Darkness Dispelled

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I was on the road to Damascus in 2018, sitting in the darkest back row of the Singletary Concert Hall for my fifth viewing of that year’s It’s a Grand for Singing (a hugely popular show-music extravaganza, mounted by the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre), when the light hit me.

I was listening to three dying soldiers in the show The Civil War dictating a message to their fathers;


“…I tried to remember you are judged by what you do while passing through.”
I was jarred.

Live performance can do that to you.

That concept had been important to me until the last two years. I hadn’t thought about it as much lately. I’ve been too busy following the daily outrages of the Trump Family & Friends Traveling Salvation and Snake Medicine Show.
Before that carnival hit town, I had resisted successfully the dubious lure of reality TV.
Honey Boo-Boo, roguish pawnbrokers, Kardashians, and dynasties of ducks claimed not one minute of my attention…not one minute. Then I had allowed the Trump Reality Show powered by the 24/7/365 news industry to hijack my focus. I now am urgently convinced of the higher urgency of Melania’s jacket, Hilary’s emails, and Donald’s tax obscurity instead of the abandonment of NATO, neighborly relationships with countries that actually share our borders, and most of the progress for health care made in the last ten years.

Interlude #1
People who farm are called farmers.
People who work are called workers.
People who earn are called earners.
People who loot…
A few minutes after the soldiers’ number, a single plaintive voice grew to three voices, then to ten, then to about forty voices reassuring us from the show Dear Evan Hansen;
“Even when the dark comes crashing through, when you need a friend to carry you, and when you’re broken on the ground……you will be found.”
Forty young voices singing what our leaders should be offering in response to daily reports of rising suicide rates of our youth, our veterans, our rural communities, and even our successful. Instead, we are distracted by chants of “Lock her up!” and self-pitying name-calling tweets of “witch hunt”, “me”, “no collusion”, “ME”, “fake news”, and “M-E-E-E!!”
Tweeting and chanting are legitimate forms of expression. Singing is better.

Interlude #2
People who sing are called singers.
People who act are called actors.
People who write are called writers.
People who tell stories are called storytellers.
People who mock the afflicted…
People who lie…
The show closed gloriously with a stage-full of circus-clad passion and hope from The Greatest Showman;
“But I won’t let them break me down to dust. I know that there’s a place for us…for we are glorious!”
Damn straight.
The reality show people may lie, loot, despoil, degrade, mock, and commit treason. They may then flee justice or even flee the country. But they will pass and be judged by what they did while passing through…as will we all. I’m good wit’ dat.

We will rebuild and restore and fix and repair. For we are glorious.
Interlude #3
People who teach are called teachers.
People who nurture are called nurturers.
People who heal are called healers.
People who restore are called restorers.
People who believe…
People who resist……
Literature, drama, poetry, music, and art have become time windows through which we can look back to before 2016 and be reminded of the glorious path we were on before the reality show took over. We can recapture our distracted momentum.
There will be damage to undo. We have undone damage before.
I think I know where we can find about forty young voices and citizens to help.

I believe they will resist…for they are glorious.

A Dream Cast…in a Nightmare

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Lexington has theatre this week! I’m reminded of a dream cast from antebellum days. You can pick whichever “bellum” you prefer, I’m sure this “ante’s” them all.

Imagine, if you will, a show in Lexington with a cast consisting of Trish Clark, Jane Dewey, Eric Johnson, Kevin Hardesty and Paul Thomas.

Sweeter than sweet. If you’re the director of that cast your duties are basically to turn on the lights at rehearsal, yes?

Now, imagine that show being not so hot.

In fact, imagine it being thoroughly shredded by the Herald’s reviewer.

As Tom Waits so elegantly puts it;

“Impossible you say?

Beyond the realm of possibility?

Nah!”

It can and did happen. I have the scars.

All it takes is a director with little directorial experience, even less experience with improvisational farce, and no real vision beyond “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?” (I’m reminded of Mickey Rooney’s immortal query; “Hey! Why don’t we put on a show!!”).

If you’re lookin’ for a director of your production of Bullshot Crummond with exactly that resumé, I’m your guy.

This was back in the early, early years of Actors Guild when they were performing in the basement of Levas’ Restaurant on Vine Street. The cast worked hard. Kevin played about eight different characters. Eric played two, including one duet scene with himself (a dream come true for him, I’m sure). Trish was ultra-sultry. Jane was innocent and dizzy. Paul was checking out the locations of the exits. All were trying to figure how to get new agents when they had no agents to begin with.

What can I say?

The show seemed funny to me. (BUZZER! Thank you for playing, Mr. Leasor.)

Then came opening night and we played our farce to an audience of seven (7) (VII)…plus the reviewer (Tom Carter).

It was a long night’s journey into sad.

(Fade to…)

The next morning I awoke to the devastating review. Tom summed things up by saying “Leasor has done his friends the disservice of casting them in roles for which they are not suited.”

Harsh.

My wife, Janie removed the poison/razor/gun from my hand and convinced me that though life was obviously no longer worth living it was still necessary to do so as we still owed a lot of money on the house.

Therefore, my next concern was how to help my cast through this undeserved (on their part) catastrophe.

I called an acquaintance who owned a t-shirt shop, set the wheels of foolishness in motion, and that night each member of the cast found, at their make-up station a bright red t-shirt that read “I am NOT Roger Leasor’s friend, please cast me”.

It seemed to help break the ice.

After that evening’s show, Eric went out for his post-show “snack” to Columbia’s Steakhouse (that Nighthawk Special and a Diego Salad always serves well when it’s time for a little something to take the edge off at midnight). He was resplendent in his new t-shirt. Guess who was standing at the bar…none other than the reviewer himself. Eric, of course, diplomat that he is, made sure Tom saw the shirt…less than 24 hours after the review was written!

Lexington’s a small town at heart. I saw Tom at lunch the next week at the Saratoga (the “Toga” always served well when a wedge and a chicken-fried steak was needed to take the edge off at noon). He was gracious and impressed with the alacrity of our response (if not our show) and life in our small town went on.

Sometimes it all falls into place, deserved or not.

Japanese Noir

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I watch some fairly awful movies with great regularity and glee. Nothing could promise less and truly deliver accurately on the promise than movies like The Giant Gila Monster or I Was a Teenage Werewolf. I maintain to this day that Gila Monster could have been nominated for an Oscar for best song in a movie. Hey, sure the song (chant?) is cheesy as hell, but it was a slow year for movie music. Gigi was better? I’m not so sure.

And Teenage Werewolf has points of interest.

  • Teenage boys are known to fret over their complexion and when they might start needing to shave. This flick posits a bizarre take on both anxieties.
  • Plus, watching Michael Landon struggle to bring life to this title character by grunting his lines (human and lycanthropic) makes the viewer ponder if this early acting challenge aided or impeded his mature dramatic efforts (Little Joe in Bonanza and the dad in Little House on the Prairie). It’s a head-scratcher for 30-40 seconds.
  • If this story were remade today, it would probably include a scene in which Nick Saban would pay a recruiting visit to our high-school werewolf promising to change Alabama’s football schedule to all night games.

What delights.

I also watch Japanese movies with regularity. They usually fall into one of two categories;

  • Happy foolishness featuring Godzilla or his runnin’ (actually flyin’) buddies Mothra, Rodan, Ghidra, et al.
  • Seriously serious films directed by Akira Kurasawa (the man is a god to me).

But tonight’s 1961 Japanese film is a new experience for me. None of the actors are wearing rubber suits, Tokyo is not destroyed, Toshiro Mifune is not in the cast, and thousands of mounted warriors with helpful identifying flags are not raising the dust.

Zero Focus (I haven’t a clue as to the meaning of the title) is beautifully directed by Yoshitaro Nomura. I prowl the overnight offerings of Turner Classic Movies just in hope of finding flicks like this.

If you are a fan of film noir and Hitchcock, this is your meat.

  • It’s in black and white.
  • There are trains.
  • The characters speak Japanese, but the language of the film is “bleak”. I happen to be fluent in bleak – I suppose it’s from doing too many Sam Shepard plays and walking out on too many productions of Waiting for Godot (patience is not my forté).
  • There are trains.
  • The plot twists and then twists again.
  • The characters play for keeps. Those who die stay dead, though occasionally we wonder.
  • Did I mention the trains?
  • Segments of Japanese post-war society of which I was totally ignorant are explored (dredged?).
  • I cared about every one of the characters in this story.

This is fine storytelling.

The acting is also fine. Excuse me for throwing some names at you, but these ladies are new to me and I was so very impressed.

  • Yoshiko Kuga is plain, pathetic, smart, and determined.
  • Hizuru Takachino is polished and desperate.
  • Ineko Arima is heartbreaking……………….just heartbreaking.

These women drive the film. How unusual is that for 1961?

Behind these performances, the music is gripping.

I was so taken by this film by Yoshitaro Nomura, I proceeded to watch reputedly his best film; The Castle of Sand. Lucky me.

The Castle of Sand contains another satisfying quota of “noir” elements.

  • It pairs an older/wiser investigator with a younger/more energetic partner (I’m hearing the theme music from The Streets of San Francisco now). They work on the case in question separately and come back together to compare their discoveries. Those discoveries are meager, but spark progress in each other through this cross-pollination. Yes, there are some “Eureka!” moments, but not the usual Hollywood kind. Mind you, I’m not knockin’ Hollywood “Eureka!” moments. They’re usually pretty exciting storytelling. But it’s intriguing to see these two hard-working, sweating, high-integrity guys tease just enough new information to keep their investigation flickering.
  • The film has bar scenes, dining car scenes, and police headquarters interview scenes. Check, check, and check.
  • Again, it has trains. I know that sounds strange but this is always good for me. It makes me a passenger with no control. I am caught in a powerful, loud machine hurling me towards the next chapter in the adventure at hand. Gulp.

The film does not have Ginzu knives.

But wait! There’s more!!

Unlike Zero Focus, this film is in color. Mr. Nomura uses that color to exploit the beauty of rural Japan. Imagine if the Ingmar Bergman of Smiles of a Summer Night had shot a film in rural Kentucky in early summer. The vistas are impossibly green and people stand small in them. The roads/trails are generally straight and so are the people. Integrity is high – tolerance is low. Hospitality is ubiquitous – charity is rare.

The acting in this film is perhaps not as uniformly fine as in Zero Focus, but the portrayal of the older detective by Tetsuro Tanba (fellow James Bond aficionados will remember Mr. Tanba as Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice) is very nice.

The treasure in this film is the remarkable way the resolution is revealed and, as in Zero Focus, the intriguing use of music. Our detectives apply for a warrant to arrest their suspect. To do so, they must present their case to an assembly of police officials. As they tell their story we see their story in painful and lush flashback. As they speak and we watch, everything is underscored by a piano concerto written and played in concert by our prime suspect. The camera smoothly and logically and relentlessly moves from police conference to rural saga to concert performance. I could not look away. The plot twists as the story is unveiled are effective and startling………and plausible.

This is a gem.

Acting School in Your Own Back Yard

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Actors are silly people.

Wait!

I’m not qualified to make such a sweeping generalization. Yes, I have acted on stage, but as painfully pointed out to me by attendees and reviewers of my efforts as Dracula, and the butler in Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear”……sigh.

However, having had a gaggle of theater folks in the house this weekend (my friend Eric Johnson would modify that to “theater-ish folks”) for Halloween deco, chili-pots, and charades, I can vouch with confidence of the silliness of those actors.

Actors are sensitive…to everything. I know I am. If someone walks by me with a limp, I will pass them by with a pronounced and sometimes accurate lurch to my gait. If you sneeze around me, chances are I will reach for two tissues; one for you and one for me. If you drawl around me I will vocally lurch southwards, again, sometimes accurately. I just watched an interview with the Prime Minister of Jamaica bemoaning the category-five hurricane about to assault his island. I then strolled to back door of our house in Central Kentucky, picked up the remote, and closed our garage door.

Sensitive.

Whence cometh this?

Today it arrived in the mailbox in the form of a battered and tattered 65-year-old book of no immense value, but a treasure none the less.

Elizabeth K. Cooper’s 1958 Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club edition of SCIENCE IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD was an eye-opener to me at the age of nine.

I’ve written before about my mom’s complete devotion to the usefulness of reading. We weren’t rich, but the public library, the bookmobile, Mr. Dennis’s bookstore on North Lime, and the Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club filled a yawning abyss of hunger.

Every month, I devoured every part of every selection; text, introductions, forewords, table of contents, dust wrapper notes… I was saddened by any lack of indices.

The first line of the dust wrapper note for SCIENCE IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD was a question; “Would you like to be an explorer—without leaving your own neighborhood?”

Yes!

Yes!!!

The roster of the first astronauts had just been announced.

I did not see my name on the list.

My neighborhood was all I had.

The title of the first chapter was “Exploring the Yard on Your Stomach.” I did just that. I flopped myself down and asked the questions prompted by Ms. Cooper;

What do you see?

What do you hear?

What do you feel?

What do you smell?

What do you taste?

I filled up my senses.

Chapter Two; Exploring the Yard on Your Back.

What do you see?

What do you hear?

What do you feel?

What do you smell?

What do you taste?

I filled up my senses.

I “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” in daylight, before midnight when the TV stations signed off for the evening. I named clouds. I reached sub-orbital in my mind before Alan Shepard.

I learned to act.

I still run through those questions when rehearsing for a stage production;

What do you see?

What do you hear?

What do you feel?

What do you smell?

What do you taste?

Those ingredients enhanced by the memories they trigger make me as human as I can be in the crucible of pretend.

So yeah…

…the book is of no immense value………except to me.

And by the way, should you wander into the wild kingdom that is our back yard and you see me flopped on the ground;

  1. Check for a pulse.
  2. If I’m on my stomach, it’s OK, I’m still exploring.
  3. If I’m on my back, it’s real OK, I’m still looking at the stars.
  4. Or, I might just be acting.

The power of books, that’s why they want to control them.

Play-Off Ghosts

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In my pre-teen years, in my pre-driving years, I listened to Reds baseball devotedly, especially late night games from Los Angeles and San Francisco. I would tuck my cigarette-sized transistor radio beneath my pillow and listen to Waite Hoyt describing the exploits of Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Bob Purkey, and Jim O’Toole.

There were only sixteen teams then, eight in each league, no divisions, and no play-offs. If you came in first in your league, you went straight to the World Series. Otherwise, you went straight to your winter part-time job until it was time for the pitchers and catchers to report for spring training. Second place got you nuthin’.

Thus, these early 60’s late night games from the coast meant far less to the baseball world in general than to a burr-headed North Lexington nerd from Bryan Station Junior High. After all, the Reds and the Dodgers could never play each other in the post-season, they were in the same league.

But listen I did…and pretty much stayed awake until the end of the games…and spent my allowance on new batteries the next day.

But now…

…starting at 9:00pm this Tuesday…

…late night baseball from Los Angeles…

…that means something.

Win, and you move straight on, perhaps eventually to the World Series.

Lose, and you go straight to your mansion on a golf course and spend the winter hitting a smaller ball that doesn’t avoid you…usually.

The stakes are serious, and I’ll be listening every night…as long as I can stay awake…hoping the ghosts of Vada, Frank, Waite, Bob, and Jim will pull us through now that it really counts.

Janie just shakes her head and wonders when she married a 12-year-old.

Let the Right One In

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I love horror movies.

Good, bad, silly, gory, American, Spanish, Italian, British, Chinese, Argentinian, Japanese, French, Mexican, German, Brazilian…even Swedish.

Especially vampire flicks.

Why?

I think those seeds were planted early by scarcity.

Through my high school years, we only had the three local TV channels, and Dad essentially controlled the remote. The remote, at that time, was me.

“Roger, go over there and switch it to channel 27.”

After high school, I didn’t have a TV at all until I was 22. I intruded on my friends’ TV’s, or schlepped up to the communal screens on the top floors of the towers at UK. Thus, film viewing opportunities were sparse and sporadic. I didn’t see Bela Lugosi’s DRACULA until I was about 14 (a bleary late Saturday night, installed on the living room floor, armed with a pillow and a hope that the rooftop antenna was aimed in the correct direction). I think I saw my first Christopher Lee bloodsucker in my 20’s and I had that Groucho Marx epiphany; “How long has this been going on?”

Now, that sounds pitiful, but it’s not.

In those years, eight nights out of ten, I was rehearsing a play somewhere, and working to pay the rent during the day. Who had time for movies? Not me, no time…but a pent-up desire musta been a’building.

Since those brutally-deprived days, I’ve tried to make up for lost vampire flicks. Happily, I still haven’t exhausted the historic backlog, and that was proven again last night.

A friend called and invited himself over to watch a film he wanted me to see. It was Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film; LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

There was much to like here.

The vampire element of the film is innovative and empathetic. One cares about and frets over the challenges being faced by this 200-year-old/12-year-old child hazard. One cares about and frets over her bullied and neglected 12-year-old/12-year-old neighbor. One cares about and frets over the flawed, ineffective adults around the children’s lives. The only unsympathetic characters are the young school bullies who are simply making Scott Farcas-like decisions with similar results.

The ending is satisfying and troubling simultaneously. It made me long for a sequel just to answer a few questions I’d like to pose.

I really have only two complaints with the film.

  1. I watched a dubbed version. I thought the voices were disconnected and flat from the happenings on the screen. It reminded me vaguely of the dubbing in those awful/wonderful Mexican monster movies of the 60’s. I think I would have preferred subtitles.
  2. It’s full of all that Nordic gloom and snow and cold. This child of American South sun and humidity just can’t………. But that’s me.

This is a real nice flick.

I think you can let it in.

Hey! Look at That!

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Once upon a time, long, long ago there a manager of a retail liquor store. He was a sporadically-educated guy, with longish hair, a gift for learning lines, and a need to pay the rent; a typical actor. But at the time (and for decades after) he was a retail manager. Gotta pay that rent.

His current assignment required two brand new assistant managers. One was a nascent Little Lebowski. He was, as Todd Snider so elegantly describes it; “an alright guy.”

The other was a go-getter. He was quick. He smoked like a chimney. He was reasonably smart. He smoked like my dad. He was willing to do the chores of retail. He was a pack-a-day contributor to the local economy. He was canny. What’s not to like?

Well…

Canny…

The definition of a good retail manager is someone who produces the best results from the available resources. The available resources in this case were young Lebowski who would do what he was instructed to do if he was reminded frequently of what he had been instructed to do. That was not an unusual managerial requirement and could be adequately met with daily chats (paternal or infernal as the case required), do-lists, and schedules. The canny guy’s capacity, however, could accomplish much more than that if his canniness could be channeled into un-terribly-harmful schemes.

What’s the business plan here?

The manager had grandiose visions of morphing his North Lexington Budweiser/Jim Beam oasis into a destination fine wine emporium. A fine wine shop would of course have fine wine sales personnel and fine wine sales personnel would never smoke on the fine wine sales floor. He instituted a no smoking requirement for employees.

The canny guy complained but complied…sorta. The retail manager would drop in at unexpected times and look askance at the hurried discarding of half-smoked violations, and would unhurriedly, but pointedly discard the hidden repositories of ashes. The cat-and-mouse scheming continued harmlessly and relatively happily (except for Canny’s potentially cancerous lungs) and the store prospered.

It thrived enough to lead to the promotion of the manager and the canny assistant took over management of the store. Now in charge and unconstrained and undistracted, his canny angels within six months rescinded the no-smoking nuisance and schemed to embezzle enough to be fired.

I am triggered to recall this by the current news.

I am feeling triggered to outrage by yo-yo tariffs, roller-coaster stock markets, DOGE extremes, Nobel Peace Prize nominations, and Schroedinger/Epstein files. But shouldn’t I be more concerned about less fixable things; crypto destroying our currency, or a Justice Department yesterday requesting voter roll info from individual states, or a president who threatens to remove citizenship from a disliked American citizen.

But then I can’t keep up with all the schemes.

Maybe I should start smoking.

Where did I put those ash repositories?

Swamp Dreaming

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It seems like a good night to pull my eyes and ears and head out of the 24/7/365 news apocalypse, and instead, sail into some YouTube videos of Blossom Dearie, Oscar Peterson, and Thelonius Monk…and perhaps visit a while with Pogo Possum.

Pogo and his friends invariably slow me down, charge me positively, and make me smile…not from a distance, but sittin’ right next to the Okefenokee denizens relaxin’ on the same log. I can smell Albert’s awful cigar and wince when he gulps Pogo’s bowl of wax fruit in its entirety before recognizing the fruit’s ersatz-ness. No problem, just a fine excuse to move into Pogo’s house (and larder) for a few days convalescence. Pogo don’t mind.

The first house I owned was on the north side of Lexington about a block from Louden House in Castlewood Park and it had a bit of that casual feel about it. I grew up in that neighborhood and felt cozy there.

Janie and I made our early discoveries together with each other there. In fact, I still believe it was my first tortoise-shell, Scandal, who convinced Janie that I might be worth taking a chance on. We would open a champagne bottle, take the foil, and roll it into a small ball, toss it, and Scandal would trot after it and return it to me. Who on this planet could resist a champagne-fetching cat?

However, not all the discoveries were pleasant in this 50+ year old (in the 1980’s) house. The morning Janie looked up in her bath and instead of the ceiling, saw a lovely azure sky was a challenge, and the unheated bedroom was a challenge of a different sort…though the latter had its upside.

But the Okefenokee-ness of the nest came from the friends who dropped in. I remember Paul Thomas coming by to help move Janie in by ordering pizza. I remember Eric and Becky Johnson watching “White Christmas” with us, and continuing to watch it to the end with Janie even though I had slunk off to bed halfway through (Hey! I was a workin’ guy!). I remember Chuck and Julieanne’s après wedding do-dah in the parlor. I remember Vic Chaney brutally critiquing my meagre collection of record albums (remember those?). I remember Gene Arkle pondering for over an hour before he made his next tragic chess move in a series of tragic chess moves. I remember Joe Gatton bouncing into our Sunday breakfast on the porch and helping us plow through the Sunday papers, about the only news we consumed those innocent days.

No, we didn’t eat the wax fruit, and the cigars weren’t awful, they were non-existent. But the company was easy. There were no conversational land-mines of which to be wary. Outrageous and wildly inaccurate things were said and then laughed away. Offense was rarely taken.

We had little…

…and thus, little to lose…

…and thus, little to defend.

We had each other…

…inside decrepit brick walls…

…a fragile and powerful bubble of heedless good will.

We had it all.

Japanese Noir…Kurosawa-Style

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Akira Kurosawa is perhaps best known for his mighty Shakespearean films; RAN (1985), THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958), and THRONE OF BLOOD (1957). His Samurai Trilogy was exciting. His SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) and YOJIMBO (1961) inspired a whole genre of European westerns, plus a little flick called STAR WARS (1974). His RASHOMON (1950) is a masterpiece of storytelling.

But that storytelling skill is also happily evident in his less grandiose crime dramas; STRAY DOG (1949), LOWER DEPTHS (1957), and tonight’s HIGH AND LOW (1963).

In HIGH AND LOW, we see a Yokohama in the swirl of Japan’s amazing recovery from WWII. It’s not the Japan of Lafcadio Hearn, Shinto temples, and tea ceremonies. This is a roiling time of factories, trains, smokestacks, efficiencies, and cutthroat board battles. It is a time to make fortunes…for yourself……or for others. The income gap is wide and widening…sound like anywhere else you’re living in today?

A brutal kidnapping occurs.

Toshiro Mifune is pathetic as he agonizes over whether to destroy his privileged life to possibly save the life of the child.

Tatsuya Nakadai as Chief Detective Tokura and his sweating team of investigators, salvage and assemble clues leading through murder and drug-infested dens that will never be documented in haiku, till they inevitably run the kidnapper to capture.

 Tsutomu Yamazaki as the kidnapper confronts Mifune;

“I’m not interested in self-analysis. I do know my room was so cold in winter and so hot in summer I couldn’t sleep. Your house looked like heaven, high up there. That’s how I began to hate you.”

Allow me to paraphrase Thornton Wilder here;

The difference between enough money and not enough money is really quite small…but it can change the world. The difference between enough money and a whole lot of money is also quite small…but it too…can change the world.

It crept into my Hearn/Shinto/tea/haiku mind as I watched the film, that perhaps we should consider Thornton Wilder and the kidnapper the next time we condescend to ask presidential candidates about raising the minimum wage.

On a lighter note, I was arrested by a cameo performance by Ikio Sawamura as an expert in the sound of various trolleys in Yokohama. Mr. Sawamura had a long film career in a number of Kurosawa’s films, and also appeared in a number of films that made a serious cultural difference in the world of a wide-eyed young film-goer in Kentucky;

1963-KING KING VS GODZILLA (witch doctor) and ATRAGON (taxi driver)

1964-MOTHRA VS GODZILLA (priest) and GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (honest fisherman)

1965-FRANKENSTEIN VS BARAGON (man walking dog)

1966-THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (fisherman #1) and EBIRAH, HORROR OF THE DEEP (elderly slave)

1967-KING KONG ESCAPES (Mondo islander)

1968-DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (old farmer)

1969-ALL MONSTERS ATTACK (bartender)

1975-TERROR OF MECHOGODZILLA (silent butler)

Whatta resumé!

The Wild Kingdom?

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Tonight…

Ah, tonight.

Sitting out in the golden sunset, under a quarter moon in an eggshell sky…a sky worth way more than Emmylou Harris’s ten cent evaluation.

Sitting surrounded by life.

The trumpet vine hedge undulates, a dark and lush shelter fifteen feet in the air. The vines are 20+ years old, contained and restrained, but as yet undefeated. They still promote a network of volunteers 30-40 feet in every direction that have to be corralled every day.

The bank of knockout roses are rolling into their second expression of the season.

The daylilies are roaring their various résumés as they clamor for best-of-the-year honors (the Nefertiti’s are currently leading, but the Bela Lugosi’s have yet to make their play).

Chloe, the Wonder Pup and I sit on the worn bricks of the tiny black lagoon. We’re waiting for Janie to return from her weekly knitting bee at Chez Spence. The frogs occasionally break the water’s surface to see if we’ve gone inside yet. They’re eager to completely emerge and begin their nightly serenade.

We are snugly enclosed by ramparts of holly and bamboo and exuberant ferns.

And now…

…lightnin’ bugs begin their twilight gavotte…

…a pas de drift…

…a doh-see glow.

Chloe asks if I can see Janie yet (insert sigh).

The light finally fades and the pup and I relent and go indoors to give the frogs their chance.

I’m in the library for two minutes and the croaking chorale commences. It’s beautiful, but the Lexington Singers have nothing to fear from this rasping and barking.

And to finally give the noble dog her answer; “No, Chloe, I don’t see her yet.”

June 12, 2024

Rule #51

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I have binging of late on reruns of NCIS.

I can’t explain or defend the habit. I blissfully glide along as the team “grabs their gear” to investigate each implausible case. I mentally note who makes the elevator walk to open each episode. I participate by precipitately guessing wrong on the solution to every problem. I blindly delight in the grade school badinage between these defenders of democracy as they struggle to thwart the myriad smart bad guys of the world.

Mostly though…

…I am intrigued by Jethro Gibbs’ striving to apply a numbered set of rules to the chaos he and his team seem to face daily.

These are rules he has mostly assembled from the wisdom of his dad and his first wife.

Mostly…

One rule comes late in the run of the show and it derives from Gibbs’ personal adult experience.

It’s Rule #51:

Sometimes you’re wrong.

It took me about 28 years to understand that rule. Soon after this dour epiphany, I recognized with some trepidation that it had taken me almost 30 years to reach the point where I believed I was making six of ten decisions correctly. That was humbling. Even more humbling was suspecting I would never achieve a seven out of ten success ratio. 40+ years later have confirmed my suspicions.

Luckily, one of the correct decisions was to surround myself with other people who also make six out ten decisions correctly and strive to get out of their way. Thus, I was mostly protected from many of my foolish moments.

Mostly…but not always…

Many…but not all…

Rule #51:

Sometimes you’re wrong.

As I age, I find when I acknowledge this rule and try to be righter, the world is generally a very generous place and space is made for me to do so.

I humbly suggest that members of congress might also find this to be useful…and right.

Dracula Does Not Suffer Fools

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I enjoy joining a group of online groupies, most of whom I’ve never actually met, on Saturday nights when I can to watch, ridicule, and gush about the usually dreadful films screened by Svengoolie on MeTV. It’s a fun, irreverent group of tolerant enthusiasts, mostly younger than yours truly, but then what in the world isn’t.

Many of the participants, if you believe their protestations of innocence, are seeing these dubious gems for the first time. While it’s daunting for a grizzled cinematic dumpster-diver like me to find any comfort in the thought that voting-age folks will be casting those first votes sans (that means “without”…sorry, Groucho Marx joke) the seasoning of multiple viewings of THE RETURN OF THE INVISIBLE MAN, PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, and KILLER KLOWNS OF OUTER SPACE, I do find solace when I see their delight in discovering;

  •  The power of random flames serving as a modern, purging deux-et-machina when troubles (aka monsters) become insurmountable, yet still flammable (dozens and dozens of European horror flicks).
  • Or that interplanetary, mutant children can be thwarted by imagining a brick wall (Village of the Damned).
  • Or that alien attackers who have just blinded 99%+ of the human race can be driven back by spraying them with sea water (Day of the Triffids).
  • Or that body-less flying brains can be shriveled by a Kenneth Tobey-type guy blowing up an atomic radio station in Canada (Fiend Without a Face).
  • Or that the potential lycanthrope menace can be nipped in the bud when his dad smacks him with a cane (The Werewolf, with Lon Chaney Jr).

It’s comforting to sneer and giggle at these masterpieces, and about as practical as my generation’s intense training in “duck and cover.”

And it’s a pretty nice clambake with no clams being hurt.

Last Saturday though, I couldn’t make it and I kinda wanted to. It was a flick I hadn’t seen (there are still one or two ‘em out there). I thought I’d be experiencing it for the first time like many of the other participants. Might be fun. Hell, I might turn into a twenty-something again.

Old fools…dream foolishly……

I recorded the flick instead and watched it this afternoon. I’m glad I did.

The film was BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA. This is not the 1992 film with Gary Oldman: it’s the British 1974 made-for-TV flick with Jack Palance playing the sanguinary Count.

There are no more menacing actors on the screen than Mr. Palance. This is unrelenting mean-ness. He can’t be reasoned with…or shamed…or redeemed…he is a vector of evil. Sounds like Ol’ Drac to me.

There’s scene where a tuxedo-clad gent who looks like Dudley Moore tries to stop Dracula with a pistol. Our vampire dismisses the impediment and the bullets with a disdainful backhand…just as you’d expect Jack Palance to handle a threat from Dudley Moore. That’s artistic integrity for you.

Disdainful backhand…

That’s what I had when I played at tennis in my 20’s. However, it was my opponents who did the disdaining.

In my 20’s…

…sigh…

Old fools……

A Feast for the Eyes

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Movie night!

Flicks a la Francais.

It’s been a week of French cinema pour moi.

Janie and I have practically forsaken physically going to the movies. Since the spawning of covid, I don’t think we’ve been in a movie theater more than five or six times. Why should we? We have a big screen, various fire-sticks and subscriptions, a critter, and a convenient parking place at home. Door-Dash and/or the fridge are near to hand.

But a phone call from a wise friend who understands real priorities in life pointed out that Juliette Binoche continues to be fine to observe on a big screen. A date night at the Kentucky Theater ensued.

THE TASTE OF THINGS (2023) is delicious to watch. It’s fun to see Madame Binoche cooking again. I first saw her in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1993 mesmerizing film; THREE COLORS: BLUE, and then his earlier THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1988). A couple of years later I won a huge lobby poster of BLUE on eBay. I still haven’t found a space of suitable vastness to hang it, but I harbor hopes…perhaps a new wing to a house already too roomy for two dreamers. She cooked beautifully for Johnny Depp, Judy Dench, and Alfred Molina in CHOCOLAT (2000). Hell, I even thought she was the best thing in the 2014 GODZILLA – better than the big guy himself.

And THE TASTE OF THINGS is a nice film itself, but like some of Akira Kurusawa’s flicks, perhaps a battle too long. The ballet of the preparation of the opening feast lingered on every step in the kitchen.

Lingered…

Every step…….

I fear I had enough time to tally the pots and pans and utensils with the weary eyes of one whose main contribution in our kitchen is the post-prandial clean-up.

However, if you’re a member of the seemingly burgeoning crowd of people who take pictures of their food, this is the film for you.

I must fess up: I have been charmed but bewildered by this phenomenon.

I wonder…

The glory of a memorable restaurant meal is a recipe with multiple ingredients.

The food is one ingredient, but only one.

The setting is another. Is the room dramatic? Cozy? Huge? Is there a view of the ocean…mountain…desert…skyline…rings of Saturn? Is it on the roof…on the street…by the fireplace…in the kitchen?

Is the company good?

I have had memorable restaurant experiences.

  • Calamari and six vintage ports overlooking the Bay Bridge in San Francisco…
  • A Nighthawk Special in a cavern-like Columbia Steak House at 2am on Limestone Street.
  • Chateau Ausone 1978 in Yvette Wintergarden’s in Chicago.
  • Hot cross buns and café au lait in the snug of the local at Hever Castle on a grey morning.
  • Eggs Nova Scotia in a booth with a wall juke box at the Bungalow across the street from the Nu-Way Boot Shop on Mill Street.
  • Huevos Rancheros in in a sunny diner in Salinas.
  • A Caesar Salad lovingly assembled tableside in Denver.
  • Hot dogs off the right field line at Wrigley Field on a sunny Saturday afternoon. (Phillies lost).
  • Shrimp and grits on an overturned cable spool table, watching a shrimp boat unloading its resupplies at the neighboring dock in Charleston.
  • Green Chile Won Tons at the Bristol in Louisville after a stunning performance of “Child Byron” at Actors Theatre.
  • Coq au Vin at Café Chantant before slipping downstairs to Le Cabaret on Vine Street.

The food, the time, the place, and most of all the company, is what made these experiences memorable. I wanted to capture each of them forever, recreate the moments for myself, and be able to share them with others. Perhaps that’s why we take our meal photos.

No photo is up to such a task, but the urge to share and relive the good stuff is nothing but admirable.