What No One Is Saying About Mad Max: Fury Road

Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.

By now you've probably heard that Mad Max: Fury Road is the best film of the summer, probably the best film of the year so far. You may have also heard that it turned a testosterone-driven franchise into what might be the greatest feminist action piece ever filmed.

The good news is, Mad Max: Fury Road is all of these things. It's so damn good, in fact, that it has infuriated men's rights dopes, impressed even the stuffiest critics, and successfully revived a bloody, R-rated '80's action franchise in the PG-13 superhero-saturated 21st century...all while upholding the unique western-hero-meets-leather-clad-post-apocalypse mythology that made Mad Max special in the first place.

Yes, Mad Max: Fury Road is a brilliant "feminist playbook for surviving dystopia", but it hasn't shed it's iconic western hero backdrop in order to be so. And that's a good thing.

The Mad Max franchise was born out of a time when the Western hero was being re-appropriated through what we now would call "genre mixing". The most iconic example is Han Solo, the resident space-western outlaw of Star Wars. Two years later, first-time Australian director George Miller would create a futuristic Western of his own, albeit a much more apocalyptic one. In the place of Harrison Ford's swashbuckling Han Solo we find Mel Gibson's unhinged Max Rockatansky, a road-Marshall-turned-anti-hero seeking vengeance for the death of his family in a future that looks and feels a thousand years behind our present. 

Mad Max's limited budget left it up to the viewer to fill in the blanks of the film's apocalyptic "wild west" outback; a world much more successfully fleshed out in 1981's The Road Warrior. With it's post-apocalyptic punk aesthetic, The Road Warrior created a new cinematic genre, but the film's archetypal Western tale of the hardened gunslinger helping the helpless and thereby reclaiming his humanity is the crux of the film's cultural success. In order to break new ground, it's often necessary to look inquisitively back to where you've been before. The brightest frontiers are successfully traversed with a winning blend of the old and the new. In the case of the original Mad Max trilogy, the Western hero needed to trade in a poncho for a leather jacket and a horse for a muscle car in order to survive. 

And in Mad Max: Fury Road, the Western hero must join forces with a Western heroin to survive the ongoing battle against the evil forces of hetero-patriarchy. At the beginning of the film, we find Max (now played by an extra-mad Tom Hardy) roaming the Wasteland as usual, until he is captured by the minions of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), the tyrannical patriarchal leader of a civilization called the Citadel. Max escapes and eventually joins forces with Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) to free Immortan Joe's slave wives and move on to greener pastures. 

It was the perfect move, really: re-re-branding the post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western into a feminist post-apocalyptic sci-fi Western. Critics and audiences alike have even argued that Furiosa is the protagonist of Mad Max: Fury Road while the titular hero takes a supporting role...but it's not quite as simple as that. If anything, the hero and heroin are co-leads in the picture. The girl power-driven plot and emotional crux of the film belong to Furiosa to be sure, but it is Max who remains the embodiment of rough-and-tumble Western heroism in a post-apocalyptic world--a world we know through his crazed eyes. 

Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in For A Few Dollars More (1965)

This isn't the first time that the iconic hero of a Western has taken a narrative passenger seat so another character can drive. Take a look at For a Few Dollars More, the second film in Sergio Leone's 'Dollars Trilogy'. The film stars Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef as rival bounty hunters who eventually join forces in search of "El Indio", one of the most wanted fugitives in the Wild West. Though Eastwood receives top-billing in the film's promotional material and opening credits (as he does in the other two 'Dollars' films), the story really belongs to Van Cleef's Colonel Douglas Mortimer, who seeks "El Indio" in vengeance for raping and murdering his sister. Eastwood's 'Man With No Name' is originally looking for "El Indio" only for the bounty, but eventually helps Mortimer exact his vengeance, taking to the sidelines in the film's climax where Mortimer and "El Indio" stand off for the final showdown. Though Mortimer's vendetta ends up being the driving narrative force of the film, The Man With No Name remains the icon of the piece, as he does in the third film of the 'Dollars Trilogy', The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (even when the camera shifts focus onto the other two leads). 

As a post-apocalyptic Western, Mad Max: Fury Road follows this same narrative pattern. Max's motivation, much like The Man With No Name, is survival. Furiosa's motivation, like Mortimer's, is personal vengeance against the forces of destructive masculinity. By drawing from the Western cinema that came before it, Fury Road allows it's titular hero and icon to sit shotgun so that the character who needs to be in the driver's seat can do so; thereby giving birth to the Feminist Post-Apocalyptic Western. Fury Road is what feminism should be all about. It shows us that patriarchal oppression is bad for women and men. And it works because the film doesn't abandon it's mythology in favor of politics. Instead, it re-appropriates the mythology in order to successfully present thoughtful, insightful, and helpful feminist ideas. The archetypal Western hero joins forces with the 21st century heroin, and everybody wins. 

In the wake of Fury Road's success, George Miller has promised more Mad Max films to come. It's not likely that every forthcoming chapter in the Mad Max saga will be a particularly feminist one, but that's probably ok. The franchise has already shown that it can take it's mythology and make something new, useful, and relevant. Here's hoping it continues to do so. 

Welcome to Dante's Blue Jeans

A great and terrible scene from my favorite movie, Apocalypse Now

"I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things." said Tom Waits of his craft. If you feel the same way, you've come to the right place. 

The name's Andersen. I'm a writer. And I'm writing this blog because I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things. I love music, film, literature, art, and the occasional car commercial, because they tell me great and terrible things in great and terrible ways. My goal in writing this blog is simple: to turn people on to good shit. 

In the process, I also hope to do some good writing...if only to combat the bad writing that plagues the blogosphere. There's an eternal riptide of bloggers out there, blogging their obvious opinions and unoriginal ideas and reaching only those who agree with them; all without writing a single sentence of beauty, moxie, or style. 

And when the artist does something with style, with honesty, the bloggers respond with ridicule. Welcome to the future, where praise is reserved only for the artist who reflects the blogger's "ideals". "Pay your dues to the fashionable discourse or we'll shut you up real quick, by any means necessary." That's the game.

Nevertheless, good art and interesting ideas continue to slip through the cracks. And for me, there is no other way to get the word out than to do it with style. In the words of Charles Bukowski, "Style is the answer to everything."  

Whether or not I can do this thing with style is still a mystery. What I know I can do, though, is tell you about the work and ideas that I find beautiful. In the meantime, I've posted a few articles from my old blog so you can get a rough idea of what to expect in the future. So stay tuned, freak out, and keep looking for the dangerous things. 

Welcome to Dante's Blue Jeans

-Andy Andersen, June 6, 2015

Post-Oscar Meditations: Why Gravity and The Wolf of Wall Street are The True Winners of 2013

Originally published on my old blog, "The Angry Fix", March 12, 2014

Every year after the Oscars, the nominated films seem to fall into two categories--those that won, and those that history will remember more favorably than the winners. Granted, some of the winners manage to fall into the second category as well, but more often they don’t. This year, the coveted Best Picture Oscar went to a film worthy of its prestige: Steve McQueen’s relentless historical drama 12 Years A Slave, while two other nominees--Alfonso Cuarón’s poignant cinematic space spectacle Gravity and Martin Scorsese’s equally poignant epic black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street--take their rightful place as not only the most important films of 2013, but two of Cinema’s most significant landmarks.

The 12 Years a Slave Win at the end of this year’s Oscars cast a long shadow over the roaring sweep of preceding Oscar wins for Gravity, including Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing, as well as Best Cinematography and Best Director for Cuarón. This particular series of wins demonstrates Gravity’s enormous impact on special effects and filmmaking in general. In terms of mere technical achievement, Gravity is the next Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (that’s the 1895 Lumiere Brothers short that had audiences diving out of their seats in fear of the train in the film coming rapidly toward them): audiences have never seen anything like it before, nor do they live in the same cinematic world that existed before they did (the film even made whatever technical innovations Avatar boasted obsolete--quite the accomplishment). To put it simply, Gravity is an unprecedented game changer.

2013 would have gone down in history as one of the most important years in modern film with the release of Gravity alone, but it also gave us The Wolf of Wall Street, which left audiences in cinematic whiplash from its unbridled epic narrative of white male debauchery every bit as much as Gravity’s terrifying spacescape. Unlike Gravity, however, Wolf came out of the Oscars winning zero of its five nominations (the most controversial of which being Leonardo DiCaprio’s Best Actor loss to Matthew McConaughey). Granted, Scorsese lost the Best Director Oscar to Cuarón, so no complaints there. But what Wolf’s nominations and losses demonstrate, as opposed to Gravity, is that the film’s innovations are far less quantifiable in Oscar terms. If Gravity represents unprecedented innovation on a technical level, The Wolf of Wall Street is innovation on the narrative and cultural fronts.

In the A.V. Club’s review of Wolf, A.A. Dowd noted that early 2013 releases like Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, and The Bling Ring were mere appetizers to the full meal of Martin Scorsese’s “aggressively broad satire of American ambition”. In former stockswindler Jordan Belfort’s shockingly true tale of ultimate excess at the heart of America’s most ferocious financial den-of-thieves, Scorsese found a tale he could cinematically execute with as much chaos as the story itself. As the film industry has rapidly become more a vehicle for franchise marketing and spectacle, Television has become the place where audiences go for interesting characters and complex storytelling (i.e. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Girls, Game of Thrones, etc.). The Wolf of Wall Street has reclaimed that space for film in a variety of ways.

First of all, it's nothing short of incredible that audiences and critics alike have responded so favorably to a ferociously dark comedy with a three-hour running time. What’s even more incredible is that the film doesn’t feel that long at all. Nor does it drag, not for one minute. Only Scorsese could have succeeded in a task this daunting, especially considering Wolf’s insatiable no-holds-barred content. Leonardo DiCaprio has stated that in early production talks for the film, the question was seriously considered as to how long an audience could stand following characters so unapologetically despicable. The miraculous thing is that Scorsese manages to keep us both enthralled and enlightened throughout the entire drug-and-sex fueled ride.

This may be partly due to the fact that Scorsese is a veteran raconteur of ingenious “bad boy” tales. Films like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, and The Last Temptation of Christ all cover similar themes of human darkness from uncensored perspectives, but Wolf stands out among these films as the one with the content and form to match the mayhem. The film is indeed a true test of endurance for American audiences--unabashedly showcasing every act of debauchery and frivolous indulgence that Jordan Belfort and his gang of greedy bastards could possibly engage in on their eternal quest for power (the now-infamous plane orgy scene is particularly nauseating)--and the fact that Scorsese and DiCaprio were able to make this 21st century Bosch painting of a movie is due largely to independent funding (a trend we'll hopefully be seeing more of in the future of mainstream filmmaking). The result is something quite revolutionary in a film industry whose financial climate has muffled truly honest voices, and the critical and commercial success of a film so incredibly relentless and wholly singular as The Wolf of Wall Street shows us--and, more importantly, shows those Hollywood executives--that great things can happen when the real artists are left to their craft.

Despite Wolf’s earned place among the frontrunners of Scorsese’s most celebrated films (as things stand, it just might be his magnum opus of magnum opuses), I would argue that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is a more fitting spiritual predecessor. The film was also a dark, chaotic, and highly visceral tale told by an American master of cinema, and was also highly controversial for its relentlessly graphic sexual content. But where Eyes Wide Shut failed in gaining wide exposure and broad cultural impact upon its release, Wolf has somehow shattered similar barriers and paved the way for a future of more honest and daring films with higher box-office potential. If Gravity is the train coming directly at the audience, then Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the train that breaks through the screen and obliterates everything in its path.

Notes of an Eager Young Man: A Candid Tribute to Charles Bukowski

Originally Published on my old blog, "The Angry Fix", March 30, 2013

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
-Tom Waits

When I’m in a real lazy leisurely mood I like to read Bukowski.

You get home from work on a Friday afternoon and there’s just enough space between you and the doom of the coming week to make it seem like it’s all over, so you can relax. And you take a nice afternoon shower so you feel clean and loose in the muscles, and with a small dose of caffeine in the veins you ease down on to your bed and prop your head up with a couple pillows.

And that’s when I make a selection from my Bukowski stack and start reading.
Buk writes with an intimacy and simplicity that relaxes me. The humor helps too. A saner man would read his stuff and get depressed, but not me. No matter how many tales of whiskey and whores and dead-end jobs and mean dogs and mangy cats and screaming girlfriends and horse races and listening to Wagner alone at 3:00 in the morning…no matter much of it all that dirty old man throws at me, it’s always a great tender leisure to read Post Office or Love is a Dog from Hell or Last Night of the Earth Poems on a tired afternoon in Happy Valley.

I think it’s because of the honesty of it all, of writing from where it is…“the pain and defeat of the world.” The merciful joy of the creative act from the bluebird soul of a gin-soaked German-born American pulp poet. “If you’re going to try, go all the way.” Buk once said of his craft. And he said it because he knew that writing was the only way to beat the grey fury of a relentless universe.

One day last summer I spent a glorious afternoon hour lying out under the hot sun on the lawn of Berlin’s museum quarter. Some folks from my study-abroad group were there, enjoying the lawn the same way I was, and a street violinist was playing Vivaldi and Mozart and the air smelled like bread and it all felt so good that it made perfect sense, as hardly anything ever does. I wished I had a cheap bottle of wine to take slow easy hits from, but I didn’t—and I don’t drink anyway—so I pulled my copy of Charles Bukowski’s Women out of my backpack and read for a while. A couple of girls from my group—young…flowers of chance…sweet and innocent in their own pure way…asked me what I was reading. I handed them the book and they looked at the back cover, reading the synopsis and gazing upon the picture of Buk grinning in the arms of his own cigarette smoke. They handed the book back to me and said something like “sounds interesting.” I could tell they meant it. I could also tell that though they meant it they knew as well as I did that they would never read a book like this. Just like they’d never fall in love with a sweaty bearded freak like me, though I imagined in my Berlin-fueled vanity that they wanted to.

With the book back in my hands I lay back down on the grass and read a few chapters of honest brutality—and the ink was wine at my leisure, just brutal and sweet enough to lubricate the soul and lull me to sleep on the warm lawn with the winos who had learned to love the bitterness of their own tragic lives.

And so, in America, or Europe, or wherever I happen to be betting on the muse, if it’s a lazy afternoon, or even a quiet night, and there’s enough inner madness to keep me grounded in the truth of all things, I might read Bukowski. And then I'll get feeling real honest and friendly, and in the tender leisure of it all I'll think, surely there must be a way. Surely there must be a divine chance that old Buk—in all his moments of ancient wisdom and laughter—was wrong when he said:

“All great poets die in steaming pots of shit.”

Movie Review: Skyfall

Originally published on my old blog, "The Angry Fix",  November 25, 2012

Grade: A-

Fast cars, beautiful women, exotic locations, with plenty of kills and a few vodka martinis along the way.

These are the elements of the James Bond franchise that are often given credit for its unprecedented success since Ian Fleming introduced the world to Agent 007 in the 1952 novel Casino Royale. 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the James Bond film series, along with it the release of Skyfall, a near-perfect Bond film that reveals a keen understanding of what really attests to the endurance of not only the franchise, but the character at its core.

Skyfall opens with another classic Bond action sequence, but the mission at hand goes awry, sending 007 into hiding after being presumed dead, only to return to MI6 after a cyber-terrorist attack threatens the security of the entire British secret service while stirring up a buried past for MI6 boss M (played for the seventh consecutive time by Judi Dench). As Bond’s investigations send him to Shanghai, he comes up against a strange and formidable enemy in former MI6 agent Silva, now a cyber-terrorist who tests Bond’s loyalty to M, as well as his ability to execute the mission at all costs as usual.


Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition) first became attached to Skyfall over a few drinks with Daniel Craig, who offered him the job to direct the next Bond film in an inebriated state, woke up the next morning, realized the job wasn’t his to offer, and immediately went to longtime Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli to chalk it up with them. Mendes ended up getting the job after all, marking perhaps the best director pick that Wilson and Broccoli have made since they took over the franchise with 1995’s Goldeneye. This isn’t the first time that a Bond film has been helmed by a director with mostly drama work under his belt, but never before has the payoff manifested itself so visibly on screen.

What Mendes achieves with Skyfall is an immaculate balance between paying brilliant homage to Bond’s 50-year past and maintaining the success of his dark, gritty present as ushered in by Daniel Craig’s first two Bond outings. Together with Director of Photography Roger Deakins (recent collaborator with Mendes and frequent collaborator with the Coen Brothers), the look, tone, and ambience Mendes creates in the film is brilliantly moody, often aided by a welcome dark humor that hearkens back to the Sean Connery era, as well as the campiness found in the pages of Fleming.

And when it comes to Bond villains, Javier Bardem is about as campy and mesmerizing as they come. Just as Heath Ledger’s Joker elevated the character beyond the confines of comic book villainy, Bardem gives a truly memorable performance that may very well win him another Oscar nomination (or should at the very least). In combining the fantastic elements of the character with the striking believability of his acting chops, Bardem often carries the film’s most prominent underlying theme—the tension between the old fashioned and the ever-increasing modernity of the world it struggles to maintain relevance within.

Representing the old-fashioned is Daniel Craig in his strongest performance as 007 yet. Bond is aging rapidly this time around, increasingly dependent on alcohol and pharmaceuticals to keep drudging through the soul-erosion of killing for a living, no matter how glamorous it has looked to his audience for the past 50 years.

Though Skyfall's plot may be underwhelmingly obvious for some fans, it's a character driven piece, relying successfully on the exploration of the central character. And what Craig’s Bond embodies is the true reason for his endurance in the collective movie-going consciousness. At his core, Bond is an anti-hero, a deeply troubled and conflicted human being who dulls the pain of his existence with the glamorous trappings of his job that have brought fans back to see him for decades and, as Skyfall triumphantly suggests, years still to come.

For Your Consideration: Ladies and Gentlemen, The Doors

Originally published on my old blog, "The Angry Fix", August 22, 2012

I was turned on to the Doors in high school. At the time I thought they were probably the most "legit" band in my listening rotation (mind you, this was a time when I considered Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” to be the greatest piece of music ever recorded). As the High School years faded and the college years materialized, I dropped radio-friendly classic rock groups like Boston and Def Leppard for ‘60’s and ‘70’s art rock and punk. As my tastes changed, my interest in the Doors feigned for a while, and the contemporary critical image of the Doors didn’t help rekindle my interest. It seems that among the pioneering blues and psychedelic rock bands of the ‘60’s, the Doors, and Jim Morrison in particular, have achieved a pop-culture status tainted by negative connotations of overratedness and all-around douchebaggery. A lot of this cultural baggage can be attributed to the image of Jim Morrison as an obnoxious, arrogant, and cruel artist, as popularized by Oliver Stone’s 1991 film The Doors. For whatever reason, this is the image of Morrison that has stuck in the public and critical consciousness, clouding out, at least partially, the Doors’ contribution to modern music, art, and poetry (however great or small it may be). Though my interest in the Doors feigned, they remained on the backburner of my music rotation. In recent months I’ve delved back into the Doors canon extensively, and just finished reading the definitive Jim Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. I’ve come out the other end with a newfound love for the band’s work, wondering how I ever let public opinion keep me from diggin' the music. 

Jim Morrison got the name for his band from a line attributed to one of his major poetic influences, William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” It was this sentiment that drove the Doors sound and mythos. Through the simplistic, moody, bluesy, and sometimes psychedelic sound created by keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger, and the voice and words of rock ‘n roll poet Jim Morrison, the band created doors of perception between darkness and enlightenment…gateways through which artists continue to follow and flourish in. Appreciating Morrison as both a singer and a true poet is a lot easier once the tired leather-pants-clad rock star image is set aside. It was an image that Morrison himself discarded in the midst of the Doors popularity (as can be seen by the beefy bearded Morrison featured on the cover of his last album with the Doors L.A. Woman), a media monster that has become far bigger than the man himself, as well as his work. But it's the work that speaks for itself.

Morrison had a wide range of artistic influences. He looked to a wide range of poets from William Blake to Allen Ginsberg for lyrical inspiration, and drew from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the grotesque imagery of the work of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch for the dark landscapes he conceptualized in songs like “The End” and “Riders of the Storm”. What Morrison shared in common with his east-coast counterpart, the Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed, was that he took rock ‘n roll seriously as an art form, which in turn manifested itself through the oeuvre of his lyrics (simultaneously adult and childish, though some would call it infantile). While John Lennon and Paul McCartney were writing about love and adolescence, Jim Morrison was writing about sex and death, creating a dangerous stage persona (now infamously known as the Lizard King) to match his words. Julian Beck’s New York based experimental theatre group, The Living Theatre, directly inspired Morrison’s confrontational approach to his audience, revealing from yet another artistic angle that Morrison’s work is part of a long and integral tradition of art, performance and poetry. On the night of a concert, just before the Doors were about to go on stage, a DJ introduced them as “Jim Morrison and the Doors”. As the DJ passed them coming down from the stage, Morrison stopped him and said, “Uh-uh, man, you go back up there and introduce us right. It’s THE DOORS, the name of the band is THE DOORS.” Jim Morrison, though eventually a victim to the excess of his own stardom, was very aware that he was nothing on his own as a musical entity. He knew better than anyone what Jerry Hopkins poignantly described in No One Here Gets Out Alive, that “to get the best view of Jim Morrison you must go through the Doors, and the most important thing to remember about the Doors is that they were a band and each individual formed a side of the diamond that was the whole.” If Jim Morrison was the word and the image, the other three sides of the diamond were the music, each deserving far more appreciation for their contribution to rock music than they have received. It could be argued that Ray Maznarek was the architect of the Doors. It was he who really had the drive and knowhow to form the band after encouraging Morrison to step up to the mike after hearing him sing one of his songs unaccompanied on the beach while both of them were students at UCLA film school. It could also be argued that Manzarek’s keyboards are every bit as signature to the Doors sound as Morrison’s vocals and lyrics. The Doors never had an actual bass player in their line-up, opting instead for Manzarek to pull double duty, playing the keyboard with his right hand, and a keyboard bass with his left. It is the bizarre, often circus-like sound of Manzarek’s playing that pushes the Doors sound into a beautiful realm of the weird.  At their best, the Doors leave plenty of space open, and execute the balance between space and sound through a signature precision and simplicity. At the heart of this precision are the Latin jazz beats of John Densmore’s drumming, keeping the Doors sound tight while allowing it to go down smooth. He is greatly aided by the Elvis and L.A. Surf rock-influenced guitar of Robby Krieger. Morrison often lamented the fact that Krieger was not appreciated as one of the great guitarists of his generation, and Krieger’s name is seldom dropped in the same sentence as Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, or Eric Clapton. But as a guitarist, his rightful place right alongside his ‘60’s guitar-god contemporaries is unavoidable. And as a songwriter, his importance in the Doors is undeniable—having written (or co-written with Morrison) many of the Doors biggest radio hits including “Light My Fire”, “Touch Me” and “Love Her Madly”. It’s been my opinion for a while now that the Velvet Underground were the most important band of the ‘60’s (and if you haven't figured out that the Velvet Underground are more important to music than the Beatles, get with the program). It has a lot to do with the way the music of the Velvets continues to challenge society’s consciousness and open new doors of perception. This is the same reason I present for your consideration the Doors as one of the purest and most timeless acts in Rock history. If the cereal image of the band and their shaman front-man is thrown away, the work will speak for itself, and the music and words of the Doors WILL cleanse, and perhaps create new doors of perception to the willing listener. Recommended Doors Albums: The Doors (1967) Strange Days (1967) Waiting for the Sun (1968) L.A. Woman (1971) Absolute Best Doors Tracks: “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” “The End” “When the Music’s Over” “Five to One” “Peace Frog” “L.A. Woman” “Riders of the Storm” Reccomended Poetry by Jim Morrison: The Lords and The New Creatures Recommended Further Reading: No One Here Gets Out Alive: The Biography of Jim Morrsion by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman