The Wyoming Whirlwind

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Movie Night!

First, sing along with me, buckaroo;

“And that ol’ sheriff, he said;

‘Git you early to bed,

And always keep yer hat screwed on real tight,

In case you git in a fight.”

–Ralph McTell (a cowboy from Farnborough, Kent, England – hotbed of trail-drivin’ music)

I’m continuing my wanderings down the trails of Hollywood’s “Poverty Row” film studios. This time the trail’s a dusty one. Fluff out yer chaps, brush up yer Stetson, and get yer bullet outta yer pocket.

The flick is Wyoming Whirlwind (1932) and I admit initially suffering severe disorientation as the cast credits rolled across the screen.

I have a much-admired friend who lives in Wyoming named Mike Moser. He’s a bright, hard-working, highly-effective guy and I have always considered him to be the Wyoming Whirlwind. But au contraire (as I’m sure they say in Casper), this is a cheapo-cheapo western from Willis-Kent Studios featuring Lane Chandler as The Lone Wolf (for no discernible reason) and his wonder horse, Raven. And by the way, Wyoming is never mentioned again after the opening titles…and there’s no whirlwind……and, of course, Mike’s absent as well – like I said, he’s too bright for this schmegege.

The film features many of the basic food groups of cheapo-cheapo westerns; a hapless sheriff who actually says; “Dag-nabbitt!”, hapless Indians with full gift shop head-dresses and smoke signals, a barroom brawl (yes, the tables do collapse), the sheriff’s wife who actually says; “Land’s sakes!”, and the classic moment; “The killer was….agh-h-h-h!”, and Yakima Canutt – king of stunt men (with lines!).

Raven, the Wonder Horse was a veteran of 20+ movies by the time this was shot and it shows. He was a pro. He keeps his face front, has flash, and always hits his mark. He even seemed to smile at the pretty girl (yes, hapless of course). Clearly, Raven was the best actor in the flick.

Rootin’ Tootin’ Lane Chandler

But Lane Chandler is the star, and his resumé caught my eye.

He was raised on a family horse ranch in Montana, which eventually got him into cowboy films in the first place. He was briefly a star in the silent films, but when sound came calling, he lost his preferred position in the studio to Gary Cooper (another big Montanan). He persevered however though a 50 year, 393 film and TV credits (thank you, IMDB) career, as the roles got smaller and smaller. Weather-related cowboy epics were a specialty of Mr. Chandler. Besides The Wyoming Whirlwind, he also starred in The Texas Tornado, The Hurricane Horseman, and The Cheyenne Cyclone. Insert your own joke here about other films he could have made (The Stillwater Stiff Breeze, perhaps). He was a regular bit player (usually the Sheriff) in every TV western series I grew up watching, but I was too busy learning the theme songs from Maverick, Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, and Have Gun Will Travel to notice.

No, he was not a star for very long, but had a lifetime as a working, paid, tax-paying actor…you could do a lot worse.

The Wyoming Whirlwind, a cowboy flick with no cows, no guitars, no Wyoming, and no whirlwind.

There was a car…a car!…did I mention that?

I loved it…even without my friend Mike.

Julie et Jim

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The title is a total stretch but there’s a “Julie” and a “Jim” in the tale. I couldn’t pass it up. Sorry.

The Southeastern Theater Conference (SETC) was held recently in Lexington and I enjoyed reading articles about it, and hearing friends’ reports of their activities during the event. I was particularly interested and inordinately proud of my friends Julieanne and Chuck Pogue’s efforts. Chuck conducted two sessions; “Auteurs-NO!  Raconteurs-YES!!” and “Tips for Adapting Plays from Sanskrit and/or Cave Paintings”. Julieanne packed the house with her session; “Concatenations from the Clash of Jung and the Restless in Tennessee Williams’ Mother Plays”. I may not have those titles exactly right, but I was mightily impressed – so impressed, that it triggered a remembrance of my first visit to SETC.

It was spring of 1970 and SETC was being held in Memphis. I had never been to Memphis, I had a ride with other UK theatre folks, I had twenty bucks, and my friend Jim Varney agreed to split the cost of a hotel room with me. Hey, as Christine Kane says; “When courage comes, you never see it comin’.”

The conference was being held in the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. I believe today it’s called the Sheraton Peabody. Jim and I couldn’t afford the Peabody. We went across the street to something called; The Hotel Tennessee. It was five dollars a night, which we split.

Decades later, when I first saw Jim Jarmusch’s brilliant film; MYSTERY TRAIN, I felt very much at home in the accommodations depicted.

There were cockroaches…lots of ‘em…big ones…and bold. One of ‘em sat on the end of Jim’s bed and bummed cigarettes from him. Another one sat on the back of the commode and charged a quarter for access and a moment of privacy. I went downstairs to the desk to complain and noticed the clerk had six arms and I quailed. I was dubious, but it was cheap and had the asset of proximity.

The proximity paid off the next morning. I awoke to Jim practicing his smile in the mirror. He had just discovered Pearl Drops Tooth Polish and was pretty sure that his new “all-teeth” smile was gonna launch his professional acting ship tout suite. He urged speed with ablutions and let’s get our “petite little small-ass bods” over to the Peabody. We might miss something!

He was right.

The Peabody had a fountain in the middle of its lobby and people gathered around it at nine o’clock AM and five PM for the ducks. That’s right, ducks. At nine AM, the public address system wheezed to life to blare; “Welcome to the Peabody Hotel and the Peabody Marching Ducks!” The elevator doors would then open and a red carpet would roll out to the foot of the fountain. A Sousa march would play on the PA and three white ducks and one brown duck would regally march down the carpet, hop up on the lip of the fountain, and splash into the water to swim the rest of the day until five o’clock when they would, with similar pomp, reverse the process and return to their evening penthouse quarters. The crowd loved it and would applaud. The applause would prompt the brown duck to turn to the crowd from the lip of the fountain, spread his wings, and……well……quack.

Yes, the crowd loved it, but Jim was enthralled. In the brown duck, Jim had found a spiritual brother. He never missed a duck event that weekend. He got there early and would sit akimbo next to the carpet and croon in “duck language” to the bird. The duck would pause, turn to Jim, and conduct a quick inventory of available exits in case this madman turned ugly.

It was a great conference and just got better from there.

At that time and perhaps still today, one element of SETC was a mass audition of actors looking for summer work. That year, 43 casting agents representing 43 southern theatres were observing those auditions. There were 568 hopeful auditionees. I was number 438 and Jim was 437. We stood leaning against the hotel hall wall for hours awaiting our chance for the Golden Ticket/Everlasting Gobstopper/Maltese Falcon/Holy Grail/Door #3.

While we waited, we rehearsed and fretted. (I’m convinced that if the proper studies were conducted, scientists would discover the leading cause for cancer is fretting.)

We were promised one minute for our audition – one minute.

Three days, 500 driving miles, $5 per night rent, and cockroaches for one minute.

Today, when see a young starry-eyed actor commencing their theatrical career, I don’t wish them luck. I wish them resilience and a full can of bug spray.

But in 1970, I was good with the proposition. I had a killer one minute segment from Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” that was gonna land me on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” within the week.

Jim agonized. He had two pieces and he couldn’t choose. Should he do Hamlet’s first act monologue (“Tis not alone my inky cloak…”), or Tom Wingfield’s diatribe from “The Glass Menagerie” (“I’m goin’ to opium dens…”)? Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams? Argh-h-h-h. Plus, at the rate this is going, we’re gonna miss the ducks!

Fretting…I’m tellin’ ya, it’s deadly.

Then the SETC officials came out in the hall and announced the audition time would have to be cut to 50 seconds or they couldn’t get everybody in.

50 seconds.

Fretting went through the roof. What was I gonna do? Pragmatism was all I had to offer at that point…I was simply gonna have to speak faster.

Jim however, became serene. His quandary was solved. Somehow, 50 seconds made things clear; he would do BOTH monologues.

They took us into the audition room in groups of ten. Thus, Jim and I were in the same group and I got to witness the deed. 43 auditioner heads hovering 2-4 inches over their tables and notes in utter fatigue and defeat. Hope had left the building with Elvis.

Jim’s turn came, right before mine. He loped to the center of the room, announced his number, and began;

“Seems,” madam? Nay, it is; I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forcéd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

The tones were round and pure, the diction crisp, the anger immediate and like a knife to his betraying mother.

And then, without pause or breath, as if from the same son centuries later;

Well you’re right, Mother. I’m going to opium dens. Yes, mother. Opium dens. Dens of vice and criminals’ hangouts, mother, I am a hired assassin, I joined the Hogan gang, I carry a tommy gun in a violin case, and I run a stream of cat houses in the valley, they call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, see I’m leading a double life, really, a simple honest warehouse worker by day, but by night a dynamic czar of the underworld, mother, I just go to gambling casinos, spin away fortunes on the roulette tables, mother, I wear a patch over one eye, and a false moustache and sometimes I put on green whiskers, on those occasions, they call me “El Diablo,” I can tell you many things to make you sleepless, mother, my enemies plan to dynamite this place, they’re gonna blow us sky high! And I will be glad? I will be very happy, and so will you be. You will go up, up, up, over Blue Mountain, on a broomstick with seventeen gentleman callers! You ugly, babbling old witch!

43 sagging heads snapped to attention. In today’s litigious times, there might have been a rash of whiplash claims the next day. Jim finished and one voice intoned; “Thank you, Mr. Varney.” Forget about his number. He was Mr. Varney now.

I followed that…………

When the callbacks were posted, Jim had 34. I had 15.

Maybe it was the Pearl Drops.

Theatre sucks.

Fire Truck (Revised)

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Now before I start ramblin’, all you fact-checkers, and score-keepers – just let it go.

Relax.

This little tale has been pressed through a 50-year-plus filter of memory. If it’s not perfectly factual and accurate…as the very fine Kentucky songwriter Mitch Barrett puts it; “I ain’t lyin’, I’m tellin’ you a story”.

Besides, it’s not like I have the codes to our country’s nuclear arsenal or anything.

This is simply how I remember it.

I’ve related the story Groucho Marx told of how he ended up in show business;

“I saw this advertisement in the newspaper for a job. I needed a job. I ran 6 blocks and up 3 flights of stairs and I knocked on the door. This fellow answered the door wearing lipstick and a dress. I thought; ‘How long has this been going on?’”

I suspect most theatre participants have had a similar moment of truth (or deception).

I know I had several. This is one.

When I was in high school, I had a part time job in the children’s department of the public library in Lexington. At that time, the library’s main (and only) branch was in what is now known as the Carnegie Reading Center in Gratz Park. I would finish my school day at Bryan Station High School, walk over to the junior high building (middle school not having been invented then), and catch the city bus for a 35-minute ride to my 70-cents-an-hour part-time gig at the library. Did I also mention that it snowed every day and the roads all ran uphill – coming and going?

I loved the job and I loved being in the Gratz Park neighborhood.

The bus would drop me at the Apothecary (not drug store, mind you – apothecary) on the corner of Market and Second, usually about 30-40 minutes before I was scheduled to start my shift. The Apothecary was next door to the original Morris Book Store. Occasionally, I would peruse the book store. Mr. Morris himself special-ordered for me my hardbound editions of THE LORD OF THE RINGS in 1968. But most of the time, I would slip downstairs to the Apothecary and get a bag of chips and a coke and slink through their back door and down the hall to a strange little subterranean chamber in which resided a parrot (or macaw or dodo…or whatever) on a guano-ringed floor stand. I never knew why the bird was there. It didn’t respond to questions. There were also stacks of story magazines in the room. No, not porn, just story magazines. I would feast on my chips and coke and reading material under the baleful eye of the parrot (or macaw or dodo…or whatever) until it was time to cross the street to the library. It all sounds so exotic today – not so much then.

On my lunch breaks I had options. I could throw my frisbee in the park until Mrs. Gratz (for real!) came out and explained that her-husband-had-given-the-land-to-the-city-and-frisbee-throwing-was-not-what-he-had-in-mind-and-how-come-my-hair-was-so-long-if-I-was-a-boy. Or, I would walk down to Brandy’s Kitchen on the corner of Main and Lime, step over the Smiley Pete (the town dog) memorial, and get a $1.35 daily special. This was my introduction to chicken-fried steak. I never knew exactly what a chicken-fried steak was. It didn’t respond to questions either.

At nine o’clock, I would catch the bus home unless my mom came down to give me a ride home. Any excuse for mom to visit the library was legit.

My duties were sometimes tedious, but mostly heavenly. I would shelve the returned books (restricting myself to only reading every other one), assist the “kiddie-lit” students from Transy, and listen to the children recite their reading adventures so they could gain credit in their “Busy Bee Reading Club”.

I fear it was during this period that Dr. Seuss, Walter Farley, Carol Kendall, Hugh Lofting, and Enid Blyton became more important to me than Milton, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley (Mr. or Mrs.).

One afternoon, my assignment was to read and tell a book to several Head Start classes visiting the library. It was a rainy day. Thus, I think there were 80+ kids in that session. I read the story and then selected several kids to act it out. There weren’t nearly enough parts for all the kids. There were two six-year-old boys on the front row who were raucous in their desire to participate. (RAUCOUS PARTICIPATION IS ENCOURAGED – wouldn’t that be a great title for someone’s biography?) I pointed to one of the six-year-olds and asked him if he could play the fire truck mentioned in the story. He roared; “YES!” and began to wail his “siren” and wave his arm as a ladder. His partner and lifelong friend (six years old, remember) was crushed to be left behind. I asked him what color the fire truck was. “Ray-udd!” he shouted, and with my extraordinary but certification-lacking linguistic dexterity I immediately interpreted that as “red”. I asked if he could be “red”. He leapt to his feet, stood next to his fire-truck-playing friend, made “jazz hands”, and danced frantically around his friend.

The room and I went graveyard silent in sheer awe and admiration.

That was a Groucho Marx moment.

“How long has this been going on?”

At that moment, I wanted to grow up to be that 6-year-old.

I still do.

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.