Ham-Fisted Doofus

After I finished reading the Apocryphal Gospels during the 11-day blackout, I turned to BLACKWATER by Michael McDowell, which seemed like a good, creepy thing to read in the dark. I had been previously impressed with the author's deep geographical and metereological understanding of the Gulf Coast of Alabama as displayed in his novel THE ELEMENTALS, so it was extra sad that in BLACKWATER, he misspelled the name of my hometown Bayou La Batre. One character suggests moving there as part of a scheme of vengeance, to which her husband replies, "What would you and I do in Bayou le Batre, that old place?" Which, if I am being honest, is something we used to ask ourselves, if only from time to time. The answer was to go down to Schambeau's or Red's Drugs and look at the new comic books! And to wander around in Schambeau's and wonder why Mr. Schambeau (his first name was Crum!) regularly stocked Purina Monkey Chow. Did someone in town own a monkey? If so, who? An unsolved mystery to this day! Truly, Schambeau's was a wonderful grocery store to stir the imagination. Well, when I first opened BLACKWATER, the title page popped right out in my hand! It simply removed itself from the book in what seemed, given the circumstances, an ominous sign. I was reminded of when McNeil called me a "ham-fisted doofus" because I once broke an egg in my hand in an attempt to remove it from its carton. This led McNeil to come up with the idea of chickens who lay eggs with edible shells. I could have sworn I "blogged" about both the thing he called me and his egg idea, but it turns out I put those two tantalizing pieces of the McNeil puzzle into two separate unpublished novels. Well, the hell with it. Here I am giving away these remarkable tidbits for free! I give up. Note for historians of the future: an email search indicates that McNeil called me a "ham-fisted doofus" on May 6, 2019.

Ophelia

Lee Durkee emailed me a recent newspaper article about the ghosts of the Bee Gees! And in return I emailed him some stuff about HAMLET. I'm sure I am not the first to observe that Ophelia does all the stuff Hamlet only talks about, like going mad and committing suicide. Or she kind of falls out of a tree, doesn't she? It's not clear she meant to do it. But forget that! Here's my idea I told Lee: what if Ophelia feigns madness too, and fakes her own death, then disguises herself as her brother (who's really still in France) and kills Hamlet herself? That would be cool. Then she'd be doing EVERYTHING that Hamlet REALLY wanted to do (avenge father; kill Hamlet). And then you'd have a play called OPHELIA. I'm sure I'm not the first to have this idea. But even though I'm not "blogging" anymore I thought I'd stick it here like a post-it note.

Red Light, Winter Light

Early yesterday I rewatched WINTER LIGHT. It had been on my mind because we talked about it in an ADVENTURE TIME meeting last week. And then when I saw Bill up at the Grocery, he and I talked about it; it's Bill's favorite Bergman film. In the evening, Dr. Theresa wanted to watch a movie so we scrolled through a bunch we've recorded off of TCM. "What's RED LIGHT?" said Dr. Theresa. I didn't remember. RED LIGHT is a George Raft movie, kind of noir, a revenge movie, a crime film... and just like WINTER LIGHT it turned out to be about a crisis of religious faith, with a similarly impassive lead performance. Strange coincidence! George Raft has a big speech in a church, concerned with what WINTER LIGHT calls "God's silence." Of course, George Raft ends it by hurling a candelabra through a stained glass window - a flashier gesture than Bergman's characters are comfortable with. Spoiler alert: God kills Raymond Burr. He's the bad guy in RED LIGHT. Raymond Burr, I mean, not God. Do you think I'm kidding? A cop standing over Raymond Burr's smoking corpse says (I paraphrase), "Well, I guess this proves it: God exists!" So, a fairly big departure from the ending of WINTER LIGHT.

Beakers of Colorful Liquids

Hi! Dr. Theresa and Ace and I watched POINT BLANK last night. Early in Lee Marvin's tour of vengeance he visits the apartment of his wife, and it's all silver and gray and white and reminded me of Jerry Lewis, especially the monochromatic "Spider Woman" sequence in THE LADIES MAN, this frame of which I've shown you before:

Lee Marvin smashes all his wife's perfumes and potions in the bathroom sink like so:

and you think of the floor in the transformation scene from Lewis's THE NUTTY PROFESSOR, with its smashed beakers of colorful liquids.

There was at least one scene that would have benefited had Jerry Lewis starred in the movie instead of Lee Marvin. See, Lee Marvin walks into a kitchen to discover that Angie Dickinson has mischievously turned on all the sleek modern appliances: a dangerously smoking toaster, a mixer, a blender, etc. Boy, Jerry could have gone wild with that! Lee Marvin just walks around turning stuff off. It's like what McNeil said about how much better 2001 would have been had Jerry played an astronaut with a pesky ant in his moon boot. Oh yeah! I almost forgot that Lewis's favorite sidekick Kathleen Freeman is in POINT BLANK, weirdly just hanging around in a single scene with nothing to do. Is her otherwise inexplicable presence a hint, a clue? I doubt it! But I choose to believe it. As Tertullian said, "Certum est, quia impossibile."

Bookmarkin'! with Jack Pendarvis

Welcome once again to "Bookmarkin'! with Jack Pendarvis," your guide on the "internet" to the complex and fascinating world of bookmarks! As you no doubt recall, a footnote in an old edition of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY led me to Godwin's LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS. Well, friends, a footnote in LIVES OF THE NECROMANCERS made me finally want to read THE FAERIE QUEENE. So I searched around the house for the dusty old SPENSER'S POETICAL WORKS I knew I had somewhere. My friend Lucy - with whom I lost touch some years ago - gave me several books that had belonged to her late father, a scholar. This is one of them. I noticed that THE FAERIE QUEENE section already had a bookmark in the middle of it! This bookmark must have been sitting here in just this position for - I'll make a guess - 40 years. It's a white slip of paper, folded over once. Well, the part that has been in the book for all these years is white, but the top part, exposed to air and sun, is brown. At first I thought it would be good to use this old bookmark as MY bookmark. And I even thought I'd see whether there might be a secret message written on the inside of the folded paper. But as soon as I nudged the bookmark with my finger, out of the position it had held for some number of decades, I knew it was the wrong move. I felt intimations of ghostly retribution. I put the bookmark back where it belonged as best I could, but the spiritual damage may have already been done. Today's tip is "DON'T MESS WITH GHOSTLY OLD BOOKMARKS OF THE PAST." That's it for today's "Bookmarkin'! with Jack Pendarvis." Until next time, "Mark my words!"

Melancholy Abounding

The usual trouble sleeping. As if you care! Picked up THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. Read "dead men's bones, hobgoblins, ghosts, are ever in their minds, and meet them still in every turn: all the bugbears of the night and terrors, fairybabes of tombs and graves are before their eyes and in their thoughts, as to women and children, if they be in the dark alone." Burton is writing about people who have "Symptoms of Melancholy Abounding in the Whole Body," to describe whom he uses the funny phrase, "the melancholy juice is redundant all over." ... "If they hear, or read, or see, any tragical object, it sticks by them; they are afraid of death, and yet weary of their lives; in their discontented humours they quarrel with all the world, bitterly inveigh, tax satirically, and because they cannot otherwise vent their passions, or redress what is amiss, as they mean, they will by violent death at last be revenged upon themselves." Wow, what, sorry, not too cheerful, but striking and incantatory. "Fairybabes of tombs and graves" really caught my attention.

She Meditated Vengeance

Hey I am reading another book by Peter Ackroyd. It's not this one ("click" here) that I mentioned recently nor this one ("click" here) that I mentioned recently. It's another one! It's about the Tudors. Hey remember when I got so sick of reading books about kings that I just couldn't stand it anymore? When I bought this one at Square Books a week or two ago, Kaitlyn said, "I'm glad you've come back around." Ha ha! I don't know. This one has so many executions it actually gave me nightmares. Executions that defy description! Though Peter Ackroyd certainly gives it the old college try. I'm ashamed to say I read this part to Dr. Theresa the other night: "When the executioner held up the head, its eyes and lips moved." That's by far one of the milder executions. BY FAR. Oh brother! You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Let me put it this way: if the king LIKED you he'd have your head cut off. So imagine if you made him mad. But anyway the queens take over about halfway through book so that's nice for a change of pace. I just read a couple of good things about Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (pictured). "She rode fast and furiously; she wore a steel helmet and carried a brace of pistols at her side." And: "Mary returned in triumph to Edinburgh where she meditated vengeance on her feckless and unstable husband."

Aaoogah!

Hey yeah so last night I watched ESCAPE PLAN, a Sylvester Stallone movie featuring a jaunty spotlight turn from Arnold Schwarzenegger. I swear that Schwarzenegger ended most of his conversations with Stallone with a pretty good wisecrack that sounded like a natural button - like, okay, that was a good wisecrack, we're moving on to another scene now - but then Stallone would have to tack on an extra wisecrack that was just gilding the lily, an inferior wisecrack, like Stallone had it in his contract that he always had to make the last wisecrack, like he had a guy on set to write toppers for him on the spur of the moment, like Bob Hope would have had, only this guy wasn't up to it. I feel sure my analysis would not stand up to the most basic level of scrutiny, but that's how it felt. One thing I enjoyed was when Stallone punched a guy in the gut a couple of times and the guy said "Aaoogah!" each time, like an old-time car horn: "Aaoogah! Aaoogah!" Or it may have been Stallone saying "Aaoogah! Aaoogah!" with the exertion of his punching. One of them was saying "Aaoogah! Aaoogah!" Once again, I am not sure my fleeting impressions of the moment would stand up in a court of law. Arnold Schwarzenegger had a "mad scene" more or less like Ophelia's! And I have to say he did a good job of it. He played that whole section in German. He sold it, man, and I was buying it all the way! Genius and madness glimmered in his eyes! In equal measure! And now I would like to warn you about the very major spoiler that is going to take up almost all the rest of this "post." It's about the ending. Okay. So, Stallone is about to wreak a mighty vengeance on evil warden Jim Caviezel by blowing him up. In the split second before the explosion, Jim Caviezel, realizing what is about to happen, just cocks his head to the side very slightly, like a curious little dog, and squeaks. He squeaks! An anticlimactic and fascinating choice. I could not find an "internet" image of Jim Caviezel squeaking like an interested puppy, but here is Sylvester Stallone about to set off the explosion with his gun, and someone has gone to the trouble of labeling it in yellow letters. While I am not sure I agree with his or her assessment, I admire the effort. (A late postscript! It strikes me that Schwarzenegger's "madness" - an act designed to confound an authority figure - has more to do with Hamlet's than Ophelia's.)

About My Solar Plexus Area

Despite the humorous titles of its chapters, I find that I cannot recommend the book with the paranormal jelly bags in it. What a letdown! I won't name it or its author because why hurt someone's feelings? But it's just a sloppy grab-bag, really - one minute the author is helping some people get a ghost out of their attic, next minute he's talking about a UFO case he has nothing to do with... there's just no point of view, and I don't believe his dialogue for a minute. ("There's no way in h..., ah, heaven that I would go up there when those crying noises begin.") It's all hooey. When I used to teach a scary story class, I think I made the observation that no kind of story benefits more from realism than a ghost story. I suppose that's doubly the case when the story is supposed to be "true." So let's move on to what seems to be a much better ghost book: A GALLERY OF GHOSTS by Andrew MacKenzie. It's the first one that Dr. Theresa held up in the shop for me to consider, and I am afraid I rudely and instantly dismissed it. I didn't like the generic title and I didn't like the cornball cover with the full yellow moon and the crooked black tree. Luckily, Dr. Theresa was persistent. Always respect Dr. Theresa's instincts! First of all, A GALLERY OF GHOSTS has an academic-sounding subtitle: AN ANTHOLOGY OF REPORTED EXPERIENCE. Classy! And I like the introduction, in which MacKenzie makes an interesting distinction: "Unlike the ghost stories of fiction, which have a beginning, a middle and an end and deal with dramatic happenings involving revenge or remorse... the true ghost story is fragmentary and often apparently meaningless." Well, now he is talking my language! I am sick of things with beginnings, middles and ends, truth be told. I do like a nice shiny fragment. I like that the book flap says with exquisite formality, "Mr. MacKenzie presents many hitherto unpublished supernatural stories from his own collection." I like that he drops allusions to weighty-sounding tomes such as "G.N.M. Tyrrell's masterly work SIX THEORIES ABOUT APPARITIONS." I like that the very first thing he does in the very first chapter is admit to his interviewee, "I have never seen a ghost, possibly because I am a poor visualizer." She - the Vice President of the Society for Psychical Research - has reportedly seen two ghosts (the modesty of the number, especially for one in her position, is something else I like). I like that she says, "I wasn't in the least frightened, but afterwards I did notice that I felt cold about my solar plexus area." And I like that MacKenzie responds drily, "That is most interesting." None of this flailing around and trying to be "colorful" like that other book with the flying jelly bags, which shall remain nameless, and which, as you may recall, had something sticky on the cover anyway. (The image above popped up for reasons unknown as a search result for a photo of Rosalind Hedley Heywood, the Vice President of the SPR at the time of MacKenzie's writing. I didn't find a photo of her but this one is all right too.)

Ghosts Are Real

As you know, Dr. Theresa and I can hardly be bothered to walk up the block to hear music. But this weekend we went all the way to New York City to hear music! That's right, our favorite band The Rock*A*Teens, who were playing their VERY LAST SHOW EVER according to Rock*A*Teens mastermind Chris Lopez, whom we saw in the club (Le Poisson Rouge) when we arrived early - though the next day (about which more later) he seemed more cryptic and less certain when we raked him over the coals about it. We can only hope - the world, I mean! - that the Rock*A*Teens will play again. Our trip began the day before, with drinks precisely at "Megan Abbott Time" - this time with the actual Megan Abbott! Hey, you know how I always wear my glasses way up on the top of my head? Sure, it's probably all you think about! You can see an example in the following photo by Dan Conaway.

Well, I tossed back my head with glee or something and my glasses flew away into a spot from which they were seemingly irretrievable. Megan, a daintily constructed person (I once asked for and received her permission to compare her to a doll in a magazine article) slipped herself behind the banquette in our swank hotel lobby to save them. Later that night, at dinner (about which more later), an efficient and stealthy waiter suddenly appeared behind me with my glasses, which I had lost again in the identical manner. "Sir, your glasses," he said. "A theme!" I thought. "This is hot stuff! The title of my 'blog' 'post' can be 'Sir, Your Glasses.'" And so I jotted in my special book of jottings. BUT IT WAS NOT TO BE. "Ha ha," I thought. "My glasses are always flying off my head. What an intriguing character I am." Dr. Theresa and I were dining at Il Buco Alimentari, a place recommended by John T. Edge. When we arrived, the hostess said, "Oh, you requested the kitchen," and the other hostess said quickly, "No, no, no," which made me suspicious. WHO HAD REQUESTED THE KITCHEN? For we were indeed seated, as if we had requested the kitchen, at a marble counter facing just inches away from where they were cooking the food, a terrific spectacle. The exchange between hostesses made me wonder whether John T. had secretly called ahead to ensure that our dinner would be especially memorable. I have suspected as much of him before! Dr. Theresa had some octopus and then later I had some different kind of octopus. Somehow I thought of Camille's, an old spot in Atlanta, though Camille's was sometimes crummy, especially in its later years, whereas Il Buco Alimentari was glorious, but my octopus made me think of the fra diavolo at Camille's if a mighty, shining archangel had prepared it instead of a human who had given up on life. It was some exquisite octopus there at Il Buco Alimentari is what I'm getting at. And Dr. Theresa said that her own pasta course was like "black pepper and pecorino romano got married and had a beautiful offspring." And there was pork with nectarines and so many other things, things just kept coming, things that could make you cry, a snifter of green chartreuse. And now I'm going to leave the heavenly Il Buco Alimentari to indulge in some memories of shaky old Camille's. Dr. Theresa and I went to Camille's on our third date! Between our first and second date she had gotten seriously ill - not because of our first date, ha ha! I mean, like, she was in the hospital. So on the third date I thought it might do her some good to try to walk to Camille's (she was very weak). It did her no good at all! In fact it did her some harm. Which reminds me of the time long before that when I made my poor sister walk a MILE to Camille's in some uncomfortable shoes which I found out later had caused her feet to bleed like some kind of saint. Good times. Let me explain that at the time, my brother and I were both living in Atlanta, in separate places, and my sister, then a teenager, would sometimes come to visit. So on that trip she and I sat around the apartment and played hangman because I didn't have a car and I forced her to march until her feet bled... and then when it was her turn to stay with my brother, he introduced her to her hero David Byrne! David Byrne shook her hand and she swore never to wash it again. So that was a contrast. Nor did my brother force her to walk until her feet bled. OKAY! Back to the present! The next day Dr. Theresa and I were to meet Megan at the Strand bookstore, where I had never been somehow. Dr. Theresa and I were a little early, so first we ducked into a comic book store around the corner. I got a copy of Seo Kim's book CAT PERSON. It's great! Sitting on a bench waiting for Megan a few minutes later I was just laughing out loud like a lunatic. Also, I was reading CAT PERSON by Seo Kim. I was delighted to see Jesse Moynihan's FORMING on the shelf in the comic book store, both volumes. But an employee told me that the recent ADVENTURE TIME comics cowritten by Kent Osborne were sold out! He told me they sell the minute they come in - they can't keep them in the shop! Our town does not have a comic book store, so I was sad about that lost opportunity. (Later the Rock*A*Teens bass player Will Joiner showed me a picture his niece had asked him to show me. She's getting ready to start 7th grade and she was all done up in her ADVENTURE TIME finery. He said she had never been so excited as when he told her he was going to meet someone who works on ADVENTURE TIME... which is the same way I feel about the Rock*A*Teens!) Megan met us at the Strand and we went down to the occult section in the basement. Dr. Theresa immediately found me several of the kind of "true ghost story" books I like, including one with a Table of Contents that promised a chapter about "The Terrible Flying Jelly Bags." I don't know what those are yet, and I won't until the books have been delivered, but I thought "The Terrible Flying Jelly Bags" would make a great title for a "blog" "post," surpassing even "Sir, Your Glasses." BUT IT WAS NOT TO BE. Megan was trying to choose between a book by a debunker and a book by a spiritualist medium and I suggested the latter because it would be "crazier." An eavesdropping young man turned to us and in a quietly intense voice said, "Ghosts are real." As I recall it, I replied in a friendly conversational tone, "I know, I've seen 'em!" Minutes later, however, on the street (and several times throughout the remainder of our stay in New York) Megan claimed that I had said, "Of course! I've seen many!" and as I was saying it (according to Megan's version, which she demonstrated to a number of people over the next few days, as I've noted) I made a sweeping, Shakespearean gesture with my right hand. That's what she said! I don't remember it. In any case, I "out-weirded the weirdo" (as Megan put it, to which Dr. Theresa sincerely added, "I am so proud of you"). It is true that the quiet and intense young man, whose eyes glimmered with danger and insanity, was flummoxed, stunned, defeated and silenced by my solicitous response. Eventually, Megan and Dan and Dr. Theresa and I were at the Rock*A*Teens show, and I literally can't remember the last time I was so happy.

For one thing it brought Dr. Theresa and me in an emotional whirlwind back to our early days (we've been married almost 19 years!) when Hogan sang at our wedding reception and Lopez picked up a guitar for one number. For this gig, though, all these years later, a band called Ricer opened, and it was a good sign when the lead singer and guitarist announced that her favorite band was The Rock*A*Teens. Then Ricer blew us all away with crashing relentless deafening sterilizing murderous vibrations that made us feel young again. Megan described their sound as "early metal" - I think. It was impossible to hear! In a good way. "They're like Frank Sinatra!" I screamed in Megan's ear, and I believe she agreed. She got where I was coming from! Maybe. After Ricer, Megan and I went and found a photo booth at the back of the club.

The Rock*A*Teens came on and Dr. Theresa danced, sometimes with Dan and sometimes with the girl from Ricer, and sometimes both, probably. I chipped in. It was mass hysteria! Dr. Theresa screamed herself hoarse. The aftereffects are apparent to this very day! She reached up for the stage and Chris Lopez reached down and grabbed her hand. She later called it her "Courtney Cox moment" - for you youngsters, that's a Springsteen reference. The next day, the bass player Will Joiner told us that the R*A*Ts had played for TWO SOLID HOURS, 23 songs, an incredible length for a set list. Lopez crowd-surfed for the first time ever. "I didn't do it on purpose," he said, sounding apologetic. "I stumbled and somebody grabbed me." This conversation took place at a joint called "The Campbell Apartment," where Megan took us, a rococo little bar in a hidden corner of Grand Central Station. Here's a picture I found of it on the "internet."

You can see the top of the nicely-upholstered couch where Lopez and Dr. Theresa and I were sitting. But you can't see the stone lion with wings (a gryphon?) that watches over everything. The atmosphere was suitably phantasmagoric but some of the fancy drinks were tastier than others and Lopez and Dr. Theresa may have had the right idea when they switched to bourbon on the rocks.

Dr. Theresa showed off her tattoo and Lopez asked whether I had got one to match and I said teasingly, "I don't desecrate my body," to which Lopez replied "THIS body?" gesturing humorously at my body. Which reminds me. We were lucky enough to see Ward McCarthy and his dear wife Ann on this trip, our old friends, and their daughter Lily (I knew her when she was a newborn infant and now she's about to start college!) and Ward and Ann LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME as they did when I first knew them. And Chris Lopez looks EXACTLY THE SAME. Whereas I am a fat guy with a lot of white in his beard. What happened? Ward said he and the family had been rafting in some rapids recently. That's not the Ward I know! As I exclaimed to all present. "Yes, because all we did was sit in a bar and complain," said Ward. "But when I wasn't doing that, I was rafting," he added lyingly. I had reason to think of my fatness as I reclined in a marble bathtub, taking a bubble bath and reading a Travis McGee novel just as John D. MacDonald never intended. A tub so deep I could float in it. I DID float in it! This was the day after the show and I was singing everything to the tune of "Don't Destroy This Night," my favorite Rock*A*Teens song, like, "Let's get a drink/ We can sit and think/ Tub so deep/ It puts me right to sleep/ I'm in the mood/ To take pictures of my food." Such were a mere few of my hilarious parody lyrics basd on gritty real-life experiences. I'm like the Weird Al of the Rock*A*Teens! But - and may Ace Atkins forgive me for saying so - John D. MacDonald writes a lot of prose that should ONLY be read in a bubble bath. "One goodnight in a sad alto echoed in an empty corridor in my mind... I stood on a dream bridge and saw an open boat drift under the bridge on the black tide, full of a lost tumble of dead maidens..." WHAT! COME ON! Travis McGee likes to explain life to the ladies. He likes to tell women what's what. "Baby, nothing is easy... real people walk around in the foggy, foggy dew." Okay, Travis McGee! That little speech runs about a page. (Ha ha, look who's talking!) By page 142 two women have literally purred at him - PURRED AT HIM, NOT METAPHORICALLY - because he's so awesome at giving them a squeeze if you know what I mean. Maybe one woman specifically purring in gratitude for his manliness every 71 pages isn't too many, I don't know, what do you think, don't tell me, I don't care. But he's trying to avenge the death of a pal and get his mitts on some weird gold statues so I'm still reading it so sue me. After drinks with some Rock*A*Teens at Grand Central Station it was off to Laura Lippman and David Simon's place with Dan and Megan for a really special evening of conversation and cheese. I am talking about a cheese called burrata, which I guess I am the last to know about because everybody was looking at it and saying, "Hm, the burrata, oh, the burrata," like it was a normal thing. But it was so much more than a normal thing! Plus Laura had thoughtfully prepared some Southern specialties to make us Southerners (she has Georgia roots of her own!) feel at home. Because guess who else was there? That's right, Roy Blount Jr.! "She introduced us to her donkey," Roy said when I asked him to tell us about the time he met Flannery O'Connor. "Funerals are a good thing to be funny after," he said later, on another subject. At one point Megan said "Everything important looks simple," and I wrote it down because I go around writing down things Megan says. Like, a day or two before that, she said in defense of Frank Sinatra, "He couldn't control his overwhelming emotions, that's the worst you could say about him," and then she laughed really forcefully ("merrily," we decided) at the audacity of her own pronouncement. Ha ha ha! At Le Poisson Rouge I wrote down something Dan said but I'll tell you the truth, I'm not sure I can read it. It's dark in there! It's dark and drunk in there. I think it says, "The promise isn't better than the thing." And I think it had to do with how fantastically he had vowed to dance with Dr. Theresa - a promise he easily kept! I have a lot more material here... I mean a LOT more... a whole riff on SNOWPIERCER for example (I think I call Tilda Swinton the Peter Sellers of our time) but even I have my limits. OR DO I?

McNeil's Movie Korner

Welcome once more to McNeil's Movie Korner, your only place on the "internet" to the get the latest and greatest news about Hollywood's star-studded hits of the silver screen in Tinsel Town Land! "Watched DONT MAKE WAVES yesterday. Jim and Henny Backus played themselves," McNeil writes. Then he expresses regret that he never got his copy of the Jim and Henny Backus autobiography for the Doomed Book Club. I told him he wasn't missing much except for the obsessive chapter[s?] where Jim and Henny Backus try to figure out who is constantly pelting their roof with rocks. It goes on for years! Did I tell you about this before? I don't know, who cares. One day Jim Backus's pal Keenan Wynn has had enough of this crud and he hops on his motorbike and races around the Hollywood Hills, searching for the perpetrator with the intention of wreaking a terrible vengeance. But nothing comes of it and somebody just keeps throwing rocks, enormous ones, at Jim and Henny Backus, or at their roof, anyway. This story takes up a large percentage of the book, as I recall. I feel like at one point the police locate a guy several miles away with a giant slingshot (or am I dreaming this?) but he's cleared of all charges and anyway the mysterious rocks of endless torment never stop coming. But anyway who cares about Jim and Henny Backus so here is Claudia Cardinale from DON'T MAKE WAVES with those sunglasses I like.

Bilbo Baggins

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

The Character of the Titular Young Man

"Geddes sings from first person narrative in the character of the titular young man." Ha ha! So formal. Yes, I just looked up the wikipedia article about "Run, Joey, Run." To enjoy it for yourself, "click" here. It even uses the verb "expire," just as I did, and notes that the woman in the song "sacrifices" her life for Joey. But I promise I did not plagiarize the wikipedia article about "Run, Joey, Run." Here is a little more of the wonderfully stilted summary which I hope you will savor in its entirety: "Though Julie's father furiously swore his own vengeance, Joey, ignoring his own peril, immediately rushes over to Julie's home." How I love it. Yet wikipedia did not tell me what I wanted to know: the identity of the unfairly neglected young woman who really carries the song for that ungrateful jerk. (NOTE: I have no evidence that David Geddes was or is an ungrateful jerk. He's probably very nice.)

"Blog" Mail "Bag"

Time once again to dig into the "Blog" Mail "Bag." Email from Burke! Mostly filled with interesting things he says should not go on the "blog," but also a TV promo he has been meaning to tell me about for some time: "America's number one New Year's resolution is... REVENGE."

My Much Anticipated George Hamilton Considerations

Just turned on TCM and saw George Hamilton playing Moss Hart. And I thought, "Huh, George Hamilton starred in biopics as Moss Hart and Hank Williams. That's weird." And then I kept thinking. I thought, "To whom will this be of interest? No one! Therefore, I will put it on my 'blog.'" And then, dear reader, I kept thinking about George Hamilton. I thought about all the brand-name top-shelf directors he has worked with, such as Vincent Minnelli, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola. In the latter case, I have always wondered whether there might have been a touch of vengefulness in the casting. Like, Francis Ford Coppola was thinking, "Oh yeah, Robert Duvall? You're not coming back for GODFATHER III? I'll get GEORGE HAMILTON to replace you and see how you like that!" Nor did my thinking about George Hamilton end there. I recalled a time that Mr. Ward and I were in Los Angeles, and for some reason the rental place had issued us a creepy van instead of a normal car. We were driving down Sunset Boulevard when we spied George Hamilton eating at a sidewalk café. So we turned the van around and parked on the street right in front of him and started yelling out the window: "George Hamilton! Hey! George Hamilton!" When he looked up, Mr. Ward took a picture of him and sped away. George Hamilton was mad! I wonder if Mr. Ward still has that picture; after all, he still has the picture of the Foster Brooks robot.

There's Something About Vipers

Here's a line of dialogue from the most recent episode of the TV show REVENGE: "As you have been warned, revenge is a stony path." Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Also, something about vipers. Plus, the Jess character wears some clothes that resemble a gentleman's bathing attire from 1910.

And Another Thing

Hey! It is almost time for the television program REVENGE. A while back I thought of another way in which the sullen yet sentimental bartender on REVENGE is an exact plagiarism of Luke from GILMORE GIRLS, but I didn't want to bore you. But now I want to bore you. There were dramatic subplots about each man selling his boat. There. Shut up.

Busted Slats

And another thing about Luke from GILMORE GIRLS! Why would a fancy house in the Hamptons - an area described hilariously in a widespread "internet" summary of REVENGE as "a world of rich caviar and lavish living" - have a ramshackle old porch swing with busted slats? Why, it is ONLY SO THE SULLEN YET SOFTLY PINING BARTENDER CAN, UNBIDDEN, BRING OVER HIS TOOLBOX AND FIX IT. Your honor, I rest my case. Perhaps never so clearly have the writers of the TV show REVENGE revealed their all-encompassing debt to Luke from GILMORE GIRLS. I do not blame the writers of REVENGE, who are probably nice people just trying to do their best. Luke from GILMORE GIRLS is a powerful archetype that has inspired the souls of artists for ages. I could not find another picture of Luke with a hammer, but here is Rory building a house with a fluffy pink hammer.

The Old Porch Swing Bit

It's certainly not news to you that I spend most of my time searching for evidence that the sullen yet tenderhearted bartender on the TV show REVENGE is just a big rip-off of Luke from GILMORE GIRLS. Like, do you know what he did on tonight's episode? He showed up at Revenge Lady's house out of the blue, toolbox in hand, to voluntarily fix her broken porch swing. Come on! That is such a Luke move. And then, just like Luke, he had to stand there with his saw or what-have-you and watch as Revenge Lady's rich and handsome date came and whisked her away to a magical evening of romance. Upon her return, of course, that sentimental old porch swing that secretly means so much to her was as good as new. So what? Tomorrow I will get up early and have some coffee and tirelessly scour GILMORE GIRLS episode guides to find you a perfect example of how Luke already beat this guy at his own game, because I don't go to my job anymore. I do this. This IS my job! PS Tomorrow? Hell! Pardon my strong language. But it took me two seconds to find this picture of Luke fixing Lorelai's porch. Are you satisfied, America?

Dang It

Yes, dang it, we watched another episode of REVENGE and I thought of yet another way that the sullen barkeep is just a sad copy of Luke from GILMORE GIRLS: he lives above his place of employment! We're pretty sure he does. Dr. Theresa agrees. He's always walking down some stairs to enter the bar.