simply lost it, you know, we let it go since everything dissolves along the way.

If you can dig it.