Kinda Scary

I half-watched some of a Frank Capra movie on TCM last night and I'm not gonna say it reminded me of David Lynch, even though it did, but I am aware that everything reminds me of David Lynch now because I just watched a lot of David Lynch.

(Megan Abbott did point out the IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE quality of the recent TWIN PEAKS finale.) But the title of the Capra movie I half-watched is A HOLE IN THE HEAD, which isn't comforting, is it? So Frank Sinatra and his little son are trying to sleep and Carolyn Jones suddenly appears in their window, dancing in her swimsuit and long gloves. It was supposed to be funny! But it struck me as eerie. Once again, this is all my own fault. Then Carolyn Jones shows up with a whole apple in her mouth and strikes a Laura Palmer pose:

The way Sinatra expresses affection for his son is to say he's gonna sock him or punch him or "flatten" him. He's consistently violent in his love imagery, but we never think he's really gonna flatten his son. At one point he says wistfully, "He's a funny kid, you know? I could beat him up, anything, leave him someplace, and I bet he'd still love me. Kinda scary." KINDA!

The background (and foreground) is filled with strange, silent animals, for which I choose this monkey that blows bubbles as representative. The monkey that blows bubbles is next to a photo of Eleanor Parker's husband and son, whom she matter-of-factly describes drowning together before her eyes. Frank Sinatra's little boy is immediately taken with Eleanor Parker because (I think it's obvious) she is like his dead mother come back to life.

She catches the little boy staring at her because she reminds him so much of his dead mother (I believe is the subtext) and gives him a sultry wink as he peeps at her from behind a porcelain dog. Oh, and Dub Taylor works the desk at Frank Sinatra's hotel, where they use the same kind of keychains you get at the Great Northern.

You know, I really have more screen shots than I know what to do with. You should see the ones I'm skipping. There was this disturbingly infantile character (below), a very poor man's Jerry Lewis, who, in his father's words, "runs to the toilet" whenever there's a customer in the store (the same father, Edward G. Robinson, who complains about his "underwear crawling up" on him, a complaint I do not recall hearing expressed so bluntly - or indeed at all - in any other 50s movies; does he say "crawling" or "creeping"? Does it matter?) and you know how much Jerry Lewis reminds me of David Lynch, even though this is not Jerry Lewis, just a tulpa.

I hardly know what to end with.

Well, here's a guy in a white dinner jacket with a pistol on a diving board. Moments later he will pretend to shoot himself in the head with a blank for a laugh, but I don't think that's where the title comes from.

We'll Meet Again

Well I just went to Los Angeles on my final ADVENTURE TIME trip. And though my jottings in my precious book of jottings in which I jot whenever I go on a trip have decreased as my "blog" dwindles into the oblivion it so richly deserves, I feel one last round of thorough jotting transcription is in order on such a melancholy occasion. So let's see what I jotted. The plane landed! I made it to Cartoon Network in Burbank just in time for a meeting. I leapt out of the cab, tripped over my own suitcase and landed brutally upon my knees. "This trip is starting out well!" I probably mused sardonically with my famed sardonicism. I had to use the Cartoon Network first aid kit, which was top notch. Now! I always like to buy a big bottle of seltzer at the grocery store across the street to have in my hotel room, as future biographers will be interested to note. So, once safely in my room, or so I thought, I opened my seltzer bottle to have my ceremonial first sip and seltzer went everywhere! It went on important stuff that shouldn't get seltzer on it. I was beginning to think the trip was cursed, and I was already bummed out because of its elegiac nature. Also, Adam Muto had STIRRED HIS COFFEE WITH A KNIFE during lunch that day! I had a roommate from Wisconsin a long time ago, and once when I stirred with a knife he said, "Stir with a knife, stir up strife!" I had never heard such a thing. But I immediately added it to my catalog of superstitions. So I was inclined to blame Adam for the ill-augured nature of the trip, though Kent reminded me that I fell down and scraped my knees BEFORE Adam stirred his coffee with a knife. I'm not sure that matters! The next morning I woke up with a piece of grit or something in my eye. My eye was swollen and red and the lid was drooping down and the corner of that eye emitted a constant stream of ugly tears. "Well, I can't go anywhere. I guess I will sit in the hotel room and clean out my wallet." Such was the content of my thoughts. "I guess this is how I am spending my last ADVENTURE TIME trip." I threw away a big pile of scrap paper from my wallet, keeping just three things: 1. My ticket stub from when Kent and I went to see 50 SHADES OF GREY. 2. Something funny I wrote down that Bill Boyle said when he was drunk. 3. My visitor's pass from when Julia and I secretly skulked around the GILMORE GIRLS set while they were shooting. Then came a knock at the door. It was Steve Wolfhard bringing me eyedrops! What a pal. Steve's thoughtful gesture allowed me to leave for a meeting I had in Beverly Hills with some degree of confidence. My eye was still bothering me a little when I sat down to a fancy lunch in fancy Beverly Hills. (This was not a lunch meeting; the meeting came later. I was alone.) I ordered a bitters and soda and when I squeezed a lime wedge into it, the lime juice squirted into my "good" eye, for I was wearing my glasses atop my head as I am prone to do. The curse had not yet lifted, I felt, despite Steve's kind gesture. (Oh yes, that reminds me, Steve and I were staying at the same hotel, the one where the guy who plays Squidward always hangs out in the lobby. One evening I came down to the lobby to find Steve sitting right next to Squidward on a banquette, entirely unawares! So I wrote Steve this important note in my ever-present jotting book.)

For my Beverly Hills lunch I had a salad of poached shrimp. There were some hearts of palm in there and some special, hairy radishes. The couple at the end of the bar ordered the same. What a piece of work these two were! First the salad didn't have the kind of hearts of palm they like. Then there weren't enough. They decided they wanted a whole bowl of hearts of palm so they could distribute them throughout the salad in their own inimitable way. But not that kind. They wanted them chopped into a different shape. Then the dressing was too sweet and there wasn't enough of it. And so on. They sent their plates back like six times. Beverly Hills! Well, I liked my salad so much I decided I was going to come back to this place for dinner after my meeting. There would be a whole different dinner menu upstairs! And so I did. That night, the guy seated at the table next to me, very close, asked if he were disturbing me by using a little light to look at the menu. I said not at all! I told him that I had used my candle for the same purpose and had burned my hand, in keeping with my cursed journey. Then I said, "Pardon me, are you an actor?" And he said yes. And I said - and I said it in exactly this peculiar and formal way - "Are you, in fact, Timothy Dalton?" And he said yes. So in a minute I got up and went to the spacious and lavishly appointed Beverly Hills men's room and called Ace Atkins (rudely forgetting the time difference) and told him I was sitting next to a James Bond, because I knew he'd want to know at once. Ace is a James Bond expert! Oh! I forgot to tell you. Flashback to an hour earlier! While I was waiting downstairs for the restaurant upstairs to open for dinner, I sat at the bar where I had enjoyed my luncheon of poached shrimp and watched a 70-year-old French woman (she herself mentioned her age) being - I am almost certain - flattered and cozened by a down-at-the-heels gigolo! Beverly Hills USA! Well, I felt heartened after my encounter with Timothy Dalton. I felt that he had lifted the curse! And so he had.

Why, the very next night I met Lyle Partridge and Steve and Pen and Sam Alden and Ryan Pequin (of THE REGULAR SHOW) at the Club Tee Gee, a dive with glitter on the ceiling, where I played a bunch of Kelly Hogan songs on the jukebox and Ryan took this picture of Lyle and me!

Lyle drew a lot of great pictures on Post-It notes so now I have those in my wallet with that other stuff I mentioned earlier. At one point I told the story of the time I got lost in the North Georgia woods and

Lyle drew this depiction, the accuracy of which you will appreciate if you go back and read the story. Sam was describing what he called the "hubristic death" of one of his eccentric ancestors and I ask idly if he also happened to be related to John Alden. And he is! He is the direct descendent of John and Priscilla Alden, one of the greatest love stories in American history! Boy was my mom excited when I called her from the airport the next day and told her. "Speak for yourself, John," Mom said, quoting Priscilla, and then demanded a picture of Sam so she could look at him. Okay! "It's no big deal, they had thirteen children," Sam said, implying that half the people in the room were probably the descendants of John and Priscilla Alden, I guess. We all loaded up and went to a party that Kent was throwing for all your favorite ADVENTURE TIME writers and artists, past and present. I sat on the floor next to Ako Castuera and we sang a bunch of songs associated with David Lynch movies.

We sang "Blue Velvet" and "I Told Every Little Star" and "In Dreams." We sang these songs at the top of our lungs half-recumbent on the floor on some sort of shaggy pillow in the middle of the room while people were trying to do other stuff and get on with their lives. On Kent's balcony, we sang "We'll Meet Again" not once but twice at widely separated key moments. Not a David Lynch song but a sentimental choice for the occasion. You know what? I'm leaving a lot of stuff out. A LOT! I feel rushed and weird in my gut because I have my last ADVENTURE TIME meeting in a couple of hours. And I'm not "blogging" anymore, anyway, as you can see. No, but really, I have twice as many pages of jottings that I didn't even get to. But everything has to end, even ADVENTURE TIME, even jottings, even parties. The day after the party Pen brought Kent a bag of fried chicken to cure his headache and I rode along. You know how Kent loves his chicken, ha ha ha! What a life. It had been raining and the sign on Kent's gate was smeared and wistful.

Pen and I had been eating at a shawarma place and noticed a tray of unexpected fried chicken glowing in a golden, almost holy light in the kitchen. It seemed like a sign! A sign for Kent. You don't believe me about this glowing chicken but I'll show you if Pen will send the photo he was compelled to take by the majesty of this glowing chicken of which I speak. [And he just did! - ed.]

The Wistful Rector

Big lightning storm came up and the satellite went out (during THREE ON A COUCH!) so I leafed through one of the ghost books I bought at the Strand. Good weather for it. "The ghost of Archbishop Laud is said to roll his head across the floor" is one enjoyable thing I read. (See also.) This book is called GAZETTEER OF BRITISH GHOSTS by Peter Underwood. At one point Mr. Underwood refers to "My friend Granville Squiers, who made a study of secret hiding places." I like everything about that. Mr. Underwood personally investigated many of the haunted spots in his book. I liked his description of one of his informants: "I found Mr Merryweather to be a large, astute and kindly man, then in his sixties, level-headed and sensible, with an infectious sense of humor and a gift for looking on the bright side of things." I'll say! Mr. Merryweather was the rector at a haunted church where (at the adjacent Manor House) he "turned from the window and... 'moved into the unmistakable embrace of a naked young woman.' This singular tactual phenomenon lasted only a few seconds: 'one wild, frantic embrace and she was gone' as Mr. Merryweather put it." I also liked this report from the Tower of London: "A few days later one of the sentries at the Jewel House maintained that he saw a figure which reminded him of a large bear 'issuing' from under the door of the Jewel Room!" Those quotation marks and that exclamation point really hit the spot. And a ghost shaped like a bear! Coming from under a door! "Issuing" from under it! The door to the Jewel Room! What more could you ask for? But I read the rest of the paragraph and the story had a tragic conclusion, with the poor rattled sentry coming to no good end. (Pictured, Mr. Merryweather's haunted church, which was demolished in 1962.)

McNeil and McGee

Email from McNeil! "Reading DARKER THAN AMBER (1966)," he writes. "I'm 3 pages into it and Travis [McGee] is just as sexist as he was in the last novel (DRESS HER IN INDIGO). So that's comforting," McNeil adds sardonically, though he does note for the record that "someone is referred to as owl-like" in the latter. He also says INDIGO has a noticeable "gay streak... everyone is gay. It's like drug use = gayness." I'm not sure what he means by that last equation. I think he's saying that the book posits a direct correlation. I'll ask! (I did ask, and McNeil replied that the characters in the book "on the wrong side of the law - and even those who walk near the border of illegality - engage in a homosexual act at some point, whether they actually take drugs or not. I think even these characters - the non drug takers - administer drugs or sell them, though. I may be wrong about it, but that's the way I remember it.") Another email from McNeil, contemplating a blurb about John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee series: "'He's the Dickens of mid-century America' - Boston Globe. I wonder which Dickens book they had in mind? Reading DARKER THAN AMBER now (at work). On page 20." McNeil then summarizes DARKER THAN AMBER up to page 20 as "The regular McGee on steroids." He notes that McGee's hairy sidekick goes around introducing McGee as "the handsome one." "It must be nice," McNeil muses wistfully. I'm going to try to get Ace Atkins to comment on all this. McNeil and I were talking about the (SPOILER ALERT) baroque death scene of McGee's romantic interest in A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD and it reminded me of the time Ace actually managed to spoil the entire Travis McGee series for me! Which I am about to do for you in turn. We were at Megan Abbott's apartment when she was living here in town. I think it was the night we watched SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT. Ace told me THE TURQUOISE LAMENT was unusual because "the woman doesn't die." And then he told me the terrible secret of every Travis McGee novel: "The woman always dies," said Ace. (And now I am remembering a conversation that Ace and I had a while back, in which he noted MacDonald's penchant for getting McGee together with physically powerful women, which I had already noticed in a secondary relationship in A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD. Ace mentioned a book - I can't remember which one - in which McGee becomes involved with a woman who can lift a car.)

Wistful Urchin Face

I watched the first three minutes of that Red Skelton sad clown movie. Guess who (according to the credits) is in the Red Skelton sad clown movie and TWIN PEAKS? Jane Greer! (And guess who's in TWIN PEAKS and this season of JUSTIFIED, which I was coincidentally dvr'ing while watching TWIN PEAKS? Alicia Witt!) The Red Skelton sad clown movie starts out with the clown and his kid, who has strategic smudges of dirt daubed on his wistful urchin face for extra wistfulness and urchin cred, AND a Goober hat! Red Skelton runs onstage and a dwarf tries to hit him with a plank, to the delight of all. Then Red Skelton shocks the dwarf in the behind with something like a cattle prod. Then Red Skelton and the dwarf use their weapons to very aggressively and without warning harass the paying customers of an amusement park. That's their job! That's a weird job.

Eating Chicken in the USA

Hey I should tell you about some chicken I ate this weekend when I was on a road trip - I felt like a regular Kent Osborne, ha ha! He loves chicken! I stopped at a buffet restaurant in or around a town called D'Lo, Mississippi. Isn't that an odd name? According to a section of wikipedia with zero footnotes, there are a few theories about the origin of the name, including this one: "old maps from 16th-century French explorers show that they labeled the D'Lo area around the Strong River with the words 'De l'eau sans potable.' This translates as 'bad drinking water.'" That's what it says on wikipedia! So I chose chicken and green beans and macaroni and cheese with peach cobbler for dessert, and I also threw in some fried chicken livers at some point, or so I thought, in honor of Dr. Theresa, who loves chicken livers but was not there, but I am not sure after all that those things I put in my mouth were chicken livers. I just don't know what they were. The consistency was mysterious. Everything else was great, though! Every table had a napkin holder on it, and to every napkin holder was affixed a homemade ad for stun guns you could buy out of somebody's house! All right, let us move on to this photo that McNeil sent me. Look, it is me being young in that dumb hat I told you about, of which I was so proud. And there's McNeil, proving his existence once again. "I'm actually rosy-cheeked here," McNeil notes wistfully.

No One Cares

An aptly titled "post" in so many ways! Yet somehow I go on. Checking the "blog" archives, I can hardly believe I have never mentioned the Frank Sinatra album NO ONE CARES here. Megan Abbott and I have discussed it quite a bit. Frank sounds like he's about to have a nervous collapse on a couple of the numbers! And one of them can only - ONLY! (and Megan and I have wracked our brains for other options) - be interpreted as Frank's wistful love song to a hobo. You'll know it when you hear it. Well, a character in BIG SUR mentions Frank and sings a few bars of the title track. I thought you'd want to know. You don't.

A Gourmand of Adulation

Did you miss me? What? You didn't even notice I was gone? Okay! That hurts. I went to Baltimore to read my story "Sex Devil" to an auditorium full of teenage boys at a prep school, I guess you call it. John Brandon set the whole thing up and it was great to get to hang out with him again. And let me say that if you ever want to read my story "Sex Devil" out loud, an auditorium full of teenage boys turns out to be the best place to do it. As usual, I jotted down a few things that happened to me on my little trip and I hope you will find them entertaining. 1) You know I don't like to fly. But the flight attendant on the first plane I took made me feel better. As he was making his announcements over the loudspeaker he said of the pilot and co-pilot, "They're going to fly this tube like they stole it and land it like they own it." His confidence cheered me up! Overpriced gin at the airport bar also helped a lot. 2) On the airplane I read passages from a book called NEW YORK DIARIES: 1609-2009, which consisted of excerpts from New York City diaries from 1609-2009. One guy called Andrew Jackson "a gourmand of adulation." I thought that was pretty good. Dawn Powell had some nice things to say about MAD magazine in her diary. She seemed to be a big fan, which I never would have guessed. She said it was good that they underpaid their writers to keep them "bitter and irreverent." She said a lot more stuff about MAD magazine but too bad I accidentally left the book on the airplane when I got to Baltimore so I can't tell you what they were. Nor can I be too specific about the diarist who went to George Washington's inauguration and was so disappointed and whining about George Washington's stupid hand gestures, which the diarist hated. He also made fun of John Adams for seeming to forget what he was going to say and just standing there gawking at George Washington. This guy was full of complaints about Washington's inauguration, that's how I remember it, but I lost the book. 3) As we strolled around the grounds of the prep school, John Brandon said, "Look at these foggy, wistful athletic fields." 4) John took me to a nice restaurant which was perversely serving as an appetizer special a duck egg in which a baby duck had begun to form! Egads! We did not order it. "One guy got a couple of feathers," our server said encouragingly.

What Killed Benny

Megan Abbott sent me this video ("click" here) of Joey Heatherton performing a song including the lines "Look what they've done to my brain/ Picked it like a chicken bone" (!). Naturally, I dispatched it to Phil Oppenheim for analysis right away. Noting that it apparently comes from a Jack Benny TV special, Phil asked, possibly rhetorically, "Is that what killed Benny?" I also came across a video of Raquel Welch singing "Bang Bang," adorned with the usual youtube comments seething with barely concealed nostalgia-fueled rage. "Is there anything more inspiring for a man than a woman?" one commenter wistfully asks. FULL DISCLOSURE: I vaguely recall that when I was a kid I had a copy of this song (not the Joey Heatherton version!), maybe on the B side of a 45. But I have no recollection of the part about somebody picking somebody's brain like a chicken bone.

McNeil Sad About Curtains

McNeil wants the curtains in the old photo that came to us via Michael Kupperman. You know McNeil and his curtains! "What about the owl?" I suggested. "You can buy a stuffed owl anywhere," McNeil said with surprising authority. "Those curtains don't exist anymore." He sounded tough. But all the while his heart was breaking!

Did Megan Abbott Dream Rip Torn's Beatnik Turtleneck?

Megan Abbott intrigued and tormented me by saying that she "almost wrote" about Rip and Bob in CRITIC'S CHOICE. She asks whether I remember Rip's "beatnik turtleneck" in the film. "Or did I dream it?" she asks wistfully.

Apples In the Rain

"I was going to send a picture of the apple," said McNeil, "but it was raining." "You should have sent it anyway. I would have called it 'Apples In the Rain,'" I said wistfully.

The Good News

Here is some good news I have been working up my nerve to spill. I got a surprising phone call a week ago. I was invited, out of the blue, to be the 2007-8 John and Renee Grisham Writer-In-Residence at Ole Miss. We have had so many nice times and met so many good people in Oxford. Every time Theresa and I visit, we get wistful and speculate about what it would be like to live there. Now we will have a chance to find out, and not too long from now, either (I start at the beginning of the academic year). We've been told that the window of my "study" where I am expected to write (not "blog"!) looks out onto Faulkner's yard. Well, we're still taking turns pinching one another over here. Of course, that has nothing to do with the news. But this is a great honor and a rare opportunity.