Gender: Male
Status: Single
Age: 43
Sign: Taurus
City: NASHVILLE
State: TENNESSEE
Country: US
Signup Date: 1/18/2005
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Saturday, August 30, 2008
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Category: Music
ME AND MY UNCLES When I was two years old, my parents were killed by a prehistoric mammal. We were visiting the Museum of Natural History in New York, watching the newest exhibit go up, a life-size replica of a wooly mammoth. The mammoth slipped off its base and pitched forward, just as we were moving up for a closer look. Ma and Pa stood on either side of me, each holding one of my hands, and the mammoth's tusks skewered both my folks as neat as you please, while its enormous head came to rest mere inches from my face. And so, the first memory I have from my childhood is staring into the glassy eye of a wooly mammoth. The next memory I have is of staring into three more pairs of glassy eyes, namely those belonging to a trio of Uncles to whom my care was entrusted after the untimely passing of my folks. I had not even known I had an Uncle Tom, an Uncle Nick, or an Uncle Robert, and from their reactions to me, it was obvious they had heretofore been unaware of my existence as well. For several days they regarded me as one might a draft notice or an electrical appliance teetering on the edge of one's bathtub. Still, as I was barely out of diapers and obviously at the mercy of all nature's destructive forces, plus the fact that I was, after all, their youngest brothers' brat (it would be a year or so before I realized my name was something other than "brat"), some measure of concern for my well-being did boil up from within their secluded hearts. Enough concern, anyway, to see to it that I had adequate bedding and a share of the meager supper fare each night. They were even thoughtful enough to warn me to stay away from the old abandoned well that lay on our property. It had, they claimed, a special hunger for "unwanted brats". Right about the time I turned five, and possibly because they had long run out of things to say to one another, my uncles began to actually really speak to me, and tolerated (I would say even welcomed) my company to a degree. I came to realize that each one, in his own mind, regarded himself as the provider and overseer of my education. Or perhaps each hoped that an attempt at actually "raising" me might avert, for a time at least, the wrath of whichever angry god had singled him out for a game of "I'll destroy you but first make you mad".  Uncle Robert stayed hidden in the dark of his room most of the time, in a corner lit only by a small candle. I often joined him in that small glow of light, while he read aloud from books of poetry and drank Absinthe. My youthful ears thought he called the drink "Absent" which tantalized my curiosity as to what magical qualities the liquid held. After much pleading, he let me try the drink, which gave me blinding headaches and lunatic dreams of screaming, headlong flights through foul labyrinths pursued by large, shadowy forms that all seemed to have Uncle Robert's distinctive hair. Uncle Robert favored the works of Baudelaire and Poe, but his library was impressive and varied, and he let me gravitate towards whatever drew my eye. Even if he sometimes disdained my selections, he could still recount the history of the book and its author in great detail, and by extension his lectures opened the history of civilization up for my comprehension. Oh, and he also talked about the spiders. He claimed there were legions of them, waiting for him just beyond the barrier of the candlelight. I never saw any more than the occasional daddy longlegs the whole time I lived there, but I can tell you that sitting there in the flickering light and listening to this talk made me quite uncomfortable. Mostly I remember how Uncle Robert would smile when he talked of the spiders, as though he welcomed their eventual coming. He was the only one of my uncles that ever did really smile, but usually I wished that he wouldn't.  Uncle Tom fancied himself something of a scientist, botanist, folklorist, literally an entire Edinburgh college that walked like a man. He prided himself on his mental collection of odd facts and laws, customs and lore of common people. He would always have a fact on hand to rattle off in answer to my questions, though it would always strike me as an answer given to some question other than the one I had asked. Complicating things was that Uncle Tom also was a compendium of tall tales, and there were many times when he had me swallowing an account of how he lived in Africa with a native tribe where the people were so large they carried their tent and tent fires in great pouches in their bellies, and how he would sleep on a hammock strung between the breasts of his tribal wife. Or he would tell of making a fortune from hunting a breed of butterfly that was actually made of plastic, and selling them to fine ladies as living hair clips and broaches. But, he'd say, damned if they didn't reverse-metamorphose into real caterpillars, and all them ladies with worms in their hair would come back all set to lynch him if he didn't give all their money back. Sucker that I was, I would be buying all of this, only to have Uncle Tom tell me in his raspy voice that he was just pulling my leg. Then he'd ruffle my hair and saunter off in his slightly hunched-over way, chuckling and humming to himself.  Uncle Nick took it upon himself to oversee my spiritual education. This normally took the form of him, lounging against a tree stump, sipping whiskey and yelling sermons at me while I chopped wood or did other chores, and occasionally throwing empty whiskey bottles at me if he thought I wasn't paying attention. Inevitably he chose lessons from the Good Book filled with extremes of blood, carnage, and the Lord's wrath. I suspected Uncle Nick's quoting of biblical passages were less-than-verbatim, especially when God strutted and preened and referred to himself as "the meanest of all the mean motherf***ers that ever f***ed a motherf***er up", but as I was never allowed to touch the book myself, I was unable to verify this. If it sounds like Uncle Nick was an exceedingly harsh guardian, I hasten to add that when I reached the onset of my teen years, he began to allow me to accompany him on his Saturday night visits to the nearest town, for what was to be some truly memorable carousing. All of my Uncles were regarded with fear and suspicion in the town, but while Uncle Robert and Uncle Tom just stayed away, Uncle Nick reveled in the fear and averted eyes that greeted our appearance. He would lurch down the main street, bellowing challenges to anyone within earshot, and we would pass a bottle of his favorite whiskey between us. Unlike Uncle Robert's drink of choice, this was singularly fine stuff, settling in my chest in a warm glow, filling me with good humor, fully convinced I was now the most charming of fellows. Whatever the truth of that last bit may be, it did help brace my courage when faced with the company of the opposite sex. Uncle Nick was currently wooing five ladies in the town. Conveniently, they were all women of "easy leisure" and they all practiced their trade in the town's one "establishment". While Nick was sparking with one of his ladies, he'd leave me in the tender care of the other four. These kind-hearted ladies also took charge of another aspect of my education, the details of which I cannot divulge, except to say it beat bible verses and dodging whiskey bottles by quite a fair distance. Needless to say, Sunday mornings were spent in deep penance for Saturday night's excesses, and Uncle Nick and I could usually be found stripped to the waist, whacking ourselves with thorny branches. I became adept at appearing to strike myself more severely than I actually was, and anyway, my head was too filled with the joys of the night before to feel the pain too acutely. On the whole, my years with my uncles I remember as a good time. The best times, to me, was when a musical whimsy would strike them (all my uncles were very musically gifted) and we'd all gather around Uncle Tom's upright piano (he claimed it once belonged to Frederic Chopin, who had discovered the secret of immortality but had to give up the piano because he couldn't get the hang of Ragtime) and sing all manner of popular and traditional songs. On occasion, the three of them would concoct a song on the spot, each taking turns with a verse. The songs would become great rollicking epics with protagonists who were both heroic and damaged, experiencing loves and hardships, but ultimately suffering, spent and adrift alone on some uncharted sea or wasteland. Once, I pitched in a final verse of my own, in which the hero is rescued by a girl with eyes as bright as wonder, skin like cream from heaven's own dairy, a heart large enough to hide his own, and the courage to face the unknown by his side. The song stopped cold and my uncles just stared at me. Uncle Tom dropped the lid over the keys and they each wandered away, Uncle Tom muttering, "boy's no Kurt Weill, that's for sure" and Uncle Nick adding, "Better if we just pack him off to our brother". This last bit got my attention. What brother? Wasn't my late father their only other brother? I asked Uncle Nick what he meant, but found myself dodging a whiskey bottle hurled in reply. As you might guess, from that point on I kept my lyrical contributions to myself. Sadly, the angry gods came to call all too soon and my time with my uncles proved to be brief. The first to go was Uncle Robert, who came down with the Consumption, likely not helped by his favoring of dank and dark corners. When he'd coughed out his last, his body lay in state for several days while we rounded up the funds for a proper funeral. Before the ceremony could happen, however, I came into the room where he was lying, only to find his body gone. Uncle Tom claimed that he found Uncle Robert's remains wrapped in deep, fine webbing. When Uncle Tom removed the webbing, whatever was inside crumbled into dust within seconds. I suspected Uncle Tom had actually disposed of the body somewhere and pocketed the funeral money. I waited for his customary confession that he was pulling my leg, but it never came, nor did he chuckle one bit. Uncle Tom's mental hold on reality grew weaker and weaker, until he began to have trouble distinguishing between his collection of true facts and his tall tales. One late summer day, he was lunging through the back yard with a butterfly net, imagining that he was once again chasing those plastic butterflies, and stepped right off into the abandoned well. Uncle Nick and I found his bowler hat next to the hole. Our shouts were met with faint replies from the deep darkness therein. Uncle Tom told us he was busted up past the point of moving, and damned if one of them plastic butterflies wasn't taking a siesta right on the tip of his nose. Uncle Nick's easy lady friends were the only ones from town who came to help, as we worked frantically get Uncle Tom up from the well. All the time we could hear him still muttering away, telling jokes and singing songs. Once, I thought I heard him say something about Uncle Robert being down there with him, and about Uncle Robert's "many legs" but I reckon there are some things in this world that ought not to be dwelt upon at length, and that's where I've chosen to put that. Eventually, we were able to construct a long enough rope so that Uncle Nick could descend into the well for Uncle Tom but by that time, the well had gone back to just being dark and silent. I lived with Uncle Nick for about another year, during which time, something I suppose he'd contracted from one of his easy lady friends went to his brain, and the evil part of his nature took more and more control. He terrorized the people in the town even more, and most of the businesses, legit or otherwise, banned his from their premises. There came a night when he was in a mood most foul, drunk as a skunk, wandering the road into town and bellowing the question of who was there around that would dare fight him. From out of the woods there arose a challenge from a voice that, I'll tell you, sounded as though it bubbled up from the literal depths of the earths' core, and floated a breath most foul on the breeze. Uncle Nick tore off into the woods without hesitation, towards the source of that voice. A search party later turned up his battered and broken body, tangled deep into some old dead fall of trees and limbs and leaves. They carried him up to our house and laid him out on the kitchen table. He only regained consciousness long enough to tell me he wanted me to have his bible. I still have it, but I've never opened it. I don't think there's enough in there about the joys of whiskey, easy ladies, sad songs played on the piano, or girls with eyes bright as wonder to satisfy me. But, it feels good to just carry it around and know it's there. So here I was, alone again in the world and still barely into my teens. I recalled the cryptic remark Uncle Nick had made about another "brother", and so I began taking out notices wherever I could, trying to locate this potential lost uncle. A succession of false patrons answered the call, beginning with an aristocratic fellow who called himself my Uncle Ernie.  Uncle Ernie brought me to his holiday camp for homeless boys. I'll admit, it was good to run with lads my own age, and Uncle Ernie certainly had the means to provide well for us. For a time I felt quite lucky to reside at his opulent estate, to go riding in his chauffeured automobiles, and of course our daily meals consisted of more food than I had normally eaten in a month's time to that point. Gradually, however, I began to realize that Uncle Ernie's interest in me, and in my fellow youths, was, to put it delicately, not exactly familial. I awoke often to find him wandering in his nightgown amidst our rows of beds. He claimed he was only "fiddling about" but I started to sleep with one eye open. Reluctantly, I turned my back on all that luxury and snuck out one night, back on the road and back on my own again. I decided to look up another possible relative who had corresponded with me a time or two, claiming to be my Uncle Don. I soon discovered that he claimed to be everyone's Uncle Don, and he was a con artist of the most outrageous variety.  Uncle Don ran many scams as he went from town to town, and he found it useful to have a "son" or "nephew" (make that an accomplice) by his side to give him respectability and thus throw suspicion off his trail. I forgave him his deception as I found him to be imminently likeable, and for a time I traveled with him and he taught me the art of the con. We parted many a sucker from his money, and through Uncle Don I got to really see this amazing country, first riding the rails in lean times, and later tooling around in "Molly", our old truck that Uncle Don "won" in a card game. Don always claimed he had a "masterpiece" he was working towards, an ultimate con of some kind. Inevitably, all that fooling around with people's income caught up with us. There came a point when we had practically an entire town hot on our heels, wanting our blood. To save me, Don split off, making sure they caught onto his trail, while I headed the opposite way. I never saw him again. I did hear later that he was killed when old "Molly" stalled on a railroad track and was demolished by a train. However, since his body wasn't found, I suspect this might have been his masterpiece, his ultimate con. Incidentally, they made a film in Hollywood called "The Flim Flam Man", starring a pretty good actor named George C. Scott, and it was based loosely on Uncle Don and his exploits. I haven't seen it.  Finally, the longed-for "true relation" did find me, in the person of my Uncle Bruce, who took me under his wing and brought me to live on his farm in Nebraska. It was sort of a strange autonomous-collective socialist commune, which in plain speak meant that if you lived there, you worked and shared equally with everyone. I could see why Uncle Bruce (or "The Boss," as he was affectionately known) had become estranged from my other three relatives. Where they were willfully obtuse, Uncle Bruce was open and honest. What you saw was what you got, and if his soul was in conflict with the same "family darkness" of our clan, he simply refused to be overtaken by it. Uncle Bruce was for anything that set a person on a positive course, he believed that mankind was heading to a promised land, and held firmly that all people deserved dignity and equal treatment. He preached gospel as fervently as Uncle Nick, but it came from a source of joy. He taught me the love of working the land, and on weekends I even joined him when he indulged his passion for racing his souped-up automobiles out on the highways. "The Boss" never turned away a hungry soul, and during my time there, we had many workers join our community for a stretch before moving on. I became especially close to a family of Tennessee mountain musicians who called themselves the Old Rugged Cross Dressers.  They were making their way across the country, working for their meals and playing music, and spreading the Word. Unfortunately, that word is not one I can repeat here, this being a family blog column, after all. The clan consisted of Big Mama and Papa Ernie, and their three boys: Jimmy Mack, John Valentine, and Da Sheriff. In addition to their colorful monikers, the men all preferred wearing ladies' fashions, and I have to admit their attire looked so invitingly comfortable I was somewhat tempted to try it out for myself. The Cross Dressers were all tougher 'n wet leather and worked hard for Uncle Bruce. Big Mama was always saying how proud she was of her "hard-livin', hard-drinkin', purty-dressin' daughter-sons". I admit it was a bit odd that she occasionally referred to the boys and Papa Ernie as "brothers", but as I said they were mountain folk after all. Just another of those things best not dwelt upon, I suppose. Uncle Bruce especially believed in the soul-healing qualities of music, and at nights I sat around the big campfire with him and the Cross Dressers and played folk songs, and for the first time I began to exhibit some of that musical ability (or at least affinity) that ran in my family's blood. Uncle Bruce occasionally got annoyed at the Cross Dressers' tendency to want to take those songs of the good earth into directions that were a bit too "earthy", but he had to laugh eventually. It was all about making a joyful noise, which we did and then some, and had us some grand times. But, living with Uncle Bruce brought with it one major drawback: he seemed to attract natural disasters like swamps attract mosquitoes. He had built so many successful communities, but had lost them all in the most freakish of ways. It had been said if he climbed Mt. Everest he likely would get swept off by a dust storm. He placed the blame on the government, feeling it had found a means of manipulating the weather in order to keep the working class of America in constant despair and turmoil, forever preventing unity and hope. I don't know if I agree, but then you tell me how a Tsunami found us in Nebraska. Sure enough, it did, sweeping away our farm and all our hard work, and my legs right out from under me. I was washed many miles from our farm, and the last I saw of Uncle Bruce, he was roaring across the 'braska corn fields in his '69 Chevy with its 396, a few feet ahead of both the Tsunami and the Old Rugged Cross Dressers, who were high-stepping it over the fields with their dresses held high. I hope they all made it to safety, I sincerely do. As for me, I was slung to and 'fro in that great wave, then floated for a time in the great sea that was left in its wake. I was nearly to the end of my strength, about to go down for the third time, when a pair of hands latched onto me and pulled me up and onto a sturdy wooden raft.  I gagged up a gallon of Nebraska mud and then found myself looking up into the face of a girl with eyes as bright as wonder, and skin like cream from heaven's own dairy. I tried to ask her if I could safely hide my heart inside hers, but all that came out of me was more mud, water, and a crawfish or two. So I lay quiet as she cradled my head in her lap and sang to me, and we floated down together, ready to face the unknown, and unknown to the world. ***************************************************** And now we call upon the author to explain..... The preceding ode to the joys of untruth was originally going to be called "My Concert Summer", as a reflection on the unusual (for me) number of major concerts I've seen (or will see) in the stretch of just four months. I will go a couple of years at a time without seeing anything other than performances in club venues. This is due partly to a lack of still-touring acts that excite me enough to want to see them in concert, but on a bigger level it's pure economics; namely, I can't afford the obscene modern ticket prices or the ought-to-be-criminal practices of Ticketmaster. It was a different story when I was in high school. In those days, I would often see as many as three concerts in one week. Of course, prices were somewhat more reasonable (I still remember bitching about having to pay $10 to see Molly Hatchet), and perhaps I was a bit less picky about whom I'd go see (I'll say it again: Molly Hatchet). Hell, I'd even get a t-shirt at every show…they ran about $5. Then comes this summer and I'm dropping big bucks on, first, The Cure in Atlanta…then Tom Waits in Birmingham…and still coming up in September, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in Chicago. You'll notice these shows aren't exactly in my backyard, so I've also been re-living that old excitement of the Concert Road Trip. So I was going to review these shows (The Cure and Waits were magnificent, Nick Cave might even ultimately top 'em), but the final shape of the blog came about from a discussion that happened after the Tom Waits show. One of Waits' sons is the full-time drummer in his band, and a younger son came out during the show to play percussion and clarinet on a few tunes. One somehow expects a son of Tom Waits to be some small, pale bowler-hat wearing version of his old man, so it was amusing that this kid looked as all-American and wholesome as if he'd stepped out of an after-school special. This was brought up later, as my companions and I strolled on the Birmingham streets on that lovely July night. At one point, myself or someone wondered aloud, "what would it be like to have Tom Waits as a father?". That simple question planted a seed in my mind, as I started thinking of that old bit of daydreaming one does as a kid, the one in particular where you imagine how cool it would be to be the nephew of, say, Walt Disney, and got your run of Disney World, or George Lucas, who put you up at the Skywalker Ranch for a weekend. What monster movie fan didn't dream of being related to "Uncle Forry" Ackerman, and getting to run amok amid all those cool horror and sci-fi props and memorabilia? Hugh Hefner and any professional football franchise owner also make for ideal "fantasy uncles" to many an imaginative boy. So out of that musing grew an idea about how I could tie all my summer concerts into one blog and ask the question: What if your uncles were Robert Smith, Tom Waits, and Nick Cave? And you have just read the results. Now, I suppose some of you are thinking that explains the initial first paragraphs, but that the story certainly becomes a sprawling mess afterwards. Perhaps you think maybe I "lost the thread" a little bit? Well, to the naysayers, I will lay out the following and hopefully show you how it all ties together: The appearance of Bruce Springsteen as the fourth Uncle is justified by the fact that I also saw "The Boss" live in August, so he is certainly part of my "Concert Summer". You might feel he doesn't belong in the same canon as Waits, Smith, and Cave, but I disagree. This blog has already gone on too long for me to spend time detailing why I think Springsteen is just as vital, distinctive, and important as any artist in popular music. Suffice for now just to note that his new album, "Magic" is his best work since 1982's "Nebraska". His current tour has been challenging, unpredictable, and career-defining, AND at his stop here in Nashville, he played "I Fought the Law" and dedicated it to Joe Strummer. 'Nuff said! As for Uncle Don Clark, I'm lucky enough to be in The Secret Commonwealth with that talented gentleman, so you could say I basically see Don "In Concert" on a weekly basis! www.myspace.com/uncledonclark The Old Rugged Cross Dressers are currently my favorite local band, and I pretty much see them live every chance I can, including a few times during this "concert summer". So should you! www.myspace.com/oldruggedcrossdressers Yes, that is actress Zooey Deschanel (ELF, ALMOST FAMOUS) as the girl on the raft, but you might not know that Zooey has her own band called She & Him. I'll confess that I checked the band out initially because I think Zooey is rather attractive (what can I say, under this gruff, manly exterior, I'm actually a man), but I know full well how often actors who attempt music just embarrass themselves (see Scarlett Johansson's album of Tom Waits covers...no, on second though, don't). It was a pleasant surprise, though, to find that Zooey is even more impressive as a singer/songwriter than as an actress. Music is probably her true calling, in fact. I highly recommend She & Him's debut album, "Volume One". And YES, I did just catch them in concert a few weeks ago! So again, a big Nyaahhh to you naysayers. www.myspace.com/sheandhim Ah, and now I'll sheepishly address those other loose ends... Some of you sharp-eyed literate types might have realized that I lifted the fate of Uncle Nick straight from the pages of John Steinbeck's "Tortilla Flat". I'll 'fess up to it, I've always loved the passage and thought it was a fitting demise for Nick Cave. Hey, at least I showed taste in my thievery. I could have stolen from Danielle Steel. Okay, okay, I'll also admit the phrase "Eyes as bright as wonder" is lifted from The Monkees' song "Sunny Girlfriend". Again, stealing from the best. Lastly, the cameo by a certain legendary British drummer as one of his more lecherous alter-egos can't really be justified. Nor yet could I resist it. ***************************************************** Oh, and if any of my REAL uncles happen to read this...don't worry, I think you're pretty damn cool too!
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Friday, March 28, 2008
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Current mood:  geeky
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
After so long on myspace, this is my first actual posting of a survey as a blog! Blame it on Rhatfink, he knows movies and music are two subjects I find hard to resist. Anyway, the brevity of this will be a relief to those who normally have to slog through my long-winded typical blogs.
This was very challenging, and no doubt after posting it I’ll be thinking of films and crying, "DOH! How could I forget that one?" But that’s the nature of these things. So think of it instead as a snapshot of my opinion today…then ask me again tomorrow!
Be sure and take a stab at this yourself. It’s fun, and don’t worry if you can’t come up with 5 films for every category. Here in the futuristic utopian village of myspace, everyone is free from the sneering tyranny of effete intellectual elitist cultish film snobbery.
Aren’t we?????????????????????????????????????????
Top 5 Classic Black & White
5. Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein
4. The Dawn Patrol
3. Son of Frankenstein
2. Gojira
1. Casablanca
Top 5 classic color
5. The Searchers
4. The Quiet Man
3. The Black Swan
2. The Adventures of Robin Hood
1. Wizard of Oz
Top 5 Comedy
5. Harvey
4. It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World
3. What’s Up Doc
2. Monty Python & the Holy Grail
1. Young Frankenstein
Top 5 Cult
5. Meet the Feebles
4. Spider Baby
3. Evil Dead
2. Rock and Roll High School
1. Dawn of the Dead
Top 5 Film Noir
5. The Third Man
4. The Big Heat
3. Elevator to the Gallows
2. Out of the Past
1. Touch of Evil
Top 5 Horror Films
5. Son of Frankenstein
4. The Exorcist
3. The Haunting
2. Halloween
1. Dawn of the Dead
Top 5 Foreign
5. Wings of Desire
4. Gojira
3. The Seventh Seal
2. Seven Samurai
1. Aquirre, the Wrath of God
Top 5 Movies About The Movies
5. The Player
4. 8 1/2
3. Cinema Paradiso
2. Contempt
1. Day for Night
Top 5 Westerns
5. Shane
4. Once Upon a Time in the West
3. The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly
2. The Long Riders
1. The Wild Bunch
Top 5 Silent Films
5. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
4. Napoleon
3. Nosferatu
2. Metropolis
1. The General
Top 5 Musicals
5. Guys and Dolls
4. Mary Poppins
3. Mad Monster Party
2. Cabaret
1. Scrooge
Top 5 Action Movie
5. X-Men
4. The French Connection
3. The Killer
2. Enter the Dragon
1. The Road Warrior
Top 5 Animated Movies
5. Akira
4. Lady and the Tramp
3. Fantasia
2. Watership Down
1. Spirited Away
Top 5 Documentaries
5. The Last Waltz
4. Signals Through the Flames: The Story of the Living Theater
3. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten
2. Decline of Western Civilization
1. On Any Sunday
Top 5 Movies That I Can’t Believe Didn’t Make A Top 5 List
5. Curse of the Demon
4. Knightriders
3. Fanny and Alexander
2. Blade Runner (think maybe there should have been a top 5 Science Fiction category?)
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
Top 5 Sequels
5. Spiderman 2
4. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back – Episode V
3. X-Men 2
2. Aliens
1. The Godfather, Part II
Top 5 weirdest movies I have discovered in the last year.
5. I
4. Don’t
3. Have
2. An
1. Answer (me neither, Chris…maybe nothing’s too weird for us anymore?)
Top 5 Movies that everyone seemed to love but me.
5. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi – Episode VI (Sorry, Chris)
4. The Big Chill
3. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial
2. The Breakfast Club
1. Fatal Attraction
Top 5 Movies you might or might not have heard of, but should see
5. Matango (1963, dir. Ishiro Honda)
4. If I Were King (1938, dir. Frank Lloyd)
3. Eyes of Fire (1984, dir. Avery Crounse)
2. Blood and Lace (1971, dir. Philip Gilbert)
1. Bliss (1985, dir. Ray Lawrence)
Top 5 Movies I’ve heard about but have yet to take the time to see.
5. Stagecoach
4. The Sweet Smell of Success
3. All About Eve
2. History of Violence
1. Dark City
My Childhood Top 5
5. The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
4. Creature from the Black Lagoon
3. Mad Monster Party
2. Godzilla vs. The Thing
1. Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein
My All Time Top 5 as of Today
5. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
4. Hannah and Her Sisters
3. Lawrence of Arabia
2. Dawn of the Dead
1. Scrooge (1970 musical version)
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Monday, December 03, 2007
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Current mood:catnipped
Category: Pets and Animals
(The part of Henrietta Hippo will be played by Flex the Cat)
I can't believe I've got FOUR friggin' cats.
That thought does run through my mind these days when I observe the quartet of furry felines that now chase, lounge, eat, or otherwise display themselves throughout my home. I, who was a devout "dog person" through most of my life; and even my closest relatives and friends all had dogs when I was a kid. I just really don't remember ever even petting a cat during my childhood. Cats were just these odd creatures you'd glimpse way off, crossing the road with their tails arrogantly, independently high in the air, or disappearing over the back fence with your loyal dog in hot pusuit of those same arrogant, independent tails.
I was in my early teens before I first heard the sound that male cats make when they're facing off over a female in heat. This incident happened in the back yard of our new home in a Kingston Springs subdivision. Here, much more than in Nashville, dogs and cats roamed everywhere on the streets and yards. It was in the early a.m. when I awoke to hear the most bone-chilling wail coming from outside my bedroom window. I thought it was human, a child perhaps, but what really raised the hairs on my neck was that each wail was of the exact same pitch and duration…not at all the sound a person in distress or pain would make. It sounded both mournful and robotic at the same time. Of course I was already an avid horror movie fan by this time, so my mind was full of images of what could possibly be making an unholy wail like that. Surely some pale ghostly child vampire was hovering just outside my window! So I did what any strapping teenage boy would do in that situation…I went and woke up Dad! We investigated together (I made him go first) and found the source of the noise…which only convinced me even more that cats were annoying, fucked up, and not really worth wasting time with, or getting out of bed over.
Shortly after that, my Mom got the notion to see what it would be like to have a cat. We acquired a female cat, named her Jessica, and she was a welcome addition to the household for a few years, until her fatal run-in with some unknown other animal; we never saw what killed her. Since that time, my parents have always had at least one cat, and usually two, in addition to also having dogs, of course. It's not surprising that I did find some things to like about cats, as we Guinns are big softies when it comes to animals anyway (and our animals grow big and soft on the too-generous Guinn diet…but more on that later). We had cats that ranged from the "I am a limp rag with whom you can do anything you wish" type, to the "don't touch me or I'll open a vein and then groom myself while you lie bleeding to death" variety. From time to time I've lived with cat owners and enjoyed the company of their felines as well, but still I never really bonded with a cat in the way I did with my favorite dogs. I hoped that I could someday have the right kind of yard and home for a dog, but I was still pretty indifferent to ever owning a cat.
Then along came Flex!
Most of my friends know the tale of how Flex (literally) walked into my life in the winter of 2004. I shared a duplex with my friend Laura Joseph in East Nashville, on a street that was completely overrun with feral cats who all turned green in the winter. No shit, they were apparently getting into some shed somewhere to keep warm during the cold months, a shed which obviously contained some kind of fertilizer/chemicals that would turn any white fur on these cats to a glowing green/blue. Laura dubbed them the "toxic kitties". I, being a bigger geek, preferred "The Cats from Yucca Flats", but that's beside the point. These cats were mostly street-wise and fruitful, so their survival rate was high and their numbers ever-increasing. Laura and I naturally set out food for them, but being wild as they were, they took the food but would never let us get anywhere near them. All of which didn't help my basic opinion of cats as still somewhat less useful creatures than dogs.
Then one day I opened my front door, and into my house strolled Flex, a Siamese by the looks of him (and no green or blue fur anywhere!), although many have said he's too fat and friendly to be that brand of cat. He made himself right at home like we were old college buddies, as if to say, "Well, here I am, ya got any beer? When do we eat?"
Flex had already made this exact same entrance on Laura's side of the duplex (in fact it was Laura who gave him his very fitting name) so he was her cat until she and I moved out of that slowly-crumbling house (which I came to refer to as the Duplex of Usher) and into separate locations. Even though Laura was crazy about Flex, she already had two cats prior to his entrance, and she didn't feel she could deal with three cats at her new, smaller apartment. I was now sharing a duplex with my younger brother, Jeremy, who'd already said he'd like to have a cat or two around. When Laura offered to give Flex to us, we jumped at the chance. We have a great set-up for a cat; there is a shared closet that connects our apartments, and we've installed cat-doors on both sides. So our cats can just wander back and forth between my pad and Jeremy's (which they do, about 300 times a day).
Yes, I said "cats"…Flex wouldn't be a single cat for long. (Flex is actually big enough himself to be several cats…but more on that later) One amazing aspect about the amazing Flex is his love for kittens. He would often adopt one of the stray "toxic" kittens as his own, keeping it entertained and also protecting it against the hordes of other feral felines on Roberts Avenue. Jeremy and I made attempts to bring a couple of those wild kittens to our duplex on Riverside, so that Flex could have a companion, but our initial luck was not so good. The first kitten we caught was a little boy, very cute but a bit sickly and weak. Turns out he had pneumonia, and we got some antibiotics for him but he didn't live but a few weeks. Next, we caught a girl kitten that Flex had already befriended back in the old neighborhood. She also only lasted a few weeks before being hit by a car and killed.
I told my brother that I was a bit burnt out on the whole kitten-death thing, and that Flex was just going to have to be an "only cat" for awhile. Apparently, Flex heard me, for the next day there he was, with a little girl kitten hopping along behind him. I'm not shitting you, somewhere in our new neighborhood, which differs markedly from my old one in that there are very few animals to be found running loose, Flex had gone out and found himself a kitten. She promptly took up residence under our house, where I dutifully set out food for her and made vain attempts to catch her so we could have her fixed. The last thing I wanted to deal with was a litter of kittens. I was never able to get close enough to her, though. She thought Flex hung the moon, and anytime he was out, she was all over him, but I could never coax her to come within reach.
Well, of course the inevitable happened, when you have an unfixed female cat that lives outdoors. Many wandering male cats began to be seen hanging around, and even though Flex caught most of them and gave them cab fare home (so to speak), he couldn't be there to intervene all the time. So sure enough, in June '05, my little under-house tenant popped out four babies, two boys and two girls, and promptly moved them also under the house. For six weeks I didn't see them, only their mother, but then she abruptly disappeared and was never seen again. This left me with the realization that there were four kittens, without a mommy, living under my house. I was dreading the prospect of having to crawl the entire length of the space under my house to retrieve them, but I knew it had to be done. I had my spelunking gear all ready to go, when lo and behold; the first of them poked his head out and began frolicking with Flex out in the yard. The other three weren't so easy to catch, but with the help of Laura and Franchesa Wolfe, we lured them one-by-one out from under the house. So now I had them all safe and inside, and here's where Flex was a true savior. He basically became their surrogate mother (luckily they were just old enough to start eating mushed-up kitten food), letting them all sleep next to him, or climb all over him while he cleaned them constantly. Ever since then, his full name is Uncle Flex. Honestly, I think having him there made things so much easier for me, and it kept all the kittens out in the open where I could see them. Not once did I have to pull them out from under beds or couches. Although I did have to rescue the runt of the litter (the future Raven), from being suffocated once when a slumbering Flex rolled over on top of her and wouldn't wake up to her cries for help. Flex is not a small cat, so imagine a sleeping elephant rolling onto you and that will give you some perspective on her plight.
So I rewarded Flex for being such an exemplary and exceptional cat by keeping one of the litter, the aforementioned nearly-suffocated runt, a pretty little black female with a single patch of white on her throat. Jeremy named her Raven, and while she is a wild child without much use for human affection, she is non-aggressive and sweet. OR SO WE THOUGHT. But more on that in a moment.
With the efforts of friends like Shannon Smith, Connie Knoch, and Dara Carson, all of whom either took kittens, found homes for them, or helped make "Free Kittens!" signs, Raven's siblings were finally "placed" in new homes, and all was right with the world. I had Flex, Flex had his kitten, and little Raven was nuts about her Uncle Flex. Raven's incredibly nimble-footed, so even her typical kitten climbing and exploring rarely ever even upset all the books, action figures, and other geek accoutrements lining my shelves.
Now we come to May of '07. Traveling cellist/pool shark/asskickin' martial artist Wendi Silberman had ridden back in town for my birthday party and (she believed) a mere few weeks interlude in her ongoing traversing of North America. Wendi has two cats also, who are in many ways mirror images of my own. She has a cool male cat named Omen, who is jet-black and has the face of a wise (if slightly surly) lion. His companion is a tiny, timid-but-sweet female tortoiseshell calico, Miko. Wendi's being able to put in a year of traveling had been contingent on knowing that her cats would be well-cared-for and in a safe place. To this point, Omen and Miko were staying with the sister of Wendi's traveling companion, photographer/pool shark/asskickin' martial artist Ryan Stoney. It seemed a fair deal, since Wendi had previously kept Ryan's sister's cat for about 9 months while sis was doing her own globe-hopping. Unfortunately, to be diplomatic, Omen wasn't really getting as much attention in his new, temporary home as was his custom, and this combined with his upset over his mommy's absence caused him to vent his displeasure in that time-honored, charming cat custom of "spraying". After a couple of incidents that found cat piss covering Ryan's sister, the bed, and the sister's laptop…well, let's say that Omen was about to be shown the door, whether or not he had a place to go.
So now Wendi found herself with half her planned travels still remaining, yet faced once again with uprooting her cats, and imposing their care on someone else. She also needed to know her "kids"'t ask me, but her relief was monumental when I proposed it as a solution, for a few reasons. For one, I had already spent a lot of time with Omen and Miko, and I knew them to be really good cats. For another, I'm a big softie for animals and have no problem giving them love and attention. Also, I'm storing much of Wendi's stuff while she travels, so her scent would be around the house. Best of all, Wendi would be coming over often when she was in town, so her cats could get their "mommy" fix more than they were when they stayed with Ryan's sister.
Don't think for a second, though, that I made this offer thinking it was all just going to be a happy transition and things would go smoothly. Cats aren't known for making any situation easy when they can cause chaos instead, and just because all four creatures were of a sweet disposition didn't mean they weren't going to freak out at first sight of one another. In fact, they might never stop freaking out. So I had to really weigh the potentialities before I opened my doors to Omen and Miko. Ultimately, I just trusted in the positive natures from all those involved, and believed things would work out. I knew that traveling the country had been Wendi's dream for many years, so if I could help her continue in any way, I would.
And on the whole…well, it's gone about as well as we could hope. Which doesn't mean perfectly or smoothly, it just means that all two-and-four-legged parties are alive at the moment, and (most) days pass without incident. On the first night of Omen and Miko's stay, I got my taste of just what mind-blowing craziness a cat can bring into one's life. Omen was really unhappy with being moved yet again, and would just not stop meowing and wandering around the house. Wendi stayed up with him so that I could maybe drift off for a couple hours, which I finally did by the early morning. When I woke up, I could hear Omen still meowing, and it was coming from my open closet door. This is a large, walk-in closet (but too normally stuffed with junk to actually walk in), so I started pulling stuff out in order to find Omen. Something about his meow sounded more desperate than it had when he was merely stressing over his new environment. Eventually I had cleared the closet out to the back wall...and still couldn't find him, only hear his voice. For a moment I stood, dumbfounded, and could only conclude that Omen had, inexplicably, gotten up in the attic, or, unfathomably, was now within the very walls of my house. Feel free to make the obvious Poe/Lovecraft references I know you want to here. As it turned out, Omen had gotten on top of the water heater in the corner of the closet, slipped off, and was now wedged down behind it and the wall. Wendi was able to get on some boxes and reach down far enough behind the heater so that, with Omen reaching up as far as he could, she could grab the scruff of his neck and lift him out. So, the cat was rescued, but the thought that crossed my mind was Yeah, this is gonna be an adventure.
Beyond the occasional heart-stopping episodes like that, the real issue was always going to be: how will these four felines take to each other? I knew that Flex and Omen were exceptionally cool cats, but history shows that icons of cool do not necessarily mesh when they cross paths. Take the time The Beatles met Muhammad Ali. Or when Dylan met Warhol. Luckily, Flex and Omen are more like John Huston and Errol Flynn, who used to get bored at big Hollywood parties, go out on the lawn, take off their tuxedo jackets, box each other to a bloody pulp, then drink and carouse until all hours afterwards. These two most excellent cats are the best of buddies, and now that Omen has settled in, I think he is even more Zen than Flex. Flex can come out of nowhere, ambush Omen and send him flying hindquarters over collar, and Omen will just shake it off and immediately resume the lotus position. (If you think that's hard for a human, just watch a cat do it!). It's no coincidence that his name sounds like OMMMMMMMMMM....
However, Omen still occasionally lets him mommy know his displeasure over her current, transient lifestyle, usually with a well-placed spray. Once, Wendi and I were playing music in my backyard on a lovely summer night. We came in to find that Omen had pissed and scored a direct hit on Wendi's bass guitar case.
Got that message loud and clear, Mommy?
As to the little girls…yeah, there's a problem there. One of the rudest and most unexpected discoveries to come out of all this is what a mean little bitch my Raven has turned out to be. Oh, I knew she has a little killer in her; in fact she's a real scourge of the insect world. She likes to sit by the kitchen door, where there's a gap between the door and the floor, and wait for insects to come through the gap so she can pick them off like it's her own University of Texas tower. But, she's never hissed at another person or animal, not even my friend Chandra's dog, Ivan, when he would come to stay when Chandra was on vacation. Raven would just see Ivan and hit the cat door like a guided missile, staying on Jeremy's side until Ivan's stay was over. So here I thought Raven would be the one running and hiding when Omen and Miko arrived. Nope. Raven has no problems with Omen, but boy did she discover the joys of her inner intimidating hell-demon when it comes to Miko.
Poor Miko has been on the run from the moment she arrived. Flex approached her like the big friendly lug he is, but Miko is just timid by nature, so she ran behind my piano. Flex stuck his mug back there and promptly got a face full of claws for his efforts.
Thus did Flex learn the lesson that males of all species must find out at some point in their lives: NO MATTER HOW HANDSOME YOUR FACE IS, YOU CAN'T JUST STICK IT INTO ANY NARROW SPACE YOU WANT.
It didn't take long for Miko to warm to Flex's chill male energy, though, and they're just fine together, especially when they can run around outside. Raven, however, just lives to terrorize poor Miko, and Miko is pretty much confined now to my kitchen counters and sleeping on top of the refrigerator. She's even afraid to use the litter boxes, so she took to shitting in my kitchen sink (well, at least she's still thinking in terms of using a box of some kind). To remedy that, I put a small litter tray on the kitchen counter, but of course the litter gets kicked all over the counter. Now there's a dilemma only a cat can give you: is it preferable to clean shit out of your kitchen sink, or constantly have to sweep stray litter off the counter? I honestly haven't decided.
I thought Raven would finally accept Miko after a while, but considering it's now been six months and nothing's improved, I'd say Raven is just enjoying herself way too much. No matter how many times I chase her away with the broom, she's always soon back to torment Miko more.
Geez, the boys get along great and the girls hate each other…I feel like I'm back in the old days of Secret Commonwealth!
So that's the tale of how this "dog person" ended up being the crazy cat lady of his street at the age of 41. In summary, what do I feel about cats….? While we love dogs for their steadfastedness, we may love cats for their inscrutable mystery. They are certainly more fascinating and complex than dogs, and they're hilarious in their fascination with each other. Seriously, put 8 cats in a room, and they will each be totally aware of what the others are doing at all times. That whole "wired in" aspect of cats just blows me away, the way they are tuned in to what's going on around them, ready to take off or get defensive at any second. A cat may not have a concept of death, but it damn sure has a concept of danger.
Ah, but then there's that whole "curiosity" mechanism, which was probably put there in cats to make 'em actually move at all. I was thinking, what a terrible paradox that must be to live with…to be so acutely aware of the dangers that might lurk within a dark space, yet to be unable to resist investigating that darkness anyway. Stephen King has written at length about the typically short, violent life a cat leads, and I'll admit it's daunting to take on the responsibility of keeping a cat alive. I've done it for six months now, and will likely have Miko and Omen at least until next summer, or whenever Wendi will be settling back into Nashville for good. Well, Wendi is well aware of cats' propensity for getting into trouble, so she certainly knows I can't guarantee her cats' continued survival any more than I can my own. I'll admit, when/if I return Omen and Miko safe and alive to Wendi's arms, I'll breathe a sigh of relief. But, I know already I'll miss the hell out of them, too.
Wendi HAS asked me not to give her cats back to her as huge tubs of lard, however. I mentioned earlier that animals tend to (ahem) flourish under the Guinn diet, which means we spoil them via food. I won't say that Flex is fat, but you can tell which side of the duplex he spends more time in, because that's the side where the foundation has settled the most. Omen has put on a couple pounds already, so we really have to all go on a diet regimen, myself and Flex included. Well, after the holidays, maybe.
I've often been annoyed at people who project their own neuroses onto their pets. The couple played by Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock in the film BEST IN SHOW are not that exaggerated, I'm afraid. When I hear people talk of a pet's "separation issues" or "this or that anxiety" I just want to scream "It's an animal! It wants to eat and shit and play and sleep and if it can do those things, it's happy!!" Yet I have tempered that belief with the knowledge that they really are little individuals, with personalities and habits that come out of left field and sure as hell aren't generic, even taking into account the tendencies of certain "breeds". They are sensitive, demanding little souls, and yes, sometimes they even go off the rails to a point that you have to let them go before they can endanger you or other persons close to you. Just ask my friend Shannon, who had a cat go pretty much insane before her eyes.
I'm a man blessed with many good and close friends, but I can honestly say that my Uncle Flex is one of my best buddies, and I count the day he strolled into my house right up there with the best things that ever happened to me. In the end, I think that our pets are emotional beings, whose needs happen to be very simple. Perhaps we'd find the same is true of us, were our lives not too complicated to ever find out.
 | Currently listening:
Year of the Cat
By Al Stewart
Release date: 27 April, 2004 |
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Sunday, February 04, 2007
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Current mood:Ent-raged
Category: Life
I'm starting to think that Saruman is a resident of the East Nashville 'hood.
Okay, I'll stop with the Lord of the Rings references. But, for those who get 'em, you probably can guess that this blog has something to do with trees. For the second time since I moved into my house on Riverside, I've come home to find a bit of forest life that I quite enjoyed has been LAID TO WASTE.
The first time happened just a few months after my younger brother and I moved into this duplex we share. We had four grandly aged trees lining the front bank of our yard. Not long after we'd settled into our new dwelling, I come home after work one day, cruise up Riverside towards my house, and screech to a halt while saying "What in the seven fucking hells...?" or "Crom's Bones!" or something like that. 'Cause there in front of my house is some massive machine, grinding up one of my trees. The three other trees lay side-by-side like executed freedom fighters, waiting to join their brother in shredsville.
According to my neighbors, NES had come knocking on this duplex's door seventeen month --- seventeen months --- ago, and informed the current resident that those trees were posing a threat to the power lines, and gave the resident a choice of either having the trees trimmed back, or cut down altogether. I don't know the exact words of the resident's response, but it was probably something like, "Aww Hell I don't give a fuck, cut 'em down". Time passes, this worthy is evicted from the duplex, and it falls into the ownership of the considerably more tree-friendly Guinns. Seventeen months --- seventeen months ---- from their initial visit, NES arrives back on the scene with all their tree-obliterating machinery. You'd expect them to double-check to be sure the occupancy hasn't changed in all that considerable time, right? Well, you'd be wrong. So I barely got to enjoy these beauties before they were gone. NES did provide four new trees to replace them, and they'll be all scenic and robust someday...long after I've gone into the celestial shredder as well.
The second incident in this tale, however, doesn't really have a villain...unless it can be the one called "Good Intentions". See, I've got this huge friggin' bush..I mean, we're talking Azathoth-proportions, this bush...in my back yard. It's really quite awe-inspiring and grows like the sun is its personal steroid supplier. Although we have to occasionally trim it back lest it swallow my back porch steps, I find it to be a great conversation piece as well as an extra shield from any eyes that might pry into my backyard. It also stimulates the imagination...I've often thought it would be cool to hollow out a place inside the bush to read or just contemplate. A clubhouse (bushhouse?) if you will, and it certainly is big enough for that. I used to sit on the porch and watch my cat, Flex, disappear under the bush, and I imagined that he had a secret passage in there that took him to another realm, where he'd have adventures and rescue kingdoms in what was only a few minutes of our time, after which he'd come back into this world to get some tuna and a nap on the couch.
Yet my Mom had noted, as mothers will, that the bush could also provide a hiding place for someone with not-at-all-legal intentions. She mentioned this once to me but I shrugged off the suggestion. Not that she wasn't right, and this IS East Nashville, after all. I'll admit the bush was big enough to set up a crackhouse (a crackbush?) inside it. I might have taken it more to heart if I had a companion or family living with me to consider. As it is, I just really couldn't get too concerned about it.
She also mentioned her concern to my Dad, and he wasn't so quick to dismiss the idea. So Dad calls up, well, let's call him The Handyman, shall we. The Handyman is a really nice guy who adores the Guinns and is reliable, hard-working, all that good stuff. Dad asks him to take the bush back a bit, and while he's at it, could he reduce the row of bushes, trees, and general growth that runs inside my back fence.
This "hedge" is also something I've enjoyed. Yes, it is wild and wooly, but it's a neat mix of bushes that pop up some really nice flowers that I pick for me mum and also a couple of sprawling trees...and it, too, adds a nice extra "shield" of privacy. I can just pull my truck in between the huge friggin' bush and this hedgerow, and unload musical equipment and whatever else, and although the trees from the hedge have been known to get a bit tangled in my hair as I'm getting in and out of my vehicle, I've always felt we co-existed quite well. Oh hell, I'll admit it, I was quite proud of the fertile, untamed growth within my back fence.
So you can imagine how it felt to pull into the fence and come face to face with...nothing. My beloved cyclopean bush and my cozy hedge had been taken down to the fucking ground. Apparently, Handyman is one of those folks who never stops to contemplate the poetic nature of trees (those people exist, believe me), and in his eagerness to please the Guinns, decided to make sure that even a squirrel would find no place of concealment from which to accost me.
Well, I was pissed...and my parents were horrified...and then Handyman was horrified that they were horrified...but remorse and regret aren't really a substitue for Miracle Gro. Poor Handyman backpedalled heroically, claiming that cutting everything back will stimulate its growth. Hell, he may be right, at least in the case of the bushes. Shit, it wouldn't surprise me to walk out in a couple of days and run smack into that behemoth all grown back again. But, there were a couple of honest-to-God trees in that mix, and I've never known trees taken down to the stump to bounce back too fast.
This was even more of a shock because Dad had completely forgot to even mention to me that Handyman was going to do any work at all...but even if he had, it probably wouldn't changed the outcome. I suppose I would have agreed that the growth could use a bit of a trim (did I mention it tangling in my hair? Yes, smartasses, I realize my hair could use a trim, too), and then Handyman would have gone ahead with his swath of destruction through my little half-acre. So my being warned ahead of time wouldn't really have made a difference.
Well, it depresses me to see it. I dig trees. I can't claim to have actually "hugged" one, but they're cool and unique and have personality. I realize that many of them have to fall before this continually expanding trip mankind has been on since the first man thought to himself, "I need some SPACE", but I still hate to see them toppled for no reason. Especially when it's on my watch.
If it doesn't look like things are recovering sufficiently, then of course we'll plant new life there. But I'll miss my little bit of forest. On summer nights it wasn't uncommon for me to sit out naked in my backyard, in a lawn chair, enjoying the rustle of branches and hear a rabbit or two rustle around behind the row...and to glance back quickly at the huge friggin' bush 'cause I'd sworn it had just moved a couple of inches towards me. I can still sit out naked (well, when it's summer again, that is) but somehow it's just not the same when you're just surrounded by brick and a man-made fence.
Wow, a quick glance back on what I've written shows that it contains the words bush, laid, naked, huge, Handyman, fuck, fertile, stimulate, growth, inches, etc. I'm afraid some googlers in search of porn are going to be directed to this blog!
 | Currently watching:
Lord Jim
Release date: 24 August, 2004 |
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Thursday, November 30, 2006
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Current mood:footsore
Category: Life
This is going to be one of those "Look at the wacky things that happen to me" kinds of blog that everyone does at some time or another…which I suppose just goes to show that wacky things happen to us all. What a wacky species we are.
So let me set the scene: My older brother Packy and his wife Linda occasionally ask me to stay at their house when they go on vacation, mainly to keep their three "children" (beagles) company. I'm always happy to do this, because their house is located in an as-yet not fully developed or bulldozed patch of woods out in Kingston Springs. They have a lovely and scenic walking trail that covers the entire perimeter of woods that constitutes their property, and it makes for a fine place to stroll while pondering life's complexities. The beagles themselves are fairly low maintenance, being gentle creatures, portly in the manner of most well-fed Guinn animals, and spend most of the time imitating throw pillows (if throw pillows could snore) on the various couches and beds. In all, it's just far enough away from Nashville to feel like "getting away from it all", plus it's only 20 minutes from my parents' house so I can go visit them as well during my stay.
Last Tuesday, Pack and Linda left to spend Thanksgiving with her family in West Virginia. Since my Sony overlords had given us most of the rest of the week off, I arrived at their house Tuesday night looking forward to a few quiet days ahead with nothing pulling me back into the city (certainly not the crush of post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping mania). It was already dark, and growing a bit chilly. As it turned out, it was the coldest night of the entire week --- a significant detail, as we shall soon see. I retrieved the door key from its hiding place, and let myself in, to a chorus of wails and howls from the beagles ("mountain music" my friend Jack used to call it), who were happy to see that some two-legged entity was there to ensure that there would be a supper that night. I threw the key on the kitchen table (another significant detail), fixed the beagles their supper and did the same for myself. After eating, I kicked off my shoes and sat down with my guitar and the remote with which to peruse the satellite channels on the 50-inch widescreen TV. Hey, I said the place was in the woods, I didn't say it doesn't have all the modern conveniences.
The oldest beagle, Murphy, though she has more energy than most dogs half her age, is somewhat arthritic and creaky, and has a hard time getting down the back stairs into the fenced-in back yard. I'd been given the okay to let her go do her "business" in the front yard, since she's too feeble to run off chasing some scent three counties away like the younger dogs would do. Murph also likes to wait until I get really comfortable before she hobbles over to the door and starts whining and doing her one-legged hop (quite a trick for a four-legged arthritic beagle). So I sighed and dutifully opened the front door, let Murphy out onto the front porch, closed the front door behind me so Corky and Sam (the younger beagles) couldn't get out, then opened the small gate at the top of the porch stairs. Murphy hopped the three steps to the ground, and I turned to go back inside where it was warm.
AND FOUND THE FRONT DOOR LOCKED.
That didn't seem quite possible, since it had to have been unlocked for me to have let myself and Murph outside. I assumed it must have been jammed, or possibly the welcome mat had gotten bunched up underneath it. I threw my shoulder into it a couple times, which of course never works like it does in the movies. I tried the knob and it didn't budge, and I had to face the fact that it was fer-chrissake locked as all hell.
A succession of thoughts ran rapid-fire through my head, which were: (1) The key was sitting on the kitchen table because I had not put it back in its hiding place out front, (2) Also inside were my cell phone, car keys, coat, and shoes, (3) I was in my t-shirt, jeans, and socks and already my feet were growing numb, and (4) there were two back doors…could one of them be unlocked?
Nope.
So after my futile check of the back doors (hoping not to step in something bad in my sock feet…it was the beagles' back yard/bathroom, after all), I was faced with the truth: me and Murphy, locked outside in the cold. So I put Murph back on the front porch and closed the gate. Just about then, I heard the house phone ring from inside. The answering machine picks up, and it's Packy's voice. He was calling from West Virginia but I couldn't make out what he's calling to tell me. Well, I had bigger problems at the moment.
(STAY WITH ME BECAUSE THERE'S A PUNCHLINE AT THE END OF ALL THIS.)
I was realizing I had to either break a window, or rely on the kindness of strangers…which would mean going knocking on doors in the dark of the night. I wasn't eager to vandalize my brother's property, so I decided on the latter, and began the trek to the nearest house. I say "trek" because that's what it was.
It's funny how the things you appreciate about the country can be real negatives under certain situations. To wit:
-There's a LOT of distance between each driveway.
- There are no streetlights.
- Every driveway is gravel.
- 99% of the households are under guardianship of the canine variety.
So I steeled my resolve, said "Right" in my best John Cleese impersonation, and hit the dark and (mercifully) paved main road. Becoming ever more aware of the blocks of ice that were once my feet, I thought I could warm myself up a bit by running, which I did.
Being a pop culture junkie, I have a tendency to see life a lot of times in cinematic terms. Now I couldn't help but flash on Dustin Hoffman from MARATHON MAN. Remember the endless footage of him running through the city at night, clad only in his pajama pants? This was sort of the rural version of the same thing. Unlike Hoffman, I didn't have Nazi War criminals on my trail, but I was setting various Germanic breeds of dogs to howling with my nocturnal sprint.
So I reach the first house, which presents all the classic obstacles, and I pick my way up the rocky driveway while a dog barks at me from the front porch. He's wagging his tail but they are deceptive, these creatures. He might be trying to draw me in close enough to strike. Still, the porch light is on and there is a car in the drive so it might be worth a risk. I get as close as I can and start calling out, "Hallooooo", and then "Hello the House!" and then getting ever more silly, like "Is the Lord or Lady at Home" when it becomes obvious no one's home or at least not planning on leaving their warm bed. (No, I didn't call out "Land Shark!" I'm more original than that).
So I make my way back down the drive, the dog hurling mocking barks at my back, and the sharp rocks eliciting ever more inventive verbal obscenities from me as they cut into my feet. Was it that long ago that I was a country boy, running barefoot across this kind of terrain in my leathery bare feet of youth? Apparently, yes.
Back to the road, now. The next two houses were completely dark. No cars in the drive. So I kept running.
A car came down the road, (the only one that would pass during this whole ordeal) and I did manage to wave him down. It was a single driver, male, and I asked if he had a cell phone. Nope. All the people that have cell phones, but not this guy. He was nice enough while I explained my story, but turned down my request for a ride to the nearest market (which, admittedly, wasn't all that near). He said he was sorry but he had to get to an appointment. An "appointment"? At 10pm? Who was she and how much was she charging?
Now, I'll admit there is a price to be paid for looking the way I generally do. You have to accept that certain people still believe that the longer the hair on a guy, the more dangerous/crazy/dirty/liberal he is. So I realize I might have had more luck getting a ride if I'd had short hair and wore a tie (hopefully one that would match my socks) or better yet, a mullet, a Skynyrd shirt, and a Black No. 3 cap. Still, I would have hoped he could see I couldn't be hiding a gun anywhere on my under-clothed person, and look at my freezing feet and guess that my story was on the level. Plus, he was twice my size at least…I really don't think I could have been much threat, all things considered. But, he apologized and sped off down the lonely road. I thought about waving my fist and yelling "LOUSYNOGOODSONOFABITCHINBASTARD!!" just for theatrical effect, but I really wasn't all that mad. It was just that kind of night. So I said "Right!" and made for the next house.
Again, a gravel driveway, and this time there was a fence around the front yard. I'd either have to open the gate or climb over the fence to reach the front porch. No sound of a dog, but somehow there was something a bit ominous that kept me from crossing that fence. So I got as close as I could to the house, began yelling and calling again, to no response.
(Later, I got a look at this house in the daylight, and lo and behold, they did indeed have a Doberman within the fence. I felt my instincts had served me well, since this was no doubt one of those "stealth" Dobermans that don't make a sound as they sever your carotid artery in one pass and are back in their doghouse chewing on Mr. Whiskers before your lifeblood has finished pumping out onto the grass)
I decided I was going to try one more house before giving up, going back, and breaking out one of my brother's friggin' windows in his accursed lovely locked house. I was really cold and my feet felt like they were pulped from all the gravel-walking. I found a dwelling that still had its lights on, and no dogs on guard, so I made it up onto the porch and rang the doorbell. I stood way back from the door so as not to appear threatening (and in case I had to perform a backwards somersault to avoid a double-barrel shotgun blast. You learn these skills growing up country) but the nice fellow that came to the door listened patiently as I explained my predicament, then he called my parents to verify who I was. My parents didn't have a spare key, but they would come pick me up and I could at least crash at their house that night. Then I was able to call Pack and Linda in West Virginia (yeah, this nice guy let me chew up a lot of his phone minutes with this business. That's just how neighbors are in the country). They felt very bad for my troubles, which Linda showed by laughing hysterically over the phone. I didn't take it badly, my friend Shannon does the same thing when things get really bad…it's more a nervous reaction than it is frivolity. It's better than vomiting, I suppose.
(A final aside here: if you're a Guinn male, your good qualities are likely to be loyalty, a good heart, dependability, and a certain patient, plodding intellect. However, a steel-trap mind you ain't got, so it behooves you to marry sharp, capable women, which my Dad did, and so did Pack. Linda proved this when she asked me to find out if the man whose door I had darkened happened to have any children. Her thinking was that a child would be able to get into their house through the "doggy door" around back. Geez, I thought, I would have stood here in my cold Grinch feet for a year without thinking of that. Well, the guy did have kids…who were about a year old. So no help there, although now that the seed is planted, when those kids hit about three there will probably be a string of crimes throughout Kingston Springs, wherever there are doggy doors to be found.)
As it turned out, a good friend of Pack's had a spare key, so he was called and asked to come over in the morning to let me in the house. He said this would not be a problem. Dad came and picked me up, and I crashed at the folks' house. Coincidentally, they had just been going through a closet that week and found several of my old pairs of tennis shoes, so at least I had shoes to wear when Dad brought me back over to meet the guy with the key. As for the beagles, they slept away the night in blissful unawareness of human folly, to the sound of the NFL Network on the TV that was left running all night. And all was right with the world.
I promised you a punch line. Here it is:
Remember I said that about 10 minutes after I realized I was hopelessly locked out, I heard the phone ring, and heard my brother's voice leaving an unintelligible message on the machine? The message was as follows:
"Hi Troy, it's Pack. I just realized I forgot to warn you about the front door knob. Even if it's locked, you can still turn the knob from inside, so it'll trick you into thinking that it's unlocked. Be sure and keep that extra key outside because I've accidentally locked myself out several times. Just wanted to let you know. Be sure and pet the dogs for us. Oh, and Go Vols."
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Marathon Man
Release date: 28 August, 2001 |
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Thursday, October 05, 2006
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Current mood:  scared
I can sense you, tossing and turning in your bed, as the cloud-covered moon gleams through your window…you long for sleep, but the question still haunts you, hounds you, nibbles on your earlobe, even…you want to scream aloud…:
"WHAT CAN POSSIBLY SCARE MR. GHOUL?!?"
Well, actually, nearly all the world's current political and religious leaders scare me, especially those that consider themselves both. That's not a very fun kind of scary, though.
With that best time of the year, Halloween, come upon us again, it's time for the FUN scares, and I thought I'd take a minute to list a few things from films and other media that I personally find frightening in the thrilling way that attracts those of our…"ilk" to the supernatural genres. Now, as you might suspect, the Ghoul has been watching spooky flicks since he could practically sit in his top hat, so obviously the real scares have been few and far between. I mean, you just grow a bit hardened and jaded, no matter how much you still love the stuff. But there have been those moments, and some of them continue to evoke a similar, though lessened, shudder even in my adult self.
I also want to point out that the following will not include the sudden, jump-out-of-your-seat kind of scares. Those are always fun, and some can even make the Ghoul yelp like a little girl…and it takes a very manly ghoul to admit that. But ultimately, it's kind of CHEAP. It doesn't take imagination or talent on the part of a director to make an audience jump. I call 'em the "flying cat" scares. You know what I'm talking about: the suspenseful music swells, the hero/heroine walks with a candle through the decrepit hallway, and then someone off-camera tosses some poor feline into the shot, a "MEOW!" and loud crashing music is dubbed over the scene, and we all jump. Well, of course we do, and I'll say it again: It's fun…but it's CHEAP.
No, what I find really impressive are those certain images, bits of dialogue, or even just imaginative concepts that send a real thrill of dread up your spine. You shudder a bit, and get on with the story….but then later, it creeps back into your mind's eye, and again and again for days afterward, it's in your head and you just have to give a measure of respect to whatever creative folk were able to produce something that managed to shake you out of your complacent tree.
Now as you know, Mr. Ghoul is violently opposed to the revealing of "spoilers" (in fact his personal graveyard is populated by the corpses of many such spoiler-revealers), but the very nature of this discussion means I'm going to have to reveal some key moments/plot points of these works. So, instead of reading my dribble on these films, you might want to just copy down the title, buy or rent it, then come back to this blog and see if you got the creepin' jeepers from the same scenes that I did.
I've put an asterisk next to the films that can be found on DVD. For the others, you might have to do a bit of "digging" to find. Heh heh…
1. *THE RESURRECTED
– This criminally overlooked film by Dan O'Bannon is still the best filmic realization of the world of writer H.P. Lovecraft, although Guilermo Del Toro's "At the Mountains of Madness" has potential to top it, if it ever gets made. The "nameless dread" and New England decay that are trademarks of H.P.L.'s style permeate the film, culminating in an amazing moment when the heroes, having uncovered a nightmarish cavern containing the living mutant results of a man's insane experiments, find themselves surrounded by these shambling nightmare creatures…and their torches go out, plunging them (and us) into total darkness. A typical scary movie contrivance? Sure, but what makes the scene so effective is the total absence of any soundtrack music, and no sound from the mutant "things"…all we hear is the sound of the humans calling out to each other, as they (and we) know that the creatures are…silently…closing in.
2. *KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER (episode 2, "The Zombie")
This 1974 TV series created by Dan Curtis (a man responsible for many of 70's television's scariest moments) might only have lasted 20 episodes, but it covered a helluva lot of supernatural ground in that short time, and gave horror fans some unforgettable sequences. None more so than in this episode, in which Darren McGavin's intrepid, unkempt investigative report Kolchak has tracked a zombie to its resting place in an automotive junkyard. The zombie can only be destroyed by pouring salt in its mouth and sewing the lips shut. Kolchak finds the zombie in the back of a station wagon, surrounds it with lighted candles, and begins the agonizingly slow work with the salt and the needle and thread….the camera holding closely on the undead thing's face…and the whole time, you just know those dead yellow eyes are gonna fly open! This was one of the most gut-wrenching few minutes of film that I had to sit through as a kid…but I made it through. Unlike the next one on our list….
3. *THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES
--- Vincent Price's campy starring role as Anton Phibes is played more for Grand Guignol fun than it is for serious scares, but it remains the one time in my life I have had to walk away from a horror film not because it sucked but because it overwhelmed me. Now, I was indeed a young soul, but I already had many horror films under my belt. It was late night, and PHIBES was playing on "Creature Feature" (all pause in reverence) hosted by Sir Cecil Creape (pause again in reverence), and I was watching this tale of the mad Dr. Phibes' and his elaborate schemes of murder and revenge against the doctors whom he blames for his wife's death. One such doctor/victim is attending a masquerade party, and a disguised (well, doubly-disguised, if you think about it) Phibes gives him a full-head Toad mask to wear. The doctor appreciatively dons it, and Phibes helps him adjust the fasten at the back of the mask. As we soon see, though, the mask is rigged in a most ghastly way...the fastener has been set to keep tightening…and tightening. The doctor, in his toad mask, is ascending a staircase when he starts staggering and struggling to free himself from the mask that is slowly crushing his skull, and the other masqueraders laugh at what they think are his drunken antics. We see a close-up of the back of the mask as the fastener loudly snaps into its furthermost point…and the frog-headed victim tumbles to rest at the bottom of the stairs, a single thin stream of blood oozing out from under the mask…
…and I had to get up and leave the room. I felt ill, hot, a little dizzy, and deeply disturbed by what I had just seen. You might be thinking that I was feeling these effects because I had seen something gruesome, and that is not the same as being scared, but I didn't leave because I was grossed-out. It was more that I felt suffocated, like I could feel that mask tightening cruelly on my head, that helplessness. Maybe it was the big glassy eyes of that frog mask, staring up as the red 70's-film era fake blood ran down from the mask and onto the white shirt.
..But in any case, I was back in front of the TV in a few minutes. Oh come on, you didn't think I'd stay gone for long, did you? But I was damn sure impressed. A horror film had just kicked my ass, albeit momentarily…and I never forgot it.
4. *THE TWILIGHT ZONE, "The After Hours"
--- I'm not alone in this, but I find any instances of dolls, mannequins, ventriloquist dummies moving/acting on their own to be damned scary. Apparently, a lot of folks feel the same way, since they turn up quite frequently in works of horror. I was already a huge Twilight Zone fan when I saw this episode. My older brother, Packy, and I were seeing them all for the first time as a local station was airing reruns, and it was a nightly routine of ours to watch it. We'd grown accustomed to the ever-shifting moods of the show, sometimes scary, or poignant, or light-hearted, but nothing prepared us for this story of a young woman who is locked inside a department store all night, just her and…the mannequins. In the opening sequence, the woman has just dealt with a strange, somewhat rude female clerk in an otherwise deserted department. Downstairs, she complains to the store manager about the clerk's behavior, but he insists that neither that department nor the clerk exists. The woman spots what she thinks is the female clerk, standing with her back to her. "That's her! That's the woman who waited on me" she tells the manager. Just then, the figure of the woman is turned around…to reveal a mannequin that looks exactly like the female clerk. I remember Pack and I turning to look at each other and mouthing "Oh…..SHIT." Come to think of it, that might have been the first time I used a four-letter word. Anyway, what followed this opening sequence was one of the scariest half-hours I've ever watched.
5. *THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT – Maybe more a brilliant concept than an actual brilliant film, BWP nonetheless scores some real chills, though its constantly moving, jerking handheld camerawork forces Mr. Ghoul to have to take a Bromo and lie down in his coffin for a bit. What's scariest to me about the film is something that seemed to be missed by a lot of folks, which is the complicit role of nature in the ultimate demise of the protagonists. I was really amused by how BWP brought out the "inner macho woodsman" in so many viewers. People would scoff at the helplessness of the three victims that enter the woods in order to shoot a documentary on the Blair Witch Legend and promptly get totally lost. They'd say, "Hell, all them kids had to do was shimmy up a tree and get their bearings" and then also expound on how they (being expert campers, of course) could have survived and gotten themselves out of such an ignorant city-fied pickle. I just wanted to scream "THE WOODS WERE SUPERNATURAL TOO! HOW DID THAT CONCEPT ESCAPE YOU??" Yes, the kids were city folk a bit out of their element, but to me it was very obvious that the reason they couldn't get out, kept wandering in circles, even did stupid things like throwing away their map, was all a result of being in the heart of a powerful, disorienting, influential evil in which the trees, the streams, the unseen wildlife, perhaps even the inhabitants of the nearby town, were all active participants. If they had indeed "shimmied up a tree to get their bearings" it wouldn't have served them any good…they'd still find the continually shifting woods taking them back to where they started from. This is what sticks with me from the film: the idea that from the minute these poor young people enter this haunted wood, they never stand a chance. And by the way, Mr. Macho Woodsman, neither would you.
6. *THE EXORCIST – Now that the once-shocking special-effects and gross-outs that made The Exorcist such a sensation upon its release have lost their impact and are tame in comparison to most typical hours of prime-time television nowadays, the film still has lasting power due to what happens when all hell is NOT breaking loose. The low-key, realistic style of the direction, as we get to know the principal players, creates a you-are-there intimacy and makes us aware of how spiritually ill-equipped these characters are to undertake the supernatural battle that is about to invade their lives. The goosebump-inducing moment for me is always after Father Karras has first interviewed the supposedly-possessed little girl, Regan. He has taped the session, in which Regan has spoken in a voice seemingly not her own, and has demonstrated fluency in several languages, including one that Karras cannot identify. Still determined to prove that Regan's problems stem from psychological trauma and not demonic possession, Karras gives the tape to a Linguistics expert for analysis. The expert tells Karras, "It's not another language she's speaking. It's English...backwards."
7. *THE HAUNTING
– Of course I'm talking about the 1963 version, which gets everything right, and not the horrendous 1999 remake, which gets it all horribly wrong. Under Robert Wise's direction, The Haunting is a model of how much scarier things can be when you DON'T show people everything, and it remains the very best haunted house movie. My favorite "don't watch this alone" moment: Two women, part of the team of psychic investigators come to investigate Hill House and its hauntings, are sharing a bedroom when the house begins its nightly round of noises and disturbances. Our attention centers on Nell, and we hear her thoughts as she watches a wall (which seems, in its patterns, to be returning her gaze) and listens to the various ghostly voices coming from just behind the wall. She realizes that the other woman, Theo, has reached out for her in the dark in fear, because Theo has a fierce death-grip on Nell's hand. Finally Nell can stand the terror no longer, and cries out. Suddenly, the light comes on, switched on by Theo…who we see has been on the other side of the room the whole time. Nell looks down at her hand and says, "God….whose hand was I holding????" To which Mr. Ghoul says, "Aieeeeee!!!"
8. *THE DEVIL'S NIGHTMARE
 
– I have a hard time finding fans of this European flick, and I'll admit it's not the most impressively directed film, nor is it served very well by the typically clumsy English dubbing that appears on all the versions of the film released so far. However, it's a fun spooky tale of a busload of dysfunctional Euros who get stranded in a castle and fall victim to a succubus. What really sells it for me, though, is that director Jean Brismee has the great benefit of two of European cinema's great faces among his cast: The sultry Erika Blanc and the very creepy Daniel Emilfork. Blanc, who plays the succubus, has a great facial bone structure that allows her to go from a beauty to a truly ghastly visage with very minimal makeup. She uses her eyes and mouth to lend surprising layers to what could have been a one-note role as the vengeful succubus. With no dialogue, we see gleeful malice, righteous rage, and even a strange hint of sorrow and self-loathing pass over Blanc's unforgettable face. Daniel Emilfork, who worked with some A-list European directors in his time, plays the role of Satan, and his rodent-like features make him the most feral representation of Ol' Scratch since Walter Huston in "THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER".
9. THE WORKS OF M.R. JAMES - various productions, 1960-2000
Give it up for the Brits! When it comes to telling a cracking good ghost story on film, they flat out "get" how to do it. It's a great blend of decorum and good taste masking a particularly nasty bit of cutlery up your bum. You can almost hear them saying, "Very well, if we have to be about all this deucedly unpleasant business, we might as well just scare the bloody buggers to death! Then who's for tea?" And scare us they do, in productions such as THE WOMAN IN BLACK, GHOST WATCH, and my favorite here, a succession of thirty-minute adaptations of the works of the great ghost story writer, M.R.James. What blows me away the most is that these films were made over a stretch of many years for BBC, with different directors (and in different decades) and yet they very nearly all are of top-notch quality and all have moments that make it very hard to extinguish that last candle before you go to bed after viewing them. Unfortunately, they're damned hard to find, and I've been lucky that some of my friends have managed to acquire bootleg tapes of varying quality over the years. The brilliance of the Brits' method can be summed up in one sequence from a black-and-white adaptation of James' "O Whistle and I'll Come to You". The protagonist is dreaming that…something…is pursuing him along a lonely stretch of beach. He pauses in his fleeing to look back, but each time he does, the screen goes black, and we only hear him cry out. He awakens, then drifts back to sleep, and the dream starts up again. To this point, we have been truly drawn into the terror because of our fear of what it is he's seeing that is not being revealed yet to us. Finally, he turns around and we see what is chasing him…sort of. It's still too far off to view it clearly, but it's very definitely not human and it moves in the most unnatural way…and it's scary as shit. Now, this is no doubt an effect that cost mere pennies (mere pennies is all the British will spend on their TV productions) and it's probably achieved by throwing a piece of fabric over a wooden frame and letting the wind do the rest. But Geez!…filmed at just the right distance, with just the right lighting, with unnerving noises on the soundtrack, and with our curiosity/apprehension already manipulated to just the right pitch…it becomes a twisting, lurching, relentless Thing spawned from the pits of our worst childhood nightmares. And to the Brits, Mr. Ghoul says, "Well Played!"
And last but not least…
10. THE TELEVISION ADS FOR "MAGIC" AND "IT'S ALIVE!"
- That's right, I'm not talking about the actual films, which really don't scare me at all, but the TV ads for them just about turned my big mop of hair totally white! I've said earlier that dolls, mannequins, and the like really creep me out. So, I'm watching TV by myself, and suddenly this ventriloquist's dummy's face fills the screen and starts reciting some kind of creepy little poem about magic. I can't remember all the words, but it ends with the line, "Magic is fun…when you're dead…" after which, the dummy's eyes roll up in his head as the movie's title, "MAGIC" comes up. During "MAGIC's" entire run at the theaters, I would leave the room if commercials came on…just so I wouldn't have to chance seeing that too-realistic doll's face again. Whoever came up with that ad should've gotten a special Oscar. Or would that be an Emmy?
As for "IT'S ALIVE", I encountered its TV spot on my small, portable black 'n white television, which I was watching in my room, with all the other lights turned off. It starts off like some Johnson & Johnson commercial, with a baby's carriage slowly turning around, and nursery-type music playing. A voice intones, "The Davis family has a new baby…" and I'm just sort of half paying attention, waiting for whatever the hell show it was I was watching to resume. Then the narrator says, "There's only one thing wrong with the Davis' baby…It's Alive." Just then, the crib spins around and we see a taloned, mutant claw hanging over the edge of the crib, and hear a bloodcurdling scream. Yeah, my lights came on pretty quick after that!
Both of these films are available on DVD, but I don't know if these brilliant TV spots are included. "MAGIC" lists the theatrical trailer as an extra, but I'm not sure if the theater ad was the same as the one for television. The "IT'S ALIVE" DVD doesn't list any included trailers at all. That's a shame, I'd love to see them again now that I'm…somewhat…braver.
Well, I could continue, but the sun's coming up, so it's time to close that coffin door. I actually have about 10 more examples I can think of right off the bat (Wow, I guess I AM a big fraidy-cat, after all), and I meant to delve into other media, such as comics, literature, etc. I think I'll save those for next October. Let me hear what scares you…and Happy Halloween!!
(Currently listening to: Chris Peltier's Halloween mixes. Thanks, Chris!)
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Wednesday, June 21, 2006
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Current mood:Rock out pandas
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with other people when we're not being cool." -Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs in the film ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)
It was 1975. I was nine years old, standing in the magazine aisle of Bradley's Drugstore on Charlotte Avenue, a favorite haunt for me and my older brother, Packy. We loved Bradley's cause it had the best magazine and comic book selection, and we'd drop our allowance on monster mags such as Famous Monsters, Psycho, Creepy, Eerie¼.and also war comics like Sgt. Rock and Weird War Tales,¼then, of course, there were magazines like Hit Parader, Creem, and Circus, that covered our other obsession, rock and roll. This night, we were waiting for my dad to come pick us up, and we were working out the solution to a dilemma. Circus Magazine had come out with a special issue devoted to The Rolling Stones. The mag was packed with great full-page photos of Mick and Keef and the boys in all their satanic badness. My parents had long ago consented to losing the walls of our bedrooms to myriad posters and clipped-out photos of Led Zep, Bowie, Clapton, Hendrix, Humble Pie, Jeff Beck, etc (the homoerotic overtones of young boys enshrining androgynous, mascara'd men in leather and spandex in their bedrooms are beyond the scope of this blog, but might be discussed at a later date). Anyway, the problem was this: Between the two of us, we only had enough money for a single copy of this Stones special issue. But we each wanted the photos for our own bedroom walls/shrines! What to do?
Pack had the answer, sort of¼.He would take one copy, and carefully pry out any pages that had a primo photo, place them within the covers of another copy, which we would then buy. Being the classic all-American easily-led younger brother, I agreed to stand watch for any drugstore employees (or anyone else, for that matter) while Pack divested the magazine of its prizes. The first part of this nefarious act came off without a hitch, but we were not home free yet...we would still have to hand the full-to-bursting magazine to the cashier, and hope that no stray page (s) came floating out, giving the game (and us) away. Cue suspenseful music¼imagine the lighting of a classic film noir...we approached the checkout counter, certain that just behind the bored clerk was an alarm button and a shotgun¼
What happened? Well, I'll reveal that later. But two things about this: One, it's hilarious that it never occurred to us to just ask my Dad when he got there if he would buy us the extra copy. Anyone who knows my father would say that was a pretty viable option. Second, even though this would not be the last shady and not-wholly-legal act of my life, it was the only time I have ever committed theft¼but even then, it was obvious that ol' evil rock n roll life had me in its sway. You could say Sympathy for the Devil made me do it.
The preceding will serve to underscore the real point of this blog, which is to write about what has become one of my very favorite films, ALMOST FAMOUS (2000). Like most of what we call favorite films, it goes past just being an entertaining viewing experience, to strike a chord (pun intended) deeply personal in me. Not that it isn't exceptionally well-made, and it was successful both with audiences and critics, garnering some awards and nominations. This, I suspect, will cause some people to avoid it due to its A-list pedigree. As for me, I think ALMOST FAMOUS is one of the best films ever about rock music, especially in the way it portrays, idealizes, and then ultimately eulogizes the era in which it takes place.
Director Cameron Crowe (whose film work I'm not in general a big fan of) began his career as a music journalist at an incredibly young age. While still a teenager, he was covering popular music for Rolling Stone. ALMOST FAMOUS is his semi-autobiographical homage to his remarkable experiences and to early 70's rock and roll. The film is set in the year 1973. The protagonist is 15-year-old William Miller (Patrick Fugit), shunned by his peers as uncool but actually possessing a love and understanding of music so strong that he writes about it obsessively until he is able to meet his hero, Lester Bangs (at a time when music journalism was coming into its own, Bangs was the best pure writer of them all). Bangs (a great "inhabiting" by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) senses William's lamb-among-wolves vulnerability but also sees his potential, and gives him an assignment covering a Black Sabbath concert for Creem Magazine. Opening for Sabbath is an up-and-coming band called Stillwater. William is assigned by Rolling Stone Magazine to travel with Stillwater, where he must struggle to remain an "honest and unmerciful" observer, at the same time he is growing fonder of the band members, and especially of Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), Stillwater's worldly and devoted #1 groupie.
Crowe has openly admitted that this film is a sentimental love letter to an unforgettable time in his life, and indeed it has been criticized as being lightweight from those who perhaps wanted a grittier expose of musician/groupie/drug hedonism and the toll it takes. You almost feel sorry for Crowe - he could win 10 Oscars but how could that ever compare to being a teenage music idealist and suddenly finding yourself traveling with the likes of The Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin? Who can blame him if his backward vision is a little too rose-colored?
This movie works wonders emotionally for me, because it's about an age I'm sentimental about as well. I appreciate music from all sorts of eras...from hundreds of years ago, to the big band era, to folk, to 80's new wave, you name it...but the music that is truly closest to my heart is rock and roll from 1964-1975. Punk Rock, God bless it, gave me the courage to stop being just a listener and pick up a guitar and play music myself...but the music of the late sixties and early 70's taught me something just as important: to be in awe of music and its vast potential, its grandeur and its mystery. It was the age of the music star as mythical figure...in those pre-video days, especially if you were too young to go to concerts, all you could know of these fascinating beings were a few magazine photos and their once-in-a-blue-moon television appearances on Rock Concert and Midnight Special (boy, did Packy and I sit with rapt attention when THOSE shows aired each weekend!). You could almost believe that Robert Plant rode a steed and slew dragons on his baronial estate, or that Bowie fell to earth from the stars, or that Gene Simmons hung upside down from a cave ceiling between gigs.
Crowe depicts this sense of wonder in so many deft little ways, one of my favorites being when William is intently writing names of bands on his school notebook...how long has it been since you did that? Remember the power of that act, the supercharged alchemical connection you achieved with merely inscribing the band YOU loved...that was YOUR band...on that secret notebook surface?
As for Stillwater, they are not a great band, nor do I think Crowe intends them to be interpreted as such, even though some of the incidents in the film are based on events Crowe witnessed while traveling with some of rock's legends. Stillwater consists of average, blue-collar rockers in the mode of a Grand Funk or Black Oak Arkansas, probably not destined to deeply impact music but merely to ride their brief cresting wave of fame until, with the possible exception of their star guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), they will fade back into obscurity until 20 years later they can get on a "classic rock" revival bill with Mahogany Rush and Head East. All of which makes them truly endearing. Stillwater represents the first group of people who grew up with rock and roll as the predominant force in pop culture, and as such they can't shake their own starry-eyed hero-worship even while they are (in Bang's words), "killing the music we love" while they inherit the spoils of those that have gone before. When lead singer Jeff Beebe (Jason Lee doing his whiny, insecure shtick to perfection) says "No one can explain rock n roll...except maybe Pete Townsend" and he tells guitarist Hammond, "I was supposed to be the front man and you were gonna be the guitarist with mystique...thats the dynamic we agreed upon....Page, Plant...Mick, Keith..", any music geek who ever played air guitar in his room in front of a mirror will have to smile in sad recognition of those sweet illusions rock and roll used to conjure. Even Penny Lane and her entourage refuse to call themselves groupies, instead proclaiming themselves "Band-Aids" who are there to help the musicians discover their potential...meanwhile, the musicians are gambling them away like so many beer cases in hotel room poker games.
One of the film's most haunting images comes when Stillwater, facing that eternal conflict over when to hang on to your roots and when to treat your art as a business, agrees to tour by plane rather than by bus. As the entourage walks across the runway, preparing to board the sleek aircraft, a reverse tracking shot shows the tour bus (named Doris by the band) lost and forlorn, shrinking in the distance like a confused, faithful dog suddenly abandoned. It perfectly underscores the dark side of Crowe's tribute...that this was the time that rock was truly losing its innocence. You can say it happened when The Beatles smoked pot...or The Stones played Altamont...or Jimi, Janis, and Jim bought the farm...but to me it was always later, with the cocaine-and-sunshine California singer-songwriters, Bowie and the glam rockers celebrating artifice over truth ("taking reality and tarting it up a bit" to use Bowie's great phrase), and Alice Cooper and Kiss and music as amusement park spectacle. Don't get me wrong, some wonderful music came from these movements, some of my very favorite, in fact...but it ended any lingering illusion that rock stars and their fans were part of a family that would somehow make the world a better place. Rock and Roll grew old and fat on a jet plane and behind the velvet rope at Studio 54, and thank god Punk came along to bury the rock gods and save us from disco (Ironically, we now need disco to save us from techno).
ALMOST FAMOUS is, finally, about loving music in a way that you can only love something that makes you feel truly alive. In a film of fine performances and memorable characters, the two at the center are Patrick Fugit as William Miller, who often seems the only adult amidst these child-like musicians, and Billy Crudup, magnificent as Russell Hammond, on the verge of stardom and trying to be a person of substance but just...can't...quite...overcome his intoxication with life as a guitar-hero.
My favorite moment is when William finally corners Russell for an interview, and asks, "So, Russell, what do you love most about music?"
Russell responds, "To begin with...EVERYTHING."
This brings tears to my eyes every time, cause I know exactly what he means. After all the crazy hours, all the loading equipment in the pouring rain, the exhaustion and the indifference, all the disappointments and the people who quit on you, and the times you feel like quitting on yourself, and all that you give up or miss out on as you try and follow wherever the hell the winding road is leading you....in the end, you just love every minute you can spend with this magical thing called music. And thank you, Cameron Crowe, for this sentimental celluloid love letter.
Oh, and about the music itself in the film...well, how about "Every Picture Tells a Story" (Rod Stewart), "Mona Lisa and Mad Hatters" (Elton John), "Thats the Way" and "Tangerine" (Led Zep), "River" (Joni Mitchell) for starters...yeah, pretty damned good listening!
A word on the DVD...the so-called Bootleg Edition is a great set and contains the theatrical version and an extended directors cut. I have to say, if you haven't seen the film, definitely start with the theatrical version! As I've said, Im not a huge fan of Crowe's work in general, and if the extended version is really his chosen cut, then I disagree with many of his choices. You can almost compare it to a typical extended version of a great album...you know how you listen to those unreleased cuts and there might be one or two that hold up, but with the rest of them it's pretty obvious why they never made the final cut? Same with the extra scenes in the extended cut of ALMOST FAMOUS...a couple are great, especially a scene where Stillwater does a radio interview with a (very) baked Kyle Gass of Tenacious D as the deejay, but the majority are scenes where we learn things through dialogue before they are later revealed much more artfully through visuals. So, watch the theatrical cut, and then, if you come to love these characters as I do, you'll appreciate the chance to see more of 'em in the longer version.
A truly cool extra is on the DVD: Frances McDormand plays William's mother in the film, a wonderful, formidable woman who drives her son crazy with her eccentricities, but who also is most responsible for challenging his intellect and believes unshakably in what he has to offer. Well, the extended version of the film features an audio commentary by Cameron Crowe and his real-life mother! I have to think this is the only "director and his mom" commentary in the history of DVD!
So, to sum up: yeah, ALMOST FAMOUS, a great film. At least, I think it is, but you probably shouldn't take my word for it. I gave up my chance to be objective the day I stood watch in the aisle while my brother stole pictures of The Rolling Stones.
Oh, and if you've made it this far, you deserve to know the outcome of our heist. Our mojo was working and we made it through the checkout line with nary a page coming loose to give us away! My dad picked us up, never knowing how close his sons had come to putting him in an embarrassing situation...and never noticing that the same photos suddenly appeared on both our bedroom walls, even the one of Jagger riding the giant inflatable penis (helluva stage prop there, fellas).
And that Rolling Stones Special magazine? Well, you know where I'm going with this, I'm sure. Yep, I just scored a copy of it on E-Bay!
I keep thinking how funny it will be if it arrives with all the best photos torn out.
 | Currently listening:
Almost Famous
By Various Artists - Soundtracks
Release date: 12 September, 2000 |
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Wednesday, April 05, 2006
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Current mood:Psyched-Out
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities
(not to be confused with National Gorilla-Suit Day)
It's midnight, so maybe I'll be the first to post a Roger Corman blog on the Great Man's 80th birthday. For anyone who might read this and not know who Roger Corman is, he's a director/producer known for releasing tons of sci-fi/horror films in the 50's,60's, & 70's. His reputation mostly centers around two distinct qualities: first, he left no stone unturned in the exploitation film market, releasing films (some great, some awful, but always profitable) that were often shot in just a few days, with an eye always on the bottom line and what sure-fire elements would lure the teens to the drive-in or theater. Second, he had an uncanny eye for spotting potential in unknown aspiring actors and directors, and he gave an amazing list of people their first big breaks in the film biz: Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Dennis Hopper, Bruce Dern, Jack Hill, just to name a few.
So Tim Lucas, of Video Watchdog, has asked bloggers everywhere to write something about Roger on his birthday, and how can I refuse? Lord knows I've spent countless hours being entertained by the filmic fruits of Rog's labors. I really don't have anything profound to say that hasn't been said before, so instead I'll just jot down a few quick thoughts on the great Mr. Corman:
First, I think it's cool that our Shannon Smith shares a birthday with Roger. Here's some things they also share:
1. Shannon can accomplish in two days what a huge crew of overpaid people would fumble over for months.
2. Like Roger, Shannon has a keen eye for talent that others might sneer upon, as witness her enthusiasm for The Exotic Ones and Secret Commonwealth.
3. Shannon might occasionally break even, but she's never at a loss.
THE TERROR is a classic example of the Corman magic/method. He finished filming his comedy version of THE RAVEN, and discovered he still had some of the cast (including Jack Nicholson and Boris Karloff), crew, and sets available for another two days. Never one to waste any part of the buffalo, Roger had a second film made - one with no script, with several people taking turns directing (including, you guessed it - Jack Nicholson), and the result was THE TERROR, which despite being made up on the spot, manages to actually have some pretty creepy moments.
Corman is a fascinating blend of pragmatist and visionary. He loved film and his own directorial efforts show undeniable artistry and style, even as he kept one eye always on the budget sheet. He acquired and introduced numerous high-brow foreign films for distribution in this country, yet he was known to splice footage of an exploding helicopter into foreign film trailers, in order to convince theater patrons that these were thrilling pictures. I can't remember off the top of my head what specific films he did this "trailer doctoring" for, but it's fun to imagine a trailer for Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL....Max Von Sydow engaging Death in a chess-game and existential Swedish dialogue, against the stark black-and-white landscape...and then suddenly we cut to an exploding helicopter!!
For me, Corman's crowning achievements were the series of films (very loosely) based on Edgar Allan Poe, starring Vincent Price. In particular, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, and PIT AND THE PENDULUM (which is one of my top five favorite horror films), are just all wonderfully presented, with gorgeous colors and sets, creepy catacombs, fine performances by Price et al, and with great, literate scripts from Richard Matheson & Charles Beaumont. All this and Les Baxter's scores! Here is the true testament to the artist that lay beneath Roger Corman's bean-counting exterior, and in my opinion his Poe films was America's best answer to Britain's Hammer Films and the 60's Italian Horror boom, until George Romero came along with Night of the Living Dead and changed the game for everyone.
I have a fantasy of Roger Corman getting an Irving Thalberg Lifetime Achievement award at the Oscars, presented to him by none other than Jack Nicholson. But it ain't likely...so it's up to us bloggers to give him his due. Roger, for everything from IT CONQUERED THE WORLD to ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES, from THE BIG BIRD CAGE to ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL....this Monster Kid says thank you!!
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Thursday, March 30, 2006
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Current mood:Rockin' into the night
This is a silly blog..but now that I've got 19 subscribers it occurs to me that I actually have a "public", and I know these readers are just waiting eagerly at their computers for me to deliver the next installment. Take Chandra, for example. She's so impatient for my blogs that I can't even telephone her because she's online all the time, just staring at MySpace for some blog action from Mr. Ghoul. So here goes, and hopefully my subscriptions numbers won't go down after this one.
Can I say that I fucking HATE the band .38 Special? This is not going out on a limb, I suppose, as I doubt many of you like them either. Which begs the question, exactly who does? More on that in a moment. What's prompted this outburst is hearing "Hold On Loosely", which now will hold on incessantly to my brain until I can find some more worthy song to push it out of my head. The respite will be brutally short, however, since ultimately some classic rock station within my hearing will play it again, as they do several thousand times a day. Some songs you just get sick of, others make you homicidal, and "Hold On Loosely" and "Caught Up in You" are two .38 Special songs that have the latter effect on me. So now to the deep psychological reasons why...
I hate .38 Special for two reasons, other than that they suck, which doesn't really distinguish them from thousands of other bands: (1) They have always dared to wave the Southern Rock banner, when what they really are is Soft Rock, or even Pop. You could say they're the Air Supply of Southern Rock, I suppose. They started off trying the bad boy posturing with "Wild Eyed Southern Boys" (it's always suspicious when you have to make an anthem of your southern-ness, boys..it works for Charlie Daniels, not for you) and then "Rockin' Into the Night" which was about as Southern Rock as Billy Squier. Then they turned into "moist-eyed sappy boys" and started cranking out swill like the aforementioned radio fixtures, while still posturing as defenders of the Southern Rock faith. .38's only claim to Southern Rock legitimacy is that they have one of the Van Zant boys (Donnie) as a member, but Donnie will never be confused with his barefoot, much more talented brother Ronnie. The only thing Donnie shares with the late frontman of Lynyrd Skynyrd is a lack of height, but he's more of a mascot in .38 Special, and not even the main singer or songwriter. It's like if The Exotic Ones were to find a brother of Glen Danzig and have him pump iron on stage while we play.
Reason (2): I had to sit through this horrible band more times than I can remember during the heyday of my concert-going. In the grand old days of festival seating/general admission, you had to get to a show early if you wanted to get either a good seat or a good spot right up to the stage. This meant you were resigned to having to sit through the opening band. Well, if you were a big-draw band touring in the South, .38 Special was who you always chose for your opening act because (a) they have a Van Zant in their lineup, so no one's going to get pissed and throw bottles at them, and (b) you know there's no danger of them blowing you off the stage because, well, it's .38 Special! Now, some of you are probably gonna tell me that I should check out their albums, that they actually had some good songs, blah blah..and you're likely right, but I never heard anything good on the too-numerous times I had to endure them at the Municipal Auditorium. While the fog of pot drifted by, and people ducked under the Frisbees flying back and forth, and while couples stood together with their hands in each other's back pockets, and guys with no dates stood with their hands hanging low in the hopes of getting a feel of some passing girl's backside...I stood there gritting my teeth while Donnie Van Zant roamed the stage trying to be a good little rebel, looking like an escaped homunculus from Dr. Praetorius' row of jars. I would be gazing up at the Municipal ceiling, praying that the ghost of J.E.B. Stuart would stop haunting the tank for a minute and direct a fusillade of grapeshot somewhere right about where Little Donnie was standing. (if you're not getting some of these references I'm making, be thankful. It means you are cool, and have probably led a more-or-less productive life)
So who exactly does like .38 Special? I suspect it's mostly Redneck Girls of the type Don Clark sings so lovingly about, and a contingent of male Southern Rock fans who feel that to diss any member of the Van Zant clan is to somehow dishonor the spirit of the mighty Free Bird. Still, I suspect that these guys, when "Hold On Loosely"takes its hourly spin on the radio, and they yell "Hell Yeah Man!"...deep inside, they're really thinking, "Aw fuck, not again!". I like to think that, anyway.
But, if I've offended you with this diatribe (like maybe if "Caught Up in You" was you and your old lady's "song") then my apologies. I think my main reason in writing it was hoping some of you might chime in with the worst opening bands you ever saw. However, if it's The Exotic Ones, please keep that to yourself.
Loverboy was the other awful opening band I had to suffer through multiple times, but bless their little headbands, at least they came by their suckage honestly and didn't pretend to be more than they were.
So now that I've set off a storm of controversy with this hard-hitting blog, I'll try and finish with a couple of positive thoughts:
Being forced to see an opening band wasn't always 45 minutes of hell..every now and then there would be a pleasant surprise. One that I remember the most was The Babys. I can't even remember who they opened for, but my friends and I heard their less-than-manly moniker and saw their pretty English boy looks and thought they were going to be good for a laugh at best...but by the end of their set we were saying "Hell yeah you Limeys rock!" Honestly, they were a damn good group that played some really catchy rock tunes, and to this day I love to hear John Waite sing, though I'm not impressed by most of his solo work.
And a last positive shout-out for the classic rock station that comes through my digital Comcast music channel! True, it was hearing "Hold On Loosely" piping out of my television set that made me kick my cat and write this blog, but since that time, the channel has more than redeemed itself by playing "See Emily Play" (Pink Floyd), "Watcher of the Skies"(Peter Gabriel-era Genesis) and "Pure and Easy" (The Who)...all songs I guarantee you will not hear on any regular classic rock station, with their playlists of less than 50 songs (but .38 Special ALWAYS on rotation, natch).
I've fed Flex, so we're cool again. He hates .38 Special too, by the way.
'Til next time....
 | Currently listening:
Anthology
By .38 Special
Release date: 05 June, 2001 |
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Sunday, March 05, 2006
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Current mood:Thirsty
One the eve of the Academy Awards, it seems only fitting to write a blog about Al Adamson. Why? Beats the fuck out of me. I just wanted to write this blog about him and needed a good lead-off sentence.
Now that I've hooked you, we of course all know that the closest Adamson would ever get to an Oscar would be if he rummaged around in the trash behind wherever it is they manufacture those storied statuettes, and found a damaged one. Al was a bit damaged himself, I suspect, judging by the films he made. Not very good ones, but great titles: "Satan's Sadists", "Blood of Ghastly Horror" "Horror of the Blood Monsters"....and my own favorite (a qualitative term), "Blood of Dracula's Castle". That's the one I watched tonight, for the first time in about 25 years. But it wasn't the same film I used to watch, in a few ways, actually.
Let me back up. I first saw this film back in those amazing-but-true late 70's, when you could actually catch b-movies during prime time, on Nashville's fuzzy-reception wonderworld, channel 17. Picture my youthful self, scanning the showcase to see if perhaps some previously unseen genre gem might be turning up on that week's tv schedule. Keep in mind, I was a vet of the monster-watching for many years at this point, but Channel 17 had, among other things, allowed me to fill in the gaps of all the Godzilla films I had not seen on Creature Feature, The Big Show, or at the theater. So on this particular week I saw a listing for "Dracula's Castle" (the film's tv version was given that title), and, as you can well imagine, words such as "Dracula" and "Castle" triggered a somewhat Pavlovian response in a kid who had already devoured the Universal and Hammer films and was eager for any new take on the classic monsters. But was I prepared for Al Adamson?
Actually, I had already encountered one of Al's films, I just didn't know it. Once again I owe it to Channel 17, when they scheduled a showing of "Dracula vs. Frankenstein". Holy Shit! I loved all the old Universal monster rumbles, but here was a matchup I hadn't seen before! In my fevered imagination I had pictures of a dynamic Dracula and a powerful Frankenstein brawling in a gothic atmosphere, it would have to be the battle of the century! Ehhh, not quite, as it turned out. Instead, this Al Adamson classic is set in a seedy carnival, with Russ Tamblyn as a biker, lots of hippies in drug freakouts, a dwarf, and Lon Chaney Jr. playing incoherent brute-man Groton, which was just cinema verite by that time in Chaney's alcohol-ravaged final years. Those elements of course make the film a must-see now, but I was still just a bit young to appreciate "bad" films...I was really eager to see great monsters doing great things! The Dracula, though, was played by a Zandor Vorkov (no, he didn't go on to greater things) who spoke with an echo effect on his voice, and had an afro and goatee. Little did I know that I would one day actually look like Vorkov, but I still haven't figured out how to speak with an echo. As for The Frankenstein Monster..ahh, how does one describe the indescribable? I'll leave it to allmovie.com, which states that John Bloom's monster looks like a "burned marshmallow". I can't put it any better than that.
Adamson shot his movies day-for-night, the process of shooting at dusk or through a filter to give the appearance of nighttime, because you don't have the lighting budget to actually shoot at night. Does anyone remember black-and-white portable televisions? My older brother and I each had one in our rooms (and there were a few years when our color set was down and we couldn't afford a new one, and the portables were all we had, period) and that's where I spent many hours, the room dark, the little set on one end of the bed, me laying on my stomach with my face nearly touching the screen. Constantly fighting with the antenna to get some kind of workable reception from dear old Channel 17. So you can imagine what friggin' day for night filming looked like on a tiny black-and-white screen...when Dracula and Frankenstein finally duke it out at the finale of "Dracula vs. Frankenstein", it's set in the woods, and the image was so dark that I couldn't see anything! All I could do was hear the leaves crunching, the Monster grunting, and Zandor Varkov's echo-fied voice saying things like "I'll tear you limb from limb!" But I saw nothing of the fight of the century, not this time. A few years later, I caught the film on a large color set, and saw that I was better off just having to imagine it. That last battle really blows.
So anyway, I'm now getting ready to watch "Dracula's Castle", on the tiny set, in my darkened room. My best friend, Larry Barber, would often call me from his home where he was watching the same film on his own little black-and-white. We would watch the whole film together this way, digging the cool parts and keeping each other amused during the slow (non-monster) bits. I remember we definitely did this ritual for "Dracula's Castle", and the strangeness of this film struck us both and I never forgot it. Beginning with the onscreen title of "Blood of Dracula's Castle", the film tells the story of a congenial vampire couple who worship "the great god Luna", have John Carradine as their butler/resident Luna priest (sorry, John, but your career was only going down from here), and have a brute henchman named Mango (distant cousin of Groton? Or Torgo?) who abducts young females from whom the vampire aristocrats drain their nightly blood. Occasionally, one of the prisoners gets the "honor" of being sacrificed to the god Luna. Meanwhile, a descendant of the castle's original owner finds out that he is to inherit the castle, and so he and his cover-model fiancee decide they must evict the current tenants so that they can move in. Count and Countess Townsend (the vampires) must figure out how to get the new owner to sign over the castle to them, and then of course they want the couple to stick around and become future blood "donors" (and sacrificees to Luna). To help them in their plan, the Townsends arrange for the release of Johnny, one of their "Lunar" brethren, from an insane asylum. While the Townsends are all genteel and sophisticated, Johnny is a ruthless psychopath whom the vamps are counting on to do all the really vicious dirty work and save them their castle home.
Despite the usual bad acting, really clumsy and off-the-wall dialogue, slow pacing, and other Al Adamson trademarks, "Blood of Dracula's Castle" maintains a little more interest because of the Addams-family-esque manners of the Townsends and their entourage. You almost expect Alex D'Arcy (Count Townsend) to start nibbling Paula Raymond's (the Countess) arm when she speaks French. There is a nice 60's California seedy look and feel to the film, which is helped by the fact that this was an early job for future famous Cinematographer Lazlo Kovaks. The day-for-night stuff was still tough going, but at least it was watchable even on the tiny black-and-white tv.
Now here's the element that really grabbed me and Larry as we watched the film: The fact that Johnny is not only a psycho, he's also a werewolf. In the course of the film's first thirty minutes, Johnny kills five people, but only one when he's a wolf. That scene is an interminable one, when Johnny as a werewolf chases a girl for about 10 minutes. The sequence consists of the girl running up to the screen, looking around, then running off. Then the werewolf comes to the same spot, looks around, and chases off in the direction of the girl. And this happens over and over again. But hey, at least it was a werewolf. What I'm getting at, though, is here was a case where the man cursed with lycanthropy is actually MORE of a beast when he's human than he is when he's a werewolf. There's none of the Paul Naschy / Lon Chaney pulling on the heartstrings for sympathy. Johnny is just a total asshole inside and out. That idea just blew me out of the water, 'cause as far as I know, that's never happened in any other film (unless you count James Spader in Wolf, but even that's a stretch). So even when I grew to know just how shitty a director Al Adamson was, I always gave him credit for that one little piece of brilliance he had in creating the character of Psycho Johnny/Psycho-werewolf. Except that....it didn't happen that way.
Flash forward to Christmas 2005. My younger brother Jeremy (creator of the epoch-defining Purple News) receives a DVD called "Horrible Horrors Collection Vol. 2" from Rhino. It's a two-disc set, very cheap, with 8 horror movies. It's a mixed bag of uncut films, widescreen ones, pan-and-scans, and chopped-to-bits edited for tv films, with prints ranging from the passable to the duped-from-a-VHS-duped-from-Nashville's Channel 17 quality. But lo and behold, I was really excited to see that "Blood of Dracula's Castle" gets its first DVD release on this collection. Before I even watched it, though, I read in Video Watchdog that this is the theatrical cut, and Johnny is not a Moondoggy in this version. See, the film, as it was shown in drive-ins, only runs 85 minutes, so when it was sold to television, it needed some extra padding. So someone cleverer than Al Adamson figured that, since Johnny has scenes in which he talks about Luna (the moon) and how it "affects" him and makes him lose control and kill, it would not be a real stretch to imagine him as an actual werewolf. So, new footage of the werewolf chasing the girl was shot and edited into the film, which explains why none of the other characters ever make reference to Johnny being a wolf, and also why Johnny doesn't become a wolf anymore after the first third of the film. Johnny's really just a run-of-the-mill psycho after all (though still a memorable one, if only 'cause he just has so much damn FUN killing folks). So the most striking element of the film, for me, turns out to be merely some suit demanding more footage be shot for tv obligations. And so I sadly have to take back the Oscar I had mentally awarded Al for a moment's brilliance in an otherwise undistinguished career.
A career which came to a brutal end, when his live-in partner killed him in 1995 and buried him under the bathroom floor in their house. That's a lousy way for anyone to end up. Better that Al's films should have been buried under the house, and poor Al should have lived to get wined and dined at conventions, signing autographs for us children of the black-and-white portable television generation.
Would you like to know more? I thought not...but there is a fun website devoted to Al Adamson: http://gregkrieger.tripod.com/aladamson/adamsonindex.html
(P.S. You really should get Al's films on DVD...only because they feature audio commentary by Sam Sherman, whose Independent International Pictures distributed most of Al's films. Sherman's commentaries are highly entertaining and educational, providing an amazingly vivid history of that wondrous 60's era of drive-in movie marketing, selling, huckstering, and backstabbing. Unfortunately, "Blood of Dracula's Castle" doesn't feature Sherman, but these do: "Dracula vs. Frankenstein", "Brain of Blood", "Satan's Sadists" "Horror of the Blood Monsters" (all by Al Adamson) as well as "Frankenstein's Bloody Terror", "Beast of Blood", "Brides of Blood", "Mad Doctor of Blood Island", "The Blood Drinkers", & "Blood of the Vampires".)
Blood anyone?
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