"Dr. Mabuse" at CSUN + Fritz Lang Is A Weirdo + Hike At Whitney + :):)

Tonight I went to CSUN for a special Halloween screening of "The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse" (1933). Man, what a weird and creepy movie! I have probably mentioned it before, as I have the dvd and have seen it several times, but never before had I seen it on a movie screen, and as always, you see things you didn't notice before, and everything is magnified (or actually, is seen the way it was meant to be seen in the first place). The screening was hosted by another film Professor this time - although Professor Tim was present - and this Professor gave an interesting lecture about Fritz Lang, the director of "Mabuse" and many other famous films. I did not know that Lang was basically a really bad guy, one step above being a tyrant, but I did know that he's made some tremendous movies, like "Metropolis" and "M" and two "Mabuse" films, and others. New research shows that, even though his mother was Jewish, he collaborated with the Nazis and was asked by Goebbels to be the Film Minister of Germany, which he turned down, but still.....

I guess in that sense, he is like Richard Wagner, the great composer. Wagner was likewise an unpleasant man, actively anti-Semitic, and the Nazis were even inspired by his works. Still, few would argue that his music ranks with the greatest of the classical composers, as one listen to the Ring Cycle or the Prelude to "Tristan und Isolde" (one of the greatest pieces of music ever written) will demonstrate.

The subject of Art and Artist is an interesting one, and this Professor tonight gave us a lot of insight into the egomaniacal mind of Fritz Lang. Perhaps he created "Dr. Mabuse" as his counterpart. I shant give my usual lengthy review of the film, just because it's weird and must be seen rather than described to you. It's a crime film at heart, but not just any crime film. More like a Supernatural Crime Film or a Psychological Crime Film, or both. Dr. Mabuse is the ultimate anarchist, who wants to create an Empire Of Crime, and by perfecting the methods of every manner of crime, he wants to demoralise the human race by creating a criminal empire that will run rampant and be unstoppable, that will commit horrific crimes for no apparent reason. But the thing is that Dr. Mabuse is an an Insane Asylum. He is catatonic. But he is able to project his philosophies by mental telepathy to his psychiatrist, who then conveys them to a local criminal gang.

Then the elderly Mabuse dies, and his ghost possesses the psychiatrist, and everything proceeds from there. I will post a short clip on Facebook, to give an idea of what I am talking about. I think I may have posted this clip before, but it bears repeating, to quote The White Stripes in that ridiculous song.  :)

"The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse" also has elements of German Expressionism, and one of these elements is the use of sound. Lang has his actor's voices mic-ed up loud, and there is a lot of shouting and exclaiming in German, perhaps not the most easy-on-the-ear language ever spoken, and so this adds an abrasiveness to parts of the film that can strain the uninitiated viewer. You don't just sit down and watch "Mabuse"; you have to be ready. There is also no soundtrack, no music whatsoever, and so that can give it a bit of a "dry" feel. But if you can handle the "cheese grater" voice effect and the German style of acting from the early 30s, then a date with Dr. Mabuse should prove to be no problem for you, and the rewards will be many. Though it's not the easiest watch, I love this movie and think that it's one of the most original films I've seen. ///

This afternoon I had a nice hike up at Whitney Canyon in Newhall. I've been a Hiking Machine these past few days, eh? In past years, since I began hiking in 2013, I used to love to go to Placerita or Walker Ranch at Halloween, just because of the Wilderness Ghost Vibes at those places, and it was a beautiful feeling, like Good Ghosts, Spirits Of Nature, and so I was establishing a Halloween Tradition of hiking at Walker on October 31st, and I did it in 2014 and 2015. But in 2016, there was a horrible fire up there, that Summer, and they still haven't restored the trails. So I went to El Scorpion yesterday and Whitney today, instead. They are beautiful in their own way, magnificent really, but I hope Walker Ranch and Placerita Canyon will be open again next year because I miss those places.

They have the best Ghosts for this time of year, and I take my Ghosts very seriously.

Tomorrow I will try to do a good Halloween for the Trick Or Treaters here at Pearl's, and then I will head home at about 8 or 8:30 and go on my walk, and check out all the Halloween Houses in my 'Hood.

One of these years it would be great to have the time and resources to do a costume, or even a costume party.

In that respect, I saw your post Elizabeth, of the Halloween Costume suggestion from Eric Whitacre. I can't say that I understood his musical reference, haha (I've got a ways to go in that respect), but I certainly liked his idea of a "couple's costume". I think that would be the perfect way to go Trick Or Treating! Hey, Halloween is like Valentines Day that way....right?

You've got your chocolates (i.e treats) and your romance both days. But on Halloween you've got your Weirdness, too! And you have got to have Your Weirdness, or you can't function.

I will outdo Tim Burton by combining Halloween with Valentines Day.  :):) 

Yeah I know I'm nutty.

See you in the morn.

Beatles Over Baseball + I Can't Take It Anymore + "Just A Closer Walk With Thee"

No movie tonight. Instead, I went over to Our Lady Of Lourdes Catholic Church across the street. They were having their annual Fall Festival this weekend, and Ticket To Ride - The Beatles tribute band - was playing as they usually are on the last night of the Festival. The group was in top form tonight. They had a lot of people dancing on the parquet square set up in front of the stage. I myself stuck to singing along to the songs. You do not wanna see me dance.....    ;)

I was there from 7-9:30pm. The group played most of that time with two short breaks, during which I walked around the block to get my miles in. There were also two TV sets in the band tent, which were tuned to the World Series. Do not get me started on that game. Now you know why I don't watch much sports, SB. It's because I wanna live out my full life and not die of a sudden stroke.

I just can't take ballgames like that. That had to be one of the worst baseball games in the history of baseball. When I had left Pearl's, the Dodgers were up 4-0, but still I had a bad feeling, and I am always right about my Bad Sports Feelings. Ask my buddies over at the King's X board how I called a win for New England in last year's Super Bowl, even though they were getting blown out something like 35-7 or whatever it was. I posted on that message board, "There is no way Brady is gonna lose. He will win it in overtime". I posted "Brady" instead of "Patriots" because I can't stand Brady as you know, because he's Brady and because he always wins. And because he's Brady.

But anyway, I just knew he was gonna come back and win, even though his team was getting blown out. And I called it one hour before it happened. I said, "Brady will win it in overtime", and that was exactly what happened. My buddies at the board were somewhat.......impressed, I guess you might say.

It's not that I'm a Sports Psychic. I play Yahoo Football Pick 'Em with my brother and his friends, and sometimes I win, sometimes not. But I have no emotional investment in most of those games. When I do have an emotional investment, I can tell who is gonna win.

You can just feel it.

And tonight, even when the Dodgers went up 4-0 and then 7-4, I just thought......"Hmmm, I don't think that's enough". And that's because in all my years of baseball watching, I have never seen a team as tenacious as these Astros. You've gotta have them down 10-0, and then you might have a chance. Otherwise, no. They are always gonna come back. I have never seen anything like it, and I am glad I did not watch the whole game. Thank God Ticket To Ride were rockin' the house and I knew all the words to every song.

I just can't do emotionally invested sports anymore, not even a little bit. I can watch sports when it's two teams I don't care about, cause then I don't care who wins and I can enjoy the game. But if it's one of My Teams, forget it. I am all done with that. There is just too much more to life and as much as I love the games, I just can't handle it. Better to just read about it in the paper the next day. This game was The Last Straw.  :)

I did have a nice hike out at El Scorpion Park in West Hills this afternoon. I was hoping for some good photos, but the light was a bit drab. It looks like our Indian Summer is coming to an end. Yesterday we had 95 degrees but today it was way down, overcast in the morn and with a high of about 75. Halloween is projected for upper 60s and cloudy. But that was an awesome two months in September and October, nice and hot most of the way through. It was a weird, late Summer, and it wasn't very long, but at least it finally got here.

We had Good Singin' In Church this morn. We were doing a choral version of "Just A Closer Walk With Thee", which was a big hit in the late '50s for Patsy Cline. It's got a Gospel/Rhythm & Blues feel, and the Tenor part had all sorts of unusual rhythmic tempos, so I actually had to study it all week. I was lucky to find a Soundcloud from the publisher, Hope Publishing, and I listened to it many times all week to get my part down. And I guess it came out pretty well. I love singing and want to keep trying more difficult pieces.

Man, could those Beatles ever sing. So could Patsy Cline.   :)

Tomorrow I will get back to Horror Movies, and Hopefully Another Hike, and maybe some pix, too. I will also get back to My CIA Letter. It has me on a little bit of a roller coaster ride where hope and expectations are concerned. I think what I really need is an FOIA lawyer, or some expert with this stuff to break it down for me, and tell me not only the exact meaning of the legalese, but also of the sum total of meaning in what is being said to me between the lines.

I need someone who really has experience with FOIA, to help me interpret what they are saying.

Well anyhow........

See you in the morn.   :):)

Boris in "Black Friday" + Brain Transplants + My Letter

Tonight's movie was "Black Friday" (1940), starring Boris Karloff as a Mad Scientist who performs an Emergency Brain Transplant on his friend, a college professor, when that man is hit by an automobile on Friday the 13th (hence the film's title). First of all, I have gotta ask : don't you just love Mad Scientist movies? I do, and I am willing to bet your answer is the same. The thing is, though, that it's gotta be Boris in the Mad Scientist role. With a few exceptions, like Peter Cushing, or Colin Clive, I think Karloff is the Kwintessential Mad Scientist, and has probably played that role in more movies than any other actor. The thing about Boris' Mad Scientists is that they always mean well, at least in their own minds, and so when they do things like Brain Transplants, it's all for the future good of humanity.  :)

The other thing is : Doncha just love movies with Brain Transplants? I sure do, and nobody does a better transplant than Boris Karloff. If I was getting a Brain Transplant, I'd want him to perform the operation.

"Black Friday" is not quite a Karloff Klassic, like "The Devil Commands" or "The Man Who Changed His Mind" (get it?). It plays more like a crime caper than a true horror film and the real star of the film is an actor named Stanley Ridges, who plays the professor with the implanted brain. You see, he was hit by a car, and the car was driven by a gangster who was on the run from some fellow hoodlums. The gangster was in critical condition........but Boris fixed all of that, you see, so that he would have a Brain to Transplant into his friend the professor's head. I think you get my drift. You are a veteran of Mad Scientist movies and you know how they are.

Anyhow, the only problem is.....that his friend the college professor now wakes up with a criminal's brain in his head. Sound familiar? And now the guy also has a Jeckyl & Hyde personality, which Boris thinks he can control. And he wants to control it, because the gangster, before dying and "donating" his brain, had hidden a half-million bucks worth of Stolen Loot. Boris wants it....to further his research of course. So, to recap, we have his friend the college professor, who has a Brain Transplant from a criminal, and Boris is trying to get the information out of him as to where the money is hidden.

Girlfriends and other Dames figure into the schemes. There are always Dames in 1940s movies, so don't accuse me of sexism. :)

"Black Friday", while not a Top Notch thriller, is nevertheless a worthwhile film for fans of Boris Karloff, especially for completists like me.....and you! And as a bonus, you get a few minutes worth of Bela Lugosi in a minor role as the lead hoodlum. Throw in '40s beauties Anne Nagel and Anne Gwynne and you can't go wrong, I think.

"I Think.....with a Transplanted Brain.....Therefore I Am" - Rene Descartes.

Did he actually say that?

Well anyhow, I also finished the second half of the "Eyes Of The Mothman" documentary. The whole thing runs a little over two and a half hours, and is a serious look at the real life events and the history behind the events of the 1966-67 Mothman and UFO visitations on the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. For people who are curious to understand the supernatural, this is a very worthwhile documentary, and in this case it is a compliment to the very effective motion picture "The Mothman Prophecies".

I had a nice hike up at O'Melveney Park this afternoon, and I am also about halfway through Stephen and Owen King's page-turner "Sleeping Beauties". One of the best King books ever, and this time it's by two Kings!

The major news remains my CIA response letter, as first reported yesterday. This letter, though it did not disclose any information, still blew me away to the extent that I am almost afraid to re-read it, that the words I read will somehow disappear and I'll be back to treading water as I have been for almost a quarter century.

But in reality, I know what the letter says, and what it does not say but says in so many words.

And so I am going to have to get settled before I re-read it, wait til Halloween is over, and the World Series. Then I will sit down and re-read what the CIA has sent to me. First, I will do a meditation, to get myself centered.

Then I will re-read it the way a lawyer would, because I am going to have to appeal their decision not to release any documents to me.

I am entering into new territory here, and I want to have everything centered and right.

I have never given up, in 25 years since my memory came back, and now....

I finally am feeling a glimmer of hope for real.

See you in Church in the morning.  :):)

"Eyes Of The Mothman" + Lucy's House + Thank You, CIA

Tonight's movie was a documentary I found at The Libe : "Eyes Of The Mothman". I have always been fascinated by this story, ever since I saw "The Mothman Prophecies" back in 2003. That movie scared the heck out of me. I thought then, and have had this feeling reinforced by a couple of repeat viewings since, that "Mothman" is not only one of the scariest movies I've ever seen, but also one of the eeriest. Man, is it weird......and scary......and that's because it's true.

This year I was gonna rewatch "The Mothman Prophecies" at Halloweentime, because it is not only ritual but law in my world that one must watch horror movies in October. You can watch 'em anytime, of course, but in October you have to watch them. And so I was gonna check out "Mothman Prophecies" from Northridge Libe....

But in searching the library system, I found this documentary which I had never before heard of, and I thought I'd give it a chance since I am always looking for new material on anything that is of interest to me. It had a good report both on Amazon and IMDB, and so I checked it out and watched half of it tonight (it's 2 1/2 hours long, I will watch the rest of it tomorrow).

I mentioned a week ago that I had just finished Peter Levenda's trilogy on the unseen, unknown haunting of America, called "Sinister Forces". The three books in his series delineate the religious, political and criminal ramifications that have played out in this country ever since the pilgrims landed and began to persecute witches and then Indians. That is an extreme oversimplification, but his overall thesis is that there is something haunted about America, and this haunted effect has been displayed throughout our history by a nearly unending run of strange, unnerving coincidences that tie so many well known events together. I cannot recommend the "Sinister Forces" trilogy highly enough, but the reason I mention it tonight is that Levenda starts book one with a tour of the area around West Virginia and Ohio where the Ancient Hopewell and Adena Indian Burial Mounds are located, and he also goes into some detail about the Mothman sightings of 1966-67. It was a big deal for these people in that area at the time, and it remains a big deal to this day. The very fact that the story lasted for almost 40 years until it was made into a major motion picture is an indication that it was no joke.

And now, the story of the Mothman continues with this documentary, which was made in 2011 and features several of the witnesses from 1966 as well as some local historians, university professors and scientists to give it context. The documentary is very well made and I am learning a lot about the story that was not included in the movie. For me, the Mothman story ranks right up there with Roswell, and I will look forward to finishing the program tomorrow night.  :)

I had a nice mini-hike this afternoon, out at Chatsworth Park. Before I left, I saw a Valley Relics post on Facebook that indicated an address for Lucille Ball's old house in Chatsworth. The house stood on a large ranch she and her husband Desi Arnaz owned, and I had always thought it was the well-known and very visible large ranch property that still exists on Devonshire and Winnetka. That's the one we used to refer to as "Chad Everett's house" when the "Medical Center" star was at the top of the Hollywood TV Heap, and owned that property in the 1970s. I thought it had previously been Lucy & Desi's ranch, but I was wrong.

Their's was nearby, on or near where the property of Chaminade High School is located now, and the house is on Tuba Street, just south of Devonshire. It's just a few miles from my apartment, and on the way to Chatsworth Park, so I drove past it for the first time today, just so I could say I've seen Lucy's house. It's just a nice sized ranch house, nothing gigantic, though the ranch must have been fairly sizable.

You know I had to say it as I drove by, to myself and also to the house : "I Love Lucy"!

Then I went to Chatsworth Park and had a nice short hike in the 95 degree weather. ////

To end tonight's blog, I will tell you that today, in the mail, I got a letter from the CIA.

You read that correctly, and it is no joke. I got a reply letter, from the Central Intelligence Agency, to a Freedom Of Information Act request that I had sent them earlier this month, pursuant specifically to the Privacy Act, which allows an individual citizen to request any and all records held by the CIA (or any government agency) to be released to him or her. Sporadically, since 1998, I have sent FOIA requests to the FBI, mostly, about "What Happened In Northridge", though when I send my request letters I do not refer to the events of 1989 in colloquial terms. I use precise language instead. And I have always gotten a response. I haven't sent a lot of requests, maybe ten or twelve over the years. I got worn out, because the FBI would always just send back a sort of "form letter" runaround. I did get something more interesting from them two years ago, called a "Glomar" response. You can Google that if you wish.

Over the years, I have sent FOIA requests to the US Marshals, and the Unites States Justice Department, to the Air Force and even Edwards Air Force Base, because I know I was taken there after the Rappaport Incident. No joke, just truth.

Well anyway, in all my years of sporadic letter writing to various agencies of the United States Government, I had never sent one to the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.

So I finally did, at the beginning of this month. I sent them a Privacy Act request. Four weeks went by, and I finally got their response letter today.

I am quite a bit blown away. The letter they sent me does not disclose anything. It does not give me any information about 1989.

But what it does is give me a degree of hope, and more than that......

There is a subtle acknowledgement, in so many words. Something I have waited half my life to hear.

I was tempted to re-print (or re-type) the letter in full, tonight - here at the blog.

But I have decided against it for now and for the near future.

I will perhaps talk a little bit about it tomorrow night.

It's a big deal, and tonight I am blowing my mind.

Thank you, CIA. I hope we can work together in the future.  :)

Buster Keaton In "Free And Easy" + Marriage Weather

Tonight at CSUN we saw Buster Keaton in "Free And Easy" (1930), his very first "talkie" and the third picture he made under contract to MGM. I probably mentioned earlier that when Keaton signed with the studio, he lost his creative independence. He was no longer allowed to direct or write his own films, as a result of the box office failure of some of his now highly regarded Silent films like "The General". In hindsight, Buster said that signing with MGM was the biggest mistake of his life (which hurt a little bit, because I worked there, lol) and it's true that, by taking away his free rein on the movie set and having him conform to a Big Studio, regimented way of filmmaking, that Louis B. Mayer and Thalberg stifled most of the spontaneous and inspired physical comedy that Buster displayed in his earlier films, in favor of having him talk (sound films were brand new) and recite "witticisms" from the script.

That wasn't Buster's style of comedy - telling jokes - and forcing him into it deprives the film - and probably the ones that came after, as well - of the impromptu physical zaniness and truly over-the-top special effect set pieces that have made his early silent pictures the classic works of art that they are now considered to be : films that have stood the test of time for a century.

Here comes the "However".......

(ahem) However - told you it was coming - despite the fact that MGM de-Busterized the films he made while with the studio, they were actually his biggest money makers, and that is because MGM knew how to put on a show. And because of that, "Free And Easy", while mostly devoid of Keaton Kraziness, is still a lot of fun. It's a "movie movie", meaning a movie about making movies. The film opens at a train station in Kansas. A young woman with Hollywood aspirations has won a local talent contest and is headed out to Tinseltown with her large and overbearing stage mother in tow. Keaton is her hapless manager. There are several different plot lines; a main one involves the ladies' chance meeting on the train with the tall and handsome early star Robert Montgomery (whose daughter Elizabeth starred in "Bewitched" on TV). He is immediately enamored of the Kansas beauty, who Buster is secretly in love with (of course), and the Hijinx flow from there.

There is actually a lot going on in this film. A big part of the fun, especially for me, was seeing Keaton run rampant on the MGM lot, antagonising the legendary Cecil B. DeMille among others. I worked there fifty years later, when all the old and most famous stars were long gone, but their ghosts lingered on the lot, and when you took a lunch break and walked around the streets between the sound stages, you could just feel the history. I was a kid, and I did not love the job of working in the film lab, and I was only at MGM for three years, but the place made a huge and everlasting impression on me, and now I know how lucky I was to work there, and I am grateful. And so it was really fun, and awesome, to see the old buildings again, and especially to watch Buster enter at the gate we lab workers would enter at, and sorry to end the sentence with a preposition.

The point is, that it's not just the movies that are great, and important. It's also the History Of Movies, and that's where Hollywood is most important. Without Hollywood, there is no History Of Movies. It all started here and eventually developed into The Major Art Form Of The 20th Century.

You know I could have added a pun in there, and said "Art Form Of The 20th Century Fox".......

But I didn't.........and it's a good thing......so we'll just let it go.  :)

In any event (and I may have to start adding a warning for that introduction as well), I can recommend "Free And Easy" as a film for fans of Buster Keaton to see, with a solid Thumbs Up. Not to see without proper background, though. You'd need to see at least a few of his early Silent classics first, and if you did you'd follow the progression to "Free And Easy" and enjoy it very much I think. :)

Elizabeth, if you are reading, I liked your photo this morning, and I have always liked silhouettes myself. I have a few from my photo class that I should dig out one day. Silhouettes are like "silent pictures" in their own way, don't you think?

I see that you photo was taken in Tampa, Florida, so maybe you were just there?

If so, I hope you had a great trip!  :)

I also saw your post about your friends who got married 20 years ago......during a once in a lifetime snowstorm in October. Now, I know what you're thinking : "touche", maybe.  :):)

Or maybe just a perfect opposition to the October weather I've written about these past couple of days - and lo and behold we had another 100 degree day today!

I write about California weather; you write about Wisconsin weather. Shared wit.  :):)

But your post was also about marriage, and that is a good thing no matter the weather. Right?  :):)

See you in the morning......    :):)

Corriganville + Sports + Director James Whale + Glenn Tipton Is 70

Man, that Dodger game......too nerve wracking. If I had watched the whole thing I'd be a basket case right now. I've gotta stick to my policy of turning it off the minute the Astros get a base hit. It's just too much I tell ya. I can only watch sports when I don't have an emotional stake in a game (i.e. when I don't care who wins meaning none of my teams are playing).

Yeah, I know, SB........sports. But on the other hand.......sports!

Sports are a lot of fun, just so long as I don't watch, and my team wins. :)

'Twas another nice hot one today, 98 degrees. How awesome is it when I can go on a (almost) Hundred Degree Hike one week shy of November? You know the answer : "It is quite awesome indeed".

I drove out to Corriganville this afternoon and had a very nice leisurely hike, nothing strenuous. I had not been there since about April or so - as you know I do not get out to Simi or Santa Clarita as much as I used to - but I had to go to Corriganville because it is almost Halloween, and I always go out there at this time of year to visit The Tree. If you are familiar with my FB photos since 2014 or so, you might know which tree I am talking about. In the past I have posted a picture of it during Halloween Week. It looks like it has been struck by lightning in the past, or has suffered some fire damage. As a result, it has a striking look. At a certain angle, you could say it looks like a demonic figure, or even........The Devil.

You can call it The Devil Tree if you wish. Me, I just call it The Tree, and I always go to see it close to Halloween. I am always happy to find it still standing.

Tonight's movie was "The Invisible Man" (1933). I saved the best for last, the original film, and one of the greatest of all sci-fi or horror films, or any movie really. In recent blogs I have described to you all of the sequels, all of which were well done and I enjoyed each sequel very much, but this first film is a cut above. That is probably because it was directed by James Whale, the atmospheric genius who made "Frankenstein" and "Bride Of...". He got a career-making performance out of Claude Rains in the lead role. Rains is most famous, perhaps, for "Casablanca", but his first American role was as "The Invisible Man" and he plays him as Evil Incarnate. It's an angry performance and I think it remains shocking 86 years later. The four sequels to "The Invisible Man" were entertaining, and fun, and each one hit the mark in it's own way, but the original has an energy to it, urgent and aggravated. Director Whale is also a photographic master who can set a black and white close up, in this case of the fully bandaged "Invisible Man" with his sunglasses on, going on a diatribe, that conveys an undercurrent of something just beyond our reach......this guy knows something we don't, but on a subliminal level, not overtly. And he's got power.

The Ten Point Grey Scale in James Whale's classic Monster movies is perhaps the best ever put on film, and again, this Grey Scale is in full effect throughout "The Invisible Man", and it adds to the definition you see in his bandaged face, with it's Black Sunglasses on top. He is speaking in these scenes, and you can see his lips move beneath the bandages. The definition is all important, because it makes him look Otherworldly. And the anger sends him over the top as a character to be reckoned with.

Whale understood all of this on an intuitive level. You can bet David Lynch is a big fan.

When you see and hear something in a film that is affecting you as an undercurrent.....you know it is happening as you are watching. It's not the plot or the dialogue or scene, but something in the way that the sound and picture combine with the actor's performance in a specific segment, maybe just a half minute long, that can strike you in a very big way and leave an impression that always remains with you. Such are the close-ups of a bandaged and enraged Claude Rains in "The Invisible Man".

True Horror that gets deep into the Human Psyche and classic filmmaking on the part of James Whale.

That's all the news for today, except for that I got my ticket for the Judas Priest concert that is coming up in April 2018, and I got it today which is also Glenn Tipton's 70th birthday.

We've got a lot of older guys still rocking nowdays - witness Russell Mael's age-regressing performance at last week's Sparks shows - but I think we will be seeing something new in the case of Mr. Tipton, who will be performing supreme heavy metal next year, on tour at the age of 70.

Judas Priest music - those guitar solos - and pounding songs into the ground, at that age.

In the old days, say the 1950s or 1930s, 70 years old was an Old Geezer. Hell! - even the great Buster Keaton, who was in phenomenal shape as a young man, looked like a Traditional Old Guy in his 60s. And he died at 71.

But now, guys are playing Judas Priest music, live onstage, at age 70.

Weird.

See you in the morn.

"The Invisible Woman" + Old Hollywood + Dodgers + Go

Super hot since Sunday. 105 yesterday and 103 today. It's even 85 degrees as I write, at One In The Morning. Imagine that. We are even hotter than Death Valley right now, hotter than Baghdad. I am loving it of course, the Indian Summer, because soon enough the Dreaded L.A. Cold will appear and I will be in sweatshirts and jackets until April.

Tonight's movie was "The Invisible Woman" (1940), an entirely different kind of sequel to the original "Invisible Man", and really it might have been a spin-off hoping to take hold. "The Invisible Woman" is a comedy, played as farce, and it is so well done that it stands on it's own as a separate movie. The reason is the cast - you could not have a better group for this kind of screwball setup. The lead is played by Virginia Bruce, whom I was not familiar with but who has a long list of credits. She is supported by "The Great Profile" himself, John Barrymore as The Mad Scientist. Barrymore was called both a ham and a great actor. I subscribe to the latter description, and he is SO great in the movie. So is Margaret Hamilton, who will always be known as "The Wicked Witch Of The West", one of the greatest characters in all of movie history, but she could do more than that, and because she had such a great face, she was very good at comedy too. It takes very disciplined and versatile actors to pull off this kind of show, and they succeed from start to finish.

Basically, it's Invisibility From A Woman's Point Of View in the 1940s. Virginia Bruce works as a fashion model with an abusive male boss. When she sees an ad in the paper from A Mad Scientist looking for a volunteer who wants to become invisible, she immediately applies and is chosen by Barrymore as his guinea pig. Of course, the first thing she wants to do is even the score with her boss.

Hey!, I guess I'd better refine my description : You could say that it's not only Invisibility From A Woman's Point Of View In The 1940s, but also in 2017. Because the same things are still going on.

The good news is that she destroys her boss. She also makes mincemeat of three hoodlums (one is played by Shemp Howard) who are trying to steal the Invisibility Machine on orders from their Crime Boss Oscar Holmolka, a great and funny-looking Character Actor from the 30s. You could actually call him a Caricature Actor.

Finally, the Invisible Woman has to fend off the advances of charmer John Howard, who plays The Millionaire Who Is Financing The Mad Scientist. He is a Cad, but a harmless one, and so she eventually falls for him.

Rounding things out is famous comic actor Charlie Ruggles as The Butler, providing much in the way of hijinx and goofiness.

Listen : they just don't make movies like this anymore, and they couldn't if they tried because they would not be able to assemble the type of cast capable of such exacting farce, everything perfectly timed and performed. Maybe the British could still pull it off, but they would not have such unique characters as John Barrymore and Margaret Hamilton.

So once again, I must say "Here's To Old Hollywood". Man, they were the best, even when they were goofing off.

I also saw "Invisible Agent" on Sunday night, which I failed to report because I was writing about Martin Ain and Celtic Frost, but it is also a first-rate sequel to the 1933 original, this time involving the original Invisible Man's grandson, who volunteers to become Invisible in order to spy on Nazi Germany. This sequel is serious, with a script that features a lot of denunciations of fascist ideology and mockery of Hitler's SS. Some of this is played as farce also, but the film overall is a thriller. You can't beat our old buddy Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the Chief Nazi In Charge, he is ruthless as you would expect.

So, I have now finished all four of the sequels to "The Invisible Man", none of which I'd previously seen. I am grateful to the Universal Legacy Collections for making all of these films available, and I cannot recommend any and all of these dvd sets highly enough, if you love Universal Monsters, or even Classic Hollywood in general. These movies created an atmosphere, which was probably influenced by the German Expressionism of the 1920s, but the directors for Universal, beginning with James Whale, expanded upon it, and with the Studio money available they built amazing sets, hired the best lighting technicians, and just did The Works.

That's why the Universal Monster Movies are the best overall series of horror films ever made.

Since then, there are scarier movies for sure, and more realistic movies.

But none with more style, panache, atmosphere, inventiveness, talent and creativity.

I am a big supporter of The Greatest Generation, and they set the foundation for great movies, too, and all that was to come in their wake.

In other news.......Dodgers Win! It was so cool to watch the first Dodgers World Series game since 1988, more than half my lifetime ago. They will win again tomorrow night I think. I am picking Dodgers in five games.

I am currently reading "Sleeping Beauties" by Stephen King and Owen King, his son. Man, it's a page turner on order of "The Stand". I am at page 217 after four days, even with my schedule. It is absolutely un-put-downable, and like "The Invisible Woman" from 77 years earlier, is all about the Untapped Power Of The Female Half Of The Species. It's time for you to take over already.

You Go, Girls. ///// 

Listening To "Van Halen III" For The First Time + "Spirited Away"

No movie tonight. Instead, I went over to Grimsley's because he wanted me to hear "Van Halen III", which I had never heard even though it came out 19 years ago. That's the one with Gary Cherone on vocals. Grim had never heard it either until he bought it a week ago, and he bought it because I had been talking about it, which was due to all of the interesting info surrounding the making of that record that I'd recently read in the EVH biography by Kevin Dodds. As I'm sure I've mentioned, I gave up on Van Halen in 1985, when Sammy Hagar joined. I've heard many Van Hagar songs on the radio - you can't avoid them - and actually, if it weren't for the vocals and the lame lyrics (in other words, the Sammy Stuff) - there are actually some nice songs there, strong melodies and soaring guitar work. But Sammy ruined it for me and I could no longer hang, and by the time Cherone joined I was like, "whatever". But fast forward nineteen years - I talked to Grim about "VH3" - he bought it, and I finally heard it.

I expected it to be terrible, because that's it's reputation, so I was a little bit surprised.....

Not because it's great, which it's not, but because it's interesting. It doesn't sound like a Van Halen record. Ed breaks out all kinds of different guitar styles that we've never heard him play (keep in mind that I'm 19 years late), like slide, lots of acoustic, Delta Blues-type of riffing, very experimental soloing, ballads galore, and one or two piano songs including the infamous "How Many Say I" with Ed on vocals. A Van Halen song about the sorrows of the world, imagine that. It's all over the map musically, and especially guitarically. Many songs, if you'd never heard them and didn't know who it was, you would not think "this is Van Halen".

The record is about 65 minutes long, and there's probably about 35-40 minutes of good music on there, some of it really good. But there are two problems. One pretty much sinks the album.

If you thought Sammy Hagar's vocals were high-pitched and screechy sounding, Gary Cherone is Hagar on steroids. He is so raw-in-the-throat and so high pitched and singing above his range (which EVH apparently wanted his post-Roth singers to do) that his vocals are absolute nails-on-the-blackboard. I said to Grim, "I like a lot of the music but I'm taking a beatdown from the singer". It's like he's running you over with his voice.

So that's one problem, the one that is the Album Killer.

The other problem is that the songs needed an editor and an arranger. I think that's where Roth would have come in handy. Although he is not a writer of music, he always understood the ingredients that made a good song. Listen to "Dance The Night Away" as an example. According to every Van Halen book I've read, it was Roth who got Ed to strip away a lot of extraneous stuff in his songs to make them more compact and keep the emphasis on riffs and hooks. But without Roth's input, or even Sammy's to keep him in check to make a commercial record, Ed went to town on "Van Halen III". Gary Cherone was not an established star and didn't have the massive ego anyway to push EVH around and tell him what to do, and so Edward made what is essentially a solo album. That is what a lot of fans think about "VH3" and I agree. It sure doesn't sound like any Van Halen I've ever heard, or Van Hagar either!

And it might have been a very good album if it hadn't been for the singing.......

Well anyhow.  :)  (hey, how about that? An album review instead of a movie review. I'm getting versatile!)

Elizabeth, if you are still out there, I hope you are doing well and that everything is going okay. I saw a couple of posts last night; one about "Spirited Away" and another that might have been a Sweet Baby post, via your friend Vaia.

I think those two things go together, Sweet Babies and "Spirited Away", which is one of my very favorite movies of all time. We could see that one if we had the chance, and then follow it with "Howl's Moving Castle", or "Kiki's Delivery Service" or "Nausicaa".....

See you in the morn, or in the movie theater.........or both!

:) + :) = :):)

Celtic Frost and The Summer Of 1986

Way back in 1986 - 31 years ago but seems like yesterday - me and Mr. D didn't have a place to play. We didn't have a drummer, either. But we knew this 18 year old kid named Sean who lived a half mile away. He said we could jam in his garage. We put up a lot of carpeting on the walls, created a makeshift studio. Sean said he could be our drummer. The fact that he'd never played drums didn't seem to be too big a problem at the time. We just wanted to be creative. We'd already played with other drummers of varying levels of skill, and it had never worked out for one reason or another, usually because they didn't wanna rehearse, or had personality problems. The usual story, right?

But Sean seemed different. I met him through Grimsley, who'd met him when he was housesitting for Ono in Reseda. This was in 1985. Sean's family lived in Reseda then, but moved two miles up to Northridge in '86. Sean had an original look, at least for back then : really long hair on one side of his head; head shaved on the other. No eyebrows, he shaved them too. He was a smart kid but many might think him weird because he had books like The Necronomicon, The Tibetan Book Of The Dead and The Satanic Bible by showman Satanist Anton LaVey. In reality, Sean was about as Satanic as Mr. Rogers....

But what happened in the Summer of 1986 that was really cool was that Sean turned me and Dave on to Black Metal. I thought I knew all the bands, but it turned out I did not.

What the heck is Black Metal?

Sean said, "Have you guys ever heard of Celtic Frost, or Venom"? We had not.

Sean did not have any albums by those bands himself, as I recall. He was a poor kid and didn't have much money for anything, but he swore by these bands and so Mr. D and I went to the local record store to inquire.

The band Venom had an album called "Black Metal". If you ever wondered where the term came from, that's it. Venom invented Black Metal, and that album - raw as it is - is a classic. Every song is great.

But even better was "To Mega Therion" by Celtic Frost. Wow and Holy Smoke! That band had a very artistic and weird album cover by HR Geiger, of all people, the guy who created the "Alien" and who did "Brain Salad Surgery" for ELP. Listening to the album at my house (cause I had a massive stereo back then), we could hardly believe what we were hearing. This was the heaviest music we had ever heard, even moreso than Black Sabbath. They even used trombones in a song. The rhythms alternated between dirge and fast break, and the singer - instead of doing "witchy" like Chronos from Venom - did a guttural vocal, singing like he was deceased. With that, Tom G. Warrior (now known as Thomas Gabriel Fischer, his real name) invented The Death Metal Vocal, since perfected by Mikael Akerfeldt from Opeth.

But yeah, that was it, my fellow metalheads. Venom and Celtic Frost had invented a totally new kind of heavy metal, called Black Metal or Death Metal, and Sean knew all about it. Dave and I got hooked on those two bands that Summer, a Summer I could write a book about. We really liked Venom, and told Sean that he looked like Chronos, and when he put makeup on he looked like Marilyn Manson, before there was a Marilyn Manson. Sean invented that guy and I've got the pictures to prove it. Sean had even dug his own grave in the backyard of his house, that's how cool he was. It wasn't six feet deep, maybe 18 inches, but it was deep enough for him to lie down in, which he would do, just for laughs.

We were having a Black Metal Summer and we really got into it. We painted our fingernails black. We hung an upside down cross in the garage and we jammed. Sean somehow got the money together to acquire a snare drum. That was his drum set. He did get really good though, at twirling his sticks. That was something he practiced with diligence and as time went on, he was a damn good twirler. He also provided us with a megaphone. Don't know where he got it, but we hung it from a rope, from the ceiling of the garage, and Dave would use it to sing through, for a vocal effect.

Venom was great, but it was really Celtic Frost who inspired us, because they were so creative. They weren't virtuoso players, but hey - it didn't matter because their album sounded incredible and today is considered a classic, and with Frost it was all about the creativity, and thanks to the teenaged Sean, we were having a blast of creativity in his roasting hot garage in the Summer Of 1986.

I write all of this because Martin Ain, the bassist and co-founder of Celtic Frost, passed away yesterday. He was nearly as influential in the development of the CF music as was Tom G, and so it is important he be given credit. Me, Dave and Sean all got to see CF live that Summer as well. It just so happened that they were touring, and we saw them at Fender's in Long Beach. It goes without saying that we blew our minds as you would guess.

Some guys die young, or fairly young. My friend Dave died nine years ago this month at age 47. Celtic Frost was one of his favorite bands, and I am so glad that in one of our last phone conversations, in 2006, I asked him if he was aware that CF had reformed and were touring. I told him I had just seen them at the House Of Blues at Disneyland, with Sunno))) opening, and that it was a mindboggler.

CF at Disneyland! With Sunno)))!.......how amazing was that?

Dave called me back a week or two later, to say that he'd seen the same show in Arizona. He was working as a studio driver then and was on location in AZ. And he got to see the reformed Celtic Frost, with Tom G., Martin Ain, and a drummer named Franco Sesa. He got to see Sunno))) too, and he reported back about the whole show. It felt like old times, to use a cliche.

That was the last time I spoke to Dave, in October 2006. He passed away in October 2008.

Sean died in January 2010. He was 41 years old.

Celtic Frost's music is very heavy, almost macabre in some respects, and it is admittedly not to everyone's taste, even for people who love metal.

But for my friends and I, we all got it. It wasn't anything sinister, it was just creativity, and it sounded great, and we all shared the music and the feeling during a long ago Summer that feels like yesterday.

I love those guys...........you know?

In Memory Of Martin Eric Ain, and Sean, and Dave.

"The Invisible Man's Revenge" + The Leatherface Interjection

Tonight's movie was "The Invisible Man's Revenge" (1944). This was the last of the four sequels to the original, and I thought it was really good, even better than "The Invisible Man Returns" from a couple of nights ago. That one had a slight comedic element mixed in. "Revenge" was pure horror, with Grade A atmosphere. The star this time was an actor named Jon Hall, an Errol Flynn lookalike who was in a lot of action and adventure movies in the 1940s. The movie opens with a shot of a freighter ship docking at night. A crane lowers a refrigerator-sized storage box onto the deck, and a knife appears, cutting it's way through the material from the inside. It is actor Hall as fugitive Robert Griffin, who has shipped himself to England, ala Dracula, only he has done it all by himself, without a Renfield to help him.

His first stop is a haberdashery, where he buys a coat and hat, leaving his old clothes behind. In a pocket, the haberdasher finds a news clipping which explains the proceedings thus far : Robert Griffin is a homicidal maniac, escaped from an institution in South Africa where he had killed three people.

However (there's that word again) he feels he has been cheated out of a fortune in diamonds by a former partner and his wife. The three murders for which he was committed are never explained, but soon he is making his way to the estate of his former partner, a diamond mine speculator, or whatever you call men who search for and develop diamond mines. When Griffin shows up, the former partner and his wife are shocked. They had thought he was dead, having become ill in the jungle all those years ago. They had left him behind and had gone on to become very wealthy in diamonds.

But now he is back, and he wants his fair share. They respond by throwing him out, using the reinforcement of the local chief of constables.

It is a stormy night. The rain pounds down, and the Universal Horror Atmosphere is on full display. Seeking directions to an Inn for shelter, he knocks on the door of a nearby residence.

It is answered by John Carradine, which - if you are a Horror Fan - tells you all you need to know as far as What Kind Of Turn The Movie Is About To Take. This time Carradine is a Mad Scientist, and an excellent one at that. He readily invites Griffin inside and instead of giving him the directions he was looking for, begins to show him his collection of experimental animals. Except that.....Griffin can't see them. Now why do you think this is?

It's because they are Invisible!

Yes, indeed. The one door Griffin happens to knock on, on that stormy night, happens to house the only Mad Scientist in all the world who has developed a serum for Invisibility.

Griffin, seeking Revenge (capitalized due to the title), asks Carradine if the formula would work on a human being. And as you might suspect, there is only one way to find out.

I have often thought that, without the cooperation between the screenwriter and the audience, and his or her trust in their suspension of disbelief, you would either have no movies at all, or at best, much shorter movies. In this case, what if the formula doesn't work?

No "Invisible Man"!

Hence, end of movie after 28 minutes. You get the idea. You can now apply it to any movie you care to name. While you are at it, you can also try my patented "Leatherface" interjection, which also works in any movie, and shortens it by whatever point - meaning whatever scene - you choose to insert it into.

With the Leatherface Interjection, you can have a scene in literally any movie. It could be "Gone With The Wind", or "2001" or "Fantasia" or even "Mary Poppins", though I sincerely hope you wouldn't choose that one. You could choose "The Exorcist" instead, or better yet, any Schwarzanegger/Sandler/Devito film. What happens is, at the point you decide to insert the Interjection, Leatherface jumps out from the side of the movie screen and chainsaws the whole scene to bits. Actors, scenery, the whole shebang.

And what happens is End Of Movie. You can choose The Leatherface Interjection when a movie is getting boring, or when it is getting trite, or stupid, or whatever you think it is getting. It also has to do with the suspension of disbelief I am talking about, and I only thought it up a couple of years ago, after watching too many newer movies that lacked competent screenwriting. But then my imagination got the better of me, and I started to apply it freely, in whimsical thought just to make myself laugh, to movies that were of high quality, or serious drama. I got a bit carried away, I suppose.....

Please then, use The Leatherface Interjection with care, won't you?

Thanks.

But think of the possibilities, too. No more boring movies!

I can't recall where I was in my description/review of "The Invisible Man's Revenge", so you'll just have to see it for yourself, and if you do you'll be well rewarded just by the John Carradine sequence alone. You have got to start watching you some Universal Monsters and Their Sequels, and in this case you won't be needing The Leatherface Interjection, and you couldn't use it anyway, even if you wanted to.......

He's The Invisible Man and he can't be chainsawed.

See you in Church. In the morning.  :):)

"The Walking Dead" + Peter Levenda's "Sinister Forces" Trilogy

I'm writing from home tonight, off until Sunday morning. No movie tonight, but I did binge-watch three episodes from Season 7 of "The Walking Dead". That's the season that aired last year. I got the complete season dvd set at Northridge Libe, and I am trying to finish up the episodes I hadn't seen so that I can be done with it. I used to love the show. I never saw a single episode until two years ago, when I wondered what all the fuss was about and checked out Season One from the Libe. It was great at first, I was immediately hooked just like the rest of America was when the show premiered in 2010. So I binge watched all through the last half of 2015 until I caught up. I thought the first four seasons were great, but then by Season Five it started to tail off a bit. Too many characters were added, I thought. Too many minor storylines about characters that had not been developed enough to care about.

But I kept watching until I finished Season Six, all on dvd. Then, last October, a year ago in 2016, I watched my first ever episode of "TWD" live, as it aired. Pearl has cable, and has AMC, and so I tuned into the first episode of Season Seven to watch it unfold with the rest of America.

What I wound up seeing was the most violent, disgusting and downright obscene thing I can imagine. It was the worst thing I have ever seen, in movies or tv. I mean - they showed this on TV - where anybody could have seen it, including kids, and it was so horrible that it shocked even me, the Unshockable One, the Ultimate Horror Fan. I swore off the show after seeing that first episode. It was no surprise that AMC got a lot of complaints, so many that the producers of "TWD" had to issue a semi-apology.

So yeah, I swore I would never watch another episode after the first one last year.

However.......and isn't there always a However in life?.........the damn show had got me hooked, even as much as I hated the Negan character (how'd you like to be Jeffery Dean Morgan, the actor?), and so I took a sneak peak at the next episode and the next one. Just a few minutes of each, as they aired. They seemed to be toned down, and so when the dvd set was finally released in August, I figured I've give the season a go - minus that first episode. Nobody should ever watch that, ever.

So I've been watching the rest of Season Seven on dvd, here and there since August, whenever it has been available at Northridge Libe. These TV people know what they are doing and they get you hooked. Just ask all the "Game Of Thrones" fans, of which I am not one. Never seen a single episode. In fact, I've never watched any of the big cable shows, no "Madmen", no "Sopranos", no none of 'em.

Not a single episode of any of 'em. What happened was that Grimsley went on and on about "Breaking Bad" until I couldn't take it any more, and so I said, "okay, okay, I'll check it out". This is on dvd of course, years after the show was over. And Grim was right; it was a great show. And it got you hooked. So I binge-watched it in early 2015, and then when I was through, I was looking for something else to replace it. And I thought, well what about this "Walking Dead" that everyone's been talking about for several years.

As an aside, one thing about me is that if everyone is talking about something, that is the most sure fire way to get me to avoid it. I just never want to be part of The Crowd.

Now, that doesn't mean I won't check it out later, haha. But in 99% of cases, I won't.

But in the case of "Breaking Bad", I did, because of Grimsley's hammering. And that led to "The Walking Dead".

My verdict is that is was a great show, but isn't anymore. The writing just isn't as good as it was, and they spend long, long periods of downtime in which the several dozen characters express their tortured feelings and psychoanalyze one another. It was an action show, and now it's all touchy-feely (save the horrific first episode). Now, I love psychological drama, but this ain't Method Acting and it ain't Playhouse 90. It's the freakin' Zombie Apocalypse, doggonnit, and I know that the show isn't really about Zombies but about what happens to people when there are no rules or laws, when society breaks down, but still..............it's a pretty boring show nowdays, and so I am binge-watching my way out of it.

I know that makes no sense, but I binged my way in, and now I'm binging my way out. They got me hooked and I've gotta at least finish out the season. One more episode to go. And then I will try not to watch next year, when Season 8 comes out on dvd. :)

On a reading note, I finally finished Peter Levenda's monumental three volume masterwork, "Sinister Forces : A Grimoire Of American Political Witchcraft" and I must say that it is the most profound study of it's kind that I know of, and I'm not sure anybody has ever tackled the subject before, of the mutitudes of connections and coincidences that exist as a nefarious undercurrent in American politics, religion, and culture that tie so many violent events together. The sentence I have just written is but a paltry description of what Levenda has achieved with his trilogy, which took him 30 years to complete.

I am lost for words, except to say that if you think CNN, or the Washington Post represents what is going on in this country, or what has gone on in it's 241 year history (and prior to that with the earliest settlers on the North American continent), then you should read Peter Levenda's "Sinister Forces" trilogy. If a book, or books, can be said to be life changing, this is it.

See you in the morning (and SB let's get married already).  :):)

"The Cameraman" by Buster Keaton

Tonight at CSUN we only had a single Buster Keaton movie instead of the double features we'd been enjoying the past several weeks, but it was one of his very best : "The Cameraman" (1928). Buster is a street photographer in New York City offering tintype portraits for ten cents. He has a big bulky camera that looks like a cross between a compressed telescope and an oversized martini shaker. His is clumsy as usual, constantly knocking things over with the camera and tripod carried on his shoulder. He manages to get his act together, though, for his first customer, a pretty young woman played by Silent Era stunner Marceline Day. Buster is very attentive and takes a nice picture, which he gives to her for free, as a present. It turns out that she works for MGM Newsreel Studio in NYC (I never knew MGM had an NYC outlet, but anyhow), and soon Buster is showing up there. He has pawned his old tintype still camera and with that money and all the savings in his bank account he has purchased an old broken down movie camera, just so he can have the right equipment in order to be at the studio. He has to be legit to hang out near his girl, only she isn't his just yet.

As always, he is up against Manly Competiton, this time in the person of another cameraman, a tall handsome professional who has previously had his eyes on The Girl.

Now who do you think is gonna win out?  ;)

The MGM Girl has a soft spot for Buster, just because he tries so hard, and one day she offers him a hot tip - "Go down to Chinatown. There is gonna be a gang war during their Holiday Parade. If you film it, you can get a job here".

You may or may not have heard of the Tong Wars of the early 1900s, involving Chinese gangs in American cities. I had heard the term but didn't know the context. Anyhow, Buster runs down to Chinatown and is soon filming right smack in the middle of a major Tong War. He has an accomplice; a skinny little monkey he has acquired by accident from a street performer.

The remaining 20 to 25 minutes of the movie are once again Absolute Classic Keaton, and I don't even want to try and rate his classics anymore, as far as which is the greatest, but I was thinking tonight that it might just be "The Cameraman" because of the added touch of Buster and the sweet little monkey, who is so amazing amidst all the usual Keaton Kaos.

You just have to see this movie to believe it, not in the mega-stunt & catastrophe way of "The General" or "Steamboat Bill Jr" but just in the way that Buster and the unflappable monkey ride out the chaos all around them as they both continue to film.

Yes, both of them. And so, who is "The Cameraman" of the title? You'll just have to see for yourself.

And does Buster get The Girl?

What do you think?

There is a lot of story that is built up prior to what I have described, including a classic scene where Buster pantomimes a baseball game all by himself, and a lengthy sequence at a public pool that features many great gags. The buildup is slow in spots, but you know you are being pulled in.

And suddenly, you are once again on the Buster Keaton rollercoaster, in one of his greatest films.

That is basically all I know for tonight. Went to Target for some more spiderweb Halloween lights. We needed enough to cross the wall at the end of Pearl's driveway. :)

Elizabeth, I saw a post about your friend Madison M., who recorded vocals for another artist in her home, and I was reminded that I forgot to mention Rebecca Sjowall, an opera singer I had not heard of before, but who sings on Sparks' new album "Hippopotamus" and who also sang one song live with them during the three show run at the El Rey. I Googled her after the Saturday show, and she is from Wisconsin.......

:):)  See you in the morning.

"The Invisible Man Returns" + Married

Tonight's movie was "The Invisible Man Returns" (1940), the sequel to the classic 1933 original. I found it on dvd at Chatsworth Libe as part of the Universal Legacy Collection of "The Invisible Man" movies, totaling five in all, so I will be reviewing several more IM movies in the next week or so. I love the Universal Legacy Collection series, which are multiple dvd sets, because they not only give you all the original Universal Monsters, but you get all the sequels, too. Beginning in 2013, I first discovered the "Creature Of The Black Lagoon" Legacy and watched all of those films. Since then, I have also watched "The Wolfman", "Frankenstein", "Dracula" and "The Mummy" Legacy Collections, and I just love the heck out of 'em. I am a huge fan of all the great Universal Monsters (who isn't?), and the only Legacy Monster I had not seen was of "The Invisible Man". I mean, he's a man, but he's Invisible so that qualifies him as a Monster.

"The Invisible Man Returns" features English actors as well as Americans. The wealthy owner of an English coal mine sits in a prison cell awaiting execution for the murder of his brother. His girlfriend frets; an acquaintance - the manager of the coal mine - makes phone calls to prison officials to try and stop the execution. Finally, a doctor friend of the condemned man, who also knows his girl, is allowed to visit the man in prison, hours before he is to die.

Suddenly, the condemned man vanishes almost right before his jailer's eyes. It seems that the doctor friend who visited gave him a pill..........a pill that made him invisible. 

You have at this point already surmised that, from there, suspense follows.

You thought I was gonna say hijinx follows, which I usually do, but this is a scary movie, so we will go with suspense.

The story overall is not up to the standards of the original, which was based on a story by H.G. Wells, who sets a high bar to begin with. But because it's a Universal Monster Movie, made during the classic era, you get as always a lot of Gothic Atmosphere, magnificent interiors and set decoration. You get great lighting and special effects - and it should be noted that ol' Invisible himself was a very impressive effect for 1940, and done a bit better in the sequel. In the original, the masking was just a tad see through. Good performances as well, especially from Sir Cedric Hardwicke as the manager of the coal mine. He is not what he seems to be.

The plot is about uncovering the truth about a murder, but the real story of The Invisible Man is about power, the potentially ultimate power one would have if one were Invisible.

H.G. Wells was on a trip. He was a pretty far out guy for his time, when you consider that he wrote about Alien Invasion ("War Of The Worlds") and he did it in 1898! And he also wrote about Time Travel (in "The Time Machine") in 1895!

Talk about being Tuned In. H.G. knew what was happening before it ever happened.

So that was tonight's movie. The rest of the day was ordinary, no hikes or anything. Next week we will try to do some, in order to get some good pictures of Halloween Trees and the like.

Elizabeth, I hope all is well with you, if you are still reading. I saw your post yesterday about your friends who had gotten married. That was very inspirational.  :):)

I wanna get married too.  :):)

Sparks at The El Rey, You'd Have To Be Judas Priest To Follow Them

Tonight was Sparks' final show at The El Rey Theatre. They played three nights in all; I was there for two of 'em, opening night on Saturday and closing night tonight. On Saturday I had a pretty good standing spot (the shows were general admission), about five "rows" of people to the stage. My sightline on Saturday was good, too. Just one Tall Guy on the horizon, and he wasn't directly in front of me, so my view was mostly unobstructed. The show was sold out, and thus the theatre was a bit of a sardine can, and we had to wait almost an hour between opening act Les Sewing Sisters and Sparks, but those were minor inconveniences in what turned out to be an awesome show. I gave a somewhat distracted review on Saturday night, which you may have read.

Well anyhow......guess what?

Tonight was even better.

Before I went down to Hollywood (this time by myself, on Saturday Grimsley came with), I told myself that I didn't wanna stress anything. Saturday had been horrible traffic, so even though tonight was a Tuesday, I left a little later to avoid rush hour. I was still hoping to see Les Sewing Sisters for a second time, but if I missed 'em, well......no problem. A stressless drive was the most important thing. Same for the show itself, and my place in the audience. I figured that I'd had such a good spot on Saturday and had such a great show, that it would be okay tonight even if I wound up in the back, just so long as I didn't have to stand in one single position for three hours, wedged into another sardine can.

I hate the following cliche, but "I am getting too old for that stuff", and really, I was too old for it when I was 16. I didn't like general admission then, and I don't like it now, unless the venue is a small club. Small clubs can be total sardine cans, but because they are small, you are close to the stage no matter where you are standing. The El Rey is just big enough to be the kind of sardine can where, if you are gonna be sardined in, it's better to be close to the stage, because otherwise you will be Waaay In The Back, and there will be Lots Of Tall Guys In Front Of You, Many Of Them Grouped Together (you ever notice how Tall Guys go to concerts with other Tall Guys?), and then You Won't Be Able To See A Doggone Thing, even if you stand on your tiptoes.

I was a little worried about that happening, getting stuck at the back of the sardine can, obstructed by Giants, but I figured I'd at least have some breathing room back there, and could just hang out in the lobby during the intermission between the bands.

But it turned out to be magic. Perhaps Tuesday night was the key, and the fact that it was the last show. I didn't get there until 8:20, just ten minutes before Les Sewing Sisters were scheduled to go on, but Lo and Behold!..........the theater was only half full, and there was only a single row of people at the front of the stage. And no Giants! I couldn't believe my luck. I wound up standing center stage, just one person in front of me, with a totally unobstructed view. It was a miracle, because as the night went on, the El Rey did fill up to about 80% capacity. But as close as I was, I was never a sardine.

So, I got to see Les Sewing Sisters once again, front and center, and I even knew their songs this time. Someone said that they should be in a David Lynch movie, and I think that is an apt description. There may be a political statement lurking within the art as well, when you consider that much of Asia is a sewing factory with women at the machines - the sweatshop factor. They make the world's clothing, and all they do is sew. Les Sewing Sisters are Japanese, and more Westernized, but methinks they might be making a comment in support of other less fortunate women in the Asian world. It's a little more evident when you see them twice, though it's anything but overt, and they do indeed belong in a David Lynch movie.

I was front and center for Sparks, closer than I have ever been before, and well.......

I guess it was the best Sparks show I have ever seen. I know I always say that after every band, and every show. But it really was, and the audience would agree with me. They (we) never stopped howling for the entire show. We L.A. Sparks fans love our Mael Brothers, and the fans went bananas at this show. The energy propelled the band to play one of the most energetic and hard rockinest shows I have ever seen. Certainly the hardest rocking Sparks show ever, which is saying something.

I have mentioned this before, but go listen to a Sparks album, even "Kimono" which is in the rock format, and then imagine what they'd be like in concert. "Kimono My House" is Art Rock, but it rocks, and yet, you might imagine that, in concert, the music might be poppish or somehow light.

But that's the startling thing with Sparks : they are as hard rock live as any band you can name.

You have to see it to believe it.

After tonight's show, I was thinking, "you can't follow that".

You'd have to be Judas Priest to follow that, or Van Halen.

Sounds crazy, right? But it's true. And you know I know my music. Even if you are not a fan of Sparks' music, you would still say "Great Googley Moogley" at their live show.

Only Judas Priest or Van Halen could follow them. That's how high energy and hard rock it was.

Okay, I'll throw in Rainbow circa 1983 and Rush, too. But that's it. Those are the most high energy acts I have ever seen, all of the above named.

And ELP. But they didn't play Hard Rock per se. They just plain blew you off the map musically. They were high energy in a different way.

But we'll leave it at that for now. The point being that you would not expect to hear Sparks equated with Van Halen as a live band.

But you have heard it now. Tonight was one of the highest energy shows I've ever been to, with a killer band of 20 and 30 Somethings backing up the Mael Brothers, who - between them - have been alive for 141 years!

Russ is 69, and Ron is 72.

Unfreaking real. /////

It's Time To Talk About The Porno People (very important but read at own risk)

Happy Monday. One thing I wanted to make clear after reading back last night's blog, is that I am certainly not condemning all of Hollywood. You know that there is no bigger fan of the Hollywood Film Industry than myself (speaking mostly of Old Hollywood) and you know I love the old movies and stars and even a lot of the newer ones. Similarly, if it weren't for the Los Angeles record industry, we would never have heard the music of so many great bands that have enriched our lives in the deepest possible ways. I grew up as the son of a Hollywood executive, and my Dad was also part of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce for a time, and was on hand when they created The Walk Of Fame. As a kid, I was taken to different studios (just tagging along with my Dad), and later I worked at MGM for a few years in their film laboratory. So I can testify that many if not most people in the industry are just regular folks, just men and women earning a paycheck, plain and simple. I am sure the same is true for the record industry. So I just wanted to be clear that I wasn't trying - and did not want to - tar and feather everyone. Also, I was not clear about the way in which my own experience relates to the awful people who do exist in Hollywood, whom I call The Porno People. I mentioned Mr. Rappaport in connection with those people, and I did so because of the larger schematic involved in the overall events of What Happened In Northridge. Mr. Rappaport was a film professor at CSUN (at least "by day"), and according to his IMDB bio, he was a graduate of AFI, so he has some connection to Hollywood, though perhaps small. However, his Pervert Credentials are straight out of The Hollywood Hills, and again I'll not go into detail tonight. But I speak the truth.

I have told you, and I will tell you again right now, that when I was rescued from the house of Jared Rappaport and his idiot wife (they are since divorced), I was not rescued by the Los Angeles Police Department, whom you would normally expect would undertake a rescue operation in a hostage situation in the city of Los Angeles. You would expect the SWAT Team, right?

But it wasn't like that for me. I was rescued by........well, I really don't know exactly.

What I mean is that I can't give you the name of an organisation, like LAPD, or Sheriff's Dept., or even FBI.

It was guys in jumpsuits. Guys that looked like something you would see in a movie.

Do you know how nowdays, you see these baseball players in the playoffs, and they are totally pro, they are great players, but they have long hair and gigantic beards? In other words, they don't look like you expect baseball players to look?

Well it's the same deal with who rescued me from Jared Rappaport's house at 9033 Etiwanda Avenue. It was soldiers, and they were totally pro, except - just like the pro baseball players - they didn't look like what you'd expect soldiers to look like. They wore jumpsuits, not uniforms. And they had longish hair (but no beards, thank God). But with every move they made, you knew - I knew - it was a military operation. I was rescued from that house by soldiers. Not cops.

Why soldiers? I don't know to this day.

But the other Straight Up Truth is that the man in charge of the soldiers, who was right there on the scene and who interacted with me directly, was the man who became The President Of The United States.

No lie. No hallucination or delusion. Just truth. I was taken away on a helicopter when it was all over, medivacked as they call it, and people on Etiwanda Street witnessed it.

So what we have here, leaving out the most bizarre aspects which are documented in my book, is that Mr. Rappaport, a sexual psychopath who was also a film professor and had maybe some minor Hollywood connections, somehow warranted, when he kidnapped me, a response by an elite military unit headed up by........you know who. Rappaport may or may not have had any Hollywood connections, but he most definitely had Porno Person Connections. That was his whole identity, his real self, the self he showed to me. In the way that Jeffery Dahmer will never be identified with whatever job he worked at, but as a cannibal, so will Rappaport be known as a Porno Person, who just happened to have a day job as a film professor. But I know who he really is.

And either he - or me - warranted a secret rescue response. If it was me that warranted such a high level response, I cannot imagine the reason. But if it was Rappaport the Porno Person who warranted such a high level response, ahhh.......then we might have something there, because of the Network Of Secrecy that goes with all of this stuff.

Now, to be clear once again, what happened to me was so off the charts that it doesn't fit into a box or paradigm of any kind. But sexual sadism was at the center of it, at least in the event that involved Jared Rappaport (and his stupid wife). And it's been covered up and never acknowledged.

And that's because the connections of The Porno People run deep, and are interwoven into all kinds of other Demonic activity.

My point tonight is not to highlight for the umpteenth time the extremely unusual aspects of what happened to me inside the house of my crazy neighbor, and of the people who responded to that situation, but of the secrecy.

You see, it is really the secrecy that is the overarching problem, because the secrecy provides the cover for the Demons to operate. Harvey Weinstein is a Demon. So is Bill Cosby. But hey, Harvey gives big money to all the right charities, and he wins Oscars for all his filmmakers and actresses. So he must be a good guy, right? And Cosby? He was the Jello spokesman. How kid-friendly is that? He had "The Cosby Show"; he was America's Dad. That's not my moniker - it's what the celebrity press and the publicity departments called him. Bill Cosby was "America's Dad".

So what you are dealing with here - what we are dealing with, all of us - is not just crime.

What we are dealing with is Demonology, the study of pure evil. People who view other people as prey.

Most predators have regular jobs to hide behind, which do not afford much protection if they are caught, neither in pay nor prestige.

But the predators in Hollywood - The Porno People - have gotten away with it for so long because they have a Huge Wall protecting them. First of all, they make bucketfulls of money, more than you or I will ever see. They also have Huge Mansions, with long driveways and gates. They have Very Powerful Security around themselves, at their workplaces and at home. Cops know better than to come knocking at Weinstein's door. Or any number of doors of these motherfuckers, and believe me, Harvey Weinstein is but the very, very tip top of the iceberg.

Porno is what they do. Evil is what they are. I kid you fucking not, and once again sorry about the f-words but they are needed in this case.

But beyond the money, and the walled-off enclaves and security protection at work and silence from the cops, what these Demons have protecting them the most is their secrecy.

Because they are all part of a Network. Everybody knows who is doing it, and everybody knows who it's been done to, and for decades.....this is just the way it is.

The Demon Predators make the rules. And you'd better keep it a secret.

Women usually do, because they are physically not as strong, and they are also historically the most persecuted "minority" (though that classification is not accurate because they are half the population). But still, let's face it - women have been kept down more, and for far longer, than black folks or any racial or ethnic people you care to name.

And the Demonic Predators know this. And so they take their horrific advantage. And as for you women? Well you'd better keep it a secret. Because that's the way it is.

But I am one man who says, "Oh yeah? Well guess what? That's not the way it is".

I stand up and tell the truth about The Porno People, so far as I know it, and in direct relation to what happened to me and a person close to me, who has chosen to remain silent for all these years.

I say "Fuck You" to The Porno People, to every last one of them, and to their secrecy especially. And to everyone who abets them by maintaining silence.

What I have going for me is a huge Force Of Will, and if it takes me the rest of my life I will uncover and make public what happened to me, just as Rose McGowan did. She is a hero for standing up.

And so I encourage anyone reading this to do the same.

Talk!

Talk!, and Start Talking!

Fuck the Porno People, fuck the Military and Government Secret Keepers.

Fuck 'em all, wherever they may be.

We have truth going for us, and as we are seeing, by the courage of Rose McGowan and others, truth is a Powerful Force.

So talk.

That's all for tonight. 

Sewing Sisters + #MeToo (read at own risk, not for squeamish) + Fuck These People

Beyond Mega Tired Tonight, but you knew that. Also, I've run out of examples/comparisons/superlatives to describe how tired I am on Sunday nights, so if you can come up with any good ones I would appreciate it. Keep in mind, though, that the reason I've run out is because I went as far as I could go with the metaphor. Once I used the Event Horizon/Black Hole example, I figured I couldn't surpass it. I mean, right? If I was actually falling into The Black Hole Of Tiredness, I could never escape that, correct? And having fallen in, I would begin to be compressed and crushed by the weight of my own tiredness collapsing upon itself. My tiredness would become ultra-dense....

No dense jokes, please. But yeah, I just gave up after that. Didn't see how I could top The Black Hole Of Tiredness. So from now on, on Sundays, just count me in as Mega Tired (or some variation thereof), unless you can think of a new Gigantic Sized Beyond Comprehension Tiredness Comparison That Will Top The Black Hole.

At any rate.......I forgot to mention Les Sewing Sisters last night. Les Sewing Sisters were the opening act for Sparks. Wait a minute - did I mention 'em? I can't remember. Gotta start reading back my blogs. But I don't think I did mention them. I was rambling on about Sparks' agelessness and didn't really review the show. I'll give a better review after Tuesday night's show, but as for Les Sewing Sisters, they are two Japanese women who........play sewing machines onstage.

Yep. It's like a Hurra Torpedo kind of trip if you remember them. Gram Rabbit opened for Hurra Torpedo back in 2006 at The Roxy. I am sure I wrote a Myspace blog about it. That band played refrigerators, stoves and washing machines onstage, so they are still The Weirdest Band I Have Seen.

But Les Sewing Sisters are up there now as well. Every song is about sewing. They wear metallic sci-fi dresses with their hair pulled up under a net with a pin cushion on top. They have Big Round Sunglasses. They are deadpan and don't break character. It's like performance art, and fun to see at least once. And, they only played for 25 minutes, so they didn't overstay their welcome or sew themselves into a corner. Try to see them at least once in your life, if you can.

Well, Elizabeth, I saw your post, via your friend Emily E. about her #MeToo experience. I did not know what #MeToo was at first glance but as I read the post I got the picture very quickly. Then I saw some more #MeToo posts on FB within a few minutes......

There are a few things I want to say. The first thing is that, I don't know if you mean - via Emily E's post - that you have had an experience of this kind. I know her post was specifically about Hollywood and the film industry, but such predators are everywhere. If you have had a #MeToo experience, you should talk about it with someone, if only to get it out of your system. If you have not had an experience like this, then I am glad, but I know - as we all do - that it happens to a lot of women, not just in Hollywood but everywhere and in all kinds of work and life situations.

But speaking of Hollywood, I could go on quite a tirade, one that could last several blogs at least.

I won't do it tonight, though I might in the future.

You see, I hate these people with a black passion. And that is because I have my own #MeToo experience, with a psychopath who lived next door to me in 1989 named Jared Rappaport. I won't go into it tonight, though you or any longtime readers of my blogs over the years may know the event I am talking about. I was kidnapped by this man, who was a professor at CSUN. This happened in September 1989, as part of a series of events that were extraordinary in the extreme. You readers know this. I know it's gross and unseemly for a man to include himself in a #MeToo confession, but in my case you can rest assured that no physical contact was made. Mr. Rappaport was an extreme sexual deviant, however, and he wanted to shove that in my face, so to speak. He also tortured me, during a night that has never been spoken of nor acknowledged by anyone but me, though many know about it.

I was pretty sure I was gonna die in his house that night. I know the meaning of Terror.

That is all I will say tonight about my own #MeToo experience, though in my case, it was not some gay guy trying to pick up on me or pressure me, but an insane kidnapper and sexual deviant, so my case is somewhat removed from that of the majority of women who are reporting #MeToo.

Or are our cases really all that different?

Perhaps not. Women are generally less physically strong, and in the presence of a large heavy set man like Weinstein must feel, if not terrified, then at least frightened and degraded.

It's all the same thing, to different degrees.

But what I wanted you to know - and everyone who reads this blog to know - is how much I hate these people. And you should know that "to hate" is an extraordinary thing for me, because I generally like people. I'm not political, don't get caught up in Us vs.Them cultural stuff. But all I have to do is think of Mr. Rappaport, and remember my terror - extreme terror......

And I am right back there. I am back in his house, and the feeling is visceral. So what I want all women to know is that I know what the visceral feeling feels like. That's the part that never goes away, the part that - even if you generally don't think about it, still brings back the original terror when you do think about it.

I will close for tonight by saying that these people are fucking scum. Sorry about the F Word, but hey.

Here in Los Angeles, in the movie business and in the music business (can't leave them out), there are networks that are ultra-secret, and akin to devil-worship groups. That's how evil these people are.

They have their networks, and they have their money, and they have their power. And they don't talk about any of the stuff they do.

They keep everything a secret. I should know, because my life has been impacted enormously by the keeping of secrets on the part of others, people who I thought were my friends or similarly on my side in life.

I have a name for these people, a name I coined back in 2005 when I was getting ready to write my book. I call these people "The Porno People", the folks who live up in the Hollywood Hills, with their little short ponytails and an earring. I know who they are and can see them coming a mile away. They have their coke connections and their money, and they have their industry positions.

My life was permanently affected by these people, by way of someone who was close to me.

I will stop now, but I hate The Porno People with a Black Passion.

In my book, I have a fantasy sequence in which I envision an F-22 flying along the ridgeline of the Santa Monica mountains, laying the homes of the Porno People to waste.

Sorry for the tirade, but these people are absolute scum, and they are crazy, like Jared Rappaport, and they keep everything secret.......

They are The Secret Keepers, and they are Demons, and somebody has got to root them all out.

Sparks at The El Rey (Holy Smokes)

Tonight was the Sparks concert at the El Rey, and so you know right off the bat that it was incredible. The Brothers Mael are back this time with a full backing band, a rock band, which is a real treat because the rock band format takes Us Fans back to the Sparks era of the 70s, when they first emerged as a kind of eccentric quasi-glam band with a falsetto vocalist. The first time I saw Sparks was in Fall 1975 (and by the way, they are now tied with Rick Wakeman for the most years between "First Saw 'Em" and "Most Recently Seen 'Em", which for Rick and Sparks is 42 years for each. 42 years!) but anyway......what was I saying? Oh yeah, the first time I saw Sparks, back in 1975, they were essentially a hard rock band. I mean, on record, they were What They Are. Listen to "Kimono My House" for reference. But live, those songs were pumped up, and Russell was a Super Rock Star back then, and so a Sparks live show came off as Art Rock Played As Super Hard Rock, with a kick ass live band.

And that's what they returned to tonight, after a decade of trying out other - equally awesome - formats, such as playing with an orchestra, or just the Two Brothers playing and singing all by themselves. Their backing band now is a group of young musicians who have their own band called Mini Mansions, which seems to be connected to Queens Of The Stone Age in some way. They were super tight and played their butts off. I thought it was the best band Sparks has played with.

As for Ron and Russ, what can even be said. Lead singer Russell just turned 69 a week ago. Now, I know that's not ancient in this day and age, but he's certainly no kid, either. I mean, I'm 57, and I'm no kid, but whatever Russ is doing, I wanna do it too so that I can run around and jump up and down on stage when I am 69. 

Are you ready for a Cliche? You are? Good, cause here comes one :

"Singers half his age couldn't match what Russ Mael is doing in concert". I've said this after previous Sparks concerts, but now it's getting weird, because Russ is not, like, 60 anymore....or even 63 or 67....

He's a year shy of 70, and yet he's putting on a rigorous show at the same level of professionalism and vocal skill as when I saw the dude in 1975. I mean, the guy is almost 70 and he is dancing and jumping around the stage, hitting every high note, and remembering volumes of lyrics with no teleprompter.

It's pretty awesome, I tell ya, but it's also weird. Ron is 72, and while he is also is very good shape, he looks his age. But Russ, he must be on a Serious Regimen Of Some Kind. Sparks may be the first band to outlive their audience. Russ will show up one day when he's 100, dancing and singing as usual, but the hall will be empty because we couldn't keep up with him.....  :)

Wait a minute, what am I saying? The whole Idea Of Sparks is timelessness. With Art, and Music, there is no time. That famous eccentric Edward Van Halen said the same thing. Asked why it takes him decades to release albums, he replied "Time is irrelevant to me". And he looks great nowdays, too, at 62 years of age. And he took a truckload of drugs, unlike Ron and Russ who are more or less Teetotalers. Sparks even have a song called "I've Never Been High"......how cool is that?

Well anyway, I am Way Out In Left Field with the whole subject.

It's the Time Thing that freaks me out.

42 years since I first saw Sparks. C'mon, you know that's weird. And do you wanna know Why It's Weird? Here's why, and I believe I've told you this before. It's the Frank Sinatra comparison.

In previous generations, there were actors and musicians who had 40 and 50 year careers. There weren't many, but there were some, like Sinatra, or Jimmy Durante or somebody like that. Mickey Rooney.

And when those guys were young, They Were Young. But when 40 years went by in their career and you saw them again, they were Old. They had aged and become what we think of as Older People.

But now we have guys like Russell Mael, who has been performing live with Sparks since 1972 - 45 years! - and though some age shows in his face - you still have to wonder what is happening, because what you are watching when you see him in concert is basically The Same Dude You Saw In 1975, but just a little older. He doesn't age like other people, and it's really weird.

And cool, too. I wanna be like Russell.

Rock 'N Roll, and Art, keep you young.

And staying in shape, etc. And love. But you already knew that.

See you in church in the morn.  :):) 

"Bowery At Midnight" + Bela + Poverty Row + Fall Hikes

Tonight's movie was a low-budget Horror Classic from "Poverty Row" studio Monogram Pictures. Not finding anything from Northridge Libe, I reached into my own vault at home and came up with "Bowery At Midnight" (1942), starring Bela Lugosi. As the movie started and the title was displayed, I thought to myself, "wow - that really is low budget, when you can't even afford to call it "The Bowery At Midnight". So, they saved some dough on the "The", and just plain "Bowery At Midnight" it is.  :)

You've probably heard of (The) Bowery in New York. It's like their version of Skid Row. The movie opens therefore with an escaped prisoner entering a soup kitchen, run by the kindly Bela Lugosi. Inside, several homeless men are enjoying their soup, and in walks the escapee, who is out of his jail clothes and wearing an old suit. Bela serves him personally, muttering to the man that he recognizes him from the newspapers, but not to worry because he won't report him to the cops......

.....Just so long as the man agrees to join Bela's criminal enterprise.

Look : it's Bela Freakin' Lugosi! Did you really think he was gonna run a soup kitchen out of the goodness of his heart? Get Real! He's Count Dracula for cryin' out loud! His heart has had a stake driven through it! I mean - c'mon you guys - I can't believe you didn't see this comin' a mile away..  :)

So "kindly" Bela of the soup kitchen in (The) Bowery is really an arch criminal, and it turns out that this escaped hoodlum is not the first crook he's enlisted in his schemes. He's actually got a whole basement full of 'em, as in "The Previous Crooks Are All Dead And Buried In The Basement Of The Soup Kitchen". What he has, see, is a Third Guy, a Thug Enforcer, who "gets rid" of the gullible down-on-their-luck crooks who become involved with Lugosi, once they have served their purpose. The crooks help him rob jewlery stores, then they are "offed" by his hitman, and buried in the basement.

How charming, am I right? (...and you thought Bela was the soul of charity....)

Well, along comes a Nice Young Man, a psychology student at the local university. He is working on his thesis, a study of the breakdown of mental processes that lead some to the criminal life, or to homelessness.

He proposes his plan of study to his Professor - that he will pose as an unfortunate patron of the soup kitchen in order to speak candidly with men who dine there. On a side note, his girlfriend just so happens to work there as a nurse.

His Professor approves of his plan of study, but you have to wonder why.

Why? Because his Professor is also Bela Lugosi! He is leading a Double Life!!

On the one hand, he is a Master Psychology Professor, highly respected and with a loving wife at home. On the other hand, he is a Master Criminal - a jewel thief - posing as the kind-hearted administrator of a soup kitchen, feeding the poor.

And with a basement full of dead crooks, his former assistants.

After a botched heist, undertaken in Broad Daylight (as opposed to narrow daylight) the cops are now on his tail. Bela forgot the title of the doggone movie, for cryin' out loud : "Bowery At Midnight". You dummy Lugosi! You're supposed to commit crimes at Midnight, not in the afternoon. Jeez.

So that messes up his whole trip, and there is a brief side plot about a policeman who is ambitious to become a detective, and he becomes one, and is now gonna capture the Master Criminal, as he has discovered Bela's dual identities.

Man! Can you believe all the stuff that's going on in this 62 minute movie? It's so low budget that not only can't they afford the "The", but there is no music either. None, as in no soundtrack at all. So the film comes across as somewhat dry in the dramatic sense, as we are all aware the music is used in films to heighten emotions. But one thing is for sure, they did not skimp on the screenwriting, and it just goes to prove yet again one of my Pet Tirades, that screenwriting was King in the 1940s

So anyway, the detective is now after Bela, but Bela's got a worse problem. You see, he has had a doctor working for him this whole time. It's not quite clear why the doctor works for him, or what he does (besides what Bela tells him to do). He nominally works for the soup kitchen, but really he spends all his time in the basement, disposing of the expendable criminals that Bela's hitman has killed.

But what Bela doesn't know, is that the doctor has a secret. He appears to be a Basket Case, a nervous wreck, a shell of his former self, but he is really a genius. 

Because he has somehow Re-Animated all of the dead criminals and has them in a sub-basement, located below the basement graveyard. So the nutty doctor has outwitted even Bela Lugosi.

And they say there is nothing new under the Sun. My Goodness.

Needless to say, Bela meets his end not by being apprehended by the detective, but down in the doctor's sub-basement, at the hands of his re-animated zombies.

If it sounds like One Heck Of A Movie, then it is! I mean, it's mega low budget, and the shots and acting are more than a bit stiff. The sets are plain and the camerawork is more or less immobile. But once you start watching it, you can't stop, and I think that this was the appeal of the best of the "Poverty Row" Horror Pictures. Google "Poverty Row" for more of an overview of the minor league studios that were grouped under that moniker. They had no money, but they were very inventive, at least in their better pictures.

I mean, you've gotta be a fan going in. If you aren't, you are gonna go, "this is just a notch or two above a Z grade picture". But on the other hand, it is inventive and baseline professional, and it's got Bela Lugosi.

And it's October, and so you have to watch a quotient of Horror Movies, and so you win even if it doesn't seem like it at the time. "Bowery At Midnight" gets Two Thumbs Up on that basis. See it.

That was more or less all the news of the day. This blog has turned into the Movie Report, but remember that it was predicted that was gonna happen. It's better than having it be The Tirade Report, right? Though that will happen from time to time, too.....   :)

Elizabeth, you are perhaps right about Fall being the best time for hiking. I have always thought Summer is the best time because of the heat and stark shadows produced, for photographs. But I am a Heat Nut, so it figures I would say that. We don't have the kind of Autumn colors you get, as seen in your FB photo this morning, and the colors we do get come later, in late November/early December. But I agree about the Fall as far as the vibe goes. There is something about the angle of the Sun and the quality of light that results, and the wind rustling and leaves falling, that brings the Spirits out. And when you are out on the trails in that environment, soaking in the Spirit Of Autumn and that intangible quality of the natural world, it is indeed The Best as you say.

That's all for tonight. See you in the morn.  :):)