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****
***
**
*
Z
As you can see, we have a five-star rating system under six divisions (with all possible subdivisions i.e. ** 1/2, etc.) inclusive of the final Z, which shall be explained.
We could of course present these categories in the usual way, since with the exception of that single peculiarity they seem to conform to the standard ratings formula familiar to the viewer, habitués of Leonard Mallin’s Movie Guide and oilier desktop paperweights (five could be Excellent, four Very Good and so on). In all other such presentations, it is never really explained what the particular reviewer uses as a criterion for five stars, etc. Oh, we hear talk of style, production values, profundity of content. But what, we ask, is the measure that any given reviewer brings to bear on these considerations? Personal subjective feeling at the moment? The gauge of artists long accepted and subconsciously assimilated from high school on as paragons of the particular field?
We would like to settle such questions the reader might - or ought to - have with respect to our review columns month to month; we'd like to put you at ease right away, assure you that we apply only the most scientific and objectively rigorous standards of evaluation that automatically lift our particular use of the five-star methodology out of the general state of implicit ambiguity it's otherwise found in everywhere. In other words, we defy Gary Franklin to profess after this explanation that he uses our methods.
A five and four star rating is naturally going to include considerations of technical proficiency; nothing at five or four stars is not going to measure up to minimal standards of such proficiency. Technical expertise or brilliance is of course not the only criterion by which a work may be judged; there may be books, movies, etc. that manifestly don't display great technical or artistic facility, that may in fact be quite flawed in that area but which nonetheless have redeeming qualities of passion, heart, flair, depth, insight, compelling narrative, etc. moving us automatically beyond the merely formal eye. But formality, as the Orient tirelessly teaches, has its important place, and it's not justified to dismiss form altogether in the face of a passionate, emotionally or intellectually charged work that is nonetheless mounted on Play-Doh. We do not give fours and fives to artists whose hearts speak with authority and conviction, yet who nevertheless enunciate in kindergarten diction (nor do we appreciate poets who spout in rap-rhymes - you know what I'm sayin', "Mo-Wa"?) On the other hand, a positive heart speaking with authority and conviction counts more than any technical tour de force; therefore it is not impossible for a passionately alive artist to merit at least a four, even a four and a half if only the minimal facility with the given medium is demonstrated as well.
Yet the important question, then, in relation to the awarding of fours and fives obviously exists in a zone which is neither squarely equivalent to technical or artistic proficiency, nor to passional inspiration per se. There is a precise if subtly apprehended spirit which assesses such polarities, weighs and measures them and finds their just place in combination on the scale of balances. Such spirit is not at all nebulous, nor is it even exactly subjective. It is a real force, a power of evaluation that swoops down upon any form of expression with wings of the Valkyries and, in a feat of austere beauty and impersonal power, measures the dimensions of the given work from tip to tip of its own colossal span. The name for this standard of evaluation was placed emphatically in front of me, when my son strongly recommended I read Iron and Silk. In this popularly received book about the martial arts, the protagonist learns that the Chinese have an ultimate criterion which is applied to a given performance, work or act, a standard that clearly serves to differentiate from the merely passionate, or the merely proficient. The Question which, one comes to learn, is asked of any feat or skill is whether or not it ultimately has "Gong Fu". Does it have "Gong Fu?" then, is the question. Any work reviewed in these pages, in order to merit a four or five, you must know automatically has passed the test of that significant question; such a work may or may not exude raw, powerful passion; it may or may not be a dazzling tour de force of nonpareil technical artistry, but it most certainly must have Gong Fu.
And what, exactly, do we mean by Gong Fu? Obviously, something which truly has Gong Fu is rare; and the presence of Gong Fu does not proclaim upon the relative seriousness or "profundity" of artistic intent in the presumptuous, sterile manner of the Great Books; you may find that Citizen Kane has Gong Fu, for example, but so does Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (see the review this issue). The common denominator is the fire with which the respective intents are ignited. Indeed, fire is the essence of Gong Fu. A work that truly has Gong Fu has caught fire. The "judgment", to filch from the I Ching, would read to the effect that ripeness has overtaken artist and artwork; the "judgment" is that water, though it may certainly warm in gradations of degrees, only boils at exactly the right temperature and not a fraction of a centigrade before. That which has Gong Fu, then, is necessarily on a rolling boil; it is incandescent. This "catching on" may be glowingy manifest, flamboyant as a boiler-factory conflagration, or it may be a quiet crackling beneath the surface. But it is there, and anyone attuned to the intuitive essence of Gong Fu may feel its presence with scintillating accuracy, know it's there regardless the ordinary considerations of content, etc. First, then, prejudicial (and, frankly, snobbish) standards regarding the "social seriousness" of the work and other artificial, conceptual barriers must be relinquished, allowed to drift the way of such dinosaurs as the New Yorker so that the Voice of Fire may be allowed to Speak, through any form it will.
Gong Fu is not, then, antithetical either to passion or expertise. In fact, as you can see, like a Japanese tea ceremony expertly rendered in the spiritual sense, it must have both components in order even to be considered as Gong Fu. Gong Fu makes of any mode, medium, form or work a sacramental act. It makes both Guernica and the early Felix the Cat comic strip a worshipful ceremony of purifying observation. Gong Fu is "ineffable", yes, in the sense that you can't define it in conventional, conceptual terms; for to point out merely that Moby Dick has Gong Fu would lead to the presumption that Gong Fu applied to "classics", accepted masterworks of ultimately serious philosophical aim, and we would subsequently be nonplussed to find that George Lucas' Star Wars was also characterized as having Gong Fu. But though it's "ineffable" in that manner, it's as fierce and unmistakable when sensed as the declaration demonstrates of Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne when he proclaimed that, in writing Moby Dick his soul was so suddenly aflame that he felt he wrote with a condor's quill for a pen, and Mount Vesuvius for his inkwell.
To give you more of the "hang" of what we might possibly mean by Gong Fu, let's take a quick comparative look: the works of James Joyce have Gong FU....all of them; whereas the works of Joseph Campbell, who admired Joyce greatly, in large part simply do not. Though they are extremely valuable works and we do not "put him down" thereby, at the critical point of near-boiling they simply come up short, they lack that last adroit degree, that pushing-over perhaps into controlled madness or modulated fury which Bruce Lee demonstrates in his kung fu movies is the one incalculable factor, the one unrehearsed key that makes all the difference in the world. Though Campbell's books are chock-a-block with scholarship, insight, learnedness, a valuable instruction and are therefore to be greatly esteemed and ap¬preciated, there is one thread or civilized filament that he never relinquishes, one link to the frustratingly common and thus dulling conceptual level that makes all his homage and overture to Joyce take place still at a sad real distance. It is for this reason that Alan Watts, though all his works are tacitly about the very principle to which Gong Fu is inextricably linked, never himself had Gong Fu nor does it flash forth from any of his astutely modeled writings.
To give another example: the works of Norman Mailer in large part simply have Gong Fu, whether you like him or not; whereas the works of Kate Milieu, Germaine Greer and certainly Gloria Steinem just don't; so the principle of Gong Fu is obviously not related per se to one's preference in the political, social or moral sense. On the other hand, there's a universe of Gong Fu-distance between the demented, throbbing dreamlife and ubiquitous interior monologue (intoned through the voice of every separate character) in American Dream and the self-consciously crafted writerliness of the all-but-worthless Tough Guys Don't Dance.
The works of Aleister Crowley have Gong Fu; whereas the writings of Israel Regardie, Crowley's former secretary and much more acceptable social light elevated to supreme expertise in the field, are utterly barren of the least intimation of Gong Fu even though large portions of his collected texts are virtually verbatim borrowings from Crowley without the decent acknowledgment of a humbly-placed quotation mark. (Obviously, then, Gong Fu isn't an easily equated function of. sun sign; for Crowley was a Libran, not a sign you'd expect automatically to have much affinity with the "controlled fury" of Gong Fu, and Regardie was a Scorpio, a sign which in and of itself is more intrinsically at home with the whole idea of "Gong Fu").
The Great Gatsby has Gong Fu; nothing else by F. Scott really does. Ernest Hemingway wouldn't know Gong Fu if it walked up and bit him on his jungle jodhpurs -so Gong Fu doesn't automatically equate with conventional attitudes of virility, macho-posturing et al.
The 60s Bob Dylan had Gong Fu; the 80s Dylan does not (come to think about it, one could make a list receding to the horizon of 60s names similarly - even mysteriously - bereft of the magical Gong Fu formerly infusing them, i.e. Mick Jagger, Donovan, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukkonen....the Beatles together always had Gong Fu. The Beatles separately never had Gong Fu. Never.)
Do you get the idea? Practice it, see if you get the hang of it as you go along. Remember, Gong Fu is always that which is more than the sum of its parts. If you'd like, make your own list of haves and have-nots in the Gong Fu domain (draw from any field i.e. art, film, writing, journalism, sports, etc.; just make sure you don't allow your already-existent personal preference completely dictate your consideration of what does and doesn't have Gong Fu - remember that Gong Fu and personal preference are not automatically the same, or even necessarily compatible. For one thing, the presence of Gong Fu, being always and by definition a fire, is a danger. It's always a danger, covert or overt; you may think that the Gong Fu of a Guns-N-Roses is dangerous simply because it verges over to the side of the reactionary and thus "negative"; but the Gong Fu of a Robin Williams or a Richard Pryor is dangerous just as well, though you may certainly consider that it lists distinctly to the "positive". "Negative" or "positive", then, Gong Fu is always dangerous; and how many make personal choices or establish selective preferences based on a positive correlation with the index of potential danger characterizing any given artwork or artist?
Send us your lists of "Gong Fu" ratings. If they seem sufficiently astute, we'll print them up (no, they don't have to agree with your friendly critics at New Thunderbird!).
A three rating may have Gong Fu or may not; it may have high technical facility or emotional power, or it may not. Some relatively powerful combination of two out of the three factors must characterize the given work to merit a three or three and a half *'s.
A two or one-star rating cannot, by definition, have Gong Fu. It may or not have technical or artistic facility. It may or may not have emotional value or force, intellectual merit, etc.
Now, for the Z. With the recent passing of Guy Madison who played Zorro, we were greatly afraid that the old Z was in danger of being permanently retired. And what a shame, because it's so perfectly…Californian. It's unbearable to think that the villainous-deserving may never taste the cold steel balance, the avenging rectifier of the zippy Z, struck smartly into the seat of their Calvin Klein’s. So we at the Thunderbirds review staff have taken it upon ourselves to resurrect the Z, since "resurrection" is in general our theme anyway. Thus from time to time you'll come upon some worthy in our columns who's just been taken to the Justicia y Libertad Tattoo Parlor, outfitted with a sharp gluteal intaglio and sent on his way to admire the familiar signature through the same strategic system of mirrors he usually uses to study himself.
In case there's some ridiculous copyright infringement standing in the way of our using that Grande Symbole which ought rightly by now to belong in the public domain, let us just submit for the record that the Z we occasionally employ in these columns does not necessarily stand for Zorro at all (nor does it stand for the recently deceased cable system!). It could just as well stand for Z-axis, zero, Zeke, zayin or Zuniga, as in Daphne (I'm sure she wouldn't mind our using her cachet for such a noble cause, as long as it wasn't in relation to any movie she might be appearing in).
So remember now (they always say "now" in the dubbings of Chinese martial arts movies, as in "why do you hate her now", "we were like that then, now"); you've got to ask yourself the question: DOES IT HAVE GONG FU?
***
**
*
Z
As you can see, we have a five-star rating system under six divisions (with all possible subdivisions i.e. ** 1/2, etc.) inclusive of the final Z, which shall be explained.
We could of course present these categories in the usual way, since with the exception of that single peculiarity they seem to conform to the standard ratings formula familiar to the viewer, habitués of Leonard Mallin’s Movie Guide and oilier desktop paperweights (five could be Excellent, four Very Good and so on). In all other such presentations, it is never really explained what the particular reviewer uses as a criterion for five stars, etc. Oh, we hear talk of style, production values, profundity of content. But what, we ask, is the measure that any given reviewer brings to bear on these considerations? Personal subjective feeling at the moment? The gauge of artists long accepted and subconsciously assimilated from high school on as paragons of the particular field?
We would like to settle such questions the reader might - or ought to - have with respect to our review columns month to month; we'd like to put you at ease right away, assure you that we apply only the most scientific and objectively rigorous standards of evaluation that automatically lift our particular use of the five-star methodology out of the general state of implicit ambiguity it's otherwise found in everywhere. In other words, we defy Gary Franklin to profess after this explanation that he uses our methods.
A five and four star rating is naturally going to include considerations of technical proficiency; nothing at five or four stars is not going to measure up to minimal standards of such proficiency. Technical expertise or brilliance is of course not the only criterion by which a work may be judged; there may be books, movies, etc. that manifestly don't display great technical or artistic facility, that may in fact be quite flawed in that area but which nonetheless have redeeming qualities of passion, heart, flair, depth, insight, compelling narrative, etc. moving us automatically beyond the merely formal eye. But formality, as the Orient tirelessly teaches, has its important place, and it's not justified to dismiss form altogether in the face of a passionate, emotionally or intellectually charged work that is nonetheless mounted on Play-Doh. We do not give fours and fives to artists whose hearts speak with authority and conviction, yet who nevertheless enunciate in kindergarten diction (nor do we appreciate poets who spout in rap-rhymes - you know what I'm sayin', "Mo-Wa"?) On the other hand, a positive heart speaking with authority and conviction counts more than any technical tour de force; therefore it is not impossible for a passionately alive artist to merit at least a four, even a four and a half if only the minimal facility with the given medium is demonstrated as well.
Yet the important question, then, in relation to the awarding of fours and fives obviously exists in a zone which is neither squarely equivalent to technical or artistic proficiency, nor to passional inspiration per se. There is a precise if subtly apprehended spirit which assesses such polarities, weighs and measures them and finds their just place in combination on the scale of balances. Such spirit is not at all nebulous, nor is it even exactly subjective. It is a real force, a power of evaluation that swoops down upon any form of expression with wings of the Valkyries and, in a feat of austere beauty and impersonal power, measures the dimensions of the given work from tip to tip of its own colossal span. The name for this standard of evaluation was placed emphatically in front of me, when my son strongly recommended I read Iron and Silk. In this popularly received book about the martial arts, the protagonist learns that the Chinese have an ultimate criterion which is applied to a given performance, work or act, a standard that clearly serves to differentiate from the merely passionate, or the merely proficient. The Question which, one comes to learn, is asked of any feat or skill is whether or not it ultimately has "Gong Fu". Does it have "Gong Fu?" then, is the question. Any work reviewed in these pages, in order to merit a four or five, you must know automatically has passed the test of that significant question; such a work may or may not exude raw, powerful passion; it may or may not be a dazzling tour de force of nonpareil technical artistry, but it most certainly must have Gong Fu.
And what, exactly, do we mean by Gong Fu? Obviously, something which truly has Gong Fu is rare; and the presence of Gong Fu does not proclaim upon the relative seriousness or "profundity" of artistic intent in the presumptuous, sterile manner of the Great Books; you may find that Citizen Kane has Gong Fu, for example, but so does Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (see the review this issue). The common denominator is the fire with which the respective intents are ignited. Indeed, fire is the essence of Gong Fu. A work that truly has Gong Fu has caught fire. The "judgment", to filch from the I Ching, would read to the effect that ripeness has overtaken artist and artwork; the "judgment" is that water, though it may certainly warm in gradations of degrees, only boils at exactly the right temperature and not a fraction of a centigrade before. That which has Gong Fu, then, is necessarily on a rolling boil; it is incandescent. This "catching on" may be glowingy manifest, flamboyant as a boiler-factory conflagration, or it may be a quiet crackling beneath the surface. But it is there, and anyone attuned to the intuitive essence of Gong Fu may feel its presence with scintillating accuracy, know it's there regardless the ordinary considerations of content, etc. First, then, prejudicial (and, frankly, snobbish) standards regarding the "social seriousness" of the work and other artificial, conceptual barriers must be relinquished, allowed to drift the way of such dinosaurs as the New Yorker so that the Voice of Fire may be allowed to Speak, through any form it will.
Gong Fu is not, then, antithetical either to passion or expertise. In fact, as you can see, like a Japanese tea ceremony expertly rendered in the spiritual sense, it must have both components in order even to be considered as Gong Fu. Gong Fu makes of any mode, medium, form or work a sacramental act. It makes both Guernica and the early Felix the Cat comic strip a worshipful ceremony of purifying observation. Gong Fu is "ineffable", yes, in the sense that you can't define it in conventional, conceptual terms; for to point out merely that Moby Dick has Gong Fu would lead to the presumption that Gong Fu applied to "classics", accepted masterworks of ultimately serious philosophical aim, and we would subsequently be nonplussed to find that George Lucas' Star Wars was also characterized as having Gong Fu. But though it's "ineffable" in that manner, it's as fierce and unmistakable when sensed as the declaration demonstrates of Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne when he proclaimed that, in writing Moby Dick his soul was so suddenly aflame that he felt he wrote with a condor's quill for a pen, and Mount Vesuvius for his inkwell.
To give you more of the "hang" of what we might possibly mean by Gong Fu, let's take a quick comparative look: the works of James Joyce have Gong FU....all of them; whereas the works of Joseph Campbell, who admired Joyce greatly, in large part simply do not. Though they are extremely valuable works and we do not "put him down" thereby, at the critical point of near-boiling they simply come up short, they lack that last adroit degree, that pushing-over perhaps into controlled madness or modulated fury which Bruce Lee demonstrates in his kung fu movies is the one incalculable factor, the one unrehearsed key that makes all the difference in the world. Though Campbell's books are chock-a-block with scholarship, insight, learnedness, a valuable instruction and are therefore to be greatly esteemed and ap¬preciated, there is one thread or civilized filament that he never relinquishes, one link to the frustratingly common and thus dulling conceptual level that makes all his homage and overture to Joyce take place still at a sad real distance. It is for this reason that Alan Watts, though all his works are tacitly about the very principle to which Gong Fu is inextricably linked, never himself had Gong Fu nor does it flash forth from any of his astutely modeled writings.
To give another example: the works of Norman Mailer in large part simply have Gong Fu, whether you like him or not; whereas the works of Kate Milieu, Germaine Greer and certainly Gloria Steinem just don't; so the principle of Gong Fu is obviously not related per se to one's preference in the political, social or moral sense. On the other hand, there's a universe of Gong Fu-distance between the demented, throbbing dreamlife and ubiquitous interior monologue (intoned through the voice of every separate character) in American Dream and the self-consciously crafted writerliness of the all-but-worthless Tough Guys Don't Dance.
The works of Aleister Crowley have Gong Fu; whereas the writings of Israel Regardie, Crowley's former secretary and much more acceptable social light elevated to supreme expertise in the field, are utterly barren of the least intimation of Gong Fu even though large portions of his collected texts are virtually verbatim borrowings from Crowley without the decent acknowledgment of a humbly-placed quotation mark. (Obviously, then, Gong Fu isn't an easily equated function of. sun sign; for Crowley was a Libran, not a sign you'd expect automatically to have much affinity with the "controlled fury" of Gong Fu, and Regardie was a Scorpio, a sign which in and of itself is more intrinsically at home with the whole idea of "Gong Fu").
The Great Gatsby has Gong Fu; nothing else by F. Scott really does. Ernest Hemingway wouldn't know Gong Fu if it walked up and bit him on his jungle jodhpurs -so Gong Fu doesn't automatically equate with conventional attitudes of virility, macho-posturing et al.
The 60s Bob Dylan had Gong Fu; the 80s Dylan does not (come to think about it, one could make a list receding to the horizon of 60s names similarly - even mysteriously - bereft of the magical Gong Fu formerly infusing them, i.e. Mick Jagger, Donovan, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Grace Slick, Jorma Kaukkonen....the Beatles together always had Gong Fu. The Beatles separately never had Gong Fu. Never.)
Do you get the idea? Practice it, see if you get the hang of it as you go along. Remember, Gong Fu is always that which is more than the sum of its parts. If you'd like, make your own list of haves and have-nots in the Gong Fu domain (draw from any field i.e. art, film, writing, journalism, sports, etc.; just make sure you don't allow your already-existent personal preference completely dictate your consideration of what does and doesn't have Gong Fu - remember that Gong Fu and personal preference are not automatically the same, or even necessarily compatible. For one thing, the presence of Gong Fu, being always and by definition a fire, is a danger. It's always a danger, covert or overt; you may think that the Gong Fu of a Guns-N-Roses is dangerous simply because it verges over to the side of the reactionary and thus "negative"; but the Gong Fu of a Robin Williams or a Richard Pryor is dangerous just as well, though you may certainly consider that it lists distinctly to the "positive". "Negative" or "positive", then, Gong Fu is always dangerous; and how many make personal choices or establish selective preferences based on a positive correlation with the index of potential danger characterizing any given artwork or artist?
Send us your lists of "Gong Fu" ratings. If they seem sufficiently astute, we'll print them up (no, they don't have to agree with your friendly critics at New Thunderbird!).
A three rating may have Gong Fu or may not; it may have high technical facility or emotional power, or it may not. Some relatively powerful combination of two out of the three factors must characterize the given work to merit a three or three and a half *'s.
A two or one-star rating cannot, by definition, have Gong Fu. It may or not have technical or artistic facility. It may or may not have emotional value or force, intellectual merit, etc.
Now, for the Z. With the recent passing of Guy Madison who played Zorro, we were greatly afraid that the old Z was in danger of being permanently retired. And what a shame, because it's so perfectly…Californian. It's unbearable to think that the villainous-deserving may never taste the cold steel balance, the avenging rectifier of the zippy Z, struck smartly into the seat of their Calvin Klein’s. So we at the Thunderbirds review staff have taken it upon ourselves to resurrect the Z, since "resurrection" is in general our theme anyway. Thus from time to time you'll come upon some worthy in our columns who's just been taken to the Justicia y Libertad Tattoo Parlor, outfitted with a sharp gluteal intaglio and sent on his way to admire the familiar signature through the same strategic system of mirrors he usually uses to study himself.
In case there's some ridiculous copyright infringement standing in the way of our using that Grande Symbole which ought rightly by now to belong in the public domain, let us just submit for the record that the Z we occasionally employ in these columns does not necessarily stand for Zorro at all (nor does it stand for the recently deceased cable system!). It could just as well stand for Z-axis, zero, Zeke, zayin or Zuniga, as in Daphne (I'm sure she wouldn't mind our using her cachet for such a noble cause, as long as it wasn't in relation to any movie she might be appearing in).
So remember now (they always say "now" in the dubbings of Chinese martial arts movies, as in "why do you hate her now", "we were like that then, now"); you've got to ask yourself the question: DOES IT HAVE GONG FU?
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