McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits

I'm sure some of you, if you existed, would be wondering about McNeil and why he hasn't bothered much with his bits lately... specifically, his "Li'l Bogie Bits," which is what we call it when he throws us a couple of bones based on the 700-page biography of Humphrey Bogart he has been reading. Well, here's what happened: he thought he had left the book somewhere and lost it. Maybe in another state of the union, I think? But then he found it at home under a pile of... unspecified stuff. Of course, Freud would say that McNeil just doesn't care about his "Li'l Bogie Bits" anymore, so he effectively hid the book from himself. But Freud would be wrong! Speaking of Freud (and don't worry, we'll get back to the promised bits), McNeil told me he's reading SYNCHRONICITY by Carl Jung. I know what you're going to say! Freud isn't Jung. Well, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. All I know is I can't think of one without the other, like the two great flavors in a Reese's peanut butter cup. Like, when Freud and Jung were arguing that time and there was an inexplicable explosion in a nearby bookcase. I think I have that story right. And that reminds me of another story! I made it into a chapter of SOUR BLUEBERRIES, my novel that no longer exists on this planet. So I think I can quote it here and no one will care. And this is a true story, and I didn't even change Leslie's real actual name to protect her innocence: "That made him think of the time he and Leslie were arguing about Kubrick and Mike Nichols on New Year’s Eve and there was a loud bang from the other room and everybody ran in and saw that the oaken bookcase with all the film books on it had cleaved itself down the middle in despair and the film books were in a pile on the floor." Okay. What was I saying? Oh yeah, and then there was the time that Freud and Jung were on a train, I think, right here in the USA, I think, home of the "blog," and Freud got it in his head somehow that Jung was comparing him to a corpse preserved in a bog, and Freud swooned and fainted! I think I have that story right, too. But if I don't, who cares? Oh yeah, and what about when Frasier had a Halloween party and came dressed as his hero, Sigmund Freud? I feel, in a related matter, that Frasier would occasionally (though maybe not in the episode in question) make a sarcastic quip about Jungians. I don't have the sources to back that up. None of this is the point. The point is (well, this might not be the point, either) that I was telling McNeil about an Elmore Leonard novel I was enjoying and McNeil said he was envious, because he wasn't making a lot of headway with SYNCHRONICITY (in a subsequent email, he indicated that he was starting to get into it and groove on its vibes, though not in those words). Explaining that he wished Jung's examples were simpler, McNeil wrote, with what I took as plaintiveness, and I believe this is a quote, "Why not cats walking through a door?" So I closed my email and I opened up Elmore Leonard and I read "A cat walks in the room..." WHAT! So I emailed McNeil back and said, I believe, "Synchronicity!" or some other smart remark along those lines. Now for the bogie bits, which I will now attempt to reconstruct before your very eyes through the power of memory. One of them was... hmm... I guess Bogart was getting sick of Sinatra coming over to the house and drinking up all of Bogie's booze, and also (if I am recalling correctly) putting the moves on Lauren Bacall, who was Bogart's legally wedded wife. What was the other one? It had something to do with Bogart winning an Oscar. McNeil did not specify the movie, but I am guessing it was THE AFRICAN QUEEN. I'm not looking it up because I don't care about anything anymore. Anyway, Bogart's buddy tells him if he wins he should act real cool and snarl "It's about time" and casually walk offstage like some kind of tough customer. So Bogart is like, "Wow! That's a great idea! I'll do it!" And then he wins and gets up there and blushes and giggles and cavorts about the stage all giddy and squealing. That can't be right. But as I have already expressed, I don't care. I was reading more of the Elmore Leonard in a doctor's waiting room today. I took it instead of my prescribed waiting room reading material. After that, I stopped by Square Books because my copy of THE ICEMAN COMETH had arrived. I ordered it because I was watching the movie version the other day, and the character Hugo, played by Boss Hogg from THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, said what I could have sworn was "Life is a crazy monkey face!" So I was going to check the text and see. So Dr. Theresa is driving us home and I'm flipping through the end of THE ICEMAN COMETH and I find Hugo saying "Hello, nice, leedle, funny monkey-faces!" And another time he goes, "Hello, leedle Don, leedle monkey-face!" I don't know, maybe he's all about the leedle monkey-faces the whole way through, though where I got "Life is a crazy monkey face!" I don't know. In my defense, Boss Hogg isn't exactly Demosthenes in this role. And he is forced by the author, as you have witnessed, to say things like "leedle." When I read the whole play, which I promise you I never will, perhaps I'll come across the exact line that I misheard. Thank you. This has been "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits." Now leave me alone!

Passing Through

As you know (?), I take my blood pressure twice a day. Before doing so, I sit silently for five minutes, for a ten-minute total per day. And as I sit so silently and still, waiting to take my blood pressure with all the suspense of someone slowly scratching off a lottery ticket, or Charlie Bucket peeling off the wrapper of a chocolate bar, I read a book. To qualify as my "blood pressure book," the book must be a sturdy hardcover with a mighty spine that allows the volume to lie open flat on the table. That is the only requirement. All this you know. But I don't think you knew that my current blood pressure book is a biography of Fernando Pessoa, which is about as long as THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. Anyhow! And forgive me for going over some of my other reading habits but it's so obviously important. Anyhow! I have also been reading old comic books at night, ever since Tom Franklin brought me some old comic books in the hospital. But I have to say I'm getting tired of the old comic books. Something has... changed. Something in the... I want to say... no I don't... national mood??? I didn't say it! Let's not talk about it! Once I finish the current pile, which is swiftly dwindling, that may be it for old comic books, at least for a while. Old comic books can't soothe me anymore. Anyhow! ANYHOW! I was very surprised, as Pessoa's biographer, Richard Zenith, which sounds like a name young Fernando Pessoa would have made up, analyzed a specific sort of Pessoa poem by saying, and here I quote my blood pressure book, "And the scenes and moods are not only juxtaposed, they also interpenetrate, passing through each other the way Superman passes through walls, without him or the walls losing their structural integrity." Talk about juxtaposing and interpenetrating: at last my blood pressure book and my old comic books had met! BUT WHY? The comparison is striking for a number of reasons, several of which I am about to tell you until you can take no more. First! The allusion does not seem particularly Pessoa-friendly, especially since Pessoa died in 1935, well before the creation of Superman. Now! We must of course admit that the biographer has an advantage, in this case, over his subject... that of still being alive (as far as I know). Therefore, he can draw from any range of examples he likes, including those from a future unimaginable even to his very imaginative subject. BUT! Pessoa is conducting seances just a couple of pages later. Isn't a ghost something that passes through walls? Might not a ghost be a more universally recognizable figure for the average reader, if the average reader pictures something that passes through walls without losing its structural integrity or altering the wall? I hope it is not blasphemous to suggest that one also thinks of Jesus, in his appearance to St. Thomas. But I'm not done! The biographer's Superman example is interesting to me because... do people know Superman can do that? I mean, I do. But I have made a serious study of all his oddest powers. A superhero who is more famous for vibrating through a wall is the Flash, if you know about the Flash, but, of course, more people know about Superman than know about the Flash... yet the question remains! Does the reader with a rudimentary knowledge of Superman realize that he can vibrate through a wall? I have no evidence to back up what I'm about to say, but I suspect that the average reader, if asked to imagine Superman going through a wall, would picture the "Man of Steel" busting right through it with his super fists, like the Kool-Aid man or the Schlitz malt liquor bull, not that my latter two examples were known for using their fists. The Schlitz malt liquor bull, being a hooved quadruped, was not even capable of making a fist! While the Kool-Aid man may or may not have been able to make a fist, I doubt whether he had the arm extension necessary for pounding down a wall with it, especially as he, if I recall correctly, grasped in one hand a pitcher of the same sweet liquid with which his living body was filled. Nevertheless, it can be easily proven with video evidence that both the Kool-Aid man and the Schlitz malt liquor bull BODILY knocked down their walls, as, I put forth, most people would credit Superman with doing as well. (I am including the "beer label" on this "post," even though the Schlitz malt liquor ads issued, according to my hazy memories, the specific command "Don't say beer, say bull!" May the Schlitz malt liquor bull forgive me and not crash through my wall. Amen. Not that I am worshipping a golden calf! Not even a hypothetical one made, unlike the all-too-fleshly Schlitz malt liquor bull, of golden malt liquor, however tempted I might be at this moment to drink a calf-sized container of such a brew.)

Speaking of Fox Mulder

I wanted to “post” this earlier, but the AT&T “internet” stopped working over and over. Anyway, here’s what you’ve been waiting for. I got one of those junk headlines that you get on your phone, something like “The Queen’s Favorite Sandwich That She Ate Every Day Since She Was Five – And It’s So Basic!” So I took a screen grab of it and sent it to Ace. That’s all we do all day every day, grab stupid things that appear on our phones and text them to each other. Then I texted the same screen grab, with its accompanying photo of Queen Elizabeth II, to Sara, along with my own humorous commentary: “The answer? A foot-long chili dog.” Sara’s reply was something like (a close paraphrase here): “OMG, really???” So I sadly had to reply that no, Queen Elizabeth II did not, as far as I know, eat a foot-long chili dog every day for 90 years. As Sara expressed it in a subsequent text, her tragedy – ha ha! she didn’t say tragedy – is that she “wants to believe.” Just like Fox Mulder from the X-Files! I added that part. Speaking of Fox Mulder, I was reading another old comic book about The Atom, and he was fighting these tiny guys who lived in a cave and rode around on the backs of bats. The editor interrupted the story to announce that tiny people of a proper size for riding small flying rodents into battle most likely really existed at some point! He insisted, in the capital letters typical of old comic books: “THE ELVES, THE BROWNIES, THE LEPRECHAUNS, THE FAIRIES, ALL MAY BE FANCIFUL RECOLLECTIONS OF A RACE OF TINY HUMANS! CHARLES FORT WRITES OF THEM.” Naturally, I was interested to run across this use of Charles Fort's captivating ramblings as evidence. I always thought Charles Fort would be a big deal on the “blog,” though he has never ended up in even 10 “posts” so far, after all the “blog’s” horrible countless years of thankless and unwanted existence. You remember Charles Fort, of whom it was once recorded on a book flap that he "collected and published reliable accounts of colored rains, living things falling to earth, unknown objects in space and in the oceans, people who have mysteriously appeared and disappeared." Charles Fort, to whom Tom Wolfe casually alluded: "Cassady began fibrillating the vocal cords, going faster and faster until by dawn if he had gone any faster, he would have vibrated off, as old Charles Fort said, and gone instantly into the positive absolute. It was a nice weird party." Charles Fort, whose glowing owls inspired the owls in my own second book. Charles Fort! That’s what I wanted to say. I wanted to say Charles Fort. Oh! In conclusion – and you will have to pardon me in advance for blue language on a level such as never, in my memory, has been attempted on the “blog” before – I watched THE DISORDERLY ORDERLY again, and as I was looking it up afterward in Fujiwara’s excellent monograph, I ran across Jerry Lewis’s defense of the puppet sequence from THE ERRAND BOY, which, having grown wise over the years, I now welcome with arms open wide. In fact, I’m ashamed of some of my earlier “posts” in which I seemingly apologize for Jerry. Back in those days, I just wanted everybody to like me! Now I don’t care anymore. So, Fujiwara interviews Jerry, who says of the part of the movie in which he, Jerry, cavorts tenderly with (if I recall correctly) a flirtatious, languorous ostrich puppet and enjoys maudlin interactions with a little finger-puppet clown… Jerry, who says of himself, actually, “We call that a director with steel balls.” And I was like, you know what? He’s right!

Familiar Barn Fight

As you know, I never, ever "blog" anymore unless I read a book with an owl in it or for some other reason. But now I have decided I can "blog" about the TV show THE BIG VALLEY whenever I want. Spurred by Laura Lippman's description of it as "gloriously weird," I decided to revisit THE BIG VALLEY, or maybe just to visit it, because I really couldn't remember anything about it. I remembered a promo in which they put a lot of reverb on the announcer when he said the title: "THE BIG VALLEY-ALLEY-ALLEY-alley-alley-alley!" And I remembered, from the same promo, the description of Barbara Stanwyck's character as "Victoria, a woman of backbone and bite!" All I can say is that was a pretty good promo if I still remember it from when I was a kid. So I watched some of THE BIG VALLEY. When a fistfight started raging in the barn, I thought, you know, maybe I did watch this show when I was a kid, because I felt secure in the knowledge that this was a staple of the show, it was all coming back to me, regular fistfights in the barn. But I can't be sure! I think there was something on the other channel I liked better. But here are some things I observed: 1. It all starts with one of the brothers on a bridge and here comes Lee Majors from the other direction and neither fellow will back up his horse to let the other one pass. So they literally just sit there looking at each other until the bridge falls down! I can't say much for the infrastructure. 2. The introduction of Barbara Stanwyck's character. She swoops into the room where her sons are standing and says (I paraphrase, but only slightly), "You're putting on weight, must you shout, here comes a visitor, I'll see you at dinner." And then she's gone. Like she was never there! She spits it all out like a machine gun and disappears in a flash. I thought maybe she was like Fred MacMurray, who supposedly used to come in and sit in a chair for one day and say all his lines for an entire season of his sitcom MY THREE SONS then get up and put on his hat and leave and they had to shoot around him for the rest of the year. My friend Ward McCarthy told me that about Fred MacMurray and if it's not true it's my own fault, because maybe I'm remembering the details wrong and I'm just too lazy to look it up. 3. Lee Majors kneels down at a lonesome grave (the patriarch has been plopped into the ground in the middle of nowhere, right where he was killed, not unlike the sad case of Meriwether Lewis) and then a young woman rides up on a horse and just casually leans down and starts striking Lee Majors wildly and repeatedly in the face with a leather strap, and she doesn't even know him! That's his half-sister, I guess, as they discover later, but there's an extremely weird vibe they've got going on (pictured). In fact they started making me think of Heathcliff and Cathy a little bit, and Lee Majors's name on the show is Heath, so I wondered whether that was on purpose, but my research methods (as noted above) are far too lazy to confirm or deny. Still, Heath is the brash, mysterious outsider who disrupts family life... for instance when he steals some apples! He's just walking around, trespassing, going through their stuff and finally taking an apple and Victoria catches him. So he takes off his hat. And I thought, oh, this brash, mysterious outsider is going to be respectful for a change! We're about to see the tender, gentlemanly side of this brash, mysterious outsider! But no, he was just taking off his hat to cram it full of all the sweet, sweet apples he could carry. And I was like, gee, Lee Majors sure has a hatful of apples now! He's going to have quite a night eating apples. Meanwhile, Audra (Linda Evans) gets a lot of use out of her leather strap, often with good reason, because they seem to live in a nightmarish hellscape. Right now everyone is shooting each other and I haven't even made it to the end of the first episode yet.

Drumstick Adventure

You know, just about every Monday, my coworker Ashly Burch asks me "How was your weekend?" and it's a very pleasant and considerate query but I sit there in silence with a dumb look on my face because I can't think of anything to say because nothing happened that weekend. Well, today is gonna be different, says I! Went out to Faulkner's house to play accordion on the Thacker Mountain Radio Show. They never had a radio show there before, and hardly even a radio. Faulkner hated the radio. There's a story about that but you'll have to go to Faulkner's house and ask Bill Griffith. He runs the place! I don't know how Faulkner felt about accordions. Kelly Hogan got in trouble for sitting - with no malice aforethought - on Faulkner's freezer. Because guess what? It's not just a freezer, it's a museum exhibit! Anyway, they had made Faulkner's kitchen into a green room for musicians, which I'm sure stressed out even the chill Bill Griffith. And I was thinking, yeah, but Hogan is probably the first person to sit on the lid of that freezer since Faulkner! It's like their very butts touched through the fabric of time!

Here's a picture that Megan Abbott took of Dr. Theresa (waving her hands in the air like she just doesn't care... but she does!) and Thacker producer Kathryn McGaw York grooving out on the sight of all their crazy hard work coming to fruition. Note Lopez's fetching hat, clearly visible in two photos thus far. Saw David Swider of The End of All Music. He said I should bring my Emmy to the record store for "Touch the Emmy Day," and people will come by and touch my Emmy while I spin records under the name "DJ Emmy." It seemed like a hilarious idea while we drank whiskey in Faulkner's yard and swooned companionably in the blazing hot sun! I feel like everybody sang about ghosts. Is that an exaggeration? I'm not sure! Must have been the unconscious pull of the setting. Or maybe songwriters just happen to like ghosts. I remember once many years ago a friend of mine claimed that she didn't like any song with the word "ghost" in it, which I found stunningly arbitrary. Okay, I'm leaving a lot of stuff out. But later that night, there was another show (not on Faulkner's lawn), and I was happy to hear great musicians like Amy Ray and Laurie Stirratt literally singing Dr. Theresa's praises (well, not literally! They were speaking, not singing, at those moments) from the stage. But before that late-night show, Dr. Theresa, who was in charge, was faced with some emergencies! Like: an amp that shocked a famous session guitarist with its electricity! Or: a drum kit but NO DRUMSTICKS! Jennifer and I were sent out into the night to scour the town for drumsticks. We went to a bar called Proud Larry's, where there is usually a band playing, to see whether the drummer might have an extra pair of sticks. But as we approached the door I noticed that the band's name had been ominously rubbed from the chalkboard outside! And sure enough, the band had been canceled because everybody wanted to watch the University of Mississippi play at Alabama, a big game. BUT! A thoughtful waiter told us that one of the bartenders was a drummer. And the bartender kindly went to check his car and found a drumstick. A single drumstick! It felt like a kind of triumph. A useless triumph! But I encouraged Jennifer to hold the pointless drumstick aloft in a victorious gesture as we returned. By the time we got back they had already found two more drumsticks. So we actually had one more drumstick than was absolutely necessary! Chris Lopez played first, under his solo guise "Tenement Halls." ("Click" here to listen to my favorite Tenement Halls song: you won't be sorry!) He kept taunting us with the first few bars of "Black Ice" (a Rock*A*Teens song which I have written about in the New York Times! or their "web" site anyway) but couldn't remember the lyrics. Finally he called out from the stage, "Theresa, what's the first line?" And we yelled back at him from the back table, but we didn't quite have them right either. Turns out the first line is "In a town up north of Nashville, where the Crackers go to learn how to play..." (I think) But (though we had the second half right) I had always heard it as something like, "In a town outta nada of Naughahooga" or something like that. Anyway, it got Chris rolling! After Chris's set, Rock*A*Teens fan Bill Boyle and I discussed the lyrics of "Black Ice" and how many different, incorrect ways we had heard them over the years. One thing I enjoyed was the fluid spirit of the proceedings. It didn't seem like five or six different bands playing, but more like one larger band that kept undulating and changing its shape in a lovely way. Lopez played drums for Amy Ray and Jon Langford and Hogan... Langford played guitar for Hogan... Hogan sang harmonies for Langford and Ray... like that. I really enjoyed hearing the Amy Ray/Rock*A*Teens collaboration "Black Heart Today." I found an older, milder, more "acoustic" performance of it on the "internet," which is good, but if you "click" here you will miss Lopez's rabid drum fills, for one thing, which had grown in majestic stature as the night drew to a close. I hope somebody recorded it! And all its mystical punk rock vibrations of glory.

I played accordion on three songs for Hogan, I think, including one I wrote a couple of decades ago (ugh! what a thought! decades! "click" here if you'd like to hear it, false starts and all). I played on Hogan's cover of the Magnetic Fields song "Papa Was a Rodeo" (really, I just noodled along) and I got so concerned with my noodling that I didn't even notice that Amy Ray had come up to join in, and I happened to glance out of the corner of my eye to see Amy Ray and Kelly Hogan gracefully two-stepping together.

Here's a still photo of that moment (post-dancing, I think). I stole it from somebody's twitter, sorry! There was a giant in a cowboy hat who was VERY enthusiastic about Langford's set. He whooped with such frightening intensity that Langford had to stop the show and calm him down with vinegary Welsh quips. Later I went to the men's room and found that giant cowboy in there with his girlfriend! They were just hanging out, no funny business, don't get me wrong. But then as he stood at the urinal he was going "OOOHHHHH! OUCH! ARRGHHHHH! AAAAAHHHWWWWWW!" like a person in the greatest human agony, which perhaps he was. Why did I mention that when there were so many nicer things to mention instead? Like breakfast the next day with Julie and Barry and Langford? John Currence surprised us by coming up behind us stomping on the floor, shaking the very building with his mighty tread! What the hell, it's his building, he can do what he wants! Then he bought champagne for the table as you can plainly see from this photo of the occasion.

Currence (not pictured) was pumped up and celebrating the University's triumph over its rival, to which I have already alluded. Sorry, Ashly, a lot of other stuff happened but my mind is going.

Disillusioned Artiste

I watched CAREER and McNeil was right, of course. I loved it! Thick, chewy melodrama. Just my speed. Here we see Anthony Franciosa caring more about his cucumber facial than Shirley MacLaine's serious problems. The day I learned to do "screen grabs" was a blot on the universe. So the night before last I flipped to TCM and they were showing a marathon of Les Blank's documentaries. I watched one about garlic. It made me really hungry! Although the part where they cook some blue-eyed baby pigs depressed me, which is good because I'm sort of on a diet because I need to fit into John T. Edge's plaid tuxedo jacket soon. Why? None of your beeswax, that's why. But I was like: "Bill Boyle is coming over tomorrow. I'll make something with lots of garlic!" And I did. I made puttanesca sauce and I was really nervous because Bill is Italian and what if he scoffed? But Bill didn't scoff. Bill's not a scoffer. I use lemon, which I'm not sure is a traditional ingredient, so I went crazy and kept adding other stuff to drown out the lemon so maybe Bill wouldn't notice the lemon, which maybe defeated the purpose, I don't know, it turned out fine, get off my case, man. The point is Bill came over to watch TOO LATE BLUES, one of the few Cassavetes movies he hadn't seen, and which I recorded off of TCM a while back. It made me think of CAREER. Well, they both had a certain post-beat feel, a "disillusioned artiste" vibe.

There were bits of CAREER that made me think of INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS and BARTON FINK but there's no way the Coen Brothers ever watched CAREER, is there? We know Scorsese watched TOO LATE BLUES. Bill and I could tell! And everybody wore black suits with skinny black ties and argued about paying the diner owner, so maybe Quentin Tarantino watched it too. Who cares? Seriously. You're not alone: I bore myself. I honestly have nothing interesting to say but I took so many screen grabs of CAREER, so here we are. There's Shirley MacLaine saying, "Sam? What a lovely name. I like that name. The first man I ever completely destroyed was named Sam." She drinks a lot in this movie! Just look how she sits at the bar:

My Nephew Is a Genius

Last time I went to Atlanta I forgot to bring my little jotting notebook in which to jot my little notes. You won't catch me making that tragic mistake twice. 1. On the drive to Atlanta this weekend, "Jokerman" by Bob Dylan played. Some particular lyric - I can't recall which; by necessity, one cannot jot while driving - made me think for a split second, "Maybe this song is about Jerry Lewis!" (You may "click" here to refresh your memory about the time Bob Dylan got obsessed with Jerry Lewis.) It did have a "sad clown" vibe. But it also has a bunch of mystical stuff about "kings dressed in scarlet" or something. So never mind. Or, wait! THE KING OF COMEDY. I believe he dressed in scarlet. I don't really think "Jokerman" is about Jerry Lewis. But I was driving alone and had time to think. 2. The occasion of the drive was Barry Mills's birthday party. Who should be there but Craig "Sven" Gordon. We reminisced without irony about the old band we used to be in together, just like a couple of living relics from the cliché museum. 3. Somehow the band Kansas came up, prompting Sven to reveal that the lead singer of Kansas moved into his neighborhood for a time and could often be spotted jogging! 4. Chris Lopez came to the party. An interesting beetle landed on his arm. It looked just like a piece of popcorn. 5. Last time I saw Barry's daughter she was two years old. Now she's nine. Barry told her how when she was two, she liked it when I made crazy trumpet noises, it would really make her laugh. So once I was doing that and Dr. Theresa encouraged me like so: "Work it, Jack!" And Barry's two-year-old daughter suddenly shouted, "Work it, Jack!" Ha ha ha! Barry's daughter bore the retelling of this story with good grace uncommon in one of her age. She was thoughtful and polite about the rambling of her elders. 6. Look!

Barry's birthday cake, of admirable fluffiness, was decorated in remembrance of that kids' show that Barry and I used to make. 7. I met a guy who is working on a feature film about the founding of McDonald's, starring Michael Keaton and Laura Dern. He showed me a picture of "the first McDonald's" building and set that he had helped construct in a town north of Atlanta. "It'll be there a few weeks and then it will be gone, like it was never there," he said. I probably said, "I just had a dream about Laura Dern!" I probably said, "Tell her!" 8. I met a woman named Jenny who I thought said she was "as culpable as any vicar." I asked her, "Did you just say you are as culpable as any vicar?" She replied, "No." She also wanted to know what Lopez and I were like when we had "velvet nubs for horns." Or did she say "fuzzy nubs"? My jotting is unclear on this point. Perhaps she said both. She meant to ask what we were like when we were young. Lopez said, anticlimactically, that one of us would generally walk into a bar and the other one would be there, and one of us would say, "Are you gonna finish eating that?" Jenny asked whether we would sit across from one another or on the same side of the booth on such occasions, and the conversation dwindled. 9. Hey! Remember when I was amazed to learn that there were chickens living on the roof of Manuel's Tavern? I finally got to eat some of those eggs, "rooftop eggs" they were called on the menu, when my sister and brother-in-law and nephew Jasper had brunch there. Jasper wanted a pancake and some French fries. My sister was hesitant! But I was a strong advocate for this hugely appealing and innovative idea. I couldn't believe I had never thought of it myself! French fries are a perfect breakfast food. Why doesn't everybody serve French fries with breakfast? They are not that much different than so-called "home fries." My sister finally said okay, and I like to think my relentless nagging had something to do with it. 10. On the drive home, I saw a coyote run across the highway! I don't think I've ever seen one in person before. I know Melissa and Chris have some living out near their place, but coyotes strike me as exotic in our region. I guess they're not. I have to remind myself about the time I was so excited to see some wild turkeys on the side of the highway, and every person I know told me it's no big deal to see wild turkeys and that I was a sucker for being excited. And now I suppose you're all going to tell me that everybody has French fries for breakfast where you come from. Liars!

Dramatics

Last night I watched JULIUS CAESAR, the version with Marlon Brando, and I don't even know why. I've watched it before and can't recall being much of anything but bored. This time I was really into it! I was like, "WHAT!" I was like, "These characters are really in a pickle now!" Also, Casca says, "And yesterday the bird of night did sit even at noonday upon the marketplace, hooting and shrieking." So I've decided that's an owl. Sure, there are night birds that are not owls, but what bird other than an owl hoots and shrieks? MY DECISION IS FINAL. Edmond O'Brien (pictured) is really good as Casca. Usually you think of him as a guy in noir or westerns. He's one sweaty assassin! Maybe that's why they hired him. He's especially good when he's acting at John Gielgud. He really shows up Gielgud's silvery vibrato. Ha ha, what a terrible description of Gielgud's voice. It does quaver dramatically, though. I think. I remember when Megan Abbott asked me for an adjective to describe John Huston's voice and I said, "Growly?" and Megan said, "I'd say the opposite! But I always use caramely." Anyway, Gielgud's voice is good for this one line where Brutus accuses him of taking bribes and he says, "I, an itchy palm?!!!???!!!!!??!!!!????!!!!!!!" And I'll add that the most sarcastic thing I've ever heard in a movie is the way Brando says, "Oh... NOW you weep." That's how he says it. "Oh... NOW you weep."

Be Sure to Include Dana Andrews

In another ASTONISHING COINCIDENCE, I hear from McNeil that he watched the old movie FALLEN ANGEL today. Here's what! Dr. Theresa and I came EXTREMELY CLOSE to watching FALLEN ANGEL today! OF ALL MOVIES. I don't even know what made me think of it. A vibration from McNeil's mind? That is the only reasonable answer! But for whatever reason we turned on MIRAGE instead, something I had recorded from TCM. We got a few minutes in and our brains hurt already from Gregory Peck's mysterious identity predicament. Don't we have enough problems with our own mysterious identity predicaments? "Maybe I'll take a nap instead," I said, and promptly fell asleep for four hours. Ain't life grand. So anyway, if you do a "Google Image Search" for the movie FALLEN ANGEL, don't just google the term "fallen angel" or all you'll get is a lot of scary fan art of scary looming demons with big scary wings. Add Dana Andrews to your search terms.

All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up

Welcome once again to "All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up," the only place on the "internet" where you can always grab the latest and greatest all-star news of entertainment celebrities on the go! ITEM! I promise never to talk about Jerry Lewis again. BUT WAIT! Guess who was JUST strolling down the Hollywood Walk of Fame and sent me this photograph?

That's right, NIGHT OF THE LOUP GAROU star Ace Atkins. Jerry's star has some dirt on it! Who's responsible for shining up these stars? Get on it! It's a national disgrace. You know I still have Jerry on the brain because I gave a lecture about him and though that was a while ago he's still bouncing around in there. McNeil left behind a dvd of CRACKING UP on his last visit. "I have two copies. I think this is the bad one," he said. AND HE WAS RIGHT! It started getting glitchy then it froze up completely only an hour in. So I put in WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT? and watched some of that and took four pages of notes on the two movies, NONE OF WHICH I AM GOING TO SHARE WITH YOU. I sent a couple of my observations in a private email to McNeil. BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO SEEM LIKE A CRAZY PERSON WHO ONLY THINKS ABOUT JERRY LEWIS ALL THE TIME. NEWS FLASH! I had to stop following Larry King on twitter. Somebody - I believe it was my reliable informant Jessica - told me that NPR had done a story on Larry King's tweets. After that, his tweeting was reinvigorated. Instead of the sporadic jewel, a deluge. Stuff about why he doesn't like snow and how he's never ridden a tractor and please don't serve him catfish. Why so negative, Larry King? He does like cashew chicken, that's one thing he likes. Anyhow, the tweets just kept coming and coming and seemed "self-aware" in a way that ruined their "outsider art" vibe. Reader, I blocked him! "'Outsider art' vibe?" PERHAPS I WAS THE FOOL ALL ALONG. Or could it be that NPR HAS CREATED A MONSTER? As usual, we can say a big thanks for ruining everything to the folks at NPR, always so hard-working and well-intentioned, just like Dr. Frankenstein. HE WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP. Speaking of Halloween, you will be relieved to hear we found our copy of SON OF DRACULA. Anyway, to compare Larry King's tweets to "outsider art" is insulting to "outsider art." "Outsider art" IS "self-aware" and to suggest otherwise is also insulting. The term "outsider art" is probably insulting. WHAT IF WE CALL IT ART? Okay! WHAT ELSE? Ace told Dr. Theresa and me that we were BOTH wrong about one of his lines in NIGHT OF THE LOUP GAROU. His character actually says, "It is time to rock and roll... like the Mickey Mouse." No wonder we misunderstood! Mickey Mouse neither rocks NOR rolls. You heard it here first at "All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up." Until next time, keep "reaching" for the "stars"!

To and Fro

Hey remember in the Geneva Bible when God asks the devil, "Where commeft thou?" and the devil says, "From copafsing the earth to and fro, and from walking in it"? You're probably wondering about my recent travels in the same way! Okay, you twisted my arm. But to understand my wandering properly we have to go way back to when my glasses fell off my head in the lobby of a swank New York City hotel some months ago. I lost a very nice silver pen in that same lobby! And Megan Abbott gave me a pen to replace it. Was the replacement a fancy silver pen? No! It was one Megan picked up in a hotel during her own travels. This pen was a gift from the heart! And cheap though it may have been, it was of an unusual and pleasing shade of blue, its body made of a sturdy, semi-opaque plastic, I believe. It advertised a company called Kimpton, which owns hotels and restaurants, apparently. So on my recent trip to Birmingham to do a reading, I thought I had left the pen Megan gave me behind in a bank! But when I came home it was just sitting there on the TV tray. While in my Birmingham hotel room, I distractedly watched the shoe factory show. Hey remember on GILMORE GIRLS when Luke had a daughter with another woman and that woman was angry when Lorelai (who was dating Luke at the time) hung out with the daughter and it caused problems in Lorelai's relationship? Well, now they are making Lauren Graham go through that plot line again on the shoe factory show, just like the other time they stole a plot from GILMORE GIRLS and marched Lorelai, I mean, Lauren Graham, through it. Lauren Graham is like some doomed soul, forced always to reenact the same torments! What a bummer. While I was watching the shoe factory show, Dr. Theresa was back in Oxford, having an elegant dinner with Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls and T. Cooper, whom she had introduced on the Thacker Mountain radio program earlier in the evening. THEN! It was on to New Orleans, where I saw many of my fave former students from back when I used to teach: Abby, Elizabeth (wearing her mother's prom dress from 1968!), Burke, Rachel and SKIN MAG, Ryan, and Anya (wearing a wedding dress because IT WAS HER WEDDING DAY, a happy occasion I wouldn't have missed for the world). It was a lovely ceremony on the porch of an old house, the kind of house where I kept looking up at the attic windows expecting to see a gently approving ghost but I didn't. Burke gave me a book with this great first sentence: "Art has a way of undermining all aesthetic theories." Just like Jerry Lewis! I added the part about Jerry Lewis. On the drive back to Oxford, "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys came on the radio and I suddenly remembered going to see a feature-length documentary about the theremin back in Atlanta with Dr. Theresa - I think it was just called THEREMIN - and Brian Wilson was interviewed in it about the memorable theremin part in "Good Vibrations." You know how Brian Wilson thinks and talks. He's a genius! And he comes off very open and vulnerable and eccentric sometimes. And I think he said the theremin was scary and made him think of sex. Is that what he said? So, the director of THEREMIN was there for this screening (and as I recall, so was Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer!) and in the Q&A session afterward, some fool in the audience asked the director if it was "hard not to laugh" when interviewing Brian Wilson and the director shot back with shocked sincerity, "No, it's hard not to cry." And that came back to me so vividly while I was driving that I was completely absorbed in experiencing that memory and sort of forgot I was driving. Has that ever happened to you? Don't do that! It's not safe! Dr. Theresa snapped me out of it. And then I started thinking that Brian Wilson's genius might be profitably compared to Jerry Lewis's in its directness. When Kelly Hogan was just visiting us, she was trying to learn a Brian Wilson song for an upcoming performance. Hogan expounded thoughtfully on the lyrics "I wrote a number down but I lost it/ So I searched through my pocket book, I couldn't find it/ So I sat and concentrated on the number and/ Slowly it came to me so I dialed it/ And I let it ring a few times, there was no answer/ So I let it ring a little more, still no answer" and their relationship to the complex transparency of Brian Wilson (which is different than Jerry's complex transparency). Complex transparency! (It comes to me just now that the theremin documentary featured a clip of Jerry's encounter with a theremin in THE DELICATE DELINQUENT.)

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?

Sexy Vacation

Ha ha, the Banana Guards sure were dumb on last night's ADVENTURE TIME episode! During the meeting when we were talking about that outline I believe I said something like, "Why aren't these guys more on the ball thanks to Root Beer Guy?" (As you may recall, he was promoted to the position of their captain, and maybe because I did his voice I was especially upset that he wasn't apparently too good at his job.) Someone - was it me? - suggested that Root Beer Guy was on a "sexy vacation with his wife"... a line that actually made it into the episode for a little while before being cut somewhere along the way. But it remains in one form: this delightful promotional poster that storyboard artist Seo Kim did for the episode. Look, she even has his little cell phone vibrating with emergency on the table next to him, and he's (I choose to believe) drinking from a coconut with a straw - something I once did in Los Angeles for an ADVENTURE TIME meeting, though that's just a happy coincidence.

Warm Last Night

It was strangely warm last night. Here we are on the balcony of the City Grocery Bar: Dr. Theresa, Bill Boyle, Megan Abbott, me (creeping around in the background as usual), and Ace Atkins. We were there to mark various milestones. One of the happiest is Bill's debut novel GRAVESEND, which is finally out in physical form. We all got one. You should get one too! GRAVESEND by William Boyle. Look for it wherever fine books are sold, and tell 'em "Bloggy" the "Blog" Mascot sent you! Ace and Bill rightly smoked big fat cigars to celebrate. It took us a while to nab a spot on the balcony: at first it was occupied completely by an Elaine Stritch convention! Ha ha, they didn't really look exactly like Elaine Stritch circa Stephen Sondheim's COMPANY, but a distinct "Ladies Who Lunch" vibe was coming off the balcony. The first time Dr. Theresa and Ace went to scope out the situation, one of the Elaine Stritches grabbed the lone empty chair on the balcony and pulled it slowly toward herself with forbidding proprietary certitude. Much in the spirit of the feisty Elaine Stritch! Before stepping over to the bar I bought so many books at Square Books I don't even want to tell you. (Look: you can see the overstuffed, wrinkled brown paper bag of books right there on the table.) My eye fell upon George Singleton's recent story collection STRAY DECORUM, for example, and what could I do but get it, especially after the one-two punch of that great interview with George in LENT MAGAZINE? But what sealed the deal was opening it at random and seeing my new favorite short-story title. George also came up with my former favorite short-story title, "This Itches, Y'all." And here is the new winner: "I Think I Have What Sharon's Got."

Deciduous

"Do you exist?" Ace Atkins asked McNeil to his face the other night, settling a question - we hope! - that has persistently plagued the "blog." McNeil affirmed that he does indeed exist. Barry B., who was also in town for my birthday, reported that, back in Atlanta, Phil recently remarked again upon his disbelief in McNeil - RECENTLY! - which seems incredible, given that Phil once sent McNeil something in the mail. Did he think he was mailing something to a ghost? Oh, how we stubbornly ignore the evidence in front of our eyes. While he was in town McNeil inspected the cashew tree he mailed me for my birthday, speaking of mail. I have to say, it's looking kind of sickly. I think often of the song "Grandfather's Clock," which is about some old dude who dies when his clock stops ticking (or his clock stops ticking when he dies) and I worry about keeping the birthday cashew tree alive on similar principles of sympathetic magic. But I draw some consolation from SIBLEY'S GUIDE TO TREES, which I've been coveting at Square Books, and which my sister and brother-in-law kindly got me for my birthday (yes, they were also in town! As you will see, everyone was in town. It was really nice! And though I kept saying NO PRESENTS, people gave me stuff, perhaps most startlingly Bill Griffith, who strode across Snackbar with a machete [for me]. "Like ADVENTURE TIME, get it?" he said). For example, I read about deciduous trees in the introduction, and took some comfort from looking at the sickly tree and thinking, "Oh! It's deciduous, that's all. Yes, that's what a deciduous tree must look like." Sometimes we can deceive ourselves with our fancy book-learning, maybe! As far as I can tell, this kind of straight-up cashew tree doesn't generally grow in the United States, though trees in "the cashew family" (including various pistachios) do. "Many species in the family exude a blackish resin from broken twigs and develop blackish spots on the leaves." Check! "Many species in the cashew family... have toxic oils in their leaves and stems." Gosh! Poison ivy and poison oak are related to the cashew. Gee! Yesterday I was thankfully able to point out to McNeil a few new, tender shoots on the cashew tree, nestled among the blackening and withering leaves. But we're not here to talk about trees! I'm sure the main thing you'd like to know is whether we had another "McNeil's Movie Korner Film Festival" while McNeil was here. We did not. And yet a peculiar mini-film-festival did occur. Dr. Theresa and Leslie (who was also in town: see?) were idly flipping around the movie channels for something to watch when they came across THREE FUGITIVES, that Martin Short/Nick Nolte team-up that everyone was probably waiting for once upon a time. Some quality of the film - Dr. Theresa and Leslie referred to it as "flatness" - they found compelling and numbing. I came in after they had already succumbed to the flatfooted vibe it exerted. McNeil came in to find all three of us staring dumbly at THREE FUGITIVES. Martin Short is an an unwilling bank robber who needs money for his moppet of a daughter who has LOST THE ABILITY TO SPEAK. "Charlie Chaplin has a lot to answer for," I said at one point. (I think it was a long shot of the Little Girl Who Couldn't Talk alone at the very end of a park bench, her hands folded in her lap, and Martin Short was really pushing the wet-eyed, gulping sad clown thing, to use Bruce Handy's definition of the term, which is looser than mine.) Late in the film Dr. Theresa and Leslie came out of the coma-like trances into which THREE FUGITIVES had lulled them for a segment in which Martin Short is forced to pretend to be a pregnant woman, Nick Nolte "her" concerned husband and the little girl is transformed into the "couple's" little boy. The academic portions of their brains kicked into overdrive at the sight of the gruff loner Nolte learning to be a "true man" by performing the role of the "man." Perhaps he, without changing his physical appearance, was in the most elaborate "drag" of all! The next day (or was it the day after?) in the post-celebration haze, a groggy Dr. Theresa and Leslie felt they "needed" another movie exhibiting the same "flatness" as THREE FUGITIVES, and charged me with finding one that was just beginning on one of the movie channels, which is how we came by chance to FEDS, a buddy comedy starring Rebecca De Mornay and Mary Gross (pictured) as would-be FBI agents. Once again I was moved to say, "Charlie Chaplin has a lot to answer for," but I can't remember why. Besides, the real phantoms hanging over both THREE FUGITIVES and FEDS were Martin and Lewis, of course. Martin Short (who often impersonates Lewis) and Mary Gross are the child-like ids (Mary Gross in a gun shop sticks a pistol in the front of her pants and does a strange, wiggling Jerry-like dance) while De Mornay and Nolte are the loners, the smooth operators, who learn to allow themselves to become dependent on their "weaker" counterparts. (And, as McNeil pointed out during the cross-dressing sequence of THREE FUGITIVES, Jerry often took the "female" role, appearing, for example, in remakes of THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR and NOTHING SACRED in the parts originally played by Ginger Rogers and Carole Lombard.) Ha ha ha, I know nobody is reading this! McNeil (who came over in time to catch almost all of FEDS) wondered whether there was a sequel, a FEDS 2, and though it seemed obvious that no one had scrambled for a follow-up buddy comedy from Mary Gross and Rebecca De Mornay, McNeil checked his iPhone, just to make sure. And of course there was no FEDS 2. Yet a sequence that played over the final credits seemed to promise just that. The ridiculous optimism we need in order to continue living! Leslie argued with force and clarity that both THREE FUGITIVES and FEDS were about the fact that we become the roles we perform. Then some great monster in the scheduling department saw to it that CONTINENTAL DIVIDE came on right after FEDS. What a double feature! As no one felt capable of movement, we sat through CONTINENTAL DIVIDE - marking the second time I have seen it in four months, a preposterous circumstance I never would have believed had some Cassandra informed me of it in advance. Yet Leslie, who had never seen it, championed CONTINENTAL DIVIDE for a long spell, repeating "I don't see why this movie is 'bad,'" at a number of points. Well into the second act she spoke of its charms convincingly, citing, for instance, the cinematography that made everything in Chicago look like "old Polaroids," and exclaiming when Blair Brown busted up the shotguns of some eagle poachers against a rock that it was just the kind of thing she (Leslie) always fantasized about doing. But soon, beaten down by the movie's numerous willful missteps, she gave up, finally concluding that CONTINENTAL DIVIDE seemed like a movie that was stitched together entirely of scenes that had been edited out of some other movie. McNeil pointed out that it aspired to the condition of the "screwball comedy," yet lacked that genre's essential ingredient: unnatural speed. The director, he thought, could have improved the movie a lot simply by getting everyone to talk faster. Thwarted by a misguided allegiance to so-called "realism"! Hey, I don't want you to think we only watched movies. Leslie also went through an old community cookbook reading recipe titles and we'd make up songs about them - or, more accurately, imagine who might have recorded a song with such a name, like "Impossible Cheeseburger Pie" (Bob Dylan) and "Baptist Pound Cake" (Leonard Cohen; "Baptist Pound Cake" being a sexy, taboo metaphor - some woman takes pity on Leonard Cohen and feeds him "Baptist Pound Cake" in "the alley behind the church.") In summation: 1) Sometimes we can deceive ourselves with our fancy book-learning. 2) We stubbornly ignore the evidence in front of us. 3) We become the roles we perform. 4) Ridiculous optimism is required for the merest survival. These seem like terrible birthday lessons! So why was everything so much fun?