The Short Version

You know, several days ago, McNeil and I had a pretty good thread going about James Franciscus, and in my heart I was like, "Oh, there's a rich vein of 'bloggable' material here." Then I was like, "Well, I better find a photo of James Franciscus, because no one knows who he is." Then I was like, "Gee, how am I going to explain what McNeil and I are talking about?" Then I realized that once I began explaining James Franciscus, I would have to explain a lot more things, and pretty soon I'd be explaining the universe. And then I got depressed. The short version is that McNeil got some information about a James Franciscus movie from one of his old books, but when he consulted the "internet" about it, he discovered that THERE IS NOT EVEN A SINGLE ALLUSION TO THIS MOVIE ANYWHERE ON THE "INTERNET." And then McNeil blamed Elon Musk for creating this new reality we live in, in which the James Franciscus movie McNeil wants to see has been erased from what we laughingly call "existence." We laughingly call it that! Laughingly! Anyway, the main thing is you know three things about me: I have a "daytime" book I read during the day. I have a "nighttime" book I read at night. And I have proven that every book has an owl in it. Therefore, it should come as no shock that yesterday during the day I found an owl in my daytime book and during the night I found an owl in my nighttime book. But let's dig deeper! Just like a burrowing owl! My daytime book is a Million Dollar Book Club selection by J. Hoberman, all about the avant-garde art scene in New York in the 1960s. In a footnote, I noticed a place called "The Night Owl Cafe." And I was like, "You can't hide from me in a footnote, owl!" So, at night, I'm reading... well, remember when I was reading that James Ellroy book while I took my blood pressure? And I chose it because it had a reliable-looking and charming spine? But I didn't really care for the words on the pages of the book itself? Anyway, I was in Square Books the other day and I bought the sequel (see also). So the narrator calls Richard Nixon a "foul owl on the prowl." A few pages later, someone calls our narrator a "night owl." And that reminded me of how James Ellroy seems to love the phrase "night owl." And who can blame him? I will conclude with the astonishing fact that in yesterday's reading, both my nighttime book and my daytime book namechecked the film THE CRY OF JAZZ (see also). All of which reminds me, Dr. Theresa says I'm supposed to take my blood pressure today.

Abalone Biscuit Stick

1. McNeil dreamed - shortly before I left for Burbank on a bureaucratic mission that would stun and bore you - that I was transformed into a toddler and Donald Trump hand-fed me a biscuit. I did not report the dream at the time because I was about to leave on my trip and it struck me as a dream of ill-omen, best blocked out of my mind until my safe return. 2. I know you want to know what book I read on the airplane. Well, you're going to be so glad you asked. See, I had this one Virginia Woolf novel all picked out. It was the right size for the airplane. The content, delightful though I am sure it would have turned out to be, was of secondary interest. You see, I like to print out my boarding passes and slip them between the back cover and last page of whatever book I am reading on the airplane, and I don't like it if the edges of the boarding passes stick out too much. My boarding passes are printed on letter-sized sheets of paper, which I fold over once, maintaining the creaseless integrity of the printed matter. I told you you'd be glad you asked! Let's move to a new numbered section as I explain why I print out my boarding passes rather than checking in via an app on my phone. 3. My phone is too old! It rejects the app! 4. Anyway, I'm going to quote an email from Jimmy Cajoleas now. I don't think Jimmy will mind. "[Have you] read Water Margin? I'm halfway through the Sidney Shapiro translation (he calls it Outlaws of the Marsh) and I think it's one of the greatest things I've ever read in my life." 5. That made me remember I have a copy of that very translation! When I go to bed at night, I often lie on my side facing a bookcase where, as I recline in that position, Outlaws of the Marsh finds itself in my eyeline. I bought it in 2007, I think, and never opened it. And just about every night I look at it from bed and think, "Will I ever read that? I certainly doubt it! It's in a cardboard box containing four volumes!" I bought it at Square Books because when we first moved to Oxford, we had some people over for dinner, and one of them was teaching it in a class, and I got so excited hearing about Outlaws of the Marsh that I ran out and bought it and didn't open it for almost 20 years. So, the night before my flight, I separated Volume 1 from its cardboard-bound brethren. Though it is part of a larger set, the first book is the size of an old-timey mass-market paperback, hardly sufficient for securing my boarding pass in the required fashion. This was a new experience for me. Just when I thought I had done it all in this old world. Walking around with most of my boarding pass sticking out! Like some kind of hippie! 6. My seatmate on the airplane saw my iPod. Unlike the last person who saw my iPod on an airplane, she was not impressed. She said, "My husband has one of those and it drives me crazy." She didn't say why. 7. On a more positive note, she announced that she was from the same town as the woman who wrote the book THE EGG AND I, and she knew the descendants of the book's characters. She couldn't remember the name of the female lead in the movie version and I blew her freaking mind by saying "Claudette Colbert." Anyway, she was saying that Ma and Pa Kettle (supporting characters in the movie) were real people and I speculated that later movies about Ma and Pa Kettle (are you still reading this?), such as MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO HAWAII, were probably not based on true stories, as they were about fanciful things like winning a trip to Hawaii in an advertising slogan contest. Anyway, I don't have time to explain Ma and Pa Kettle to you. I "posted" a publicity still of them above, and I'll let that do the work. The important thing is that despite my know-it-all attitude about Claudette Colbert there is no movie called MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO HAWAII, as I learned when I looked it up minutes ago. It's called MA AND PA KETTLE AT WAIKIKI. And they're just working on a pineapple farm in that one! They didn't win a contest, as I needlessly misinformed my seatmate. Further research (WHY?) led me to discover that Pa Kettle does compose a prize-winning jingle in MA AND PA KETTLE GO TO TOWN. And that is the story of how all the Ma and Pa Kettle movies I watched as a kid eventually got mixed up in my head. Most of all, I was shocked to learn that Ma and Pa Kettle were from this woman's hometown in the state of Washington! I don't know where I assumed they were from, but it wasn't there. Sadly, we must now move on from Ma and Pa Kettle. I know you're disappointed. 8. My Uber driver's wife makes a living singing the national anthem at sporting events! You'd think he would have an interesting story about how someone gets into that line of work, but he didn't. 9. I broke my glasses. 10. I saw Kate, who brought with her a treat from Hong Kong: abalone-and-oyster-sauce flavored "biscuit sticks" (the latter two words in English on the box). They were thin, crispy little sticks and I could eat them all day. Savory, with, as Kate remarked, a little of the sweetness of the abalone coming through. 11. She also brought something from a side-trip to Japan: a sake-flavored Kit Kat bar. We tried that, too, and it made us want to throw up. 12. I ran into Cole Sanchez, who remarked, of my shirt, "Do we have the same shirt?" (He was not wearing the shirt - let me be clear: he was wearing a shirt, just not that one - but yes, it did turn out he had the same shirt at home.) Now, you must know, in order to truly appreciate this story, that we consulted Cole while writing the sartorially concerned Adventure Time episode "Bespoken For," because he is a stylish man who knows everything about clothes. So hearing that Cole and I have the same shirt made it a big night for me. I was telling everyone who would listen, "Cole and I have the same shirt!" Cole went home and rethought his life. 13. At the departure gate for my trip home, I sat next to a Pepsi vending machine. A man came and stood in front of it and coughed down into my face a couple of times. He stood in front of the Pepsi machine for five minutes, examining the various Pepsi products on display. Then he walked away, never to be seen again. 14. Dolph Lundgren is on my flight! Yeah! He's speaking Swedish! In the middle of a Swedish phrase, I hear him say "tough guys" in English. I thought, "If anything bad happens on this flight, he'll save us!" Dolph Lundgren's drink of choice? Cranberry juice. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he was doing some kind of seated shadow boxing. His feet were subtly and elegantly "dancing," as I believe it's called in the boxing ring, as he cast some punches toward the seat back in front of him. He put on his shades before shadow boxing. "I'm living in paradise!" I jotted in my jotting book. The very sweet flight attendant, Diana by name, turned out to be a Dolph Lundgren fanatic, and addressed him with such giddy enthusiasm as the plane began its descent, to which he responded in such a cheerful and gracious manner, that I felt emboldened to turn around and tell him that he had given me confidence and peace in case of emergency.

I'm Not Cool

It is my duty to report that I will be wearing giant wraparound sunglasses at the event tomorrow, not an eye patch as previously predicted. Please be advised that I received the giant wraparound sunglasses at the surgery center and will be wearing them under the orders of a physician. I am not trying to look "cool."

Unrequited Owl

Tom Stoppard, as we learn from this biography of him, wrote many letters to the object of his unrequited love, in some of which he playfully referred to her and himself as "the Owl and the Cat." The author of the biography does not specify which was the owl and which the cat, nor is any mention made of the possible influence of Edward Lear on Stoppard's whimsical entreaties. The one thing we know for sure is that this biography of Tom Stoppard is a book with an owl in it. As long as you are here, I think I should tell you about some developments. Do you remember when I rewatched the film EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE and took note that Mel Tillis sang "sexy smile and Robert Redford hair" in the chorus of "Coca Cola Cowboy," rather than the song's actual lyrics, "Eastwood smile and Robert Redford hair," possibly out of deference to the film's star Clint Eastwood? Why, of course you do. Well! According to wikipedia, the lyric in the movie is "sexist smile and Robert Redford hair." I have done nothing to either refute or confirm wikipedia's claim, but it doesn't make any sense at all. Why would Robert Redford's luxurious, shining locks, which are famously attached to a head encasing a left-leaning brain, be associated lyrically with sexism? Furthermore, the eponymous "Coca Cola Cowboy," one would imagine, drinks Coca Cola, in contrast with the rotgut favored by "authentic" cowboys in disreputable saloons, whom one pictures harrassing barmaids and whooping it up in a sexist fashion. Therefore, the "Coca Cola Cowboy," I would argue, whatever he harbors in his heart, presents a smooth and shallow front, all empty calories and fizz, his immaculate, gleaming teeth as well-tended as his much-brushed coiffure, and is less likely to reveal a "sexist smile" than the fictionalized version of a cowboy to whom he is presented as a contrast. Having done no investigation whatsoever into the matter, I would like to state that I am right and wikipedia is wrong. But in the interest of justice, I couldn't keep the existence of wikipedia's questionable interpretation to myself.

The Neville Conundrum

Here's Adam Sandler walking past "my" table at Dan Tana's in the movie SANDY WEXLER, or, as Kent Osborne calls it, SANDLY ADAMS. Did I watch SANDY WEXLER? Apparently I did. I have a comment and a question. The comment: It is really long! It took me two nights to finish it. At one point I was like, well, we must be reaching the end of SANDY WEXLER. So I paused it and saw that there was another hour to go. I couldn't imagine how it would be filled. It shouldn't take two nights to watch a comedy. I did a little math. I'm not good at math, nor did I check the running time of BROADWAY DANNY ROSE, the movie from which SANDY WEXLER lifted most eagerly. But I think you could fit 1.5 BROADWAY DANNY ROSEs into a SANDY WEXLER. That's an estimate! [There are almost exactly 1.548 Broadway Danny Roses in a Sandy Wexler - ed.] Aaron Neville is in SANDY WEXLER, which, combined with the fact that when I went to Rob Schneider's house he compared his own height favorably with that of Aaron Neville, leads me to the question: is Aaron Neville friends with the 90s cast of Saturday Night Live?

Another Experienced Shakespearean

I'm not "blogging" anymore but of course I have to tell you when Dr. Theresa and I watch the COLUMBO where Johnny Cash is the murderer and in one scene they cut to this very same angle of Johnny Cash and Sorrell Booke about ten or eleven times! Look how Sorrell Booke uncannily looms! Ten or eleven times he looms just so. It should go without saying I'm basing my new "look" on this Sorrell Booke character. Booke is in the Orson Welles bio, doing KING LEAR with Welles and BONANZA's Pernell Roberts, "another experienced Shakespearean." I am happy to report that the Johnny Cash COLUMBO episode holds up just swell. You want Johnny Cash to murder someone new every week just so he and Columbo can keep hanging out.

Jennifer Lawrence Admires a Conch

I guess you think I "blogged" an awful lot in May for somebody who stopped "blogging" in April. Shows how much you know! There was so much stuff I didn't "blog" about in May! You wouldn't even believe it. Here is some of it. 1. Stopped by Square Books and bought a notebook. Katelyn said, "Don't you like ______?" (She named another brand.) I said I found the binding inferior. "You should write a letter to the company!" said Katelyn. "I love writing letters to companies." I asked her, "What are you, a ninety-year-old man at heart?" "She does it after she eats her liver and onions," said Slade. Katelyn guilelessly confirmed that she loves liver and onions and wishes she knew how to cook it for herself. 2. Ace wasn't in his office, where I was supposed to meet him, so I sat in the anteroom (?) and looked at a magazine with this caption on the cover: "With a team of wildlife experts, Uma Thurman moves a white rhino threatened by poachers to safety." But you don't see any wildlife experts; you just see Uma Thurman hugging a rhinoceros's head. I like how scrupulous they are not to give us the false impression that Uma Thurman was out there wrangling rhinos by herself. 3. I started reading the new Don DeLillo novel, which is about cryogenics, I guess. That made me recall all of a sudden that McNeil and I tried writing a screenplay called BLUE PERIOD back when we were in our twenties. The plot was that two guys (?) got trapped in an industrial walk-in freezer and told each other stories while they waited and hoped for help to arrive. One story was about a war with Antarctica, maybe? All the stories were about being cold. I remember that McNeil invented a weapon called the ICBM (Icy Cold Banana Malted instead of Intercontinental Ballistic Missile). Another story was about a scam artist with a cryogenics lab. He froze celebrities and thawed them out on a desert island, where they were forced to act in a movie he had written. That's all I remember about the screenplay. McNeil, confirming that such an attempted screenplay existed, said it featured a character named Dean running for office with the slogan "Dean Is Clean." 4. I met with Julia via computer monitor. I thought she said, "You look great!" She actually said, "You look gray!" 5. My doctor's waiting room suddenly has all of Richard Howorth's old NEW YORKER magazines in it - with his home address on the mailing labels and everything! 6. Dr. Theresa went to lunch at Handy Andy and I had pangs of jealousy, traces of which I allowed to cross my face. I had been craving Handy Andy, having recently written about it for publication (details forthcoming, surely, though I am not "blogging" anymore): I feared I had misremembered the condiments with which the Handy Andy double cheeseburger is dressed! Fact checking! Dr. Theresa even offered to bring me one home to examine and consume, but then we remembered that I had a doctor's appointment shortly (different doctor; never mind why I have so many doctors!) and a double cheeseburger might not sit well at a doctor's appointment. 7. This other doctor had more standard waiting room fare: in PEOPLE I read about how Tennille of The Captain and Tennille was embarrassed by a damaged finger she suffered in a wheelbarrow accident as a child. That's why she always turned down movie offers! Meanwhile, "The Captain" wore his famous captain's hat even to bed, humiliated by a failed hair transplant. They struck me as... tragic? "Jennifer Lawrence admires a conch" was a phrase I read in US magazine. 8. In an ADVENTURE TIME meeting I was trying to say the title of the TV show THE BIG BANG THEORY but I accidentally said "8 1/2 MEN." Sadly, I was not trying to be esoteric or funny. My brain had simply fizzled out and died. A good laugh was had by most. 9. We drove past Tom Franklin's place and there was a chicken pecking in his yard. I don't think he owns chickens! (See also.) This was a fluffy chicken with black feathers, salted with white. 10. I realized that I didn't give you a truly complete picture of everything I learned from THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. I kept a bunch of it off the "blog" and crammed it instead into a novel that will probably never be published, but here's the epigraph, anyway: "Bees indeed make neat and curious works, and many other creatures besides; but when they have done, they cannot judge of them." 11. McNeil's apple tree (below) is producing again. 12. Megan Abbott and I emailed back and forth about what Lady MacBeth meant by "spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" and I sent her a chapter about demonology in Shakespeare from some old book. Only afterward did I realize that the old book was by T.F. Thistelton Dyer, who provided the epigraph for my new book of short stories MOVIE STARS! Yes, that is just one more example of the meaningless junk I didn't "blog" about this month. "Posting" this a week early I do hereby vanquish May's tyranny over my troubled and searching mind.

Swooning Near Some Birch Trees

Megan Abbott said that QUEEN OF EARTH made her think of PERSONA and I think she must be right because I rewatched PERSONA yesterday and it gave me QUEEN OF EARTH style nightmares! One of the people in my nightmare was even wearing a crown, though no one in QUEEN OF EARTH actually wears a crown. She had been declared legally dead but the doctors brought her back to life. In the meantime, though, her maid, to whom she had left everything in her will, had completely taken over. She was like, "THE MOMENT YOU DIED, I BECAME YOU!" And she took the crown off this other character's head and placed it on her own as the first character wailed in terror. So as you can see, I dreamed a low-grade version of PERSONA. But I also woke up thinking, "That's a neat gimmicky plot!" Has anyone written a movie or book where someone is declared legally dead for a few minutes and someone else... ah, forget it. It's already boring me. I remembered (from buying it when it came out) that Bergman's autobiography THE MAGIC LANTERN was frustratingly opaque about the content of his movies, but I got it out anyway and looked up PERSONA and the most he had to say about it was that during the press junket he felt too dizzy to be photographed under some birch trees, ha ha! I don't mean to laugh. Also I came upon this paragraph: "Ghosts, devils and demons, good, evil or just annoying, they have blown in my face, pushed me, pricked me with pins, plucked at my jersey. They have spoken, hissed or whispered. Clear voices, not particularly comprehensible but impossible to ignore." My first thought was DID INGMAR BERGMAN WEAR A LOT OF JERSEYS? Huh, right underneath that is a description of an operation for which Bergman was given too much anesthetic. Obviously, that must have contributed to my nightmare too. Thanks for nothing, Ingmar Bergman.

Dr. Theresa

This nice picture of Dr. Theresa comes to us from Jon Langford, who sent it yesterday. He snapped it on Faulkner's lawn that time.

Famous Lipstick

Look! Here is Taylor Swift walking down the street wearing her famous lipstick and if you will look to the far right, there's our unmistakable pal Kent Osborne looking so very happy in the background. This paparazzi photo was taken back when we were in New York for the Peabody Awards but I guess it only came to Kent's attention yesterday.

People Alone in a Room

I don't suppose any of you will ever forget late 2013, when I read in that Norman Mailer biography that Norman Mailer thought the Twist was "evil." Well, some of that leaked into his CIA novel, I tell you. Now, you should never, ever confuse the narrator with the author, but I'm reading this part where the narrator is at a party on the eve of Kennedy's election and everyone is doing the Twist: "I thought it was strange in the extreme that the dancers did not hold each other but stood apart and rotated their hips like people alone in a room leering into a mirror." Ha ha, Norman Mailer really hated the Twist! (See also, the time Lyndon Johnson was doing the Twist and fell on somebody.)

Our Young Nation

The other night I was flipping around and saw that I had missed the first five minutes of ANOTHER STAKEOUT, which came out in 1993, just like STRIKING DISTANCE and THE NIGHT WE NEVER MET. And I thought, "So what! I missed the first five minutes! I could still 'live-blog' this! It's the Richard Dreyfuss/Rosie O'Donnell team-up our young nation was yearning for!" (See also.) So anyway, Albert from TWIN PEAKS seemed to be a sly hitman in a sewage truck. That's as far as I got.

Unemployment

Here's a movie no one has thought of in many years: JACKNIFE (that's how they spell it - I've checked repeatedly, in denial and disbelief). I've never seen it. I have no idea what it's about. But it rushed into my mind. And I'll tell you why. You know what came on last night? THE DEER HUNTER. And there was Robert De Niro in a baseball cap. Okay. So. In the 1980s I was "laid off" (fired) from my job at an advertising agency, and my friend Tony and I decided to drive across the country once I had accumulated enough unemployment checks. I remember a few things about it. Washing the car in a scary, desolate, crudely slapped together facility in Gallup, New Mexico. Slipping and sliding on the concrete because it was freezing cold and the water turned to ice almost as soon as it left the hose. When we got to Los Angeles we went to a live taping of the sitcom DESIGNING WOMEN. Afterward, I asked Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (a creator of the show) if I could have a job and she said no. But I didn't care. Because I was on unemployment, I had to write down a certain number of people on my card each week, people I had asked for a job. That's how you got money in the old days! You wrote things down on a piece of cardboard with a pencil. As I recall, it had to be in pencil. All of this is likely wrong. So I wrote "Linda Bloodworth-Thomason" on my card. Mission accomplished! The suckers at the unemployment office bought it! What am I saying? It was legit. And Linda Bloodworth-Thomason was nice and patient and gave me a lot of writing advice... more than I wanted, really. I remember this: Tony and I drove up a mountain. These were the days when there were only paper maps. And I screwed up. I neglected to tell Tony to turn, so we drove all the way up a mountain. On a treacherous road. Nobody was going up the mountain. It got dark. There was occasionally some daredevil speeding DOWN the mountain (barely enough room for two cars) and giving us a nice heart attack. At some point we were like, "Uh... does it look like we're going up? It's really dark now. Should we be going up? We're going UP." We were running out of gas. Tony was mad at me. Understandably. Once we found a place to turn around (a nightmarishly difficult process) we started back down the mountain, hoping not to run out of gas, but thinking - praying - maybe we could coast if it came to that. We went around a curve and saw an elk in the road. We stopped the car and stared at the majestic elk. So it was kind of worth it. The radio static turned, at last, into a feed from a local TV station. Which seemed unusual. But THE GOLDEN GIRLS was on, which took us some time to fathom, because it should not have been on the radio and also we were in a general state of shock. I guess I have never been so happy as when that shining vestige of civilization THE GOLDEN GIRLS manifested itself. We were laughing in hysterical relief at the stale jokes of THE GOLDEN GIRLS. We made it to a cheap Chinese restaurant in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and I suppose no food has ever tasted so good. Just moments earlier we thought we were going to die on a mountaintop! But where was I? In Los Angeles, we went on a tour. As we bounced along on the Universal Studios tram I saw some dude with long, greasy hair in a baseball cap walking through the lot with a sense of purpose and wondered whether he might be an actor. Back in Mobile, I went to the movies and saw the preview for JACKNIFE and thought, "Hey! That's the same dude I saw in Los Angeles." Obviously, it wasn't. There are countless holes in that theory. "Look at that baseball cap and that greasy hair!" I exulted, however, as I enjoyed the no-doubt suspenseful preview for JACKNIFE, which I no longer recall. I do recall that on our trip Tony and I stopped at a restaurant in Beaumont, Texas, where everyone was cold and silent as the grave. That was the quietest restaurant I've ever been in, filled with the stoniest, least communicative families of Texas. Upon our return I went back to the ad agency that had fired me (I can't remember why - to pick up one last check?) and they had a new receptionist who was so cute I asked her on a date. And she turned out to be from Beaumont, Texas! Yeah, that went nowhere. Even though I was able to say, "I've just been to Beaumont, Texas!" As I recall, I drove her around the city of Mobile and environs with no destination in mind. I seemed to think that's what a "date" was. I want to say we ended up in a bleak, rusted-out industrial area. I was probably lost. And certainly broke. I wonder why she never took my calls after that. I was probably like, "I don't have any money but I can show you the world!" As I recall, Tony and I walked all the way down into Walnut Canyon (Arizona?) and for the first time in my life I realized how much harder it was to walk up out of a canyon than to walk down into a canyon. That hadn't occurred to me somehow. I was sheltered as a lad. Boy, it hurts walking up and out of a canyon.

McNeil's Movie Korner, With Extra Mayo

Welcome once again to "McNeil's Movie Korner" - your one place on the "internet" for all the latest movie news and reviews. McNeil recently watched STARFLIGHT: THE PLANE THAT COULDN'T LAND. "I found a review from 2-25-83 on the NYT website titled 'A Big Night for Movies,'" McNeil writes. "Apparently that was a Sunday night and the networks were battling for ratings with STARFLIGHT, the tv premiere of 9 TO 5, and a Dennis Weaver movie about cocaine addiction that sounds great called COCAINE: ONE MAN'S SEDUCTION. Those were the days." McNeil says that STARFLIGHT: THE PLANE THAT COULDN'T LAND "has some of the worst ideas for space rescues ever." In addition, McNeil has been reading about mayonnaise on the "blog" and says that his mom's attitude is the direct opposite of my mom's attitude toward the controversial condiment: "My mom would put (and still puts) mayo on anything, anywhere, no matter the weather," McNeil claims. "Independence Day deviled eggs can bake in the afternoon sun for hours and it doesn't bother her." McNeil concludes with a suspicious anecdote: "Sometimes I'll even catch a plate of deviled eggs warming on a window sill before a Thanksgiving meal."

Corn

"When I think of sour corn, I think of Dean Martin." What a cryptic sentence! Well, there's a paragraph that explains it but I like it better by itself. That's from yesterday's menu at the Southern Foodways Symposium, an indescribable annual summit concerned with global politics, economics, history, art, activism, race, space, place, family, gender, science, agriculture, industry, philosophy, and so many other subjects, and I know I'm leaving out food, but as one of the organization's oral historians described her mission yesterday, "It's about the people, not the food." That being said, superstar chef Sean Brock and his mother made us a 20-course lunch. A 20-course lunch! That will really make you take a nap. Sean Brock and his mother made this 20-course lunch for more than 400 people (as seen above). He said the most people his mom had cooked for until yesterday was about ten. Earlier that morning I gave an unnecessarily blistering talk about the TV chef and humorist Justin Wilson, a relatively harmless entertainer who is long dead. I put on some sunglasses and just went full "insult comic" mode. I'm not even sure why! The talk as given wildly diverged from what I had so carefully researched and printed out. Maybe I was possessed! Actually, Gustavo Arellano spoke right before me and he was ON FIRE and I was like, "Uh-oh, I'm gonna have to DO something to follow that." And nature took its course.

As you can see, I wielded my Emmy as a comedy prop and the whole thing went very well despite my inexplicable viciousness, which I believe worried JoAnn Clevenger, the astonishing doyenne of New Orleans's iconic Upperline restaurant (at the Symposium to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award), who stood up in the Q&A section to nobly defend Mr. Wilson, a frequent customer of hers. I saw her later in the evening and she told me some complicated things from Justin Wilson's personal life. "I always like the underdog," she said. We had a nice talk about it. I also saw Sean Brock and he said the 20-course lunch was "the most important meal" he had ever made and "the meal I was born to make." He was referring to its transcendent emotional content for one thing. All I could think with extreme gratitude was, "We got to eat the meal Sean Brock was born to make!" I also told him that his mother's statement - "When I think of sour corn, I think of Dean Martin" - could be the first sentence of a novel. It's my favorite sentence right now.

I guess the other thing I need to tell you is that John Currence got dressed up in a shrimp costume and was positioned above a dunk tank filled with grits. He told me he studied Gary Busey in the movie CARNY (pictured) to perfect his aggressive dunk-tank patter. "Were those really grits in there?" I asked Blair Hobbs about the dunk tank. "It looked like brown water," said Blair, which for whatever reason sounded like the worst thing to get dunked into. I honestly doubt that the Southern Foodways Symposium, with its deeply concerned soul,

would waste grits, or anything else that could help someone. For example, another lunch, this one made for us by Mashama Bailey (pictured here with Joe York, whose pinpoint accuracy as a pitcher dropped shrimp-Currence in the tank; "Your Emmy won't save you now!" yelled Joe as I walked into the danger zone between him and his target), was ingenuously based on ingredients that usually get thrown away: Chef Bailey's salad was made with the stems of the collard.

Their Urine Is Subtile and Fiery

When I couldn't sleep last night I got out of bed and said to myself, "I'm not gonna watch TV this time! I'm gonna read a book like a big boy!" So I sat on the couch and AUTOMATICALLY TURNED ON THE TV BY FORCE OF HABIT. But I stuck to my guns and turned it off again immediately, laughing at my foolish foolishness. BUT HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED. In the time it took to perform that action, TCM sprang to life. I could see from the satellite-company banner at the top of the screen that the movie was called THAT HAGEN GIRL. And the only image I saw from the movie, the only sound I heard, was a scowling old matron in close-up saying, "Have you seen that Hagen girl?" So that was an odd coincidence. That's all I've seen of THAT HAGEN GIRL. In fact, I choose to believe that that is the entirety of THAT HAGEN GIRL. It's like I made a little movie with my mind. Then I picked up THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY from the side table and read, "they are bold and impudent, and of a more harebrain disposition... they sleep little, their urine is subtile and fiery." It was already getting a little personal. And then the next page had some demonic possession so I was like, "Yikes!" I put down the book and turned on the TV. SPEAKING OF MIND GAMES: Don't forget to come to Square Books later today to see me mercilessly grill Ace Atkins about his brand new book THE REDEEMERS. There's a poster and everything (below). I noticed that Ace cc'd Greg Evigan about this event on twitter, ha ha! I think Mr. Evigan will find himself confused and even insulted, as the poster depicts Burt Reynolds in the incongruous company of Clyde from EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE, whereas Mr. Evigan was arguably the poor man's Burt Reynolds (actually the poor man's Jerry Reed) and his chimp friend "The Bear" was the poor man's Clyde. It occurs to me that I should put a photo from The End of All Music record store at the top of this "post," featuring Megan Abbott, Bill Boyle and myself, with Ace holding a bottle of whiskey in silver paper from Megan and a Jerry Reed LP from Bill. I gave him nothing. We'll probably drink that bottle of whiskey while we talk tonight. No we won't! We're PROFESSIONALS. We'll drink it beforehand. Ha ha, not really, am I blowing your mind again with my mind games? It's Four Roses, despite what the poster says.

The Long Double Feature

Ace's plan was a double feature of FUN IN ACAPULCO and BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA. It didn't quite work out. A few weeks ago we watched FUN IN ACAPULCO but we got started late, and only last night did we get around to BRING ME THE HEAD. Anyway, that's pretty quick compared to our George Lazenby Film Festival. The protagonist of each movie in our double feature is an entertainer in a Mexican bar. In the latter, Warren Oates's lover strums her guitar and sings to him as they race down the dusty road in a red car. In the former, Elvis Presley sings to a "lady bullfighter" about how there's "No Room to Rumba" in her red sports car, if you know what I mean, which brings up an interesting point. Angela said - and I agreed - that Elvis made the wrong choice vis-à-vis the lady bullfighter, who, as Angela pointed out, was a "bad-a**" and also sexually progressive, with a thriving career to boot, whereas Elvis went for the "good girl," who was the daughter of the hotel chef - the chef was a disgraced count or baron or something... never mind... and Ace disagreed with us and kept saying of the chef's daughter, "But she's Ursula Andress! She's Ursula Andress!" But she's not "Ursula Andress" in the movie! She's the chef's daughter, and very vaguely defined otherwise. As you know, I like just about everything, but I was afraid we were going to see some stock footage of bullfighting in the movie because of the "lady bullfighter" and I just don't like any movie with bullfighting in it (see also). But there was no bullfighting, though in a funny touch, Elvis seemed to work at a nightclub where he was only allowed to sing about bulls. He sang a song about bulls and then the next time he sang at the club he sang a different song about bulls! Ha ha ha! I imagined him going to the manager, like, "I'd like to sing about birds tonight," and the manager is like, "No! Only bulls! My customers only like songs about bulls!" At the beginning of BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA, when the guy tells everybody to bring him the head of Alfredo Garcia and they all jump in their cars and airplanes and whatnot and zoom away to look for the head of Alfredo Garcia, Dr. Theresa said, "It's like IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD." An apt analogy!

The Wrong Mistakes

Finished that Bob Hope bio (which had an owl in it, like every book: Bob Hope described as a "night owl") and now I've moved on to a Thelonious Monk bio written by Robin D.G. Kelley, which I picked up in hardcover at Square Books back in 2009, and it's just been patiently sitting there on the shelf ever since. It starts out with something pretty surprising: the subject of the biography coming to the author in a dream! This was 30 years before the writing of the book, when the author was an aspiring pianist: "he came to me in a dream. Decked out in divine alligator shoes, a dark green silk suit, yellow tie, bamboo sunglasses, and a cold straw hat, he snuck up behind me as I sat hunched over my stepfather's Steinway upright, looked over my shoulder, and simply mumbled, 'You're making the wrong mistakes.'" I also read this about Monk: "One of his favorite pranks was to stare intensely at a spot on the ceiling or in the sky... Invariably, several people would look up with him." That reminds me of the gag Saint Thomas More used to pull!

Silver Bells

I'm writing a book about cigarette lighters and supposedly another book, plus look what the producer of SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS put on twitter the other day:

Yeah, so that's going on too! And I just went to Burbank to work on ADVENTURE TIME, so maybe that's why I haven't been "blogging" too much, what, you didn't notice? Gee. And you know I pride myself on taking a little notebook along and jotting down precious memories for you, but the whole first day of my trip I had a dull, aching feeling that there was nothing to jot. I remembered that before I left TEQUILA SUNRISE was on TV,

a movie that I went to see a number of times on the big screen during the callow days of my impressionable youth, and Dr. Theresa came in the room and made a funny comment about the "smokin' hot Kenny G riffs" on the soundtrack, so I jotted that: "Dr. Theresa, sarcastically: 'smokin' hot Kenny G riffs.'" And I closed my notebook and sat there in the hotel lobby nursing my drink like, "Well, I guess that's it." BUT THEN GARRY MARSHALL SHOWED UP. Garry Marshall, creator of HAPPY DAYS! Director of PRETTY WOMAN! Actor in a memorable cameo in LOST IN AMERICA! He was meeting some friends so I eavesdropped on them. The bartender came over and Garry Marshall asked him about "the score of the game" and the bartender said that Tennessee had just scored a spectacular 80-yard touchdown and Garry Marshall said "Eh." Some of his younger friends started trying to explain what ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK is to Garry Marshall and he was slightly ticked off that they didn't think he knew what ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK was. He knows what ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK is! He's Garry Marshall for God's sake. He didn't say it in those words. I'm interpreting. One of Garry Marshall's friends reminisced about his (the friend's) first big job onstage, in which he had to bound out naked for his first entrance. "He was very good naked," Garry Marshall said, which got a big laugh from everybody. Garry Marshall and his friends left the bar area of the hotel lobby so I called Dr. Theresa and told her I had seen the director of RUNAWAY BRIDE and she was very proud of me. Then I told her about how I had accidentally bought a really expensive brush at the drugstore across the street from the hotel. I should have known because it said "By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen" on the handle. That was the slogan of the brush company! But the brush was so small! Whether from pride or embarrassment, I allowed the cashier to ring it up without protest. Dr. Theresa got in some good jokes about me and my expensive brush. Then Verdell showed up! She had been hoping she could come by after work, and she did. These days, Verdell works for a space company that makes space rockets that go into space! Anyway, Verdell sat down and ordered a drink and I told her she had just missed Garry Marshall. AND we discovered that Garry Marshall and his friends had been blocking our view of another actor. I said, "Hey, look, it's the guy who played the mad scientist on FRINGE!" Verdell had never heard of this guy. (Later, Dr. Theresa told me he has a current role on the television program SLEEPY HOLLOW.) The mad scientist from FRINGE was reading a newspaper. "What do you think he's doing?" I asked. "Looks like he's reading a newspaper," said Verdell. Verdell said that there were Christmas carols on the radio on her way over. She doesn't like most of the religious Christmas carols but said she finds the secular "No Place Like Home for the Holidays" acceptable. We discussed the meaning of the line, "Gee the traffic is terrific." Then we talked about "Sleigh Ride" and "Let it Snow" and "Silver Bells." Then I had to pee. I walked into the bathroom humming "Silver Bells." There was just one urinal! So I had to stand behind the guy who was using it. When he turned, he revealed himself to be the mad scientist from FRINGE! He had what I must call a sour demeanor. I also noted that he had an unexpected resemblance, somehow, to the late Robert Preston, a sour Robert Preston. As I peed, I noted that I could hear him over there at the sink washing his hands. Good hygiene! And he started humming! I can't swear to this, but I think maybe he was humming snatches of "Silver Bells"! I could hardly wait to tell Verdell.

Verdell and I had some more drinks. Garry Marshall came back to the lobby! I pointed him out to Verdell. Garry Marshall noticed us noticing him and came over and introduced himself. Verdell said to him, "You look fashionable, are you wearing desert boots?" "I don't know," replied Garry Marshall. Later, when Garry Marshall sat down with a friend of his, Verdell was able to determine that Garry Marshall was most likely wearing "tan suede oxfords." She noticed that Garry Marshall's friend was wearing loafers with no socks. That reminded me of something else I had overheard earlier in the evening, about Garry Marshall and his wife (I think) donating 650 socks to the homeless, or maybe 650 pairs of socks. There's a breakfast place I like across the street from the hotel, and the next morning TV's Andy Richter sat at the counter next to me! I am pleased to announce that he is the trusting sort and left his keys and sunglasses on the counter when he went to the restroom. Needless to say under my watchful eye Andy Richter's keys and sunglasses went undisturbed. Kent and I had lunch with Kent's brother Mark, who happened to be in town directing Jeff Bridges for Mark's upcoming movie! Mark told us how nice Jeff Bridges and Albert Brooks are, and that's what you want to hear, you want to hear that these actors you like are nice people. Dinner at the Tam O'Shanter! Seo Kim came. I got to tell her about a cat she drew that I especially liked. While Kent and I were waiting for the others to arrive (we went there early, right after work), Kent drew me at the bar,

contemplating my favorite curse. Joey and Brian came to dinner! We had Welsh rarebit and deviled eggs to pass around the table and then Kent and I had expensive ribeye steaks! Kent paid! What a pal. I tried to give him the bit of ribeye I had left over and Kent demurred until Joey came up with the brilliant idea of asking the waitress for one of those delicious rolls that came with the Welsh rarebit. "Now you can pop it right in there," said Joey to Kent. Kent thought it was a great idea for leftovers. And that's when I found out those rolls we had been enjoying were "Yorkshire puddings." So that's what a Yorkshire pudding is. I didn't know. Anyway, Joey had been joking that I sounded like a mom, repeatedly begging Kent to take my leftover ribeye so he could "make sandwiches" but SHE is the one who came up with idea of nestling the last bite of ribeye into the welcoming center of the Yorkshire pudding for a tempting taste treat okay I think it is time for me to stop jotting now.

So It Begins

"Ze hunt... eez my life." With those words we first meet the cowboy-hat-and-sunglasses-wearing, big-cigar-smoking Russian werewolf hunter - you heard me! - played by Ace Atkins - you heard me!!! in NIGHT OF THE LOUP GAROU, the most recent screening in our yearly Halloween film festival. That's right, our friend Ace, who is not Russian (he's from Alabama!) plays a Russian werewolf hunter in a movie. A bunch of local folks got together and made it a few years ago. I think it has been sitting on our mantel since Ace brought it over along with a George Lazenby movie on December 21, 2010. WHY DID WE WAIT SO LONG? Well, did I mention that Ace plays a Russian werewolf hunter? That is not accurate! He is a regular Russian hunter. But not TOO regular! He never uses a gun. He makes it fair. "Their claws..." he says, and then, holding up his Crocodile-Dundee-style knife: "My claws." That was Dr. Theresa's favorite line in the whole movie. I think my favorite thing Ace said was, "I keel everythink... I drink their blood." Hey, don't think for a second I am giving Ace a hard time! First of all, you may remember when I ribbed even the late Katharine Hepburn about her Russian accent. And Ace commits! I think we've talked about this before. Commitment, I mean. Ace is in that part 100%. I know I've told you about the sitcom actor I met a few times who used to watch reruns of himself on the sitcom "227" and get angry with his younger self and hang his head in shame - SHAME! - because he thought he was above it all and didn't "commit." That sitcom actor told me with rue and regret in his voice to always commit! "Commit!" he said. And it's good advice. Ace - I'll say it again! - commits. When you are playing a Russian werewolf hunter that is your only choice, and a good lesson to think about. Ace had one line that Dr. Theresa and I debated a little. At first I thought he said, "It is time to rock and roll. Nighty, Mickey Mouse." See, they were leaving the cabin to hunt for the werewolf, and they were leaving behind the earnest werewolf expert who only wanted to understand the werewolf, not kill it! So I thought he was saying "Good night" to that guy in a dismissive way, because Ace - I mean, the Russian werewolf hunter! - said the latter sentence with growling menace right in the guy's face: "Nighty, Mickey Mouse." Dr. Theresa contended that he was using "Mickey Mouse" as a verb: "It is time to rock and roll, not to Mickey Mouse." I briefly conjectured that he was calling the guy a "naughty Mickey Mouse," but I did not really think that, that may have been a little joke I made. Of course we concluded that Dr. Theresa's interpretation was the correct one. And we are all aware of "Mickey Mouse" as an adjective. I looked it up this morning in my GREEN'S DICTIONARY OF SLANG and Mickey Mouse gets practically a whole page to himself, including an entry for "Mickey Mouse in the house, and Donald Duck don't give a ****" (hint: it rhymes!). And indeed we see one entry for "Mickey Mouse" as a verb, meaning "to fool around, to botch," quoting a primary source from 1969: "It don't pay to mickeymouse me." Ace also gets to say the archetypal movie line, "So it begins." But somebody steps on that line! Oh, man, that's not a line that should be stepped on, I don't want to tell you how to make your movie. There's even a childhood flashback that reveals how Ace started smoking cigars - uh, I mean, how his character did, but I think it was probably similar. The movie has some interesting lore about the loup garou, a Cajun form of werewolf, such as that you hang up a colander for protection! Because the loup garou cannot help but stop and count the holes in a colander. I tried to confirm this with my collection of CAJUN AND CREOLE FOLKTALES I picked up at Square Books a while back, but this delightful dual-language oral compendium has an index that is so scholarly as to be almost useless, organized according to an "international classification" system you probably only know about if you have a PhD in folklore. I found that folktale "E423.1.1(b)," for example - filed alphabetically under "E" (!) is about a "Ghostly dog opaque and insubstantial." Huh. Not close enough. Directly under that was "E423.3.5. Revenant as owl." And you know what that means. So I could hardly resist taking a peek. And in the academic introduction to that story we are informed that "the traditional concept of a werewolf" falls under the classification of "motif D113.1.1" and that it "applies to many other were-animals, including were-owls." Were-owls! But there were no D113.1.1 stories in the index. Ha ha! This is the point (it should have come earlier!) where I always start laughing because I know I am going to keep typing and typing and no one will keep reading and I just don't care. Anyhow, I thankfully (ha ha!) remembered my PARANORMAL MISSISSIPPI RIVER: AN ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA, and was able to confirm that the loup garou is obsessed with counting holes. This volume referred to a more general "sieve," not a "colander." The loup garou is also afraid of frogs! Which led to my favorite line - other than any of Ace's - in the movie, when a police officer laments that the earnest werewolf expert doesn't have a gun and the earnest werewolf expert says with the earnestness that characterizes him: "All I need's a frog." The movie, in fact, reaches an admirable pinnacle of dementia in the montage showing the earnest werewolf expert strapping cheese graters to his arms, a colander on his head, a frog in a jar around his neck and, I am pretty sure, capping things off with a flour-sifter codpiece.