Just about every put-down in Sturt's piece about Easy Rider actually justifies that film's importance, unless of course you expect a film made in 1969 to reflect where culture is at in 2025 (i.e., "I don’t remember seeing a single black face in the movie"). Or is that what you meant when you said it "gets put in its place by Tobias Sturt"?
Beyond reflecting the cultural moment in 1969, it occurs to me that Easy Rider also illustrates the point that Steven Stoll makes in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. In that book he describes how subsistence farming is an alternative economic order to our own wage-based economy.
Sturt references the scene where the rancher offers them a meal: ‘It's not every man that can live off the land, you know? Can do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.’
This is contrasted later in the film where the hippie commune seems headed for failure as they try to grow crops without the necessary water.
Stoll makes the point that subsistence farming is not market-free, but rather markets are where surpluses are exchanged for goods. (Subsistence farming also requires a common space outside any farmer's growing area, where hunting and gathering is available to all.)
Easy Rider goes beyond a mere "reflection of its times" to illustrate the alternative to a wage based economy that some in the hippie movement dreamed of. Hopper and Fonda after all are not working at the behest of some pusher, but free agents taking their goods to market, and finding common ground with a traditional subsistence farmer at the start of the film, and meeting resistance to that alternative as the film proceeds to its conclusion.
Not a question of liking or disliking Easy Rider. It and its doppelganger, Charlie Daniels UnEasy Rider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJrRwTTqm0o is pretty much key to understanding the contradictory Pynchonian amalgam of flotsam that is MAGA.
LOL when you really, REALLY identify with the narrator. Started the description of Dark Matter and jumped out of my seat:
“Are you happy with your life?”
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the kidnapper knocks him unconscious.
Was in Copenhagen once but didn't get to Montmatre. Hallowed ground in my listening landscape, thanks to Kenny Barron & Stan Getz's People Time. Hope the rest of the continental jaunt goes well.
Just about every put-down in Sturt's piece about Easy Rider actually justifies that film's importance, unless of course you expect a film made in 1969 to reflect where culture is at in 2025 (i.e., "I don’t remember seeing a single black face in the movie"). Or is that what you meant when you said it "gets put in its place by Tobias Sturt"?
Beyond reflecting the cultural moment in 1969, it occurs to me that Easy Rider also illustrates the point that Steven Stoll makes in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia. In that book he describes how subsistence farming is an alternative economic order to our own wage-based economy.
Sturt references the scene where the rancher offers them a meal: ‘It's not every man that can live off the land, you know? Can do your own thing in your own time. You should be proud.’
This is contrasted later in the film where the hippie commune seems headed for failure as they try to grow crops without the necessary water.
Stoll makes the point that subsistence farming is not market-free, but rather markets are where surpluses are exchanged for goods. (Subsistence farming also requires a common space outside any farmer's growing area, where hunting and gathering is available to all.)
Easy Rider goes beyond a mere "reflection of its times" to illustrate the alternative to a wage based economy that some in the hippie movement dreamed of. Hopper and Fonda after all are not working at the behest of some pusher, but free agents taking their goods to market, and finding common ground with a traditional subsistence farmer at the start of the film, and meeting resistance to that alternative as the film proceeds to its conclusion.
Just ordered Dark Matter. And some Cixin Liu. With your help, I will become a SF reader in 2025.
Not a question of liking or disliking Easy Rider. It and its doppelganger, Charlie Daniels UnEasy Rider https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJrRwTTqm0o is pretty much key to understanding the contradictory Pynchonian amalgam of flotsam that is MAGA.
LOL when you really, REALLY identify with the narrator. Started the description of Dark Matter and jumped out of my seat:
“Are you happy with your life?”
Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the kidnapper knocks him unconscious.
Was in Copenhagen once but didn't get to Montmatre. Hallowed ground in my listening landscape, thanks to Kenny Barron & Stan Getz's People Time. Hope the rest of the continental jaunt goes well.
If you like Dark Matter and its themes, M.R. Carey's INFINITY GATE and its followup are to recommend.