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 Now in charge and unconstrained and undistracted, his canny angels within six months rescinded the no-smoking nuisance and schemed to embezzle enough to be fired.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.
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.
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)
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Since the 1961 Reds (Vada Pinson, Jim O’Toole, Frank Robinson, Jerry Lynch, Jim Brosnan), and Curt Gowdy/Tony Kubek on Saturday afternoon TV games, I have known the ambrosia of bat, ball, and glove.
Pete Rose was a god to me.
But there was only one “third rail” in the game and everyone knew what it was.
If you gamble on baseball, you cannot play professional baseball.
Worth repeating for clarity; if you gamble on baseball, you cannot play professional baseball.
It diminishes me, and baseball, and the planet, for Pete Rose to be excluded from baseball…but he broke the one clearest rule of the game.
Should it turn out that Mr. Ohtani has committed a similar offense……
If we cannot maintain an integrity in our games, I despair of maintaining it in the things that matter in our lives…such as government.
I resist and will persist in resisting that despair.
A divorced father puts his 6-year-old son and his stuffed tiger (I’m already confusing this with Calvin and Hobbs – this can’t auger well) alone on a plane bound for Brazil and bound for the boy’s mother. (You don’t need to keep track of the personnel here, this is the last we hear of the mom from Ipanema.)
The dutiful dad then heads for the airport bar – I kid you not. Maybe instead of “Terror in the Jungle,” it should be; “Mai-Tai’s in the Tiki Bar.”
The plane is populated (infested?) with a tawdry, middle-aged. purple-puffy-shirt-wearing, Beatles knock-off band (oh yes, complete with mop-top wigs in shades of color God never intended).
Airplane band revisiting life choices
They play one of their “hits” in the back of the airplane cabin (oh yes, with full drum kit) as the plane crashes on the Amazon and everyone is eaten by crocodiles except the kid. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.
The child drifts down the river in a coffin (it’s too complicated to go into right now) until he’s captured by descendants of the Incas who have the same crummy wigs as the doomed band on the plane. They also wear those same feathered Indian headdresses I used buy in the gift shop at the old Bird and Animal Forest on Highway 27 when I was a kid. The tribe decides first to dance on stone steps to entertain the child (frankly, the best part of the show) and then to sacrifice him to their god. Talk about yer mood swings!
Meanwhile, dutiful dad has sobered up, heard about the crash, and races grimly by plane to Brazil, then by hotel shuttle to check in (I KID YOU NOT), then to a church, and then to a riverside mission in his coat and tie to rescue his son. Will he make it in time?
This is truly one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.
Oh yeah, there’s piranhas, boa constrictors, jaguars, and quicksand too. The only vital ingredient missing was an inexplicable yeti.
It was a warm, salty, sunny day in the June of 1984, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
I lived then, and live now in Lexington, Kentucky, the largest US city with no major water element…or so I’ve been told. We have no ocean, no lake, no river. We do have the Town Branch of the Elkhorn Creek that runs through our downtown, or at least it formerly did. We (“we” being folks before my time) paved over the creek. Thus, it now runs under our downtown.
I’ve never seen it.
But I suspect many of us Lexingtonians, like divining rods, know it’s there, and I think we harbor a longing for it. A few years ago, an enterprising local artist ran an audio cable through a sidewalk that lies between a 20-story downtown bank building and its parking structure to a microphone near the underground waterway. Hidden speakers whispered the sounds of running water to the strollers on their way to make their mortgage payments. Not exactly ocean surf…more like trickles of desperation.
I love where I live, but I do long for big water…and a major league baseball team. It’s all that stands between Lexington and perfection in my book.
The first time I saw an ocean I was on a winery/vineyard business trip to California. One late afternoon, my colleagues and I drove our rental gondola of a car due west until our path ended on two tire tracks on the grass. We walked to the cliff overlooking the biggest water I’d ever seen.
A couple of days earlier, I had made my first hajj to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and now I was standing at the physical and logical end of Kerouac’s road. I was at the end of the western world, basking in that western light, gazing across to where nothing was visible, nothing was promised, nothing was assured, and nothing was finished. The possibilities of Diebenkorn’s and Seurat’s blank canvases were immediate and possible. What was on the other side? Stoppard advises; “I wouldn’t think about it if I were you, you’d only get depressed.” Tolkien is more hopeful, but just as final, and since I did not want to visit those Grey Havens while still in my 20’s, I reluctantly pulled myself away…changed more than a bit, to a more pedestrian search for Dr. David Bruce’s winery and some colossal chardonnays.
I have been mesmerized by big water ever since. Key West, Clearwater, Biloxi, New Orleans, Savannah, Charleston, and the Outer Banks. Waves and tides, sunsets and sunrises, lakes, bays, rivers, marshes, herons, dolphins, pelicans…
Pelicans…
…ah yes-s-s-s, pelicans…
…back to 1984.
It had already been a long, full day and we still had a ways to go…but that was alright. By this time, I was pretty warm and salty myself, and still fairly sunny.
The Outer Banks are big water writ even bigger water. These fragile strips of sand are far enough out to sea that to the east you can’t see Africa though you’re told it’s there, and to the west you can’t see the mainland though you’re told…
Sunrise over the water inspiring your day.
Sunset over the water evaluating your day.
Promising to do better tomorrow…or perhaps, do nothing at all.
This day, the Queasy Rider and I had been covering ground all day.
We had left the third member of our expedition, P-Tom, back at the beach house, nursing his badly sunburned feet. P-Tom had camped out the previous afternoon on the deck of his uncle’s beach house, in the shade, with 800+ pages of light reading about Confederate naval fortifications. As sure as Martello walls must crumble before the onslaught of the modern cannonballs of 1861, it was just as inevitable that P-Tom’s page-turner was no match for the insidious onslaught of the warm ocean sun.
He fell asleep.
The shade moved, as fickle shade will.
His beach-appropriate bare feet were exposed.
He snored.
His feet simmered.
We’ll turn that inevitable page for him.
Queaser and I were sympathetic, but still ambulatory. Heartless and undeterred, we beat our un-fried feet down the road to adventure.
We checked out the site of the Chicamacomico Races. This is just fun to say out loud, and it was where the Blues and the Grays in the jolly 1860’s spent a jolly day chasing each other up and down a sandy stretch of beach that meant little to either side, to no discernible improvement to the strategic chances of either side. I forget who chased who first, but both factions got their turn to chase. It was like a re-enaction of something that had not yet been enacted. I dunno. It plumb evaded me. Maybe there was yelling and whooping and beer involved. Maybe it ended in a real nice clambake.
We moved on to see the lighthouse at Hatteras. This is the lighthouse that had been moved back from the encroaching sea. It was an impressive feat, but not speedy, and we had a ferry to catch. We were on our way to Ocracoke Island.
Ocracoke was pleasant and small—humps of sand, clumps of sea oats, and a squat lighthouse that was moving nowhere. We had pretty well “done” the isle in about 20 minutes, but we had time to kill before the return ferry. We treated ourselves to a dark little restaurant and some dubious-looking, but tasty chowder.
Now we were returning on the ferry along the fringe of the Pamlico Sound to Hatteras. We were leaning on the rail looking toward the mainland we were assured by the maps was out there somewhere.
A line of ten or twelve pelicans flew sinuously past on a course parallel to our craft…above the horizon…then below the horizon…above again…then below again……repeatedly……………..sewing the sea to the sky.
I admire pelicans.
They look so ungainly on land and so commandingly graceful when they fly.
Sewing the sea to the sky, a beautiful unconscious act of nature, oblivious to and unconcerned with the fact that their stitches will never hold.
I have many friends who are stage actors and directors. They are pelicans. They create people and situations that stun and move real people. They sew the sea to the sky for the run of a show. Their stitches never hold. The show closes and the moment disappears except in the minds and hearts of those they stunned and moved…and later of course in their stories shared and expanded with other pelicans over omelets at Josie’s breakfast oasis.
These thespian pelicans are oblivious and unconcerned. They have new lines to learn. They have new, un-permanent stitches to sew.
June's Boy 