Frivolity When the Earth Is Swallowed Up

This is where I tell you about my trip to Burbank. 1. On the flight out, my seatmate had a sweet dog companion seemingly smuggled under his hoodie. I don't know about dogs. I believe this one was a boxer. But I just don't know. I can't swear to it in a court of law! The dog had one blue eye and one brown eye. It would arise from the neck hole of the hoodie and look at me with a nice expression. Sometimes, due to the angle of its owner, it looked like a human with a dog's head! When the guy got up to go to the restroom, he stuffed the dog into a duffel bag. The dog was fine. 2. Layover at the Salt Lake City airport! This story just gets better and better, doesn't it? So, a booming voice on the public address system repeatedly gave out the first, middle, and last name of a guy who had walked out on his check at an airport restaurant. It was an old-school public shaming... Cotton Mather style! I realize that by mentioning Cotton Mather, I may have confused you geographically. I don't know enough about Brigham Young to know whether he would have made an appropriate replacement in my already shaky allusion. 3. Okay, on the next airplane, a guy across the aisle was scrolling through pictures on his phone and narrating to his friend: "This is a salad bar... that's another salad bar..." Ha ha, anyway, I thought that was funny. They were looking at photos of salad bars! It's a crazy world! 4. BURBANK! Kent was in town, too, and we were both staying in the same hotel. As we rode back to the hotel from Dan Tana's, Kent spied a DeLorean pulling into traffic behind us. He was pretty stoked, I don't mind telling you! He kept saying, "It's a DeLorean! Look, it's a DeLorean! It's right behind us. The DeLorean is right behind us!" But I don't know why, I never turned around to look at the DeLorean. It was just like when Kent begged me to watch Mark McGwire break a home run record and I coldly refused. We'll never know what's wrong with me. 5. On one menu, I briefly misread "scallion" as "sea lion." 6. Kate Tsang and I spent a good part of one afternoon just wandering around in the impossibly vast Warner Brothers prop department. People were working, loading props on carts to be taken to various sets. We just stayed out of their way. No one hassled us. In fact, one man cheerfully asked if we needed anything. We said we were just looking. Then we ended up in some odd corners, such as a section containing many kinds of animals who had been subjected to taxidermy. I have never enjoyed the thought of taxidermy. But here's Kate. She notices that some of the animals are falling apart. She dates them for me to the time "when Theodore Roosevelt was shooting animals" because they were stuffed with straw... a discontinued practice, Kate gave me to understand. I was standing there thinking, like, "Wow, Kate sure knows a lot about taxidermy!" Which reminds me of something: 7. I ran into Steve Wolfhard completely unexpectedly! Somehow we got to talking about the movie THE SEA HAWK and I mentioned how much I enjoyed the monkey's performance in that film. Steve said the monkey made him sad. I got it! I feel the same way about taxidermy. I said, "Were you thinking about the monkey's home life?" And Steve said... I think I have this right... "I was thinking, 'That could have been me!'" Trying to show Steve that I was on his side about being sad concerning monkeys, I said I didn't like it when monkeys were made to ride dogs. Steve said, "Maybe the monkey likes it. Maybe he likes going fast." 8. Oh! Before I get back to the prop department, I should say that when I arrived at the gate into Warner Brothers, I was greeted by a young, groovy guard, not an irascible old guard of the type the movies have trained me to expect. So, when Kate and I entered the parking garage over near the prop department, an irascible old guard really didn't want to let us in. At last, he asked us for identification, and that's when I discovered MY DRIVER'S LICENSE WAS MISSING! I bet you didn't know you were in for thrills like this. Anyhow, it turned out the groovy young guard forgot to include it when he handed me back everything I had taken out of my pockets for him. And I didn't notice! So I'm not blaming the hipsters of today for falling down on the job! BUT! If that hardboiled old-school guard hadn't been so stereotypically irascible, I might never have been allowed to leave Burbank! I might be sitting in a small room at the Burbank airport right now! So, thank you, hateful old guard. 9. Well, I can't really describe how satisfying it was to wander around the prop department with Kate. I don't know - though I suspect there's a Warholian element - why it is so wonderful to look at, just for example, a wall full of rotary phones arranged by color, or a shelf of hundreds of miniature Statues of Liberty, or boxes and boxes of beauty products from the 40s and 50s, or the long row of toilets, of which (the toilets) I sent a photo to just one person: Ace Atkins. Kate and I stayed in the prop department so long that they were closing up. We didn't know it. We just kept trying to get out and finding nothing but locked doors. We could have been trapped forever! Who was going to help us? Not the irascible guard! He would probably think we were getting what we deserved. Then we found a different kind of door: a door that was not locked. 10. Kate and I walked a few short steps from the Warner Brothers lot to the Smoke House, where we dined with one Adam Muto. Now that I can't eat steak anymore because of wanting to stay alive, I was excited to order the chicken pot pie. You know the one! The one that Pen and I saw once! The one as big around as a manhole cover! But friends, I am here to inform you they have taken it off the menu. The server told me that one time... just one time... they had put it back on the menu for a special occasion. But that time is gone forever. We live in new times now. He was very nice, and couldn't have known he was breaking my heart. 11. Reading Seneca's NATURAL QUESTIONS while taking my blood pressure in my hotel room, I laughed when he observed, "Frivolity when the earth is swallowed up shows a lack of serious-mindedness." He was angry at Ovid for beautifully describing an apocalyptic flood but then adding the image of wolves and sheep and lions swimming around in it. "Come on, Ovid! Get real! As if!" Such seemed to be the contents of Seneca's objections. 12. Quinn took me to a place that featured on its menu something called a "Good Ass Salad." Such language! Is that how you get your kicks? Forcing someone's great-grandmother to say the words "good ass salad"? This great-grandmother I'm imagining can't silently point at the item on the menu with her quaking, palsied finger! Thoughts along these lines led me to confess to Quinn that I have been saying "ass" on the "blog" a lot lately. Quinn said, "Oh, Jack, Bart Simpson could say 'ass' in the 90s." She might not have said "Oh, Jack." 13. It was raining the morning I left for home. Kate had said just a day or two before, "It never rains here." But there it was, falling from the sky, the tears of the gods as I like to call it. At a stoplight on the way to the airport, I saw a driver sticking his hand out the window, eager to discover for himself what this thing they call a raindrop must feel like. His beaming grin indicated that he was pleased with the result!

Blank

I have three gigantic books going, four if you count the audiobook of FINNEGANS WAKE. Rememeber when I fancied myself a one-book-at-a-time man? At night in bed, instead of old comic books, I now read old BUDDENBROOKS by "blog" favorite Thomas Mann. Then, of course, there's the Pessoa biography I read in bits and pieces as part of my blood pressure ritual... the doctor has me taking my blood pressure less often now, so I may never finish it. Just like Pessoa never finished his masterwork, THE BOOK OF DISQUIET. Ha ha, oh, Pessoa, you're something else. And I have a smaller book next to my favorite chair, but I don't want to talk about smaller books today. I want to talk about the 800-page monster THE SOT-WEED FACTOR by John Barth, which seems like a single joke stretched out to unimaginable lengths, something I can deeply respect. So, in THE SOT-WEED FACTOR, we find "a countenance blank as an owl's," which is fairly neutral as far as owl depictions go in figures of speech. As you know, an owl is "wise" if it's lucky, but more often it's drunk or stupid, etc., at least as far as the owl-hating literary giants of our times are concerned. "Blank," I'll take. It is at least more accurate than the "grinning" and "smiling" owls we have run across elsewhere. Please "click" on the "hyperlinks" for more owl information, or visit your local library.

Bible Belt

I have something else to say about that belt. So, it had a price tag on it, of course, and this price tag was the size and shape of a fortune cookie fortune. When I clipped off the price tag, I saw that it (the price tag, not the belt) had a Bible verse printed on the back of it! (See also, the bottle of water that had a Bible verse printed on it.) Now, the verse was a translation from what I took to be the New English Bible or such. That doesn't cut it around here! So I'm going to give it to you from the King James Version. As everyone knows, I'm a KJV stan. "Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye." What that has to do with the price of belts, I'm not sure. Well! As long as I have you here, McNeil read a book with an owl in it. I am sure you recall that McNeil has been going through his grandfather's old books. Before he found the owl, McNeil was primarily struck by the fact that the detective in the novel he is reading is, quote, "naked a whole lot in this book - just walking around in a dead guy's apartment talking to cops and reporters and whoever wanders in. Weird." The owl, he tells me, appears in the guise of a character who "grinned owlishly." Naturally, this put me in mind of the Travis McGee novel in which someone is said to be "smiling... like some kind of owl." Once again I find myself forced to state my belief that owls do not smile or grin. What else? Oh! McNeil has an idea for a comic book about a character he has created, Professor Moon Menace. I hesitate to reveal too much about Professor Moon Menace, but his name gives you a fair idea of some of his interests.

Literary Matters

It's time once again for "Literary Matters"! No one enjoys those. They're not enjoyable. 1. I covered this one on twitter yesterday, but it's sticking in my mind. I read in the New York Times about Jimmy Buffett "grinning and splashing Tabasco on a modified Cobb salad." The editorial machinery of the New York Times saw fit - for the sake of accuracy, one supposes - to make sure the reader did not receive the false impression that Jimmy Buffett was eating a completely traditional Cobb salad. BUT! They did not care to let that same reader know in what way the Cobb salad had been modified. That's really all I have to say about that, except that I can't stop thinking about it. 2. EVERYBODY has been telling me to read BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL. Why, Randy Yates stopped me on the corner outside his own restaurant just to ask whether I had read it. And he was only one of many to make that query. And I needed something to read after MEASURE FOR MEASURE. (Ha ha, don't worry, I haven't given up on THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY; I just read this in it: "Cupid and Death met both in an Inn, and being merrily disposed, they did exchange some arrows from either quiver; ever since young men die, and oftentimes old men dote"... but I need a new "carry-around" book.) BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL is done up at least partway in that poetic style that Chandler made permissible for crime stories (instead of bubbles in the bathwater there are "little zeroes of suds"), and I'm more than fine with that! Okay! But then I had to stop on page 12 when he referred to the "trashy tune and words" of a Hank Williams song. The idea of someone sitting around proclaiming something "trashy" has never set well with me. And I know I should not confuse the author with the narrator! But here's a guy working in a genre that has been (unfairly) called "trashy" and he is going to have his narrator refer to the towering melodic and lyric achievements of Hank Williams as "trashy"? He should be on Hank's side! The irony (?) is compounded by the fact that this is a slick nyrb paperback, which has "rehabilitated," I guess, his "pulpy" novel. 3. Have you ever noticed in those books how your tough-guy narrator always wants to tell you when he takes a hot shower and eats some steak and eggs? It's a tendency I noticed in Spillane a lot. Maybe it's realism! I always thought it would be interesting to write a detective novel where there's no crime to solve and the detective just tells you about all the eggs he eats and hot showers he takes. The narrator of BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL "had no more idea of falling in love with her than I had of making a meal of the big yellow cake of soap in the Victorian bathroom," curiously combining both tendencies. 4. So I put down BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL. I'm gonna come back to it! I just have to shake off that unnecessary sideswipe at Hank Williams, though it's really got its claws in me. But in the meantime I thought I'd see what some of these here Shakespeare experts had to say about MEASURE FOR MEASURE. Out of three scholarly tomes I opened, two fell open EXACTLY and AT ONCE to the part about MEASURE FOR MEASURE, as if guided by the ghostly hand of Shakespeare himself! 5. Okay, I told you I'd read some more of this novel. Just three pages later the narrator is complaining that descriptions of women's legs in books are "trash." I don't know whether he's obsessed with trash or I am. But he's used the term twice in three pages. And now he's washing down seconds of potato salad with ice cold beer. Don't get mad at me, kind recommenders! I'm going to give this guy more of a chance than he gave Hank Williams. 6. I WAS WRONG! It's more like Cain than Chandler, but that's not what I mean. See, he's using the Hank Williams song ("If You've Got the Money, Honey") in a much more complex way than I expected... as a kind of shifting leitmotif. "Before it had sounded frank and functional. Before it had sounded gay and uncomplicated. Now the tune had a nasty taste to it." So, see, he was going somewhere with that, and I'm the sap. 7. I'm "not 'blogging' anymore, but I thought a late addendum to an old "post" would be okay. I'll probably come back to brag when I finish THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY too. But in the meantime, from BLACK WINGS HAS MY ANGEL, "She split some canned wieners and fried them with the eggs." See? I told you this kind of narrator always tells you when he eats eggs. 8. "... his hand busy as a tarantula in a fly cage." Gross! And I don't even know what a fly cage is. I assume it is a cage full of flies. And then you put a tarantula in it. But with its obvious debt to Chandler's "tarantula on a slice of angel food," the pendulum of influence swings back. I said I'm not "blogging" anymore but I keep sneakily adding to this list. Pitiful.

Orgoglio

Well, I am getting pretty cocky with my reading! I thought to myself, you picked up THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY again, Pendarvis, I bet you can handle a return to THE FAERIE QUEENE, you old rascal! Yes, that thought was brewing. Brewing! And the other day I was in that used book stall I like and I saw a tattered old paperback called A PREFACE TO THE FAERIE QUEENE, and I was like, I better get that! Because unlike THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY or THE DECAMERON, I bet you can't just put down THE FAERIE QUEENE for a number of months and breezily pick up where you left off without a care in the world. And there's no way I was going to go back and read those first six cantos again. So many cantos. Cantos! So many. Something in this paperback A PREFACE TO THE FAERIE QUEENE will surely have a section that reminds me of what happened in those first six cantos of THE FAERIE QUEENE! But so far I have read only the first sentence of A PREFACE TO THE FAERIE QUEENE, which is, "I would have called this book 'Spencer and the Romantic Epic' except that I have already written two books with the word 'romantic' in the title, and I should like to break the habit." How pleasantly dry! Oh, the British. Wait, let me check the "About the Author" note. Yes, he is British. How could I have doubted myself? I also see the name George Boyle scribbled in the front of the book in blue ink... the previous owner... quite a coincidence, as I took my copy of THE FAERIE QUEENE out of the house yesterday when I went to meet Bill Boyle for coffee - this mysterious George perhaps a distant relative! - and I knew I was going to be early. The last time I went to this coffee shop I forgot to bring anything to read and I had to sit there looking at a confrontational painting of a grinning skull with flowers coming out of it until my friends arrived. Another solution would be: don't get there early all the time, fool! Ha ha, we have another contender for most boring "post" ever, but I can't lie to you: the more boring it is the more I enjoy typing it. So I am going to keep going. As I am sure you are aware, all the books I am reading now are big and heavy. THE FAERIE QUEENE is more compact and manageable, though it is a precious and fragile old volume, but gee, the weather was so nice yesterday, I was sure nothing bad would happen to it. So I got to the coffee shop early and waited for Bill. Maybe I was sitting in a shadow but I found it hard to make out the words. There was no shadow! My old eyes are going. And the print is so tiny and smushed together. And, as I had not prepared myself adequately with A PREFACE TO THE FAERIE QUEENE, I had no recollection of why all these characters were fighting each other or what the hell was going on. The sudden appearance of a giant named Orgoglio cheered me up considerably! "Orgoglio! Orgoglio!" I whispered to myself. But they were blasting Billy Joel pretty loud at the coffee shop, I have to say, and his somber shouting about the time he "wore a younger man's clothes" and his assertive screeching about everything he was determined to prove to his "Uptown Girl" made it hard to concentrate on the dark, blurry, smushed-up tiny print of THE FAERIE QUEENE, so I just shut the book and sat there.

New Hit Song

Kelly Hogan sang a whole new song in my dream last night. And I still remember it! There's not much to it. It just goes, "I was born to break up with you," over and over, kind of to the tune of "You Send Me" by Sam Cooke. When it becomes a big hit just remember I wrote it in my sleep. Melissa Ginsburg and I (in my dream) were in a church where Hogan was singing this song, and Melissa was like, "Go talk to Michael Kupperman! He's by himself and he's CRYING." So I went to the pew where Michael was sitting, only it wasn't him. It was a tweedy old man! With a cane! And the old man wasn't crying. In fact, he was grinning intensely and seemed eager to chat. I was like, "Melissa, that's not Michael Kupperman!" And she was like, "Well, his hat fooled me." But he WASN'T WEARING A HAT.

Fake Beards of History

Remember King James's special favorite Buckingham, who "danced a number of high and very tiny capers" for the king - if you know what I mean? He and the king's son Charles decide to put on fake beards and go to Spain as "Tom and John Smith." Ha ha! (This is from that Peter Ackroyd book I've been reading.) It's all because Charles wants to woo Maria Anna, the infanta of Spain. But they start getting in trouble right away. "They gave a boatman at Gravesend a gold piece and rode away without asking for change." That's weird! But they're rich and royal and titled and don't know any better. And the boatman was like, "There's something screwy going on here!" (I paraphrase.) "As suspected assassins they were stopped at Canterbury. Buckingham had to take off his false beard in order to assure the mayor." I am wondering whether these were extremely high quality fake beards or if people were just less used to the idea of fake beards back then. (Are people used to the idea now?) Surely the king could supply you with the best fake beards available. They get to Spain and the infanta is even lovelier than Charles imagined! But he makes the mistake of saying something along those lines in the royal court. Far too informal for the Spanish! His lovestruck words cause a stink! Long story short, by the time they get back home, Charles and Buckingham are ready to go to war with Spain! Buckingham is especially mad because they were rude to him over there. This is where wars come from! I am going to tell you about one other thing I read in this book. My grandfather used to describe someone with an especially open smile as "grinning like a mule eating briars." I always wondered where that expression came from. Ackroyd quotes a 1607 pamphlet by Thomas Dekker, in which people are described as "looking scurvily (like mules chomping upon thistles)." So that's a clue, though Dekker and my grandfather seem to mean the phrase in opposite ways. I recall asking my dad what my grandfather meant by "grinning like a mule eating briars" and he said that a mule would roll back its lips while eating briars so as not to get pricked. So my grandfather just meant a big, happy smile showing all your teeth, with none of the pain that you (and Dekker) might associate with the phrase.

Are You Me

All I really ask from life is that late at night some shopworn movie I didn't know existed with a weird cast will come on. So last night it was something called THE LAST MARRIED COUPLE IN AMERICA, starring George Segal, Natalie Wood, Richard Benjamin, Dom DeLuise, and TV's RHODA, Valerie Harper. That's so interesting if you are me! It's all about this set of couples who get together to play touch football every weekend! HUH! One of the guys is a patient from the Bob Newhart Show and one is the psychiatrist who helped Alan Alda realize that the chicken was actually a baby on M*A*S*H. Then Rhoda comes along with some startling sex talk! And some young dudes try to pick up Rhoda and Natalie Wood in a restaurant. I could have sworn one of them was Mark Hamill until his disturbing AUTO FOCUS grin made me decide it was a very young Greg Kinnear with a Mark Hamill shag and a premature Bob Crane leer. I even rewound it and convinced myself. But after extensive "internet" research (why, God?) I'm pretty sure it was this guy (pictured), Brad Maule. Hey, there was somebody in the cast named Edgy Lee. I thought that was a funny name! Well, I only made it 16 minutes in before I conked out. I think I was mad because there was no Paula Prentiss. She would have livened things up. I didn't even make it to Dom Deluise! Just saw his name in the credits. But I recorded the rest of it, so it's your lucky day. Valerie Harper's and Natalie Wood's costumes were designed by Edith Head. How long was her career? Is her name on every movie the way it seems? I think of her just locked in a room for a hundred years with a spinning wheel, like Rapunzel. At one point Natalie Wood was jogging and I was like, what, Edith Head made that jogging suit? I bet Edith Head was like, "I don't even know what world I'm living in anymore." 1980 was like a futuristic dystopia to Edith Head!

Bilbo Baggins

Hello! Here is a picture of Norman Mailer in a top hat, leather vest, and denim shorts, snapped by Bill Boyle off of Megan Abbott's TV screen. We were watching Mailer's film MAIDSTONE. Ace was there too, and he thought it was pretty good revenge for the time he made Dr. Theresa and me watch THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (which I would like to state for the record here is, I think, about twice as long as MAIDSTONE). "He looks like a hobbit," Ace said of Norman Mailer, and other disparaging remarks. To be fair, when I was in a video conference once, I held up the cover of the Norman Mailer bio to the camera, so that Mailer's face filled the screen instead of mine, and Pen cried out "It's Bilbo Baggins!" - not trying to be funny, more in simple recognition. Megan and I argued that Mailer was a good-looking man. Ace remained unconvinced. Megan Abbott owned up that she saw him once and "he was just a little taller than me." (She's tiny!) I found a number of things to enjoy in MAIDSTONE, but we all agreed that by far the best part of the movie is the famous bloody scene at the very end when the actor Rip Torn goes a little bit crazy and hits Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer FOR REAL and then Norman Mailer tries very hard to bite and rip off Rip Torn's ear. "Click" here to see a demonically grinning Rip Torn on Bill Boyle's twitter feed, in the electrically tense aftermath, gracing Mailer with a startling scatological encomium, unsuitable for printing on the "blog." You will note that Megan Abbott had at that point in the film turned on the subtitles for extra musing and study. Below, another example, from the climactic fight, sent to me by Ace this morning. Ace did admit that MAIDSTONE shares a certain sensibility ("group therapy" he called it) with the original BILLY JACK (which we watched and enjoyed very much, as distinct from its sequel, though, as Ace reminded me last night, THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK had some good parts, such as when there is an all-red Billy Jack and an all-blue Billy Jack and they battle for his soul in a cave, encountering a spiritually significant cobra in a scene that made me wonder if Scorsese hadn't lifted from it for THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. I guess I would say that the main problem with THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK is that they gave Billy Jack too much money and he loved helicopter shots so much.) Another common thread between the Billy Jack movies and MAIDSTONE is the dominating personality of the filmmaker, and the film's existence as a stubborn extension of that personality. Ace said that MAIDSTONE was like BILLY JACK "without the karate." And you know, when he said that, I had to admit that Billy Jack knew what he was doing, putting the karate in there and driving the original film with a good, old-fashioned revenge plot.

All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up: Dunkel Edition!

Hello, friends, and welcome once again to All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up, the only place on the "internet" that combines entertainment with the entertainment all-stars! Let's get things started with our first juicy tidbit! Okay! Halfway through that newish movie of ON THE ROAD, up pops Peggy from MAD MEN in the thankless role (in the movie, the book, and life itself perhaps) of Galetea Dunkel. When we first see her she's on the phone to Sal Paradise, complaining, "These people are mad! They're mad!" And I wanted Sal to reply, "Would you describe them as... MAD MEN?" But he didn't. (See also.) Bewilderingly, the movie did not include the scene from the novel in which Sal looks through the window of a Buick dealership and sees Jerry Colonna (pictured). Buddy Ebsen is in THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON, by the way. I wonder if he ever sat around on the set of THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES bragging about how he was in Fitzgerald's final, unfinished masterpiece. Probably not. He seemed too nice to brag. But hey let's talk about something else. That movie I don't like (though it's rude to say as much) keeps coming on TV all the time. Now I have seen the part where the younger woman gives the older man (who wrote and directed the movie) a "mix tape" of "classical music" and he walks around listening to it and looking at buildings and then writes her letters about it which are quoted from at length in his voice-over narration while she sprawls out dreamily in a moony daze, grinning in a helpless rictus of joy as her shining eyes caress his profound and touching words, such as, "When I listened to the overture you sent, I suddenly realized I had hands... AND LEGS!" And in defiance of Billy Wilder's famous rule, we see exactly what he is narrating as he narrates it: the man who wrote and directed the movie staring at his own hands in childlike wonder as he listens to his "classical music." He also says, "I echo your sentiment about the Beethoven: Whoa." I know what he's doing there. With false modesty he is undercutting his sense of grandeur to seem real cool or something. I do it on this "blog" ALL THE TIME. Wait, this movie I claim to hate just made me realize it's myself I hate most of all. So let's talk about something else! McNeil sent me a 25-minute youtube clip (see also) because Johnny Carson's name appears on a marquee at 5:08, and I understand that! And McNeil understands that I understand that. The marquee is for one of Carson's early hosting gigs, a game show called "Do You Trust Your Wife?" That may bring us back to the oppression under which women like Galetea Dunkel labored, I don't know, sure, let's say it does. It's a MIKE HAMMER TV show, and I was surprised at the opening when Mike Hammer turned toward the camera to reveal that he is played by Darren McGavin, who is far too zany and lovable to play Mike Hammer. In an email, McNeil agreed. "They try to play the whole thing like a comedy it seems to me," he said, making a few more observations on various subjects before concluding, "what a fairy land goes on in my head." Mike Hammer drops his napkin on the floor of a restaurant to get a surreptitious look at a suspect, which is just about broad and cornball enough for the real Mike Hammer to do, but not in the vaudeville style McGavin does it. The suspect closely resembles Wimpy from the Popeye comic strip. He fiddles with his derby and makes funny faces. In conclusion, I guess nothing is good enough for me. That's it for today's All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up! Until next time, keep "reaching" for the "stars"! And go to hell.

Sometimes Hilary Duff

Yesterday I turned on the TV and it happened to be tuned to one of these here movie channels, so I saw part of a Hilary Duff movie. See, Hilary Duff was helping out a street musician. This young woman was busking with her violin but it wasn't going well - maybe she was playing uptight violin music that only squares and eggheads could love! (I hasten to add that I have no idea if I am interpreting the scene correctly; I came in at the tail end of it.) Anyway, Hilary Duff and some harmonizing buddies of hers convinced the violinist to play a Four Tops song instead, and Hilary Duff and all her friends sang along, and then suddenly everybody was thrilled. The music faded out and the scene went into slow motion and then it was just Hilary Duff laughing and clapping in slow motion while a mime in a beret and a red-and-white striped shirt waved sparklers in slow motion! This went on longer than you can imagine. I think the filmmaker's intent was whimsy but instead it really seemed that the sparkler mime was horning in on the street musician's turf. He just popped up and started waving his sparklers like a jerk, hoping to cadge some of that sweet Four Tops money, in slow motion, forever and ever, waving his sparklers, while Hilary Duff laughed and laughed, so slowly, kind of terrifying, HA... HA... HA. Then we cut to Hilary Duff on the roof of a building, saying to a boy, "Sometimes I come up here to think." I wonder how many movies that line has appeared in: dozens and dozens, I bet. Later in the day as I was attending to a mundane chore I turned on TCM for company (see also and also) and the movie MRS. SOFFEL was just coming on - a prison romance between Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson. I saw that one in the theater. It doesn't bother me anymore that movies I saw in the theater routinely come on "classic" movie channels now. All I remember about MRS. SOFFEL is walking out afterward and saying to my companion, "They should have called it MRS. SO AWFUL." Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ah, the thoughtless barbs of youth. I am sure Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson worked hard to provide an enjoyable experience, and maybe they did, maybe I was dumb back then, I guess we'll never know. Hey let's keep going with our theme of "movies." As you know, the homepage of my email provider has been illustrated lately with photos of "satisfied customers," I guess they are supposed to be, but they look more like deranged maniacs. Take this guy (above). He's the latest! I don't know if you can see the fine print, but he is supposed to be writing a screenplay... I don't know what that has to do with email. But here is what he has written: "The South Pole. Ext. Yves is sitting on a hill, sobbing. In the distance, Elliott shivers in the cold." He's grinning demonically at the human suffering he depicts in his incorrectly formatted masterpiece! It's obvious my email provider is TRYING TO DRIVE ME CRAZY. Sometimes Yves goes up there to think.

Don't Forget the Nuts

Woke up at 5 AM for no good reason, precisely in time to watch an entire episode of MOVIN' ON on the channel that shows Porter Wagoner. As I am sure you will recall, MOVIN' ON visited the Gulf Coast of Alabama to shoot some episodes in the mid 1970s and we were all pretty excited. Well, folks, you're going to be thrilled to hear that the episode of MOVIN' ON I happened to catch was shot in Mobile, Alabama! It sure was weird. I don't know if it would be weirder, less weird, or exactly the same amount of weird to someone not from the area, and I guess I'll never know. That's one of the tragedies of life. The episode was filled with things peculiar - very peculiar - to Mobile, such as "Azalea Trail Maids." It was a strange combination of long, static, method-actor scenes fueled by meandering improvisation, unbelievably contrived plot points, and allusions that only someone from Mobile in the 1970s could even begin to understand. Along the way, scenes had to be invented to account for the gawking crowds. There was an endless, almost experimental montage of balloons being popped by darts, Frank Converse grinning, and money being stuffed into a bucket, the same shots over and over. I would describe it as all padding, yes, everything in the whole episode seemed like padding for another episode, a missing episode, a phantom episode. Here is something I noticed about the acting style of Claude Akins, star of MOVIN' ON. He would add a sentence of his own to the end of every scene. Like, his sidekick (played by Frank Converse) was noisily eating nuts (a bit of method-actor "business") while looking over musty old books in the Mobile County courthouse (I guess). And at the end of the scene, when Frank Converse got up to leave, Claude Akins uselessly said, "Don't forget the nuts," obliging Frank Converse to ad-lib some line back to him, expressing that the nuts did not belong to him. That, in a "nutshell" - ha ha ha! wheeeee! - is what the whole episode felt like. At the end of another scene, Claude Akins added out of nowhere, "Shine your shoes!" The viewer then noticed that Frank Converse's shoes were extremely dirty. I could just imagine Claude Akins talking to the director like, "My character would notice that his shoes are dirty!" Or in that other scene, "My character would not want to see nuts go to waste!" Claude Akins was just trying to do his best.

Trash Pillows

While I am waiting, I will tell you about an infomercial I watched in the wee hours while I couldn't sleep. It was for a revolutionary new pillow that looks exactly like a pillow. ORDINARY PILLOWS SIMPLY DON'T WORK, the graphics kept proclaiming. Maybe they're right! I was awake! I think it is kind of clever when they run the "can't sleep" infomercials during the hours when people should be sleeping. Dr. Theresa's fave moment - that's right! She noticed I wasn't in bed and got up and joined me for a spell - came when an interview subject said, "The pillows you buy at the market are just trash, really." I liked the "neurologist" who couldn't help grinning broadly and even laughing every time he tried to make an outlandish, straight-faced claim about the pillow. It was his "tell," I think! The woman who hosted the infomercial had the appearance and mannerisms of Michelle Bachmann. She tried to tell a moving story about her little daughter saying she had become a better mommy since purchasing the pillow. I think she tried to tear up or choke up or something while she told it BUT IT DIDN'T WORK. She couldn't make herself go through with it.

John Dee Fan Club Report

"Was awesome. Especially when they dragged him screaming down to hell." So ran Lee Durkee's review of DOCTOR FAUSTUS at the Globe Theatre, a performance of which he attended yesterday. That was the condensed version, as presented in a facebook comment. Later, Lee followed up with a nice, long email, portions of which will be presented below. Dr. Faustus is thought by some scholars (one scholar?) to be Christopher Marlowe's negative portrait of Dr. John Dee, while Prospero represents Shakespeare putting a nicer gloss on him. Also Neoplatonism is involved, says Lee, but let's keep this rolling along. We don't have all day! All right! And now let's turn it over to Lee Durkee, reporting from England: "a blockbuster version of Faustus all stops pulled Hollywood style. It was great, though it wasn’t Elizabethan in any way; there were more actors on stage in the opening scene than existed in an entire old school troupe, but the play, essentially a series of slapstick vignettes inserted kinda jarringly into the stream of a dark narrative that’s not nearly as interesting... worked because it was prop-filled and bawdy [WARNING: one example of bawdiness follows below - ed.]... I was leaning against the runway tongue of the stage and half the time had to crane my head directly up to see the actors, and what I’ll always remember is that O in the sky above them. Shakespeare’s O, his Globe, which even in a theme park void of ghosts (the remains of the real Globe were discovered a quarter mile away while the new one was being constructed) was haunting, that view upward with clouds passing overhead an Elizabethan archetype... Props galore included giant dinosaur-boned birds, representing dragons, on which Mephistopheles and Faustus scoured the globe looking for trouble. Giant masks of Helen, of demons, behind which costume changes were made. Books opened into flames. A wench ran on stage with a Roman candle spurting fire from her crotch. [I warned you! - ed.] The three trap doors were in constant use, props and people appearing and vanishing, especially during the highlight of the play, the parade of the seven deadly sins. John Dee would have been proud of them... My legs held me up okay in the pit, though we all sat down during intermission... Fun to watch the people in the boxes the same way the nobility used to get ogled by the runts. There were a couple of moments when things went wrong and the actors had to improvise and bite back giggles, and in many ways these are always my favorite moments, the spell gets bubbleburst and replaced by a moment of intimacy between the actors and crowd filled with grins and shrugs. A floating castle helium balloon that was supposed to rise up out of the Globe and reproduce one of Faust’s spells instead floundered in a downdraft, was captured by an audience member, who then let it go a moment later; it drifted back onto the stage just as some regent was complimenting Faustus on his magical castle-in-the-sky illusion. The balloon seemed playful almost and finally Meph grabbed it and stalked off stage with it while Faustus laughed and the crowd laughed... Another great moment was when some king of evilness hit a tennis ball into the crowd, and the crowd member tossed it back, and the king broke out in laughter, as did the audience... afterwards I decided to follow the crowd across the walking bridge over the Thames, just like in the old days, and of couse I got lost and then ended up an hour later, still looking for the tube, finding The Shakespeare’s Head instead and popping in for a pint."

The Grinning Variations

One thing you can say about Mickey Spillane's famed detective Mike Hammer: he sure does grin a lot. I would say it is the main thing he does, aside from shooting people in the stomach. Here are three of the literally billions of examples from VENGEANCE IS MINE! (exclamation point Spillane's): 1) My grin split into a smile and that into a laugh. 2) I forced a grin through the frown. 3) "You don't have much faith in yourself, kid," I grinned.

The Veidt Stuff

Had enough Conrad Veidt for today? I DIDN'T THINK SO! I asked Barry B. (re: the previous Conrad Veidt "post") if the picture of Veidt that frightened him so as a child was the one in which Veidt is grinning and cross-eyed - because that one is terrifying! And Barry B. replied, "Yeah, it’s a straight-on shot and his shoulders are shrouded like he’s wearing a cloak or smock. It freaked me out which caused me to sit and stare at it for too long an amount of time." I hear you, Barry B.! I actually picked the least horrific shot I could find from THE MAN WHO LAUGHS for "blog" usage. The others are just too scary. I am sure that anyone who reads this "blog" knows this already, but Veidt's look in THE MAN WHO LAUGHS was the inspiration for the Joker in the old Batman comic books. Say, one of the many images I have described would make a great illustration for this "post," wouldn't it? Well, too bad! I am going back to my old "random illustration" rule, because my computer really is going to blow up. Steam comes out of it every time I add a new photo, and there's a faint chugging noise. So from now on, just old random recycled photos from the "blog's" glory days and nothing else! Nothing will make sense anymore, and you're going to like it. I grew weary of that promise before, and never turned back, and have added over 500 pictures since then, which is why my computer is really truly going to explode for real unless I mend my profligate ways.

Olive Garden

Saw this Olive Garden commercial where this grown man says, "It's just like being at the kids' table again!" And he says it with a big smile on his face, like he's proud. Like, "Look at me, I'm a huge diapered baby!" Like, "This is the condition to which I aspire!" Like, "There are no adults anymore!" Like, "The world is so great this way!" Like, "Wheeeeeeeeeeee!" It made me think of that phone commercial where the phone turns the guy into a baffled toddler and what a terrific selling point that is. Oh yeah, and then I saw a phone commercial where a guy texts really hateful things to his friend and neighbor - making fun of his home and his clothing - but he does it for really cheap because his phone has such a great "plan" that comes with it. And as the guy texts, he stands there grinning dumbly at his neighbor, like daring him to object. Really he's like a psychopath. Like, "I don't understand your human emotion." Honestly! It's a monstrous grin. A rictus! And the neighbor says to the crazy guy, quietly, "Look me in the eyes." The actor interjects pathos that the commercial does not acknowledge! There is a plea for humanity buried in there. A plea for humanity that the commercial finds stupid and amusing! The commercial is ON THE SIDE of the jerk with the phone, not on the side of the insulted neighbor. The commercial is like, "Buy this phone so you can be a jerk for cheap!" The commercial is like, "Hooray for jerks!" The commercial is like, "Hooray!" Say, did you know that Tom Franklin and I first met at an Olive Garden? That's a "'Blog' 'Fact'" you can clip and save! Trade with your friends. PS It was Mobile in the 80s, what do you want from us?

Can't Hardly Stan It

Today James Wolcott refers to Stan as a "grinning jackass," proving my point that not everyone feels the way McNeil does about Stan.

Obscure Commerce

Don't you want to hear about a commercial I saw in the wee hours when I couldn't sleep? As I have noted before, commercials at that hour are obscurer. This one was for a jewelry store, which is not as obscure as the time I saw the one for the chimney sweep. And I seem to recall a birdseed commercial I saw back in Atlanta one time. Ah yes, I love to sit back and nostalgically consider commercials I have seen. Last night's scene was set in a family garage. Dad was under the car, tinkering away! You know how he is! He rolled out to retrieve something and his son surprised him by asking advice on the subject of marriage proposal. "You need to get down to Riddles Jewelry Store. They have great bargains and the finest quality merchandise. She's worth it," the dad suggested. I am paraphrasing, but that's pretty close. I believe that was the name of the store: Riddles. At the close of his advice, the dad rolled back under the car and called for a wrench. When he rolled back out, his son did not hand him the wrench, for the son had already scooted off to Riddles! The dad looked around, amazed. Then, as the announcer drove home the message about Riddles, we were treated to a pantomime scene of the son at the ring counter, his face aglow with happiness. He was holding the wrench aloft! That's where the wrench went! The son ran so fast to the store that he forgot he was holding the wrench! I could almost hear the director: "Hold it higher! Higher! We have to see the wrench! That's the payoff!" The result was somewhat unnatural for the poor actor required to display the wrench. He probably said, "Why would I be holding the wrench like this?" And the director was like, "You're so excited, you forgot you have it!" And the kid said, "Okay, I guess that could happen, but in that case wouldn't it just be held loosely at my side like this?" And the director said, "Then there's no payoff! The jewelry counter is blocking the shot!" And they argued a little, and the director said, "What are you, John Cassevetes? I can get a hundred other kids in here who will hold the wrench. Just do it!" The unintended consequence was that the final scene in the commercial looked like a jewel store robbery in progress! If the man didn't hand over the goods, the kid was going to slug him with a wrench! That was the general impression. Of course the kid had a big goofy smile plastered on his mug, but maybe he was one of those grinning psychopaths you hear about.

Preen 'n' Bray

I saw a vodka commercial. There's a dark room. There are men wearing dark suits in the dark room, and they are preening and braying like characters in a searing drama by Neil LaBute. They grin wolfishly, showing their teeth, and appear to spout great gushers of Neil LaBute dialogue, but you can't hear them because there's an announcer talking, and the announcer says in a commendatory way, without irony, putting forth these fellows as exemplars of vodka consumption, "For some men, substance IS style," and as the announcer announces this, one of the predatorily grinning Neil LaBute characters riffles through a giant stack of greenbacks representing substance.