Cheese Statement

A character on DARK SHADOWS said "I find that cheese always helps me sleep." And, you know, DARK SHADOWS was a daily soap opera, so they would often enact a little recapitulation, or "recap" as I like to call it, of what happened at the end of the previous episode to keep it fresh in the audience's memory in those days before binge-watching. So at the end of one episode they did the old "using a ring with a secret compartment to poison the sherry but then the glasses get switched" bit, during which the statement "I find that cheese always helps me sleep" was uttered. Then, at the beginning of the next episode, we got to hear the guy say "I find that cheese always helps me sleep" again!

A Bad Habit of Dead Opera Composers

I don't like it in an opera when a character lets out a sudden scream of horror. I don't mean a wail of despair that has been musically interpreted. I'm talking about an unmusical (or should we say extra-musical?) scream of horror befitting the action of the scene but very jarring if you don't brace yourself. And even if you do brace yourself! Maybe especially if you brace yourself! Imagine the powerful lungs of an opera singer deployed in such a manner, screaming a scream that would make Brian De Palma himself ask if it could be toned down a little. After deep and extensive reflection, I can think of a number of operas that do this, and that number is two. It really jangles my old nerves. I won't call out the opera composers by name because don't they have enough problems in our crazy world? And also, they are dead. I know why you're doing it: you're trying to see if I'm paying attention. Well, guess what? I'm not. Get it together, dead opera composers!

Devil Fox Trombone Opera Summary Mayhem

Yesterday, while I was "blogging" about the fox and its relationship, if any, to the devil, I happened to be listening to an opera called DER FREISCHUTZ, forgive the missing umlaut. And I'll tell you why! Why I was listening to an opera, not why to forgive the missing umlaut. So, I had read an obituary in the New York Times about the singer Edith Mathis, and as I often say, without joking, I get all my ideas about what to read and listen to from the obituaries. If you're not dead, don't bother me! Well! This opera really snagged my attention and I started looking into it. I noticed that there was a fox in the summary! And also, the devil! But none of that is what I decided to tell you. So, while I was looking up more stuff about this opera, I found a "web" site called Interlude. I won't "link" to it, because I can just tell from sad experience it will be a wasteland of zombie "links" one day and then when I'm 78, Lord willing, I'll have to go back and replace the "link." So you can look it up for yourself or trust me when I tell you that it mentions "quiet string tremolos and low trombones, an instrument traditionally associated with devilish doings." So! That reminded me of my famous novel SOUR BLUEBERRIES, which used to be on the "internet" - that's just how good it was! "Internet" good! - until I read that the platform I was using had also decided it was okay to host actual, real-life Nazis. So I was like, "No thanks." Later, somebody told me that the platform had entertained sudden misgivings about hosting Nazis, which I hope is true. But who knows in our hilarious modern times? Anyway, I can quote SOUR BLUEBERRIES here because it doesn't exist anywhere else and never will. And here I go! "Anyway, in today’s meeting I kept talking about trombones for some reason. I saw everybody’s eyes glazing over but I couldn’t stop." Of course, SOUR BLUEBERRIES was a work of fiction (wink, wink!) but that detail came from an ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE meeting I had. And one of the myriad boring things I was claiming to know was that trombones had been considered the devil's instrument! But I couldn't find any evidence to back that up at the time. I'm not saying I tried. But it seemed like something I might have "learned" in college, when I was a music major, which I'm not sure is a thing I have ever admitted here.

Monocles, Bullets, and Cigarettes

Like the world at large, I have completely forgotten about the book I wrote about cigarette lighters. But yesterday I was watching Erich von Stroheim's version of THE MERRY WIDOW, that's right, a silent operetta, what could be more fun? Lots of things. And let's say Erich von Stroheim doesn't exactly have the Lubitsch touch, as I wittily texted to Megan Abbott, and oh how she must have chuckled at my waggish observation. For example, it takes Stroheim an hour and a half to get to the point where Lubitsch's movie STARTS! To be fair, the stories are pretty different. But why should I be fair? Who is reading this? You? You don't exist! Anyhow, I guess you, if you did exist, would be wondering what this has to do with my cigarette lighter book. Fine! I'll tell you. In THE MERRY WIDOW, as undertaken by Stroheim, there are a man and woman with cigarettes in their mouths, and they are standing so that the tips of their cigarettes touch. It might be that one is giving a light to the other, a process described in my book, in which I thoroughly explore the obscene slang term for such an action. I tried to search the "blog" to see if I had mentioned it here before, but I don't see how I could have, except by such euphemistic means as I have employed above. If you want to read dirty talk like that, you'll just have to buy the book! Anyway, so these two are standing there with the tips of their cigarettes touching and the bad guy, who is across the room, and in a hilarious mood, takes out his little gun and shoots off the ends of both of their cigarettes with a single bullet. Then he shoots the eyes out of a statue, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. He is, however, wearing a monocle, and monocles figure heavily in my cigarette lighter book for reasons I would tell you if we weren't both asleep by now. But! The relationship of guns to cigarettes and lighters is another theme of the book, so you can see clearly that when you tabulate all the various themes and subthemes and so on of my book you've never heard of and will have forgotten by the end of this "post," I am obliged to add THE MERRY WIDOW (1925) to my appendix of stuff that really should have gone into my cigarette lighter book but didn't. You know what else has a lot of monocle action? NIGHTWOOD! What pie and ice cream were to Kerouac, monocles are to Djuna Barnes. There's one chapter where a guy fiddles with his monocle in every conceivable way. You should take a drink every time Djuna Barnes uses the word "monocle"! (The surgeon general advises against it.) In a movie, the actor playing Felix, the guy with the monocle, would be like one of the pipe-smokers I have observed in at at least three movies "letting the pipe do most of the acting," except with a monocle instead of a pipe. And in an earlier chapter, Felix's monocle pops out, I believe, the way your monocle is always popping out when you're shocked. You may recall that I also found a person whose monocle pops out emotionally in Fitzgerald's TENDER IS THE NIGHT. You know what else had lots of monocles? That Erich von Stroheim bio we read in the Million Dollar Book Club! (Did you know Anita Loos affectionately called him "Von"?)

McNeil's Li'l Sausage Bits

Welcome once more to "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," where McNeil reads a 700-page Humphrey Bogart bio and I pass the savings on to you! As you may recall, we were on the fence about whether the casting of Dooley Wilson in CASABLANCA was a legitimate bogie bit. As McNeil put it, Wilson "was not their first or even second choice, but....that's how sausage is made. I'm not sure that's how sausage is made." Which reminds me of a whimsical quotation from a whimsical narrator in my beloved bestseller (it's neither beloved nor a bestseller) MOVIE STARS: "There is a reason no one wants to know 'how the sausage is made.' How the sausage is made is terrible." And here you may note the most significant difference between my "blog" writing and my "real" writing: on the "blog," that second sentence would have ended in an exclamation point. And, honestly, in most of my "real" writing too. I wonder why I didn't do it! But we are getting far away from McNeil's li'l bits. McNeil says that Lena Horne was considered for the role of Sam! He also contends, rather boldly, that CASABLANCA would have been "twice as good" if Lena Horne had played the role. And I do say that such an observation indeed qualifies as a bogie bit. Another bogie bit is of a sad nature, as it depicts Mayo Methot, in a drunken rage, getting herself wedged tightly behind a sofa somehow. But let's get back to sausage. By a weird coincidence, I was listening to an opera when I received the first bogie bit alluded to above. That's not the coincidence. So, in a while, I was like, "What the hell is this opera about? I don't speak whatever language this is!" And I looked up the plot on the "internet," and this guy in the opera gets in trouble for eating a sausage on the moon! I guess you think I am making that up. But I will tell you the name of the opera - THE EXCURSIONS OF MR. BROUCEK - so you can look it up for your damn self. So I was like, "Sausage!" And, believe it or not, it was, by another coincidence, the second opera I had listened to THAT WEEK about somebody going to the moon. (The other one was Il mondo della luna by Baldassare Galuppi... and I can almost swear that Haydn wrote an opera with a similar title and subject matter, but now I am just showing off my knowledge of moon operas.) This is getting long, but I have more to tell. I just hope the lousy AT&T "internet" doesn't stop working before I'm done. We're getting something better installed on Monday! Leslie came over to watch INLAND EMPIRE the other night and we couldn't finish because the AT&T "internet" crapped out. So we turned off the lights and put on these plastic toy rings that have colored lights shooting out of them and Dr. Theresa requested Kraftwerk, so we danced around to that for a while, and then switched to a playlist by Kate Tsang. But the main point is that... you know all those books I am reading all the time in various circumstances? Now I've had to add a book that I put next to my laptop in my home office for whenever the "internet" goes kerplunk and I'm just sitting there with a stupid look on my face and nothing to distract me from the terrible abyss. There are books littered all over the place around here, it's a sad mess. Oh! So... one of the most recent books I had downstairs, on the side table near my favorite chair, was DAISY MILLER by Henry James, which somehow I had never read before. And in it, a character quotes from MANFRED, the poetic drama by Lord Byron, and I liked the quotation, so I dug out the old SELECTED POEMS of Byron and started reading MANFRED. And I hadn't made it too far, just to lines 196 and 197 of the first scene of the first act, and what did I see but "When the falling stars are shooting,/And the answer'd owls are hooting"? And you know what that means. Well, as long as I'm here, I'll mention a message I received yesterday from DJ Gnosis, who said he had gotten a news alert about his own old "blog," and when he checked it out, he saw that a "web" site called - I think - casino.org had discovered a 2008 "post" of mine, and a contemporaneous "post" by DJ Gnosis commenting on it, about the time I "posted" the first-ever photographic evidence on the "internet" of the existence of the Foster Brooks robot that used to live in Las Vegas until it was dismantled and sold for scrap metal, as we all must be eventually. Quoted in the article? Foster Brooks's own daughter! I would "link" to the article, but, being in the midst of a nightmarish effort to scrub old zombie "links" from the "blog," I am no longer much inclined to "link" to outside sources. Nothing against casino.org! Anyway, this on the heels of my 45-year-old letter inspiring McNeil to watch HARRY AND WALTER GO TO NEW YORK. Given enough time and patience, such meaningless things can happen.

Doom and So On

I was chatting with Megan this morning through the medium of email about a Mark Rothko book I picked up at Square Books the other day. Its subject is the paintings he did on paper rather than canvas, and it features many vivid color-plate reproductions. Rothko is quoted in the introductory essay, of course, often saying the kind of stuff that Megan and I are partial to, as I am sure you will recall ("click" here) from the time we got all in a tizzy over something Bellini said about opera. I'll give you a couple of examples! 1. "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on." 2. "If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again." End of examples. Moving on to other artistic matters, a lot of these old comic books that Tom Franklin brought over are horror comics, a genre I read a little bit of as a kid, but not too much, after a story in either HOUSE OF MYSTERY or HOUSE OF SECRETS (I think) about a guy who turned out to have goat legs shook me up pretty bad. Which brings up something I've noticed... these old comic books, and not just the horror ones, either, really do have an awful lot of the devil in them, just like the Sunday school teachers used to say! I was wrong to scoff! But I'm sure you've guessed what I'm getting at. So, I was reading this one THE WITCHING HOUR last night, and there's a story in it about "coffin inspectors," which I didn't know was a job. You can learn a lot from the old comic books that Tom Franklin gives you! The coffin inspectors are marching along in the first panel, singing a song that goes like this (and, once again, I quote): "OOHOOHHOOO OH, HO! OH, HO! WHEN THE MOON IS GIBBOUS AND THE OWL CRIES FOUL... THEN WE'LL DIG AND SHARE THE WEALTH OF THOSE WHO NO LONGER DRINK... THE RED, RED WINE... OF LIIIIIIIIIFE!!!" I can't say that's much of a song, but it does have an owl in it. Yes, there are eight I's in LIIIIIIIIFE, I counted them several times in the interest of accuracy. Oh, and I get it now, they're graverobbers. Why, there's no such thing as a coffin inspector after all! In my defense, Ace and Angela came over last night for a special screening of Dr. Theresa's favorite TV show, QUINCY, M. E., and afterward, tuckered out from all the Quincy enjoyment, I did no more than glance at the first panel (after reading a previous story in the same issue, which I had trouble following, about the devil attacking a Swiss town - it ended as abruptly as SIMON OF THE DESERT! [which also featured the devil]) just enough to notice the owl before succumbing to slumber with a Quincy-like smile on my cherubic face. In conclusion, I don't mean to brag, but TECHNICIANS OF THE SACRED does have more owls in it, just as I predicted. If the numbers hold up, there should be an owl every 4.5 pages. One more thing. Goat legs (see above) make me think of a line that Dr. Theresa and I are always quoting to one another. It comes from one of those "true stories of the paranormal" shows. They were interviewing a couple of guys from Texas, I think, who saw a creature in the woods with "the head of a goat and the body of a jacked-up man." That's it. We say it a lot. Try it out at home! "The head of a goat and the body of a jacked-up man."

A Convivial Visit?

I was just thinking about how on July 4, 2011, I was reading a book about werewolves and how, four years later, on July 3, I was reading about werewolves in another book, and furthermore I was thinking about how, this year, on July 2, Dr. Theresa and I coincidentally watched a mediocre werewolf movie. But that's not why I sat down to type. I wanted to show you a sentence from that book about Wagner by Alex Ross: "Holitscher left a rueful description of how on one occasion, after a convivial visit to Mann's home, he turned around to see his colleague at the window, studying him through opera glasses." That sentence has everything! You could make a movie out of it.

Door Trouble!

Well, you know I don't "blog" anymore, but I usually tell you if I go to Los Angeles and all the wonderful things that happen there in the magical city of broken dreams. I went to Los Angeles recently, but much of the "material I gathered" is going straight into a secret project I'm working on with McNeil for actual publication. And the rest, well, I thought about using the "interesting details" in a novel, but then I thought, oh, that sounds hard, writing a novel, maybe I won't do that. 1. Scallops at an Elvis-themed hotel. Does that sound like a good idea? Ordering scallops at an Elvis-themed hotel? As you know, I often stay in Memphis the night before a flight, for easy access to the airport. And sometimes I stay in an Elvis-themed hotel. And this time I ordered scallops, which, even as I was doing it, seemed like the last thing a person should order at an Elvis-themed hotel. Well! I'm still here. The scallops had an aggressively candied flavor. 2. At the Elvis-themed hotel, my hotel door wouldn't shut all the way! Well, I put on that latch thing they have at the top of many hotel doors and hoped for the best. 3. I lost my favorite pen somewhere in Los Angeles. Almost immediately! Why bring your favorite pen on a trip? On the other hand, why settle for a less-loved pen? Don't you want to feel happy? A grown man ought to be able to keep track of a pen. Should a person of a certain age, however, have outgrown notions like "favorite pen"? 4. By a weird coincidence, I was in town on a national holiday, just as it occurred in 2015 (please do yourself a favor and "click" here for corroboration), so the office was closed on Monday, and I found myself in the EXACT same bistro in which Kent and I had a green chartreuse before going to see 50 SHADES OF GREY together at the movie theater next door, so I had a green chartreuse in Kent's honor, though Kent lives in Vermont now, and I was all alone, it was a desperate sight, let me tell you, drinking a green chartreuse all alone and thinking of Kent. 5. "My twin will hug me... sometimes." - Hilary Florido. 6. Dan Tana's, just the place for dinner with my brother! I got there a little early, so I sat at the bar waiting. I listened to a guy who seemed to be on a first date telling a woman that he was directly descended from William Bradford. He was telling her all about what kind of wine to order after her martini. A Malbec will be velvety and heavy, but without the tannins of a cabernet, he yammered. Whereas a "pinot" will be "fluffy." See? This could have all gone in a novel. Anyway, it wasn't a first date, because he suddenly asked, "What's your name?" She said her name was Lurleen, a name I know because it was the name of the wife of the awful governor of Alabama, George Wallace, who briefly became governor herself, and I was born in Alabama, so we know the name Lurleen. But this guy was enraptured. "WHAT A BEAUTIFUL NAME!" he rhapsodized. Ha ha! If this were a novel I couldn't use the word "rhapsodized." I'd be kicked out of the novelist club. Then he said something that surprised me: "My wife's name is Melody." I didn't see that coming! But he was still trying to pick up Lurleen, I'm pretty sure. "WHAT ARE YOUR PASSIONS?" he oozed. Ha ha, I hate my verbs today. I hate them so much that I sort of love them! She said she liked to paint and what do you know, this guy's brother is a famous artist! "I could do you a lot of favors in the art world," said the putative descendent of William Bradford. "And do you know why? Because my brother loves me! HE LOVES ME!" How the rest of the story went, I just don't know, because my own brother showed up, speaking of brothers, and we were escorted to our table. 7. As my brother and I were eating I glanced up and thought I saw Thomas Middleditch, star of TV's SILICON VALLEY, sitting at the bar. I asked my brother, "Hey! Is that that guy?" My brother said I had to be less obvious so he could find a reason to stare inconspicuously. So I looked in the opposite direction, which frustrated my brother! "No, you have to look in sort of the SAME direction!" he said. So I looked at the TV over the bar, where there was a car race going on, which seemed like something a person would look at, and my brother was able to stare properly at the person whom he indeed confirmed to be Thomas Middleditch. 8. But then, later, out on the sidewalk, after dinner, we seemed to be walking behind that same guy, and I humorously remarked that he would think we were stalking him. "That's not the same guy!" my brother said. I insisted it was the same guy who had been sitting at the bar. "He's wearing the same suit!" I said. "Yes, he's wearing a black JACKET!" my brother replied dismissively. Trouble in the family! So I thought the guy had never been Thomas Middleditch, and my brother thought the guy sitting at the bar had been Thomas Middleditch and this was a different guy we were looking at now. I suppose we'll never know, unless Thomas Middleditch gets in touch. I will just say that the guy at the bar, whom we both took to be Thomas Middleditch at the time, was really making a meal out of his knuckle. He was gnawing ravenously on the knuckle of his right forefinger like there was no tomorrow! 9. Reading a book in translation and the translator uses "trooper" when he means "trouper." How can I trust him now? 10. Back at the hotel in Burbank, I returned to find my hotel room door cracked partly open! If you will glance up at #2, above, you will see that a theme for the trip had formed! I gently and suspiciously pushed the door the rest of the way open, like a person in a movie would do. Nothing was amiss. 11. Cole Sanchez taught me the word "subluxation," meaning a hyperextension of the joint, and I asked him what a hyperextension of the joint was and he said it was when he, Cole, made someone's elbow or knee go in the direction it doesn't want to go. Ouch! It's all part of of what I believe he called "Brazilian jiujitsu," which he practices. He also told me about choking people until they pass out. Don't get me wrong, it is another move in the same sport! "They can submit," he explained, meaning that the person can tap out before they become unconscious. I asked whether there were people who refuse to submit and Cole said that yes, some people are so annoyed that you got past their defenses they would rather just let you choke them unconscious than undergo the humiliation of submitting. 12. I went to see Dianne Wiest performing her magnificent and inexhaustible heart out in Samuel Beckett's great play HAPPY DAYS. I made up a funny blurb for it: "It's a different kind of 'Cheers' for THIS Sam and Dianne!" I eavesdropped on the people sitting in front of me. They have stopped eating octopus because they met a really smart octopus. The guy had a long gray ponytail and was wearing a bracelet that said "RESIST!" Anyway, it's funny because Julia Pott had just been talking at dinner the night before about not ordering the octopus for similar reasons, though to my knowledge she has never met an octopus in person. I'm skipping over most of the dinner with Julia because it's going undiluted into my project with McNeil, alluded to in the introductory paragraph above. 13. During the Beckett play, a certain segment of the audience would go HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! whenever Dianne Wiest, as the character Winnie, said something like, "One forgets one's classics." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! "One forgets one's classics." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! They were laughing like it was the farting scene in BLAZING SADDLES. Naturally it made me think of what Kierkegaard said about farce, which makes me no better than them. 14. There was a guy in the hotel bar two nights in a row who also laughed HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, but I don't know what about. His laugh suggested he was either an opera singer or Paul Bunyan. Booming, highly articulated and distinct HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAs. He really pronounced each HA. "Boy, that guy really enjoys life," I said out loud to myself, bitterly, alone at the hotel bar.

Normal Levels

Well, I was happy to read in the New York Times today that there is a five-and-a-half-hour filmed opera about the life of Norman Mailer and also this five-and-a-half-hour filmed opera is about poop. I'll never see it because where would I ever see that? It's not coming to the movie theater up the road anytime soon. And also it sounds gross, I don't want to see that. Or do I? Probably not. But I'm happy it's there. You know Norman Mailer was very concerned with pooping. There are some... digestive concerns in this Norman Mailer CIA novel, but nowhere near the normal level of poop in a Norman Mailer novel. Of course, I'm only on page 378. That's just a third of the way through! Okay, goodbye, I love you, I'm sorry I said poop so much.

Rice Droppin'

So Dr. Theresa and her coworker Kevin and her whole department (which is, like, one other person) and all their partners and helpers and students and affiliates did an amazing thing pulling off this 10-day musical event, culminating in last night's joyous Neko Case show. The "green room" was the balcony of the Lyric Theater, and I crept up there and stole a plate of Neko Case's food. So I was leaning on the balcony railing watching the show and two grains of rice fell off the plate! And they hit some guy on the head. And he looked up, right at me! And I just slowly stepped backward and disappeared into the shadows like the Phantom of the Opera! I did not take responsibility for my actions. But the point is that things have been busy around here and also I went out of town and my reading of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY and THE FAERIE QUEENE has been temporarily stalled. These are nice editions I can't take out of the house! And I just haven't been in the house. But don't worry, I'm gonna get back to them eventually. I don't want you to worry! Promise me you won't worry. Because I'm also doing a presentation for the upcoming Southern Foodways Symposium and I have to get some research done for that! My topic: TV cook and "humorist" Justin Wilson. So I have to read a lot of his "humor." AND! I was sitting at Square Books looking through the new William Gay book, which is a short manuscript found in his papers after he passed away, and I read the compelling introduction by Tom Franklin and I started reading the book and I suddenly realized I had read a certain quantifiable PERCENTAGE of the book and it no longer seemed right to just sit there and read the whole book, maybe, so I bought it, so that's something else.

Juvenile Possum

I was sitting up at the City Grocery Bar the other day, drinking and reading THE DECAMERON. And I was like, "THE DECAMERON really reminds me of Faulkner!" Maybe because I was in the middle of the town square of Oxford, Mississippi, and drinking. But also because this character was a horse-trader and he spouted off a whole page of dialogue about his feelings for this woman, and when the woman responds only with silence he spouts off another page of dialogue in what he imagines is HER voice, and that sounds like Faulkner, doesn't it? And then Jonathan Franzen walked into the bar. And I said, "Hi, I'm Jack. Jon Langford was in town this weekend and he told me to say hello if I saw you." And Jonathan Franzen said, "I know, he told me. I know about your Emmy." Ha ha! That was a funny thing to hear upon meeting Jonathan Franzen. Reader, I balked! Is that the correct word for what I did? I don't know. I was discomfited. Is that a thing? I couldn't think of what to say. I said, "Oh!" But that reminds me. When Langford was in town a bunch of us went to lunch with him and he started talking about his affection for the soap opera ALL MY CHILDREN, and especially a character named "Janet From Another Planet." And she was an evil twin, and sometimes tormented her sister's husband by pretending to be her sister. It was generally agreed around the table that a husband would be able to tell his own wife from her sister, twins or no. But I remarked that ALL MY CHILDREN was just indulging in a tradition going back at least as far as THE DECAMERON. In THE DECAMERON, men are always fooling women (or the other way round) by just putting on somebody else's cloak and creeping into a bedroom when it's dark. Finally, when I was flying back from California, the iPod played Bob Dylan doing a version of the old love-and-murder ballad "Frankie and Johnny" while I was reading THE DECAMERON, and I was like, this song is just like THE DECAMERON! (Photo by Kent Osborne. He said he was going to get a "candid shot" but he made me wash my hands a second time so he could get it... that's not candid!) So when I left City Grocery night was falling. My only job was to pick up the cat food on the back porch before a possum came along after dark and got into it. And when I got home there was already a possum eating leftovers! I shooed it away. It was a likable possum. It had been coming around a lot. Dr. Theresa saw a "juvenile possum" (her phrase) that had been struck by a car on our side street the other day, and I fear it was the same possum. And now the floodgates of memory have opened!

I remember that when I was trying desperately to meet Matt Weiner after the Emmys, this guy (pictured) was walking with Matt Weiner and Harry Crane and he seemed more approachable so I kind of poached him from the group and I was like, hey, remember in THIS IS THE END when your head pokes through the door and then a demon gets you? And he was like, yes. And then I reminded him of some Sonic commercials I had seen him in, and then I asked him wasn't he in CAKEY: THE CAKE FROM OUTER SPACE? which surprised him. Anyway, he was nice as I recited his own credits to him Chris Farley-style and Matt Weiner sprinted into the distance, along with all his hopes and dreams, maybe, or mine, who knows?

Occasional Small Consignments of Bananas

When I was in Atlanta this weekend, my sister and brother-in-law and I kept seeing a headline that had a funny yet mournful ring to it: "Chiquita Banana Dies." They really meant the woman who did the voice of the Chiquita Banana in a popular animated commercial, to which I "link" you here. Please watch it. It's the best commercial ever, a mini-opera and PSA all in one. Plus it sells bananas! You will note that the banana arrives in an ocean liner with a singular purpose: she has "come to say [that] bananas have to ripen in a certain way." All that distance! Just to say that! What a journey! What an idealist this banana is! The commercial first appeared in 1947, and the citizens of the United States - or so the executives at Chiquita Banana seemed to think - required a lot of banana education, which made me wonder when bananas first became popular in the U.S. There was some talk of googling, but I insisted I'd look it up properly in my OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD when I got home. And I did! "During the 19th century occasional small consignments of bananas were sent by fast ships... Early varieties had not been bred for keeping qualities, so the fruit had to arrive in little more than a fortnight and was an expensive luxury. But all this began to change in the 1870s, when two American entrepreneurs began to ship bananas from the Caribbean to New Orleans, Boston, and New York." But here's the most amazing thing! "As bananas ripen they give off ethylene gas. Most fruits do this during ripening, but bananas produce an exceptionally large amount... A banana put in a lidded box with green tomatoes turns them red. It also helps a hard avocado to ripen overnight." Bananas are magic!

The World Was Young

My friend and former ADVENTURE TIME coworker Emily Quinn made this portrait of Marceline. I tweeted it, but couldn't think of the proper name for the technique employed. Maria Bustillos helpfully tweeted back at me: "it is called pyrography, remember you could buy those kits of it when the world was young." And just minutes later my friend Judge of Chicago independently confirmed via tweet: pyrography. Somehow Maria's tweet reminded me of something you could order off the back of comic books when I was a boy: a shrunken head kit. A curious child was encouraged to make grotesque heads out of apples! At first I didn't even tweet to Maria that Vincent Price was on the box, though that's the way I remembered it, because it could't possibly have been that perfect. BUT IT WAS. Maria Bustillos, by the way, wrote a good, long article about ADVENTURE TIME, which I'm sure I've "linked" to you before, but just in case, here it is. You'll hate yourself if you don't "click."

And now, unless I'm crazy, I am recalling that there was (is) a song called something like "Ah, the Apple Trees! (When the World Was Young)" which brings everything together, but that can't possibly be a real title, can it? Pretty melodramatic! But then of course you remember what Bellini - dead at 34! - said: "Carve into your head in adamantine letters: OPERA MUST MAKE PEOPLE WEEP, FEEL HORRIFIED, DIE THROUGH SINGING." Speaking of which! Yesterday was Record Store Day and we played some records. We played a record Jimmy gave us a long time ago, back when he lived in town. It's called NIGHTINGALES AND CANARIES, and to oversimplify, it has some songs sung by immigrant women in New York in the 40s and 50s and songs recorded by women in Istanbul in the 30s. The first couple of numbers are sung by Virginia Magidou, which is, as the liner notes say, probably a pseudonym used because of the "disreputable, underworld style of some of her songs." One song she sings goes

(and the liner notes apologize because it's actually in "Greek slang that can't be precisely translated"): "I was born a tough chick, I'll die a tough chick... I like the tough life, and if I'm lucky I'll be rich./ In this lying world, I'll live even tougher... I would like to have a man who feels, a tough guy, or gangster./ To be the love of crazy guys who are a little troublesome... This false world, I just want to party in it."

Adamantine Letters

Went to look up Bellini in MILTON CROSS' ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE GREAT COMPOSERS AND THEIR MUSIC and he didn't even have a section! Then I accidentally ran across an aside on him in the Donizetti section and got sad because they casually gave his birth and death dates and poor Bellini died at 34! I think. Anyway, something like that. So today at Square Books I looked him up in a history of opera which I did not buy - which is just like stealing! I even asked for a scrap of paper from Carla behind the coffee counter (more stealing!) so I could write down this thing Bellini said in a letter to his librettist: "Carve into your head in adamantine letters: OPERA MUST MAKE PEOPLE WEEP, FEEL HORRIFIED, DIE THROUGH SINGING." Megan was there, followed by her friends Karen and Dennis in town for a visit and one of the things we talked about was the TV show JUSTIFIED and I said it looked like they were setting up Mary Steenburgen to be the bad guy next season and Megan reminded me of something she had told me before (which I am probably getting as wrong as the Shirley Temple martini pitcher story): that Mary Steenburgen just woke up one morning magically able to play the accordion, having never done it before, can that possibly be what Megan said? I am not even going to research this nor, if I am wrong, correct it.

A Very Man Bait Christmas

We watched two Hammer movies Dr. Theresa gave me for Christmas: MAN BAIT on Christmas Eve, ha ha! And BAD BLONDE on Christmas Day. MAN BAIT is not as saucy as it sounds. It is virtually sauce-free. In fact, the first five minutes are just bookstore workers puttering around in a bookstore. Puttering around! Finally Diana Dors (pictured) showed up and I yelled "MAN BAIT!" And then I giggled. I couldn't say the title without giggling. Sometimes I giggled until I cried, Dr. Theresa standing by to dial 9-1-1. Dr. Theresa was amused by the low stakes in MAN BAIT. The big villain's plan is to get a hundred pounds from a bookstore manager. A hundred pounds! From a bookstore manager! (In the accompanying illustration here, he is TRYING UNSUCCESSFULLY TO STEAL A BOOK!) Things escalate. Sort of. There are some murders - I guess. Kind of accidental murders. The bookstore manager's "invalid" wife dies from reading a letter, for example. MAN BAIT! Well, BAD BLONDE had more of the old pepper to it. It was a brazen rip-off of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. It even had opera in it, Cain-style. Someone should (and I'm sure someone has) write an article about how, for Cain, opera is always tied up with betrayal and murder. I seem to recall that Cain wanted to be an opera singer but his mother - who WAS an opera singer - scoffed and jeered at him and told him he didn't have the voice for it. Freudian! I can't remember where I read that, but I used to proclaim it forcefully to my hardboiled class all the time, so it is probably true. The BAD BLONDE in BAD BLONDE was Barbara Payton. She had a lot of lines like, "It's too hot to sleep," in which she invested special meaning. And she literally licked her chops at the sight of her "prey," a young boxer. That's another thing! MAN BAIT started with a host of sad sacks glumly and quietly preparing a bookstore for daily operations and BAD BLONDE started with a boxing match at a seedy carnival. One of those is a better way to start a movie. Hey, remember when I went to an auction of Bob Hope's personal effects but I couldn't really tell you about it because I was going to write about it "professionally"? I've done a little bit of that, in an article on the Atlantic's "web" site, which you may read by "clicking" here. I mention it because Barbara Payton makes an appearance. Looks like, knock wood, I will be able to squeeze a good bit more juice out of that Bob Hope auction in the coming year. I'll let you know. Allow me to make a closing observation about MAN BAIT, ha ha! It will contain spoilers. So there is the inevitable "good girl" character in MAN BAIT. Her chief rivals for the affection of the bookstore manager (!) are the MAN BAIT (Diana Dors) and the bookstore manager's "invalid" wife. Thanks to the psychotic, if not very ambitious, criminal, her rivals are eliminated. I have half an idea here, something about how the "psychotic" characters in movies often reward the "good" characters by acting out the "good" characters' dark and unspoken impulses, and wow, as I'm typing it boy does it sound obvious and boring. STRANGERS ON A TRAIN deals with the idea explicitly, though maybe I am thinking about movies in which the filmmaker seems unconscious of the implications... hmm... My one consolation is that no one has read this far.

Gagutz & Gobaloon

Hey I was watching the last episode of THE SOPRANOS last night and Tony kept calling A.J. "the gagutz." (I've seen it spelled lots of ways on the "internet," and that's one of them. "Googootz" is another, actually closer to the way I heard it, but inelegant in print. There are others.) And the other day I was reading the Irish play THE SEAFARER by Conor McPherson and somebody called somebody else a "gobaloon." Well, you know what I like to say: the world is divided up between gagutzes and gobaloons. I don't really like to say that. Ha ha! For one thing, they appear to mean roughly the same thing. Still, Gagutz and Gobaloon could be one of those shows about a pair of mismatched cops. One is a gagutz and the other is a gobaloon! Together they solve crimes. In conclusion I don't want to spoil THE SEAFARER for you but here's a line I kept reading out loud to Dr. Theresa because it scared me, and it is certainly a spoiler about the surprise identity of one of the characters in the play: "We're going to play for your soul and I'm gonna win, and you're coming through the old hole in the wall with me tonight, Sharky." The scary part is "the old hole in the wall." But is it really a surprise? Who else are a couple of guys in an Irish play going to meet but the devil? Hey, that reminds me. I've been reading other stuff. At one point I seemed to be kind of trying to read the MAHABHARATA (the version put together by William Buck, highly recommended by Lee Durkee) and a William Gaddis novel and Norman Mailer's book about the moon landing all at once. And that big book about Hinduism might have been in there too. Talk about a recipe for brain tragedy! But this Gaddis novel, J R by name, has a hilarious early scene at a rehearsal for a high school production of DAS RHEINGOLD, and I thought I detected something. I thought I detected a Gaddis influence on the way George Saunders writes dialogue for dumb youngsters, something of which he (Saunders) is the absolute master so I try to rip him off all the time. The Rhinemaidens ask about Alberich, "Like if we're all so beautiful who would want to love this here lousy little dwarf?" I have no idea whether Saunders was influenced by Gaddis, but the specific syntactical, tonal and rhythmic glee induced in the reader is similar. And I'm into the lack of commas. Hey, you know how "Google" sometimes thinks it knows better than you? When I was looking up "gobaloon" it insisted that I wanted to "go ballooning" instead. "Google" is up in my biz and I don't like it. Don't tell me I want to "go ballooning." You don't know me!

Ouch!

FOR REAL WARNING! The following "blog" "post" contains excruciating violence! In my big book about Hinduism I read a legend about this guy who got impaled on a stake. An angry king jabs this guy onto a stake, but then the king is like, "Sorry! I changed my mind." But the guy can't pull out the stake. He's really jabbed good! So he decides to make the best of the stake he has poking out of him, "thinking it might be useful for carrying things like flower baskets." Talk about a positive mental attitude! "And so he went about with the stake still inside him, in his neck, ribs, and entrails, and people used to call him 'Tip-of-the-Stake' Mandavya." Some nickname! I bet he kind of got sick of people calling him that, but then again, I don't know, this guy seems pretty cool about everything. And then about 20 pages later I read a couple of different stories about some dude shooting seven arrows into a dog's mouth. Not cool! Though nobody in the stories seems to think it's a big deal, nobody but the dog. Well, I take that back, people find the marksmanship notable but nobody gives a dang about the dog. And now all I can think about is Phineas Gage, the real-life historical figure who got an iron bar through his head and was all, "Whatevs." I first heard about Mr. Gage from my friend Bill from Hubcap City, who wanted to write a rock opera about him as I recall, or maybe a normal opera. Of course, Phineas Gage was not really all, "Whatevs." I think he became sort of a jerk. Yes, I just looked it up on the University of Akron "web" site, which says that Gage became "fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane, showing little deference for his fellows. He was also impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, unable to settle on any of the plans he devised for future action. His friends said he was 'No longer Gage.'" Yeah, but I mean, come on! Give him a break. A THREE-FOOT, THIRTEEN-POUND IRON BAR WENT THROUGH HIS HEAD. You'd be capricious too. (PS In one of those stories a guy cuts off his own thumb and we didn't even get to that.)

Crickets 'n' Corn Dogs

I watched a thing about Macbeth on PBS, yes I did, shut up, and Lady Macbeth was like "I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry" so I guess Macbeth is a book with an owl in it. Also last night I saw the great George Saunders eat a corn dog, yes I did, shut up, it was a lot nicer than hearing an owl scream, in fact it was adorable. Hey, as long as I've got you here, I'll tell you how Larry took me to his orchestra rehearsal tonight, so I was the only audience member in the huge auditorium and an opera singer walked out and started belting the hits to the nosebleed seats! So I was just sitting there all by myself and it seemed rude not to clap because I felt she was singing right at me - she was really selling it, man! - but I just sat there real quiet digging the weirdness because of course you can't interrupt the rehearsal by clapping. And then I went to pick up some falafel for Dr. Theresa, who lived all over the Middle East for many years, but her fave falafel is from Petra, right here in Oxford, MS, just across the street from the James Food Center. While I was waiting for the falafel, some guy asked if he could sit with me! So I said, "I guess." So he sat down and told me why George W. Bush was a better president than Albert Einstein would have been. So I was like, "Cool." He was just some dude. Oh yeah, and yesterday I was giving a little lecture about Jack Kerouac and a student suddenly stood up and said "I can't take it anymore!" and left - "it" being me, I guess, this whole package you've got right here. All right, I think that's everything.

A Boiled Owl

And now I would like to say a few feverishly anticipated words about THE IRON PETTICOAT. Aw, it wasn't so bad! Or maybe that's the whiskey talking. Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn started drinking whiskey early in the movie and I am highly suggestible. First Robert Osborne came on and introduced it. He said that nobody has seen this movie in 40 years, because when the rights reverted to Bob Hope, he locked it up tight. I guess Bob was ashamed of it! Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay, but Bob decided to have his gag writers punch it up Bob Hope style, which made Ben Hecht furious. There was lots of trouble. But I must say that anything I laughed at in the movie bore the distinct mark of having been added by Bob Hope's gag writers. The movie starts with a score that indicates we are about to watch the curtain rise on a turbulent opera. It's heavy! Like Wagner trying to evoke a stormy seascape or something. Katharine Hepburn's Russian accent is somewhere between German and Dracula, with some French thrown in and something else... Spanish? She rolls her r's really expansively. But the minute Bob comes onscreen the energy and pep are palpable. He just breezes in and starts tossing off one-liners, walking in that supremely graceful way of his. He's so relaxed that during a scene with his commanding officer he just swivels back and forth on a chair casually, like a little kid, like he's thinking of something else. I was proud to notice an actual Russian (I think), a guy I recognized - decades younger here! - from Woody Allen's own Russian epic, LOVE AND DEATH. He plays a martial arts expert in THE IRON PETTICOAT. This Russian (I guess) and Bob have a funny fight scene, during which Bob unforgivably breaks character to make a Bing Crosby joke. So that's another Woody Allen/Bob Hope connection, which we collect here. The politics of the film is standard Cold War stuff, except that a porcine anti-communist senator from Alabama is portrayed as a dumb boob. Very early in the movie, Katharine Hepburn is said to be "as sore as a boiled owl," an expression I have heard before, maybe in other old movies, but I still don't get it, not really, a boiled owl, sore, why? What's that? In conclusion, what's the big deal? Who cares? Who cares about anything? Goodbye forever.

Cultural Studies

Welcome once again to "Cultural Studies," the part of the "blog" for studying culture. Last night I watched DAS RHEINGOLD on PBS. A solid two hours of it is some guys standing around arguing over a bill. In song form! SPOILER ALERT! They finally decide to put a woman in a big fishing net and cover her with golden trinkets and when she's all covered up, that's how much money they get. And for you comic book fans, Thor and Loki are in it! But they call them Donner and Loge. Loki gets all the best lines. Thor kind of sulks around in the background. He looks like Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live. But I know it's him from his trademark hammer and right near the end just when you think it's all over and you can stretch your legs he suddenly brags for a while about how he's going to make it thunder then everybody climbs on a rainbow and goes to Heaven, natch. Hey, you may be asking yourself what this supervillain who turns to silk by touching a curtain has to do with DAS RHEINGOLD. Nothing, baby. I kept looking for a good picture of Thor on the "internet" and this popped up instead. CULTURE!