Deja Foolishness

StickyLexington-70's
The Younger Fool

Lemme see if I’ve got this straight.

Mr. Trump says we have a “deal” with Iran.

It’s not in writing, but it will be signed “in two or three hours” according to Mr. Trump. Pakistan, who has brokered this “deal” says the “memo of understanding” will be signed in Geneva this Friday. Iran says we have neither a “deal” nor a “memorandum of understanding,” but we are nearing an “agreement” for a “memorandum of understanding” to agree to negotiate for another 60 days. There is to be a cessation of military action during this period unless the cease fire is violated

This old peace-nik hippie believes all this is possible.

I believe that Mr. Netanyahu (needing this conflict to continue to avoid prosecution in his own country) will refrain from attacking Hezbollah to protect the cease fire. I believe Hezbollah (seemingly receiving support and instruction from the military leaders of Iran) will stop launching attacks on Israel to protect this cease fire. I believe the Iranian negotiators will negotiate in good faith and not delay and obfuscate while they repair and prepare for the next chapter in this 47 year exercise in hate and betrayal. I believe everything that Mr. Trump has said last time he spoke until the next time he speaks.

I believe these things, but I guess I’ll not plunge on the stock market this evening.

I also believe my Reds are gonna storm from ten+ games back and send me hunting and gathering World Series tickets. I believe a wrasslin’ match on the White House lawn is an inspiration to high aspirations in all Americans. (Hey! Let’s see that AI escape from an arm bar!). I believe Chloe, the Wonder Pup when she assures me she won’t requisition my pillow when I get up to pee.

I believe we should give peace a chance…but remember how to duck and cover.

A memorandum of understanding to not kill each other as we negotiate to agree on something at some uncertain future date.

It reminds me…

50 years ago I was asked to represent a local arts organization at another local arts organization.

I attended the first meeting.

We were deciding who should be on a committee to determine who should be on a committee to decide who would be the best person to ask a local doyenne to approach a local businessman for a donation. We couldn’t agree in that meeting so we agreed to meet again at a future date. As everyone whipped out their calendars, I whipped my butt outta the room and outta that responsibility.

Even 50 years ago, life was too short.

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.

Dang-a-Dang-Dang — Revised

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I used to drive around Kentucky quite a bit in my job. Most of the time, it was a great blessing. I love living in Kentucky; the people and the places are precious to me.

One blissful evening I drove to Bowling Green to attend their bi-monthly city commissioners’ meeting which turned out to be a sterling lesson in civility and good government that completely refuted the “government doesn’t work” message that dominates our television news channels. Those smart, well-prepared, gracious public officials efficiently moved through their agenda, addressing issues of waste management, zoning adjustments, car-towing policies, golf course maintenance, personnel changes, and alcohol sales. Every voice was heard. No voices were raised. Decisions were made and accepted. Some of those decisions went the way I preferred. Some did not. Life goes on. I could not have admired the experience more.

Seriously!

What can I say? I’m a wonk.

Sha-nah-nah-diddy-diddy-bomp…

Then I drove home, fairly late at night – certainly too late to be talking to folks on the phone as I drove (which of course I would never do).

That means I had entered and was truly immersed in “Windshield Time”.

Nem-nem-nem-nem-nem-wurp-wurp-wurp-wurp…

Windshield time is akin to dreaming, especially on I-65 on a midsummer night.

  • The tiny rhythm of the eight million bugs repainting your car with their lives.
  • The mighty rhythm of the eight million trucks buffeting your car while chortling at your rate of speed.
  • Giant dinosaurs looming at one roadside attraction.
  • Adult bookstores larger than Fayette Mall looming at another…

Your mind disengages and works on unresolved issues of the day or, if you’re lucky and open to the night and the rhythms, it embarks on far more interesting paths not bound by the day’s sound bytes and tweets and grunts.

Thus it was this evening.

Doh-doh-doh-doh-ooooo…

I listen to a lot of music in the car. Queued up this particular night was a mini-festival by the pride of Pittsburgh doo-wop group, the Marcels.

In order to truly appreciate the Marcels you have to get past some curious facts. But, as a Trump-supporting friend of mine regularly and gleefully chants; “Facts lie!” Well, these are fairly benign facts. I think we can accept them without destroying the planet.

  1. The Marcels were named after a haircut. The “Marcel Wave” was very popular that year and one member of the group had a family member who was a hairdresser and she suggested the name. Compare this to the opposite dynamic with the Beatles and their hair choice. It became a “Beatle Haircut” after their success as a band. Trust me; I know this…all too well from my years as a rock and roll singer who occasionally glanced at mirrors…though I think I’ve destroyed all the negatives and daguerreotypes (remember them?).
  2. The Marcels’ vocabulary was amazing, but had little to do with English as we know it. I’m sure they must have been the inspiration for a Mad Magazine piece I recall that quoted a fictional rock singer’s biography entitled; “Famous Syllables I Have Sung”. Everyone has heard the story of how Dr. Seuss was challenged to write a children’s story with only xx number of words and how the result was THE CAT IN THE HAT. I would suggest that the Marcels managed to build a career on fewer words than Dr. Seuss if you deduct the un-definable syllables sung between the legitimate words.

Mum-mummum-mum-bah-yip-yip-yip-yip-yip…

Undeterred by these facts; in my 70mph dreamy opinion there has never been a better version of “Blue Moon” than that of the Marcels…

Bomp-bababomp-bom…

…and their “Get a Job” is an American anthem worthy of being sung before athletic events. Imagine 20-40,000 people with a few beers in ‘em wailing;

Dit-dadit-dit-dadit-doo-doo-didit…

I’m smilin’ at the concept and wonderin’ how this ol’ white-haired hippie might look in a Marcel Wave. An-n-n-n-d woooosh! There goes the Willisburg exit! Only 44 miles to go.

Lilla-lilla-lilla-lilla-wah-wah-wah…

God bless the Marcels!

Livin’ Up to the Title

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Well…

…it does that.

Movie night!

Tonight it’s an exercise in exquisite tedium called; Monster from Green Hell (1957).

I never have thought of the Bronson Caves area of Los Angeles as green hell, but apparently director Kenneth Crane did…or at least his budget did. I just couldn’t keep from recalling the last time I saw these caves, a man in a gorilla suit and deep sea diving helmet was wobbling out the entrance in the classic Robot Monster from Outer space (1953). I suppose that kind of aesthetic decision-making is to be expected from the same fellow who directed the remarkably bothersome quasi-Japanese horror piece; The Manster (1959), featuring an unfortunate guy with a murderous Neanderthal growing out of his shoulder.

You can’t make this stuff up…yet…someone did.

Tonight’s flick features a volcano of the deux-et-machina variety, a giant wasp, water scarcity, cigarette lack-of-scarcity, elephant stampede stock footage, native stampede stock footage, and lots of bare-chested young Jock Ewing of Dallas fame (aka Jim Davis).

How can you miss with ingredients like that?

Perhaps the footage of Jim Davis coulda (shoulda) been stock.

YouTube Giveth and…

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Movie Night!

A double feature of YouTube’s offerings from the 1930’s yielded a strange dichotomy of performances by two actresses of whom I’ve previously never heard.

DOUBLE DOOR is a 1934 conte cruelle directed by Charles Vidor. Mary Morris, in her only film role, plays the matriarch of a 1910 ridiculously rich family who lives in, and are practically prisoners of a Fifth Avenue mansion. Ms. Morris is intense and wicked…wicked……WICKED! The film is worth watching for her malevolent portrayal alone.

The mansion itself is a mighty character in the film. The insistence of Ms. Morris to keep the windows tightly and thickly curtained, the heavy mahogany paneling, the ponderous doors of the rooms, all reinforce the feeling of barricade. But is it a barricade to keep the world out, or to keep the treasures in? And just what are the treasures? Family? Tradition? Breeding? Style? ………or just treasure? We find out clearly, if a bit implausibly.

JUGGERNAUT is a slouching 1936 British film starring Boris Karloff as a murderous, insufficiently funded doctor. It’s not good at all, but Mona Goya’s performance (she took her performing name from her favorite painter – I wonder if she asked permission) is an un-tasty ragout of hysteria, shrieking and frantic lurching. It’s a performance for which the Razzies were later created.

YouTube; “It’s like a box of chocolates.”

The Glory of the Hummingbird

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Pssst!

Winter’s over.

I know it’s the 1st of June, but I despise the cold and dark winters. This last winter wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, but there was a very difficult period of snow under a lacquer of ice, under another layer of snow, wrapped in two weeks of below-ten degrees. This is not typical of the Bluegrass, and it’s not good for Lexingtonians, and it’s debilitating, it’s depressing, and certainly not de-lovely for yours truly.

I’ve been fooled before.

I remember the dismay my winemaker friends felt one April, when the temperature plunged to below freezing for a week, and yes, I have seen it snow on Derby Day (quelle horreur!).

Thus, I don’t truly accept that full-fledged summer has arrived until I see a hummingbird.

Yesterday, I saw my first of the year.

<<  sigh  >>

I love hummers…inordinately.

I think it’s because I don’t remember seeing any growing up. In fact, the first hummingbird I remember seeing was in 1986. Janie and I were visiting Chuck and Julieanne. We were sitting down to breakfast and I gazed out the window to admire their canopy of bougainvillea when a magical tiny critter zipped up to the feeder, that until that moment I had considered purely decorative. Little did I know the true decoration was this mini-pompous bird. Astonished, I quickly mentally revised my animal classifications, moving hummingbirds off the list that included unicorns and snipes.

The glory of the hummingbird…

I wish I had thought of that description.

T. S. Eliot beat me to it. In his 1930 poem “Marina,” he posits;

“Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning death.”

Later, Peter DeVries entitles his 1974 novel; THE GLORY OF THE HUMMINGBIRD.

Eliot and DeVries are seeing this small bird acting like it’s something special and big, when it’s merely special. It hangs, still, in the air. It flies backwards. It wiggles in the air.

It preens.

Like larger birds, it poops whenever and wherever it damn well pleases.

I remember when I would wrinkle my righteous nose when an arm would extend from a car in front of me at a stoplight and flick a depleted cigarette butt out into the street.

I would invariably think; “The world is my ash tray.”

I am heartened by the fact that you rarely witness this heinous act today. I take it as positive proof that we can improve as a species. Maybe we really can make it to Mars.

Today, I watch my much-admired hummers and when they randomly and heedlessly relieve themselves I think; “The world is my commode.”

They probably won’t make it to Mars.

But they made it to summer.

Thank God.

I Like CASABLANCA…but…

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I like the film CASABLANCA.

No, I really like CASABLANCA.

The moment I see that map opening of the film, I stop blinking (except to dismiss the tears) until Rick and Inspector Renaud walk away from the camera into the fog.

Less happily, the moment I see a map opening of any film (Indiana Jones, Mister Moto, Marlin Perkins…), I expect to not blink until Rick and Inspector Renaud walk away from the camera into the fog.

Some days, if I’m asked to name a favorite movie, I will unhesitantly answer; CASABLANCA.

But how many times can you watch it until you have it memorized and inevitably clear every room by singing “As Time Goes By” and “La Marseillaise” with an execrable Vichy accent?

You eventually start longing for more.

Yes…

…more like CASABLANCA.

Thank goodness, they’re out there; films that are liberally flavored with spies, bazaars, boozey night-club piano-players, men in fezzes (who don’t ride miniature motorcycles), crooked police authorities, bumbling Nazis, and beautiful women with a back story that involves Paris. The movie may set in the Casbah, Greece, Portugal, Tangiers, or Martinique, but the beautiful women “always have Paris.” Films like PEPE LE MOKO (1937), THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (1944), and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) can assuage the longing to visit Rick’s Café Americaine for a couple of hours.

I’ve recently added two more flicks to this list.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER (1950) is set in Portugal and stars Trevor Howard. Mr. Howard’s fine, but others in the cast are more interesting to me. This is one of the first films of Anouk Aimée. She’s 18 years old, and while she’s not yet the luminous beauty she later became, you watch nothing but her when she’s on the screen.

Walter Rilla menaces convincingly, dripping with corruption and lethality. This is not a man I would wish wanted to hurt me or help me…just leave me alone, please.

Wilfrid Hyde-White plays the Hoagy Carmichael/Dooley Wilson piano-player with a soupçon of Walter Brennan. It’s a remarkable departure from the gentle aristocratic characters in which we are accustomed to see him. This ain’t MY FAIR LADY.

One villager rationalizes his lack of protest against the clear evil of local authorities;

“The world has more evil than a dog fleas. We were given eyes, but for our comfort, the wisdom of knowing when to shut them.”

Admirable?

No.

Redolent of segments of today’s American conundrums?

Most certainly.

CANDLELIGHT IN ALGERIA (1943) stars a young James Mason and, again, a wickedly driven Walter Rilla.

But a delightful moment is spun by Pamela Stirling as the tragic Yvette;

“Madame, in love, you can fool a man, you can fool yourself, but you cannot fool another woman.”

In 1943, WWII was still quite in doubt. This closing moment in the film must have been stirring, if troubling;

“I know when I light this candle, I light a flame that will drive the enemy out of Africa, a flame that will be carried across the waters and across the heart of Europe to the very heart of Berlin.”

Feel free to light that candle…and grab a tissue.

Howlin’ at the Moon

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Movie night!

I’m sneakin’ out tonight with my lunatic pup (Chloe) to gaze at the promised micro blue moon. We may howl. We may discuss the opening chapter of Neil Stephenson’s fascinating book; SEVENEVES. It’s my favorite of Stephenson’s novels, but Chloe quibbles with the last third of the piece. She has a fair point.

Then, we shall scurry to the library to watch the 1964 version/vision of H. G. Wells’ FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.

The personnel involved are the main reason to watch this film (Chloe suspects my shallowly buried hope of being chosen the next 75-year-old astronaut might also be a motivating factor).

Nathan Juran is the director. Mr. Juran is an Oscar winner for…Art Direction…for the HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, a beautiful film, but nothing like his directing career. He directed some of my favorite guilty pleasures; THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957) – big bugs…never misses, 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), and ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN (1958) – 50-foot Alison Hayes…never misses.

Nigel Kneale is our screenwriter. Mr. Kneale wrote screenplays for serious stuff; THE ENTERTAINER (1960) and LOOK BACK IN ANGER (1959), disturbing British sci-fi; THE STONE TAPE (1972) and FIVE MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1967), and a truly terrifying ghost story; THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1989), not the Radcliffe remake.

Valentine Dyall, the narrator was memorable in HORROR HOTEL (1960), a fine, foggy scare as Jethrow Keane, a hitchhiker to whom you do not want to give a ride. He was also in THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (1963) as one half of the unhelpful caretaker couple; “No one from town will come after dark…in the night…in the dark.”

Our old friend Miles Malleson is also in this film. His is an amazing career; HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), THR HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1959), and THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960) for Hammer, and about a hundred more.

We may howl indeed.

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?