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+---- Thread: Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018) by Jake Meginsky, Neil Cloaca Young (/showthread.php?tid=7289)
Milford Graves Full Mantis (2018) by Jake Meginsky, Neil Cloaca Young - cranefly - 11-10-2022
A portrait of renowned percussionist Milford Graves--a blind spot in my musical education. Actually. my whole musical education is a blind spot. Anyway, this is a pleasant mix of meditation, philosophy, and performances covering most of his life.
The title is off-putting, and the image used by Criterion is terrible. Glad I decided to penetrate the veil. Only a little over an hour long, it opens with a meditation sequence I really enjoyed. Later on, you really get a feel for his talents as well as his unique view on life. He reminds me of Dali. Not that their philosophies match, but they hold forth on odd things and you're thinking it's so much bullshit but a surprising amount of it starts to make sense.
An example, and I suppose this falls into the spoiler category, but it sheds light on the title: Milford took an interest in the martial arts, but masters would not share their teachings with foreigners. Top students wanted to teach him, but were forbidden by their masters. So Milford went into the library and read up on the martial arts, and he learned that all these systems were learned by someone going into the forest to commune with nature and build the system from that.
So he said to himself, well, hell, I can do that. So he went into the forest and developed his own mantis. It's a strange, limber, boneless mantis that jumps about and collapses in strange ways, and I question just how good it would be at self-defense. But it's strangely beautiful and a wonderful physical activity in it's own right.
One other example I'll give is his trip to Japan. He suddenly finds himself in a situation where is to do a drum performance for autistic kids. He realizes they are not wired the same as most people, so he seeks to alter his drumming style to fit their dancing. Did he do that? I don't know. But by the end of his performance, almost all of the kids were dancing.
Worth a gander, in my book.