List of Lists: Best African Films

I Googled so you don't have to. Here are links to some (very few, really) of the best films about Africa. Most were released in the last 20 years, but some are a good deal older. 

IMDb: 100 of The Best Films on Africa

www.imdb.com/list/ls051534056/

African Cinema: 10 of the Best
https://www.theguardian.com › Arts › Movies › Africa Express

10 Films from Africa That will Change the Way You Think about Poverty ...
https://www.one.org/us/2016/01/15/10-films-from-africa-that-will-change-the-way-you-think-about-poverty/

10 Must-see African Movies of the 21st Century 
www.cnn.com/2013/08/02/showbiz/must-see-african-movies/

20 Essential African Films You Need To Watch
www.tasteofcinema.com › Lists › Film Lists

Movies and Documentaries About Africa
https://www.tripsavvy.com/movies-and-documentaries-about-africa-1454497

10 Best Movies About Africa | Made Man
www.mademan.com › Entertainment › Movies & TV › Movies

Keep Them for the Birds and Bees

I made my money the old-fashioned way. I was very nice to a wealthy relative right before he died. 

–Malcolm Forbes

Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.

–Mark Twain
 in a letter to his wife telling her 
that he'd declared bankruptcy

Fresh from bankruptcy court, I'm inordinately preoccupied with money these days. I find myself seeking new and different angles from which to view it. I’m fortunate -- if I may use that unfortunate word choice --  to live in a place where many, perhaps most, people are accustomed to getting by with little or no money, so there are many models for how to cope. Of course I’m wealthy compared to most people here just by virtue of getting U.S. Social Security. Turns out that’s of little comfort when it’s time to pay the rent or take the baby to the doctor.

Money can be both an answer and a question, sometimes both. In terms of power, maybe only eroticism is its equal. James Baldwin put it like so, “Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.” I’m always thinking of both. Just one more thing Baldwin and I don’t have in common.

My parents, both children (teens, actually) of The Great Depression, were calm, reasonable people (most of the time). But they were hysterical about money. I can identify. I have four fewer kids than they did, but a night doesn’t go by that I don’t wake up tormenting myself about what I’ll do if the baby is ill or injured and must get medical help. As for my own health, I don’t think about it.

I hold the — some would say goofy — conviction that giving away money brings it back to you with interest. This belief is based on experience. I won’t drag you through those experiences. Trust me. I say this in all seriousness (the first assertion). You get what you give. The Beatles, who had mountains of money, insisted that “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” Same goes for money. 

I believe that I’m slightly less hysterical about money than my parents were at my age  -- my mom only lived 5 years longer than the age I am now, 64, old but not elderly. Age changes your outlook on money (and most everything else). Oscar Wilde, said, “When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.” A few years later, Federico Fellini chimed in, “Being old is much like being young, but without the promising future.” 

I see that as very optimistic for some reason.

Rolex: Crafted from the finest raw materials and assembled with scrupulous attention to detail

"He slipped his Rolex back on his wrist. Ten past six. The bar would be open -- time for a drink."

I was on page 114 of "Solo" in which the novelists' novelist, William Boyd, channels Ian Fleming, before I realized why reading about the exploits of 007 made me crave a rolex. And I'm not referring to the expensive wristwatch.

Rolex is the national street food of Uganda, where I live. They sell for about 1500 shillings; less than 50 cents. You can buy them on any street corner anywhere in the country. They are as finely crafted as Mr. Bond's Oyster Perpetual and at least as satisfying to own. 

To make a rolex the young vendor, usually a guy, mixes up two eggs with finely chopped onion and shredded cabbage. He then pours the eggs into a puddle of oil on a scalding hot, slightly concave circular cook surface heated by burning charcoal. He uses a large knife, not a spatula, to flip the egg mixture. Once cooked, he slaps a chapati on top of the eggs, flips the whole, then scoops it up with the knife blade and sets it on a nearby counter. He slices a small Italian tomato, tiles the slices across the egg and rolls up the chapati. The result resembles a small burrito. The effect of eating this delicacy is intoxicating. It is so satisfying your first thought is to order a second one. But it is so filling that by the time you've wolfed it down you can't imagine eating another until your digestion has an hour or so to do away with the cylindrical dream you've just consumed.

The name rolex apparently comes from the phrase "rolled eggs." Why the snooty watch company hasn't capitalized on this decades old craze is anybody's guess. And why the otherwise flawlessly clever William Boyd didn't have Fleming's hero eating a rolex while wearing his Rolex (while making wild jungle love with some architecturally magnificent female) shall go down as one of literature's great missed opportunities, especially given that the book takes place in Africa. 

As for "Solo," it's actually damn good, not surprisingly (Boyd grew up in Ghana and Nigeria, knows Africa, good and bad). It moves right along with Bond knocking back scotch and martinis on every other page. Scotch, 007 says, is the perfect drink for the tropics as it's best served without ice, thus it need be neither shaken nor stirred.

Green Mansion

In our new home, the kingdom of leaves and light, we are swaddled in verdant foliage. There are many other homes nearby, but the trees and lush undergrowth visually cushion everything -- including our hearts and minds -- with glistening greenness, punctuated by polychrome birds and Nureyev monkeys dancing through the treetops. Our third floor palace is in the center of it all.

Every night the drums, the crying babies, singing mamas, drinking papas, revving motorcycles, cackling, coughing children, silent flickering lovers -- every night. In the downtown streets there's love and smoke, blood and knives, but in the amber-lit homes there are lives, meals, baths, flames and music.

What would have happened, I often wonder, if Kurtz had come to Africa and had a good experience, become immersed in the real Africa instead of the Dark Continent that was inside of him and Conrad, his creator. Heart of Lightness? Apocalypse Never? 

There have been more kingdoms and kings and queens and princes and princesses here than in all of Europe ever. More walled cities and grand palaces and shining ceremonies than the imagination can hold. More complex societies and politics and languages and medicine and religion and learning than any mind can embrace. For centuries and centuries and centuries and...

And it all sat atop gold, diamonds, copper, silver, uranium, coltan, oil, and more and more and more...

And then the outsiders came with guns and chains and took and took and took and they still are...

Dreamland

It's too bad it only seems
It only happens in my dreams
Only in dreams
In beautiful dreams.
-- Roy Orbison, In Dreams


I'm amazed how rich my dreams have become since I returned to Africa about 6 weeks ago. Once I nod out, they come tumbling forth at a furious rate and Felliniesque quality. The cast and storylines are fantastical -- people I knew in elementary school and others I don't recognize, all in the most vivid terms. The dreams are dramas, usually, or absurdist documentaries, documenting realities of my imagination. I wake from them in the middle of the night, rain pounding outside, my 9 month old son lying beside me, his little hand on my forearm. What is he dreaming, I wonder. Anything? Oh yes, I'm sure he dreams, baby dreams of special richness, fears, happiness, excitement, fun, fury. Do babies get angry in their dreams? Yes, I think they must. We do, and they are just saplings of adults, so they must, no?

Baby Love

It is an enchanting mix of charm, love, glee, joy and goodness to see how excited Mukisa gets when his nanny Sophie shows up after being away for a day. He adores her, and so do Ruth and I. If she brings one or both of her sons that sends Muki over the top. His unbridled, unselfconscious display of love for Sophie is intoxicating, but what does a baby know of love? They can live or die because of it; that's what they know. A baby left without physical or emotional affection will drift away and die. Babies who have love and are secure in it flourish. Mukisa has lived with love and security and health all his life (9 months). He typically falls asleep on his mother's back or on Sophie's. He sleeps between his mother and me every night and is rarely away from us for long during the day. And when we are gone, Sophie is with him. In the morning he bathes with his mom, sometimes both of us, then Sophie makes him warm milk or porridge. His mother or I feed him a banana and maybe some tea. Most mornings he sits on my lap on our balcony and watches the profusion of gorgeous birds, the sun and cloud show, and the visiting monkeys galloping over the rooftops and through the trees. Sometimes it rains and we talk about the rain.

The Righteous Reign of Lord Buckley -- Part I

HE WAS THE WORDMAN FROM WORDLAND, THE HIPPEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED. AND THE KINGDOM OF COMEDY STILL KNEELS BEFORE HIM.

Now lookit here all you cats and kitties out there whippin' and wailin' and jumpin' up and down and suckin' up all that juice and pattin' each other on the back and hippin' each other who the greatest cat in the world is. Mr. Malenkoff, Mr. Dalenkoff, Mr. Eisenhower, Mr. Woozinweezin, Mr. Wyzinwoozin. Mr. Woodhill, Mr. Beechhill and Mr. Churchill and all them hills gonna get you straight! And if they can't get you straight, they know a cat that knows a cat that'll straighten you. But I'm gonna put a cat on you was the coolest, grooviest, sweetest, wailingest, strongest, swinginest cat that ever stomped on this jumpin' green sphere. And they call this hyar cat...the Nazz.

In the beginning was Lord Buckley. And he was good. In fact he was a gas.

Lord who? Why His Lordship, of course - His Hipness, His Flipness, His Strictly Trippiness, His Most Incredible Crypticness, the Reverend of Irreverence, the Paul Bunyan of Bravado, His Double-Hip Ebullientness, His Intractable Impracticalness, His Undoubtedly Way Outedliness, the Charlie Parker of Talk, the Fred Astaire of the Tongue Dance, the Guru of the Gone World, the Paganini of Prose, the Man with the Multiple Minds and the Magical Mouth, the Voice of the Viper from the Vortex, the Cardinal of Cool, the Vicar of Visionaries, the Bishop of Bebop, Beatness and Boo, the Loose-Lipped Lingo Lover, the Purple Pope of the Poetical Patois - Lord Buckley!

In the 1950s, at the Music Box in L.A., the Gate of Horn in Chicago, Jazz City in Hollywood, Bimbo's and the Coffee Gallery in San Francisco, the Monterey Jazz Festival and dozens of other similar venues, one was likely to come across Lord Buckley, a tall, broad-shouldered, mustachioed man of regal bearing, wearing a tuxedo and perhaps a pith helmet, chanting something like the quotation that appears at the top of this article - the introduction to one of his most famous pieces, "The Nazz," His Lordship's take on the story of Jesus of Nazareth.

"Yeah," Lord Buckley would continue after the applause subsided, "he was a carpenter kitty. Now the Nazz was the kind of a cat that come on so cool and so groovy and so with it that when he laid it down-WALAM!-it stayed there!" And Buckley would go on for 10 minutes or more, unraveling his story. When he finished, he'd step back from the mike, take a long drag on his ever-present cigarette, look out across the audience, then walk forward and say, "What a great thing it is to be alive. My Lords, my Ladies, Beloveds, would it embarrass you very much if I were to tell you that I love you?" Clinking glasses, murmurs and nervous laughter would be heard as Buckley paused, then whispered, "It embarrasses you, doesn't it?"

Lord Buckley couldn't rightly be called a comedian. He wasn't a teller of jokes; he didn't pick you up, floor the accelerator and drop you off at the punch line. He wasn't into arriving, he was into driving. He wasn't even a satirist, a humorist or a monologist - though he has been called all those things. He was some kind of a way-out dramatic storyteller, a word musician, who used his magnificent theatrical voice and jazz phrasing to compose language symphonies and create a unique attention-grabbing, soul-tickling story fabric by reweaving ancient tales with the vital fiber of beat lingo - "hipsemantic," he called it - so that the listener was able to hear the old and tired as fresh and vigorous.

His Lordship loved language and he knew how to shake, rattle and roll it in a way that renewed its impact. He took Marc Antony's funeral oration from William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (which, in the original, begins):

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil
that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred
with their bones; so let it be with Caesar. The noble
Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were
so it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar
answered it..."

Then he whirled it around his wig and out came this:

"Hipster, flipsters and finger poppin' daddies: Knock me your
lobes; I came here to lay Caesar out, not to hip you to him. The
bad jazz that a cat blows wails long after he's cut out, the groovy
are often stashed with their frames; so don't put Caesar down. The
swingin' Brutus hath laid a story on you that Caesar was hooked for
power: If it was so it was a sad drag, and sadly hath the Caesar cat
answered it..."

Buckley was the Wordman from Wordland. But, though his storytelling drew on an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and current events - he read as many as six newspapers a day and inhaled books - hearing Lord Buckley is crucial to appreciating what he was all about. His use of sounds (and silences), his intonations and masterful timing, his roiling, boiling waterfalls of word interspersed with clairvoyant laughter and oblique asides to members of the audience resulted in a jazzlanguagemusic that, over three decades after his last performance, is still thrilling to listen to for anyone who believes in the spoken word as living culture. Because to hear Lord Buckley holding forth is to experience the incandescence of outrageous invention as it is occurring. One gets the distinct impression that in performance, Buckley, perhaps to his own surprise, often found himself astride a mustang mind, raging across the frontier of his own intellect - splashing through linguistically rococo rivers, careering down cosmic canyons, galloping into new and unexplored territory, uncertain where he was going but compelled by some force of nature to go there nonetheless. And his intoxicating good humor and confidence makes one want to throw off the shackles of linearity and timid convention and gallop alongside - right off the butte, if necessary. In the live recordings (while hard to find, several are currently available), one hears the hum of recognition in the audience's reaction. Some are perplexed, others enchanted, but all seem to recognize that something is happening, even if, over there in the corner, Mr. and Mrs. Jones don't know what it is.

And it was not merely the performances that kept friends and followers enchanted: It was The Compleat Buckley. Though he died in 1960 at the age of 54, his offstage high-octane declaiming and the theatricality of his life left an indelible imprint on the minds and hearts of all who moved through his realm, whether they were granted an audience at the Crackerbox Palace, his pleasure-bent hillside home in Los Angeles (memorialized in a song by George Harrison), attended the "salons" held at The Castle, another L.A. home, congregated at his Church of the Living Swing in a Topanga Canyon art gallery, partied at the "mattress farm" outside Las Vegas, or simply bumped into His Hipness in the nighttime jazz alleys and disheveled back rooms of coffee houses and cabarets that were the extended living room in which he played out his lushly worded life.

Like other catalytic figures in art, music and literature, Buckley's projection of his unusual personality was as significant as the art form he invented. Like Wilde, like Dylan, like Presley and Warhol, Lord Buckley came bearing messages, and one of them was himself. Over half a century earlier Oscar Wilde declared, "I have put my genius into my life; all I've put into my works is my talent." One could debate into which sphere Lord Buckley injected his genius, but most would agree that both his art and his life were singular creations.

Last spring, in a telephone conversation, Jonathan Winters recalled meeting Buckley backstage in Las Vegas in the 1950s. "We went out in the country where he had a mattress farm, " Winters told me, "and everybody sat on those things, and he kind of held court, you know. And started doing numbers and bits." According to Richard Buckley, Jr., His Lordship's 41-year-old son, the Army had dumped a hundred or more surplus mattresses in a pile by the roadside across from the Buckley's property. Lord Buckley saw this not as a defilement of nature but as a unique landscaping opportunity. He dragged all the mattresses across the highway to his desert manor and carefully arranged them around the house, creating an environment that combined the best aspects of a padded cell and the wide open spaces.

"I loved his stuff," Winters said. "I thought he was one of the most gifted and one of the funniest guys I'd ever met, and I still do. Me, Lenny Bruce, the others - we were all out of the same magical pot, as it were. I think he rubbed off on all of us. He painted such a great verbal portraits. I've had people here and I've said: 'If you haven't heard this dude, please, listen to him now.' I've never been able to single out many people who really put me on the floor. Buckley was one of them. I think he is going to last forever. I've got everything he ever did. On rainy days and chilly nights, summertime or whenever, I pull it out and listen to it. People are going to rediscover Lord Buckley. He was a far-out dude. If you're a fan of his," Winters said, "you're a fan for life."

Nowadays, with male investment bankers walking around in ponytails and earrings, with a bona fide jazz musician leading the Tonight Show band, with kings of cool like Lou Reed and Gus Van Sant Jr. appearing in ads, it's difficult to convey just how square the square world was in the 1950s and how far outside of it (and out ahead of it) Lord Buckley was. So ahead, in fact, that it took years for the rest of us to catch on.

Lord Buckley is long gone from what he called "this sweet swingin' sphere," but his resurrection is well under way. Performers from Bob Dylan to Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams have expressed their admiration for Buckley. An annual memorial festival has been in existence for several years now. An exhaustive oral biography is in the works. Newspaper and magazine articles appear with greater frequency, one new collection of his recordings has recently been released, and another is coming this fall. There may be a movie in the future - maybe this, maybe that.

The road through his mythology leads across an exotic landscape and past a zoofull of quirky personalities, each with a story, if not dozens of them. The stories go on forever - some apocryphal, some not. (Who knows which is which? Who cares?) There was the time he marched 12 buck-naked people through the lobby of the Waikiki Sheraton (or was it the Royal Hawaiian?) when Frank Sinatra was appearing at the hotel, which reportledly ended his friendship with Sinatra; the time, in 1949, after a poorly received performance at Grossinger's in the Catskills, when he stopped on the way home at a small bar ("Stop here, I want to see what a man looks like who'd name a bar The Never Sink Inn":) to lecture the blue-collar clientele on the activities of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai; the one about him riding through Chicago in a hearse-sitting in a coffin-to advertise his appearance at the Suzy Q (now and then the Buckley corpse would sit up to display a sign reading, "The body comes alive at the Suzy Q"); the time he got a cop to light his reefer outside of Birdland, then walked in smoking it and caused the jail-phobic crowd of hipsters to clear the place, and so on and so on and so on.

The thousand-fathom voice of Lord Buckley bounced off of the ionosphere and touched down in my suburban teen-age bedroom sometime in the mid-1960s, courtesy of KMPX radio. It was his retelling of "Jonah and the Whale," Buckley's baritone giving the whale a deep, echoing voice. Jonah, it seems, was smoking wacky tabacky far inside the leviathan, and the creature was feeling the effect. "Jonah!" the whale intoned, "Jonah, what are smokin' down there?" It was a different time, of course, and such a monologue seemed impossibly daring to an East Bay adolescent (I had no idea that it had been recorded years earlier). Thereafter I'd knock his Lordship my lobes whenever I found him sermonizing over the airwaves with his pithy word portraits of Christ ("The Nazz"), Mahatma Gandhi ("The Hip Gan"), William Shakespeare ("Willie the Shake"), the Marquis de Sade ("The King of Bad Cats") and others. Years later, when I happened upon him once again, I found Lord Buckley just as appealing, just as irresistibly alive and profoundly funny as I had so many years before. So recently, with the intent of figuring out who Buckley was, where he came from, and why he seems to be coming back more than 30 years after his death, I set off on a search that took me back and forth across the country and got me involved in a rather peculiar late-night telephone expedition.

Richard Myrle Buckley was born in 1906 in the small Mother Lode town of Tuolumne. He was the youngest of 10 children. As a young man, he worked as a lumberjack, later setting off to meet his brother in Mexico, where he planned to become an oil roughneck. "I got as far as Galveston and met with a long, angular Texan in a boarding house who was playing guitar. The first date I ever played in my life was at the Million Dollar Aztec Theater in San Antonio," where the manager of the theater told Buckley, "You are the lousiest act I ever played in my life!"

"And he was right," Buckley said.

He kept at it, however, later making a reputation for himself as a comic and master of ceremonies in the Depression-era dance marathons. He toured widely in vaudeville and also did a turn as a disc jockey, in the early days of radio in Portland, Ore. During World War II, he performed for the troops, touring with Ed Sullivan and establishing an enduring (if unlikely) friendship with the conservative impresario (Buckley appeared on Sullivan's TV show 11 times). Earlier Buckley had turned up in Chicago, where he played speakeasies and became a favorite of Al Capone. For a time he ran a club of his own, said to have been financed by Capone. "He was the only man who could make me laugh," the gangster once commented. During those early years in Chicago, Buckley immersed himself in the jazz life, hiring some of the finest practitioners of the music to play at his club and developing a deep affection for their lyrical dialect. In the '40s and into the '50s he played the showrooms in Las Vegas and Reno (where he was busted, though not convicted, for possession of marijuana, a misstep that would later contribute to his fall). And in Hollywood, he had a role in a Fred Allen-Ginger Rogers movie, We're Not Married - "A real stinkeroo," Buckley called it.

In 1945, after several failed marriages, Lord Buckley met a blond chorus girl named Elizabeth Hanson. They married, had two children (Laurie and Richard Jr.; Buckley also had an older son, Fred) and spent the next 15 years together. Now in her early 60s, Lady Buckley is a gracious, vibrant woman who still refers to her late husband as "His Lordship." (In the 1950s, their circle of friends became known as The Royal Court, with Lord Buckley doling out names like Prince Owl Head, Prince Hair Head, Prince Cougar Head, Princess Water Lily, Lady Renaissance and Count Jocko, Crown Prince of Morocco.) "We had a very healthy relationship; we vied with one another in a wonderful manner," Lady Buckley told me. "He was inspiring to be with. His Lordship spoke to everybody. They would wait for him and his invisible dog. There was a restaurant where His Lordship would dine when he played New York. He'd bark like he had a dog under the table, and all the waiters would smile and the people would wonder where the dog was. He made things fun in that way."

But Lord Buckley could also be blunt, and some found his irreverence offensive. "The worst thing he did was tell people the truth," Lady Buckley told me. "Lots of times people don't like that. We had a man jump on stage in Florida with a knife who was going to kill him for some remark he made.

"Another night," she continued, "I was sitting right in the middle of this club and he said to the audience, 'You all have too much money and you don't know what to do with it.' We left by the back door that night. One of the musicians said, 'Now! Run and get in the car.' I felt like I was living in a Humphrey Bogart movie."

Not timid about dishing out his own brand of hellfire and damnation, Lord Buckley often referred to the theater as a church and seemed to see his calling as an evangelical one. So it surprised few of his circle when he dubbed their weekly get-together at Bob DeWitt's Topanga Canyon art gallery "The Church of the Living Swing." "All the people sat on railroad ties," Lady Buckley remembered, "and it was the first time they had a light show. His Lordship would perform, and there would be music. It only lasted four weeks, but it was wonderful."

I asked her if she was bitter or disappointed that Lord Buckley is not better known today. "I loved the man and I loved the artist, too. I was just happy the he passed my way, because he looked at life differently than anyone else. We always ate well and we always were warm and had shelter. We lived in palaces and we lived in tiny places like the Crackerbox Palace. It never seemed to make any difference - we were happy together. But yes, I would have loved to have seen him come up one more time and be honored for his efforts."

Lord Buckley began performing his hip storytelling onstage at the urging of his wife. "I suggested he tell some of the stories he told backstage when he was in front of the audience," Lady Buckley said. When telling the stories, he usually employed a black dialect. The use of the black idiom - he was also known to use a British accent - and his appropriation of a title gave rise to the two most commonly held misconceptions about Buckley: that he was English or that he was African American (as recently as 1980, Michael Ullman, in his book Jazz Lives, mistakenly referred to Lord Buckley as "the black comedian and social commentator"). He was neither, but what little controversy exists around Buckley comes from the mis-aimed criticism he attracted due to his use of African-American lingo.

Decades before the academics informed us that the African-American patois was a legitimate, even artful, form of the language, Lord Buckley had embraced it. He celebrated the dialect as the most lively variation of English ever devised and paid homage in his own rambling, self-assured fashion. "I came by the language," he said in 1959, "in association with the beauty of the American Beauty Negro. They got themselves a zig-zag way of talking that eventually became their intimate social language. It has a fantastic sense of renewal that will take any old and revered movement and swing it right up to the pounce of the now. It is sparked with the magical beauty of the American Negro for which the United States should be tremendously grateful...Because in growing up against the granite walls of stupidity...they have dug out their well of humor to such a point that it turned into a spring. Many, many times they had to laugh at a number of things that weren't funny, and as a consequence they wound up with very, very deep sparkling humorous wells of beauty." Elsewhere he was quoted as saying, "I could not resist this magical way of speaking, nor the great power it had for good in its purity and sweetness. A power that said ... everything is understandable...This black riff voice swung, grooved and gassed me - triple-hipped my soul - launching the fabric of my being into the outer realms of the Fargonasphere!"

One evening during my Lord Buckley inquisition, I was at the Bay Area apartment of poet and novelist Al Young when the conversation turned to Buckley's use of language. "We talked like that when I was growing up in Detroit in the 1950s," Young told me. "We would study for a history test in those terms. We'd say, 'George Washington went in and kicked the British's ass.' It was a way of vividly reinterpreting the story so it seemed real. The old language just didn't say anything to us."

"Was Buckley's appropriation of the black idiom a rip-off?" I asked Young.

"No," he replied, sipping from a cup of tea as he handed me one. "Buckley didn't rip anybody off. I remember something I once heard the late blues singer Big Bill Broonzy tell Studs Terkel. Broonzy said, 'You can't steal something from anybody else. What you do is you take it and you do with it what you're going to do with it. But it's not the same.' I think that's the process of making art." Young continued: "I'm not saying that, in the marketplace, people don't maliciously exploit such cullings or borrowings. I'm just saying that the spirit of Lord Buckley was not malicious, hostile or in any way exploitive. That was the language that was around in the world that he inhabited: Everybody talked like that."

As the caffeine in the tea took its effect on us, we got into the nitty-gritty of what Lord Buckley had been up to way back in the Precambrian ear of stand-up, back when Eric Bogosian was still wearing rubber pants, when every word Robin Williams uttered sounded like "Mork," when Sandra Bernhard was performing from a highchair with Gerber's pureed liver on her bib, and long before Spalding Gray had ever heard of Cambodia. I put a tape of "The Gasser," Lord Buckley's hipsemantic rendering of the saga of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a soldier of Ferdinand II of Spain who, in the year 1528 (though Buckley places the story in "fifteen hundred and leapin' ten"), was the first white man to cross North America from east to west. That doesn't even begin to tell what Cabeza de Vaca and his three comrades were put through during their eight-year expedition, but that's another article. Let's just say it was not a cakewalk. However, the four lived, prayed, and by doing so they were able to heal Indians with their touch, and the Indians declared them great medicine men. Buckley ends his telling of the story with the last paragraph of a letter Cabeza de Vaca wrote to Ferdinand II: "Yeah, he blew about 200 beautiful miracles right across the land," Buckley says in his whiskey warble to the cackling crowd. "This is history, dig this jazz-and it's beautiful jazz." Buckley's voice lowers to a soft suede growl. "And Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca said, at the end of the letter, 'Your Majesty, I'm hip that you are a great swingin' king with a fat book, but I wanta knock a page on it. I found out on this expedition that there is a great power within that when used in beauty and immaculate purity can cure and heal and cause miracles. And when you use it it spreads like a magic garden, and when you do not use it, it recedes from you!"

"Of course Buckley was a storyteller," Young said as the tape ended. "in that respect what he did was very close to black sermonizing-preaching-when you retell a chapter of the bible in vernacular. But he was also a poet. His language was poetic, and the effects he achieved were poetic effects. And he had a sense of rhythmic development that not all monologists have. He also had the ear of a musician. Buckley knew how to use repetition, he knew how to build to a crescendo, he had a musical sense of dynamics. He was in the tradition of the folk storyteller that has been a part of America since the early 19th century. He was not doing anything substantially different from what Mark Twain did. Lord Buckley was from that grass-roots, populist, anarchist American tradition that was a force for so long in this country. And, for a while there, made it great. Buckley reinforced my own inclinations as a writer. The vitality in the heart of storytelling and poetry resides in the spoken idiom, the vernacular. All the old guys knew that. Shakespeare knew that. You take the spoken word and you transform it."

"Lord Buckley is a secret thing that people pass under the table," Ken Kesey said in a conversation with New York writer Oliver Trager, who is working on an oral biography of Buckley. "You ask writers who they think is the best writer and they all mention someone above them. Gradually you get up at the top, and you get to Samuel Beckett and not many people have read him. But a lot of people have been influenced by Beckett. I think the same was true of Lord Buckley. There were a lot of people influenced by Lord Buckley who have never heard his material."

Continue onto Part II -- http://www.lordbuckley.com/…/LBC_Print_…/All_Hail_Part_2.htm