Art Chimp

Dr. Theresa and I watch many monster movies and such every October as part of our personal Halloween festivities, of which watching movies is the only component. So last night we watched REVENGE OF THE CREATURE, which I remembered parts of surprisingly well, though I have not seen it since I was a child and it aired, I assume, on "The Big Show," the WKRG afternoon weekday movie hosted by Max Goodman, a man in glasses and a suit. I sure remembered the part when people were having a nice time at a seafood restaurant with a spacious dance floor and then a monster strolls in! But what I wanted to say is that REVENGE OF THE CREATURE had a chimpanzee that painted paintings in it, a "trope," as I call it, to which I have alluded in my masterful fiction, ha ha ha. Here! I have quoted myself once, and I will do it again: "Henry knew that a lot of times people just pretended to like art so they could be cool. They would stand around and drink alcohol and eat weenies on toothpicks and make a big deal about some piece of junk that was supposed to be great art, but then it would turn out to be nothing but a knocked-over garbage can or a no-smoking sign or a spot on the floor where somebody had thrown up, which was a situation that Henry had observed in many comedy movies. Like the one where the supposedly great artist had trained a monkey to ride around on a tricycle with paint on the wheels, and that was how he had made his supposedly great art!" That's from my second book, and you shouldn't confuse the author with the character and so on. I must say the chimp came off pretty well in REVENGE OF THE CREATURE! There was no making fun of chimps OR artists. He just happened to be a chimp who painted! And it was fine! And no one was worried about it and no statement was made about whatever people usually make statements about.

Curtains

After reading that Henry James novel I was in the mood for more Henry James! So I started reading his short story "The Figure in the Carpet," in which the narrator says of another character, "she was literally, facially luminous." Speaking of McNeil (he likes carpet), McNeil saw an obituary in the New York Times the other day, and he really admired the curtains in the accompanying photograph (he also likes curtains). I present a snippet of the curtains here, but no more, out of respect for the dead. McNeil also wondered what the deceased (living at the time of the photograph, of course) was holding in his hand. One guess was a toothpick, a guess with which I agreed.

Sandwich and Alexander

As you know, I have given up "blogging" entirely. However, something has occurred which requires immediate comment. You no doubt recall with a bittersweet admixture of reverence and nostalgia the time I noticed the importance of sandwiches to Bergman's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. Having recently rewatched the same director's FANNY AND ALEXANDER, I was stunned to discover that it features even more sandwiches than SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. The exciting prospect of studying the entire Bergman oeuvre from the perspective of sandwiches presents itself. In FANNY AND ALEXANDER, an unusually lenient wife orders up "two cheese sandwiches" for herself and her happy, adulterous husband. Soon, the eponymous children are offered "a molasses sandwich," which the subtitles have in the singular. I will have to learn Swedish for a more complete examination. Moments later, for example, the children are asked to put down the "sandwiches," plural. One may imagine that half of a molasses sandwich is enough for any child. Perhaps the single molasses sandwich was divided in two, becoming, for all practical purposes, two sandwiches. While "half a sandwich" is a traditional unit of sandwich measurement, it is not difficult to picture two halves of the same sandwich, being consumed by two separate people, as "sandwiches." A mystery! I am put in mind of the J.J. Special, a favorite order from Manuel's Tavern in Atlanta. It was a patty melt of sorts, divided into four sections, each held together by a fancy toothpick. At some point, the J.J. Special was changed, and it came to the table cut in half, appallingly like any ordinary sandwich. It took a long time to get used to the new configuration. I should also mention that the J.J. Special might have been the name of the entire order (which came with onion rings AND fries), and not merely the name of the sandwich (see Dr. Frankenstein and his monster). We may further examine two sandwiches of unspecified ingredients in FANNY AND ALEXANDER. The cruel and austere bishop asks for "a sandwich and a glass of milk," while the happy adulterer is promised "a beer and a sandwich" to be served in bed by his indulgent wife. Can it be that a sandwich is the one food that pairs well with either milk or beer? I have put no thought into the question. But surely we may draw many conclusions from the beverage choices of these two very different characters. In conclusion, sandwiches for the happy adulterous Swedish man form somewhat of a framing device in FANNY AND ALEXANDER, as they appear near the beginning and near the end of the film. One might say, then, that the film itself is a sandwich.

Show Me a Toothpick

David Simon's SHOW ME A HERO was magnificent, but it had the unintended consequence of severely curtailing Bill Boyle's innocent lifelong habit of chewing toothpicks, which he picked up from his grandfather in Brooklyn. (You can read about Bill's grandfather chewing toothpicks in my upcoming nonfiction book CIGARETTE LIGHTER, by the way. I ain't lying!) Alfred Molina chews his toothpicks in a such a gross, villainous way in SHOW ME A HERO that it really made Bill Boyle rethink the whole idea of chewing toothpicks for a minute. "He just lets it dangle there," Bill said disgustedly when I saw him at The End of All Music a week or so ago. Bill showed me, by contrast, the way he had been tucking his toothpicks almost all the way into the back of his mouth as of late, in a sort of shame, ever since witnessing the spectacle of Alfred Molina's dirty, blatant toothpick dangling - an affront to the memory of Bill's grandfather! Later that week I was watching AMERICAN GRAFFITI on TV and happened to notice Paul Le Mat lovably chewing a toothpick, so I sent that clip ("click" here) to Bill to cheer him up. Some days later I happened to be watching IT'S A GIFT on TCM, and the put-upon W.C. Fields was heroically chewing a toothpick, which I hope afforded him (Fields, I mean, but Bill, too, I guess) some relief. That clip is yours for a "click" here. Let's all chip in and help Bill give toothpick-chewing back to the good guys! I mentioned that my own grandfather used to occasionally chew flavored toothpicks, which I assumed were a thing of the past (see packaging below), but then Bill offered me a "tea tree oil" flavored toothpick from his own personal stash! I declined, perhaps haunted by thoughts of Alfred Molina. This seems like the place to mention that in my ill-advised search for "flavored toothpicks" on the "internet," I astonishingly (?) came across - and forgive me for mentioning this - "breast milk flavored toothpicks." I'm sorry. I had to tell somebody. I have a hard time imagining the targeted demographic.

Now I Know Everything About Kings

This book says that Edward IV "possessed a toothpick made of gold, garnished with a diamond, a ruby and a pearl."

A Scoop!

You heard it here first, folks, direct from the source! Readers of Laura Lippman's continuing serial in the New York Times Sunday magazine should keep their eyes peeled in the upcoming weeks for what Lippman calls "a longish discussion of the Shirley MacLaine vehicle WHAT A WAY TO GO!" (The exclamation point is neither mine nor Lippman's - it's in the title.) It should be noted that by the wildest of coincidences, WHAT A WAY TO GO! came up during my recent luncheon with Kelly Hogan, Kathleen Judge, and Neko Case. Will it therefore appear in my Oxford American article? Wait and see! This is not a scoop about me, it is a scoop about Lippman, whose highly anticipated discussion of WAWTG offers, in her words, "a new theory of cinema, involving the inverse relationship between a film's quality and the presence of a chimpanzee in said film." I believe one of us is misunderstanding the word "inverse." If Lippman means to suggest that anything with a chimp in it is awesome, I concur wholeheartedly! (Pictured, MacLaine in WHAT A WAY TO GO!, standing in front of some art made by the Paul Newman character - with the help, if I am recalling the plot correctly, of his wily chimpanzee. The point of a lot of movies and TV shows of the 1960s seemed to be that we are suckers for enjoying "modern" art because a chimp could make it - unlike movies and TV, as I suppose went the unspoken corollary. The teenage protagonist of my B+ novella "Your Body Is Changing" considers the situation as it has been presented to him in popular culture: "Henry knew that a lot of times people just pretended to like art so they could be cool. They would stand around and drink alcohol and eat weenies on toothpicks and make a big deal about some piece of junk that was supposed to be great art, but then it would turn out to be nothing but a knocked-over garbage can or a no-smoking sign or a spot on the floor where somebody had thrown up, which was a situation that Henry had observed in many comedy movies. Like the one where the supposedly great artist had trained a monkey to ride around on a tricycle with paint on the wheels, and that was how he had made his supposedly great art!" So you can see that I am torn. I love chimps in movies, yet I am not crazy about the way they are used to belittle the role of the artist in society! It is not the chimp's fault! Speaking of Paul Newman and chimps, he also appeared with one in another exclamation pointed title, RALLY 'ROUND THE FLAG, BOYS!, as has been noted on the "blog.")