A Movie Review + For Elizabeth

 I'm back at Pearl's.

Tonight's movie was called "Violent Saturday"(1955), a rather blunt, unimaginative title for what turned out to be a mix of melodrama and crime. It sets out to be a heist movie, but then as soon as the job is plotted by the bank robbers (which happens right off the bat), the story switches gears and we get several vignettes of "ordinary people in trouble". This is one of those movies that they used to make, where a bunch of people's lives collide during one big event. Remember "Smashup on Interstate 5"? It's like that, without the freeway. And in fact, wasn't "Crash" one of those movies? And it won Best Picture. So go figure.

Don't get me wrong, "V.S." is not a bad movie, in fact it's exceedingly watchable, with a fluid storyline, good characters, a good cast, solid direction from old pro Richard Fleischer, and those colliding plot threads. On top of all that, the whole thing looks fantastic. It was shot in Cinemascope in the mining town of Bisbee, Arizona. The town center looks straight out of the 1920s, and it's authentic, not a set. The desert landscape provides an arid, isolated backdrop. A key character is an Amish farmer who lives in the outskirts. He is played by Ernest Borgnine of all people, and quite well too. Lastly, concerning the look of the film, one phrase is all that's necessary : Color by Deluxe. The early 50s to the mid-60s was their absolute peak. What they did was to take the full saturation of Technicolor down a notch, refine the warm tones and give everything a touch of pastel. This is one good looking movie, thanks in part to the boys at the lab, and the print I saw on Youtube was Blu-ray all the way, baby.

But it's not quite the heist movie you may be expecting when you hit "play". Instead, much time is spent on the Mine Owner's unhappy marriage. His wife is cheating on him. He's an alcoholic. He spies a young Gold Digger at the local bar. She is Virginia Leith, from "The Brain That Wouldn't Die". He should know better than to mess with her, but he does anyway. Lucky for him she doesn't have that Potato Head Monster locked in his closet, but the results are almost as bad.

The bank's loan manager (Tommy Noonan, a dead ringer for MSNBC's Chris Hayes) is a Peeping Tom, spying on Virginia Leith. 1930s veteran Silvia Sidney is a librarian who owes the bank some dough. Mr. Peepers is putting the screws to her to pay it back, but she knows what he does at night, and is blackmailing him. And finally, the star of the movie is Victor Mature (though his screen time is equal to all others). Mature plays a mining company foreman whose eight year old son gets into fistfights because Dad was not a war hero like his best friend's Pa. There will be a a playout of this thread, and you can see it coming, but beyond all of these troubles, the bank robbers don't give a flip.

They continue to plan their caper, detail by meticulous detail, and Lee Marvin is one of their number. If you've ever seen Lee Marvin in any movie - and I have to reiterate : any movie - then you know that no one ever gets the better of him. It must be in his contract, due to that face and that voice.

So there you sort of have it. What do you think? To me it sounds like a good one, and it was. The ending culminates in the violent release indicated by the title, but don't worry, it isn't excessive, not by today's standards. You'll actually finish up by saying, "hmmm, that was a pretty original picture when you put it all together". Or if not exactly original then at least imaginative, and very good looking.

I give it Two Thumbs Up and a solid recommendation. Don't miss the Blu-ray print on Youtube.  ///////

And finally........for Elizabeth, what else can I say but congratulations? :) And it's from the heart. I see now what the situation is, and why the Facebook thing happened this Summer (though you needn't have worried about me). I'll refrain from posting any more comments or messages on Instagram, but I hope you won't mind if I am still a follower, just cause I've been with you in the artistic sense since 2012, and I'd like to remain so in that regard. You know that I think You Rule (I've long said so), and I've always kept my commentary strictly right here at the blog, where the choice is yours to click it or not.

Whatever you do, keep doing what You Do. And again, I hope you will seriously consider making an album of singer/songwriter material, along the lines of the songs and snippets you have posted in the past year.

I have to say yet again that the Red Dress series is one of the most ambitious and amazing photographic presentations I've seen. Even more importantly, it's original. So never forget that. And keep in mind that you've had a film that played on the screen at Staples Center. Don't give up on your dream, which really means don't give up on your plans and what you've already accomplished.

In any event, congrats once again, I wish you the absolute best, and I'll be right here if you ever wanna say hi.  :)

Tons of love.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :)

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth! + Thanksgiving + The Path of Souls

Elizabeth, before I go any further I want to wish you a very Happy Birthday! I'm writing this shortly after midnight, so it's officially the 27th, and I hope you have a wonderful day tomorrow. Even though the circumstances make it difficult to celebrate in the ways you normally would, I hope you will do something fun for yourself, maybe go on an awesome hike or road trip, in addition to sharing your day with your family. It's been one heck of a tough year, but things are gonna get better, so just keep that in mind. You are an awesome lady, an Artist with a Capital A, and an exceptionally nice person, and I am always thinking of you.   :):) 

I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving, once again considering all the current factors. For me, this is the first Thanksgiving that I haven't spent at Pearl's since 2005, which is five years before I became her caregiver. As I'm sure I've mentioned, the family friendship goes back to 1953, when my parents moved to Reseda from Cincinnati in 1951. Almost simultaneously, Pearl and her late husband Roy were moving west from Minnesota. The Valley was founded, in large part, by Midwesterners! And in our case, my family and Pearl's family ended up just around the corner from one another in Reseda, a cool suburban town that still looks, in some respects, just as it did 70 years ago. We moved to Northridge in 1968, but always kept in touch, and the family Thanksgiving tradition at Pearl's house began sometime in the mid-to-late 80s. I didn't go in those days, because as a twentysomething I was doing my own thing, but many years later, in 2004 I accompanied my Mom to Pearl's on Thanksgiving Day. For me it was a reintroduction to friends I hadn't seen since I was seven years old! But my parents and sister Vickie had maintained contact all that time. Mom passed away just after Thanksgiving in 2005, so I didn't go to Pearl's that year, but I did go back with my sister and my Dad in 2006, and I've been part of the tradition ever since. Until tonight of course.

But we'll be back next year, and I'm confident the whole world will be back. Covid will probably still be with us, but will be weakened by then. Even the terrible Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed 50 million, only lasted two years.

I didn't do much today. We had Gale Force Winds which made a trip to Aliso unappealing. So I just camped out in my apartment, watched some football and finished my book : "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins and Gregory Little. It's a mindboggling work, featuring extensive research into North American Mound Culture, and the history of it's cosmology. The observance and monitoring of the night sky was all-important to people of the post Ice Age, particularly those whose ancestors had lived through the Younger Dryas Impact Event. Very interesting to me was the revelation of The Path of Souls, based on the folklore of American Indian tribes in the Great Lakes area. It has to to with their belief in the spiritual journey, after death, to the next life, which is attained by following a specific path through the Milky Way, and finally up through the polar axis at the top of the night sky dome, around which the constellations turn.

I can't see any of this. I've never been able to, as I live in a major city that blots it out with electric light.

But that was their world, the world of the Denisovan ancestors, which also produced a race of giants, who stood between 7 and 8 feet tall, and sometimes 9. The "Tall Ones" became the elite of the American Adena Culture, and the Hopewell Culture, that lasted until somewhat recently, 500 AD. 

The importance of The Path of Souls was their idea of progress, to "progress" successfully into the next world. We in the modern era, having discovered the electron, have our own notion of progress, which has enabled us to travel into outer space and to blow things up. I won't go on a tirade about progress (and who could?), but it's worth asking the questions : "what exactly is progress"? and "what is it supposed to lead to"? Such are the vexations of the Human Condition, but in the case of the paleoancient Americans, they were looking to the sky as The Universe. Right now, we're staring at our gadgets. I know that's totally cliche to say so, but it's true, and so it's up to us who have the historical perspective to revert to at least some of the old ways.

Who is to say that the Denisovans of old saw nothing in the night sky of value? Not me. I wish I could see it myself.  //////

That's all I know for tonight. Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Birthday, Elizabeth! Tomorrow I will be back at Pearl's until mid-December. See you in the morning.

Tons and tons of love.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxo  :):)  

"Les Miserables" (1934 Version), One Of The Greatest Films Ever Made

 Two years ago I was browsing Criterion releases and I came across an early version of "Les Miserables" on their Eclipse label. This version, made in 1934 by French director Raymond Bernard, was packaged as a double feature with Bernard's "Wooden Crosses"(1932), a WW1 saga. Having never heard of the director, I checked his IMDB. Both films had high ratings, with "Les Miserables" receiving a whopping 8.2, very rare for an older film. The price was right - about twenty bucks for the set - so I purchased it from Amazon. I proceeded to watch "Wooden Crosses" as soon as it arrived, and I was blown away. It was one of the greatest war films I've ever seen, and I surely must've reviewed it here at the blog. That would've been in early 2019. So why did it take me almost two more years to watch "Les Miserables"?

Simple. It's almost five hours long. I saw right away that it was broken into three parts, and spaced over two dvds, but I'm kind of a purist about some things, and I figured that Bernard meant it to be watched all in one go, so I wanted to do that. I had no idea how it was released in theaters, in parts or as a whole, but I wanted to watch the whole doggone thing, all 4hrs 41mins of it, all in one sitting. But as you can imagine, I kept putting it off. I obviously couldn't watch it on a work day, but even when I wasn't working I found myself making excuses for not watching, after planning to do so. "Well, I wanna work on my drawing tonight", or read my book.........and in my mind was the truth : ("it's a five hour movie, there's no way I can sit that long").

But I still didn't wanna break it up, even if Criterion had arranged it that way. So it lingered on my dvd shelf for 23 months until tonight, when I finally threw in the towel and decided to watch it in parts.

Up until now, my short list for Greatest French Films (prior to the New Wave), would include "Children of Paradise"(1945), directed by Marcel Carne, and "Diary of a Country Priest"(1951) by the great Robert Bresson. Both films are legendary and would make many "all-time" lists from critics or other directors ("Country Priest" is Scorcese's favorite film.) And now, after seeing only the first part of Raymond Bernard's "Les Miserables", I am ready to place it in the French Pantheon, or simply the Cinematic Pantheon of the greatest films ever made. And I've only seen Part One.

Update : It is now Tuesday November 24, and I have completed the film. I watched parts two and three today.

Now, you may be a "Les Miz" veteran for all I know. Not only have there been just shy of a million movie and tv versions made over the last 90 years, but the Broadway adaptation was one of the biggest hits in stage history, and is probably running on other planets by now. So yeah, you may have already seen it somewhere, in one version or another, on stage or on screen. You may have even read Victor Hugo's book, and if so, I'll ask you to please ignore my "newbie naivete" and my enthusiasm for the plot, which I only just discovered. It's not just Hugo's writing or his creation of indelible characters (as memorable as those of Shakespeare or Dickens), but his uncanny ability to weave together multiple plot threads to create dramatic crescendos in the story and give it an epic rhythm. I didn't watch it all at once (though I did watch it in a 24 hour period), but even though the film runs 281 minutes, it doesn't lag for a single one of them.

That alone has to be one of the greatest feats in filmmaking history.

Now, yourself probably already knowing much about Les Miz, you are aware that Jean Valjean is the main character, a man locked up for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread, and subsequent escape attempts. As the movie opens, he is finally set free, but he's so inured to prison life, and his self-image as a convict, that he robs the first man to help him : a priest (you could even call him a Country Priest, at that!). This circumstance will introduce the story's second main character, Inspector Javert, who collars Valjean shortly after he absconds with the priest's silverware. But at this point, only ten minutes into the film (and I assume, the book), the story takes a 180 degree turn. Instead of standing idly by as Valjean is taken back to prison, the priest lies for him, telling Javert that he gave the items to his visitor. Valjean is spared, but even this kindness doesn't set him on the right path. As he leaves the priest's home, it isn't until he stoops to stealing a coin from a small boy that he finally feels a pang of conscience.

The next we see him, years have passed. Valjean has transformed his life and is now the mayor of a small town. He's also amassed considerable wealth from his invention of a glass jewelry making process. Now, he has become a beloved benefactor, trusted by the townspeople, and especially the poorest among them, to do right. It has become his life's mission.

However, he is living under an assumed name, because his theft of the boy's coin eight years earlier is still on record with the police, and Inspector Javert is a man who never gives up. There will be many encounters between the two men throughout the film, which usually end with Valjean (under whatever name) giving Javert the slip.

But that's only half the story, or really only a third. Part two introduces us to little Cosette, a waif who is under the care of a decrepit innkeeper and his witch of a wife. She's been entrusted to them by her indigent mother, a penniless woman who's been forced into prostitution as a last resort after selling her hair and front teeth. Les Miserables, indeed. But the inkeepers treat Cosette as a virtual slave, the wife in particular constantly hounding the tiny girl into chores of labor that are only suited to an adult. Such were the ways in which poor children were treated in Europe in the 19th century, as noted by Charles Dickens.

At any rate, Cosette becomes the film's third main character. Jean Valjean will rescue her from her plight, when - in his new persona - he happens to stop at the Inn.

So much happens in this movie that to call it an epic is an understatement. Part three deals with the Second French Revolution of 1830, which was really no more than a street battle, yet a brutal one at that. By this time Jean Valjean has taken up another guise, and Cosette - whom he has unofficially adopted - is now 16 and ready to be married. All of this is set against her fiancee's commitment to the revolution, and a host of other dramatic concerns. As noted, "Les Miserables" is one of the greatest stories ever written. I am new to it, but it's easy to see why it keeps being told over and over again.

This version also looks incredible, and features sets and photography reminiscent of German Expressionism. The orchestral score is tremendous, nuanced in all the right places. But most exceptional of all is the acting. Harry Baur, whom I'd never heard of until this film, is amazing as Jean Valjean. He exudes a quiet strength and resolve, as well as enormous physical strength simply as a man. Some of his feats have to be seen to be believed, as when he carries a very tall young man through the sewers of Paris, over his shoulder and even up and down ladders. For me, Baur's performance is one of the greatest in motion picture history, and the other lead characters and supporting cast do equal justice to Bernard's impeccable direction.

I'm all out of words for this film, it's simply one of the greatest movies ever made. All you have to do is check out it's IMDB reviews, pretty much everyone gives it a 10/10.

Supposedly, the 1935 version with Fredric March and Charles Laughton is also tremendous, so I'll have to check that one out too. But I am certain that this is the definitive version. You couldn't make a better film than this, in any genre, in any era. See it whatever you do.  /////

That's all I know for tonight. See you in the morning. Tons and tons of love!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox :):)

"The Steel Jungle" + A Brief Political Rant

Tonight's movie was "The Steel Jungle"(1956), a rough and tumble prison flick starring Perry Lopez as "Eddie Novak", a bookie in what looks to be Los Angeles. Eddie's at a crossroads in his young life. On the one hand, he's got a pregnant wife (Beverly Garland), to whom he swears he'll get a job and go straight once their child is born. He's not a thug; he pays his rent on time, buys Garland nice things, and never stiffs a bettor. But on the other hand, even though his heart's in the right place, he's not making an honest living, and to make matters worse, he's tied in with a syndicate.

As the movie opens, Eddie is running from the cops. When they catch him, he's not too worried because the operation he works for has gamed the system. They've got everyone paid off, cops, lawyers, judges. Eddie tells the arresting officers : "I'll be out within an hour". They inform him that his mob boss is doing a prison stretch. "Don't be too sure you won't be sharing a cell". But Eddie is confident because the get-out-of-jail system has always worked like a charm for him. Except this time is doesn't. The Judge (played by "The Chief" from Get Smart) is a straight arrow. He offers Eddie a choice - to rat on his colleagues or face a year in the penitentiary. Eddie is shocked, then angry. But he's no snitch. He'll take the year in prison, even if it means missing the birth of his first born child. He swears to his wife he'll get out anyway; "I'll talk to Marlin" (i.e the Boss who's already locked up). Marlin will surely grease the right palms leading to Eddie's early release. But that doesn't happen either. Marlin doesn't give two shakes about Eddie Novak.

At this point, the story moves from the courthouse to the Big House, and the filmmakers clearly shot inside a real prison, though unfortunately no locations are listed on IMDB. But Eddie is about to get an education into the rules of life behind bars, courtesy of Mr. Marlin the syndicate boss, and his hoodlums, including his enforcer Leo Gordon. I have to take an aside to talk about Gordon for a moment. If you're a fan of old Westerns, you've surely seen him. He's a big man, physically fit with a hard face and a gravel voice. He always played a menacing "heavy", and he was a good actor too. But what's most fascinating about Leo Gordon is that before he became an actor, he was a real life criminal who did five years in San Quentin for armed robbery.

Five years in San Quentin is no joke, and would ruin most men for life. But somehow, Leo Gordon managed to transform himself. According to IMDB, he went on to study at the American Academy for Dramatic Arts, and in his acting career he amassed 198 credits. What's more, he became a screenwriter. I am a fan of TV westerns, like "Tombstone Territory", and on that show I saw his name pop up several times in the credits. He wrote for a lot of other series, too. So to sum up about Leo Gordon, his role in this movie as a vicious lieutenant for mob boss Mr. Marlin is not only well played, it's realistic. He lived the prison life prior to becoming an actor. 

Kenneth Tobey, another veteran presence from the 50s, co-stars as the prison psychiatrist who tries to get Eddie Novak to talk, to open up and name names. If he will do that, the warden has promised him an early release. He can be back with his wife. But Eddie won't take the deal, so fearful is he of the inner prison workings of Mr. Marlin and the gang he controls, which includes the guards. 

Also appearing is Allison Hayes (aka The 50 Foot Woman) in a small role as Eddie's neighbor, so overall you've got a good cast. Even Bob Steele, early star of countless Westerns, shows up for a split second.

I came to "The Steel Jungle" though a recommendation by my brother Chris, who posted it on Facebook this morning. It's a good one, especially for the subtheme between the prison warden and psychiatrist Tobey, which highlights the need for balance between law enforcement and prison as punishment, and rehabilitation of those who can still be rehabilitated. Good script, good movie. Highly recommended. ////

 I'm in the second week of my time off, before I begin my next work cycle. I've just been doing The Usual, which is reading my books, going on my hikes and watching my movies,

I've got to finish with a brief political statement to say that I'm sorry I voted for Gavin Newsom. He's one of the worst governors we've ever had, and you can't just say "well he's a Democrat, therefore he's gotta be cool". No he is not cool. He's as Corporate America as you can get, and what's worse, he's a phony baloney prick. Witness his dictatorial attitude and his visit to The French Laundry. He's a snide, elitist dude, really not far removed from Trump (though smarter), and I'm sorry I voted for him. He's no Jerry Brown, and in fact he's the absolute worst, a self-satisfied power monger. That goes double for our corporate-owned mayor Eric Garcetti, the king of overdevelopment, passive-aggressive covid response, and letting the homeless situation grow unchecked. It's been hard to do a worse job than Antonio Villaraigosa, but Garcetti has left him in the dust.

I'll never vote for him, or Newsom, ever again. You couldn't have a worse twosome running our state, and I don't care if they're democrats. They suck, and not only that, they're the absolute worst, just like Trump. ////

Sorry about the politics, but I had to say it.

Tons of love, see you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

Elizabeth + The Denisovans + Thunderbird Cave + Two Very Good Movies

 Elizabeth, I loved your post of your memory of Japan. The clip of the young deer eating out of your hand, with the little antler buds on his head, was "off-the-charts" cute, and your smile in the "happiness level" picture accurately reflects the experience! Every time you've traveled over the years, I've always had fun too, just by seeing your posts. And I know that Japan was your favorite trip ever, so as I said in my note, I know you'll return. Not only that, but you'll soon be back out there, traveling far and wide, back and forth across America, in the air and on the road, doing what you love to do and what you are so good at. The current situation won't last forever, and maybe by Spring we'll be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Then your Happiness Meter will be pinned in the red zone. :):)

I am glad you posted and I trust that you're hanging in there and all is well. In my current book, "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins, I'm reading about the migration, over millennia, of the Denisovan people, a recently discovered ancestor to modern humans, who - it is coming to be understood - lived concurrently with Neanderthals but likely predated them. According to Collins, the two groups interbred, but what is most interesting is where the last surviving modern ancestors with Denisovan dna ended up. The Denisovans originated, it is thought, in Northern China and Siberia, perhaps 250,000 years ago. They were around a long time, but perhaps before the Ice Age, maybe 25 thousand years ago, they crossed into North America. In the United States, the people with the highest percentage of Denisovan dna are the Ojibwa, who as you probably know live in the Great Lakes area including Wisconsin. There is a petroglyph, reproduced in the book, of a mythical Thunderbird of Native American lore (likely Ojibwa), that was found in a cave in Juneau, Wisconsin. One day you should check it out, or get as close as you can to the site since it's probably not open to the public.

But what's equally mindblowing - at least to me because I love this stuff - is that the "Thunder People" (i.e. the ancient Denisovans and Denisovan/Neanderthal hybrids) had their own cosmology, based on the Milky Way and the Great Rift at it's center, where it splits into two forks, or arms. To the Thunder People, as they've come to be known in Ojibwa folklore, the Milky Way was The Path of Souls in the afterlife, and to attain the next world, a soul had to reach the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan), which was located 40,000 years ago at the center of the Great Rift.  

All of this is especially cool, because of the Thunderbird cave in Juneau and also because of your awesome photo of the Milky Way last Summer, in which the Great Rift was visible. So you can imagine the early Ojibwa in their cave, thousands of years ago, one of them painting the Thunderbird on the wall, perhaps in accordance with a ceremony of some sort, or after an evening of watching the Milky Way turn in the night sky.

I love this stuff, and I'm really enjoying this book. It's just as good as Collins' "Gobekli Tepe", which I read earlier this year. Next I'm gonna order a book called "The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America : The Missing Skeletons and the Great Smithsonian Cover-Up" by Richard J. Dewhurst. I've already read ample evidence, in the massive tome "Forbidden Archaeology" by Michael Cremo, about nine foot skeletons that were found in burial mounds in the South and Midwest during the peak years of excavation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And for whatever reason, the Smithsonian Institution, once it got hold of the bones, either shut them away or destroyed them. No one knows. But several books have been written about the giants, and this one is said to be the best. We'll tackle it soon, maybe next month or in January.

The Denisovans were said to be huge as well. Collins compares them to "the largest American wrestlers", which leads me to think of Andre the Giant. 

The bottom line is that I love ancient history, even though much of it is based on supposition. But we have their bones, their cave art, and their stone tools, and from that we can tell a lot. For a final image, I will leave you with the Denisovan Bracelet. Google it, and you will blow your mind at what someone created 70,000 years ago. ////

Two quick movies, both having to do with men working undercover for the Federal government. The better of the two, which I watched last night, was "I Was A Communist For The F.B.I." (1951). Frank Lovejoy plays real life agent Matt Svetic, who for nine years pretended to be a Communist in order to infiltrate the Pittsburgh steel industry, whose leadership was being taken over by the Commies. This is an incredible film, important still today, as it shows the methods the Soviets (now the Russians) have used to try to destabilise our government. They're using the exact same tactics now, except they're working on our elections instead of our industries. I'm no right wing reactionary - far from it - but this film gets my highest recommendation. 

Almost as good, but more formulaic and melodramatic, was "Johnny Allegro"(1949), where George Raft plays Johnny, a florist who used to be a criminal. He's a complicated guy; he did part of a ten year stretch in prison, then escaped and enlisted in the Air Force, where he became a war hero. He turned his life around, but the Feds are still looking for him due to his prison escape. When they catch up to him (led by Will Geer playing a Treasury Agent), they offer him a deal : go undercover to help nail a counterfeit ring, and all is forgiven. It's good stuff, with Raft at his best in one of his "gentlemanly tough guy" roles. Nina Foch is the love interest, and the suave George McCready is the bad guy. But it's Geer who steals the show. Before he became a counterculture grandpa in the 1970s, while starring in "The Waltons", he was in a lot of film noirs in the 40s and 50s, often playing a G-Man. His height made him an intimidating character, and he is especially good in this movie as George Raft's handler. "Johnny Allegro" is also highly recommended. /////

That's all I've got for tonight. Thanks for reading, I know it was long but I could go on and on forever about ancient history, archaeology, etc. See you in the morning. :)

Tons of love.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

Mickey Rooney + "The Thing With Two Heads"

 Last night's movie was "Quicksand"(1950), a Noir starring Mickey Rooney in which The Mick plays an auto mechanic who dumps nice girl Helen (Barbara Bates) for the more dangerous Vera (Jeanne Cagney), a tough broad who works at a local cafe. Mickey is looking for excitement; Vera provides it, but to take her out, he needs money. Instead of waiting til payday. he sneaks a twenty spot out of the auto shop's cash register, vowing to himself that he'll put it back once he gets his check. Unfortunately, his boss calls in an accountant to do a random audit of the books, and Rooney is in the hot seat. To avoid being busted, he runs down to the jewelry store, buys a $100 watch on credit, then sprints down to the pawn shop to hock it for 30 bucks. He puts twenty back into the register, which saves him from his boss, and then - relieved - he heads over to the cafe to take Vera out for a night on the town.

But Vera is trouble, which he should have known, being that she's James Cagney's sister. Like her older brother, Jeanne/Vera knows all the local hoodlums, in particular Peter Lorre, an arcade owner who also runs numbers for a gang.

Mickey is soon being dogged by a fraud inspector, sicced on him by the owner of the jewelry store, who found out that Mick pawned a watch he didn't own (you can't sell something you haven't paid off, at least in the movie). Finally, in order to get everyone off his back, Vera persuades Mickey to rob Peter Lorre, who has a loaded cashbox hidden in the back room of his pinball joint. She knows where it's located, they can use the dough to skip town. But as anyone knows, it's a mistake to mess with Peter Lorre. His voice alone is lethal, and Rooney is no master criminal. He's just a guy who lifted twenty bucks from the till in order to impress a new date. Now he's in over his head in "Quicksand", which is the title of the movie and so we're right back where we started.

Can you believe that Mickey Rooney, who was short of stature and not classically handsome, was the #1 male box office star in America for the years 1939 - 1941? Yes indeed, it was The Mick who ruled the theaters during that period, not Clark Gable, Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart, and the reason - so far as I am able to see - was his energy, his force of personality, and his wide range of talent. No less than Sir Laurence Olivier called him "the best there has ever been" (I got that from Wiki). Now, I myself have not seen a great deal of Rooney's work. I haven't seen any of the Andy Hardy pictures that made him famous. But I have seen him in roles as diverse as the horse trainer in the wonderful film "Black Stallion", which he made in late middle age, and "Puck", in William Dieterle's adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which was filmed when he was 14. So Rooney could do Shakespeare even as a kid. He could also dance and sing, and in that way he was multitalented like Judy Garland and James Cagney. Anyhow, read his bio on Wikipedia if you're interested. People my age may remember him as being in the news in his later years for all the wrong reasons, and there is no doubt he was a victim of his own excess. He was married eight times, but one of them was to Ava Gardner. To sum up, although I've only seen a few of his movies, there is no doubt that he was a very good actor, a Hollywood megastar, and a crash-and-burn celebrity all in one.

Read his Wiki just for the hell of it. As for "Quicksand", it was a solid noir with good acting and a nice plot twist involving Mick's two girlfriends (the good girl and the bad girl), but the gimmick of him getting in deeper and deeper trouble after stealing that first twenty began to wear thin. Still, it's recommended, and it has some great location footage from Santa Monica circa 1950.  /////  

Tonight's movie was "The Thing With Two Heads"(1972), starring former Oscar winner Ray Milland, who obviously needed a paycheck, and Los Angeles Rams star Rosey Grier, who at the time was also famous for his book about macrame. And he subdued Sirhan Sirhan, who didn't kill Robert F. Kennedy but was only a Manchurian Candidate. That picture would've been a much better selection than this one, which started out as a decent Cormanesque monster flick ala "The Manster", but then devolved into a Burt Reynolds chase movie, with the Rosey/Ray "doubleheader" riding around on a motorcycle for half an hour, in the hills of Agoura, the two heads jabbering at one another in a blaxploitation motif. About two dozen cop cars were destroyed in the chase, parts of which must still be embedded in the landscape. The viewer was left thinking that a two-headed director must've helmed this film, and it would've been nice if Sirhan showed up to end it early. But no such luck, avoid at all costs.  ////

See you in the morning. Tons and tons of love.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

"Cell 2455, Death Row" : The Caryl Chessman Story

Tonight I watched a true crime thriller called "Cell 2455, Death Row", an intriguing title that turned out to be the life story of Caryl Chessman, adapted from a book he wrote while in prison awaiting execution. Chessman's was a famous case, which was also made into a well-regarded TV movie in 1977 called "Kill Me If You Can", starring Alan Alda. Having developed a True Crime fascination in my teens, I knew of Caryl Chessman even though he was before my time. He was known as the infamous "Red Light Bandit" who haunted Lovers' Lanes in the L.A. area in 1948. When he was finally caught, and convicted on 17 counts of rape, assault and kidnapping, he was sentenced to death even though he never killed anyone, due to the prosecution's invocation of something called The Little Lindbergh Law (Google it).

But what made the Chessman case so interesting from a true crime standpoint was what happened in the aftermath of his conviction. Though he was a career criminal who had done time in San Quentin and Folsom prisons, mostly for armed robbery, at his trial Chessman swore he was not the Red Light Bandit. He acted as his own attorney, and though he lost his case, he learned a lot about law in the process. As a result, he was able, through appeals, to forestall his execution for twelve years, using only the law books and other legal materials provided him by the prison, in accordance with state law. He apparently was highly intelligent, which made him such a successful criminal in the first place. In addition, he wrote "Cell 2455" while on Death Row, and it became a best seller.

As a crime reader I only knew of him marginally. I never read his book and only knew the overview of his story. But the movie gives you the full picture (Hollywood-ized of course), starting in Chessman's childhood. He went off the rails as an adolescent, after his family sank into poverty during the Depression. His father attempted suicide and his mother was left a paraplegic following a car accident. With hardly any food in the house, he began stealing from grocery trucks. From there, he progressed to auto theft, and after that to armed robbery, which landed him in prison for much of his early adulthood. He has all the hallmarks of a career criminal, and as the movie begins, with the Chessman character's narration, we see that he wrote his book to try and understand how he got this way. "How did I end up here, on Death Row"?

The plot takes you through those steps, as Chessman looks back on his life on the eve of his execution. What you see - and what he discovers for himself - is that it was no one's fault but his own. If the movie is even remotely accurate, Caryl Chessman was a classic sociopath. Something was wrong with him from the get-go, and his crimes cannot be blamed on poverty or anything else. He comes to this conclusion himself, though to the very end he still insists he was not The Red Light Bandit. To admit that would have been admitting that he was capable of rape and extreme violence, and as a sociopath he wasn't able to admit it, though by the testimony of multiple victims he was clearly guilty. He was indeed The Red Light Bandit, and was a textbook example of an unrepentant, incorrigible violent criminal. The controversy in his case came from the fact that he was sentenced to death, even though he never killed anyone. He lingered on Death Row for a dozen years - a record at the time - and after using up all his appeals, he was finally executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin in May 1960. Governor Pat Brown had previously issued him a stay of execution, and his case made it to the Supreme Court of California. Later on, it was a major force in the anti-death penalty movement in California, which resulted in the abolition of capital punishment in 1972. The death penalty was reinstated five years later.

I used to have a viewpoint on capital punishment, but as time went by and I examined my thoughts and feelings, I came to the conclusion that it's not for me to say. As a young man (as far to the Left as you could get), I was adamantly anti-death penalty. Then I got older, and there came along a much publicized and horrible case in the early 1990s, the Polly Klass case. The accused in that case was clearly guilty, and I thought, "good riddance". I mean, I thought that about many horrible criminals, even when I was a Commie, but this guy tipped the scales, and it got me to thinking past the point of choosing a side based on my political position at the time.

Over the years, I've thought about it from time to time, though it is not something I dwell on. It's just that as I go along in life, I want to try and refine my thoughts, my feelings about things, to understand what I actually feel about something, rather than what society and the media would program into me.

And what I came to understand about myself, is that I cannot have a meaningful opinion on the death penalty. My opinion does not count, except maybe on the periphery, because I have never experienced the pain, which is beyond our comprehension, of having a loved one murdered. God forbid.

And not just the pain, but the sense of psychic dislocation, the horrific otherworldliness, of "this can't be happening"........and yet it has.

So I've come to the conclusion, even though as a Christian I'd prefer there be no more executions, that it isn't for me to say. Because it's never happened to me, though I know how I'd feel if I were in the shoes of the folks on the other side.

Which is to say, I don't know how I'd feel at all, except horrible beyond imagination, which is why I don't judge, nor have an opinion that I don't feel entitled to, on the cases of other people. 

Sorry for the grim report, but I felt the need to extrapolate due to the content of the film, which is highly recommended. The Youtube print is Blu-ray and razor sharp. //////   

That's all I know for tonight. Stay safe and well. Tons of love.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

"Tobacco Road" & "The Great Flamarion" + "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins

I'm back at home, where over the past two nights I've watched a couple of good movies. Last night I found a razor sharp print of "Tobacco Road"(1941) on Youtube. I've been wanting to see this movie for several years now, ever since I caught a few minutes of it on TCM a while back at Pearl's. It was originally a stage play, based on the novel by Erskine Caldwell, that in the 1930s held the record for the longest running show on Broadway. It's the story of The Lesters, a family of poor Georgia sharecroppers. Apparently some of the material in the book was too controversial to be used (and I have no idea what it is), so the play was homogenised, and then when John Ford was chosen to direct the movie version, he decided to turn it into a comedy with tragic undertones. The plot is simple : "Jeeter Lester" (Charlie Grapewin), the family patriarch, is informed that he will lose his ramshackle house and farmland if he can't come up with rent by a certain date. Jeeter's never had to pay rent before, he was always under the wing of a kindhearted landowner. But the Great Depression has begun, and the bank is taking back the land. Will Jeeter be able to come up with the money?

The actual storyline contains subthemes and dialogue which is more complex than that, and involves religion, social commentary on rural America and materialism in general. But it's played mostly for laughs, and the characters are deliberately exaggerated to be caricatures of the Deep South, like those in "Lil' Abner". Still, it's so well played, by Charlie Grapewin especially (he was born in 1869!), and most importantly it's a John Ford picture, which means that it looks fantastic and is filled with sentiment. I've been meaning for a long time to undertake an exploration of Ford's work (and it's too bad we never got to do one with Professor Tim). I've seen most of Ford's most famous movies, and you have too, but he made a lot more that we've never seen, like "Tobacco Road" which I highly recommend. There is a John Ford box set called "Ford at Fox" that I've got my eye on. The price is steep, but if it goes down, perhaps at Christmastime, or if I can find an affordable used copy, then we will do us a proper John Ford retrospective. ////

Then tonight I watched a noir called "The Great Flamarion"(1945), starring Erich von Stroheim, about a Trick Shooter, a marksman, who has a nightclub act and falls in love with his assistant "Connie" (Mary Beth Hughes). The thing is, she's married and her husband (Dan Duryea) is also part of the act. He keeps showing up drunk, which puts him in danger because von Stroheim uses real bullets in the act, which requires precise timing from the performers. The reason Duryea drinks is that he's jealous of his wife, who is always putting the make on other men. Now she's trying to seduce her boss, the grim and unflappable von Stroheim, he of The Never Changing Expression. Von Stroheim eventually succumbs to her charms, but what he doesn't realise is that she's just using him to get rid of Dan Duryea her husband. She's got a third man waiting in the wings, with whom she plans to run off when all is said and done.

However, she may not have seen enough Erich von Stroheim movies to know that she has messed with the wrong guy. I also found "The Great Flamarion" on Youtube, this time from a recommendation, and the picture quality was once again pristine. The director was Anthony Mann, who later became known, like John Ford, for his masterful Westerns, featuring wide open landscapes and realistic characterizations. Ford had John Wayne, Mann had James Stewart, with whom he made several absolute classics, like "Winchester '73", "The Far Country" and "The Man From Laramie", all of which I have on dvd.    

Last but not least, I finally began a new book, "Denisovan Origins" by Andrew Collins, the author of "Gobekli Tepe", which I read at the beginning of this year. I blogged about that book, and if you recall, Gobekli Tepe is the name of the world's oldest stone temple, unearthed during the past thirty years at a site in Turkey. It was Collins' book that brought Gobekli Tepe to the public eye; before he wrote about it, it was known mostly to archaeologists and paleoanthropologists. In short, the temple - which consists of several circular sites situated on a constructed mound (see "mound culture") - was built at the direction of an advanced technical culture that settled among the hunter-gatherers of Anatolia (now Turkey). Both of these cultures had somehow managed to survive the cataclysmic Younger Dryas Impact Event, in which comet fragments struck the Earth and exploded in the sky circa 9800 BC.

The more primitive hunter gatherers were terrified and superstitious for centuries thereafter. They suffered from what one historian refers to as "catastrophobia". Imagine seeing a freakin' comet headed toward Earth.

And then try to imagine the geophysical effects when it broke apart, and it's very large fragments, the size of football fields, either exploded in airbursts like nuclear weapons, or hit the ground full force. It was very close to being the end of human civilization, at least for the peoples of the northern hemisphere.

At any rate, a more advanced culture, with sophisticated tool making skills and organisational capabilities, ended up in Anatolia after migrating from Russia and Scandinavia, where a new mini-Ice Age had set in after the comet impact. Finding the locals in a state of ongoing terror, they directed the building of the mound that became Gobekli Tepe, that ultimately included tall stone monuments in honor of the Godlike "people of knowledge", who promised to protect the locals from further astral catastrophies.

These advanced people are known as The Swiderians, and at this point, to avoid having to write a full length review of the book and it's history, I suggest you Google "Gobekli Tepe" and "Andrew Collins" if you are interested in the subject. I'll add that you shouldn't waste your time searching for conventional information about Gobekli Tepe, because all you will get is the same old and tired info about what hunter-gathers have always been assumed to be (i.e, simpletons), and how the Younger Dryas could not possibly have been caused by a comet.

Snoozeville.

The trouble with many of the sciences, and especially the geophysical ones, or anthropology, is that the science itself is only a couple of hundred years old. We haven't been studying this stuff for all that long. And so, when new evidence emerges - and in the case of Younger Dryas it is extensive - it freaks out and dismays the scientists whose theories came before it, because now their theories will cease to matter, if Younger Dryas is correct, and I am sure it will prove to be. So this is why you have all the infighting among scientists, and the flinging of accusations like "pseudo-science" against someone who has new information. Entrenched scientists understandably don't want to lose their funding, but again, we are relatively new in these studies, and the findings that are coming in about Gobekli Tepe and the Younger Dryas Impact Event will, in the long run, withstand all the name calling and will stand up to scrutiny to become the new standard of prehistoric knowledge.  /////

Read the books for yourself if you are interested. Andrew Collins is the author.

That's all I know for tonight. See you in the morning. Tons and tons of love.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

"House of Dracula" + My Top Ten Favorite Singers

This blog was begun Wednesday night, November 11 2020 :

Pearl and I had fun tonight watching "House of Dracula, one of the movies included in "The Wolf Man Legacy Collection" that I purchased on Amazon just before Halloween, and it's also the first movie I've watched since Halloween. Like everybody else, I've been distracted by the unfunny clown show in Washington, but since tonight is my last night at Pearl's until November 27th, and since I don't have a Blu-ray player at home, I figured it was a good night to watch one. I've actually seen "House of Dracula" before, a few years ago on a regular dvd that I got from the library. But it certainly bears repeat viewing (as do all the Universal Horror films and their sequels), and man does it look great on Blu-ray.

The plot is fun, too. As the movie opens, "Baron Latos" (John Carradine) appears at the door of "Dr. Franz Edelmann" (Onslow Stevens), asking for his help in curing a terrible malady that's causing the Baron to crave human blood. When he tells the doctor he will only be available for nighttime appointments, Edelmann puts two and two together, and Latos confesses that he is, in fact, Count Dracula. He then guides Dr. Edelmann down the stairs to the doc's laboratory, where Drac has already moved in - his coffin is sitting in a darkened corner. The nerve of that Count Dracula! Squatting in the basement unannounced. Give the governor a "harrumph"! But he does seem legit in his desire to be cured, so the doctor, a man devoted to the Hippocratic oath, takes Drac on as a patient, scheduling him for a blood test the next evening.

But then, the next day there is another knock at the door. This time it's "Lawrence Talbot" (Lon Chaney Jr.), also known as the freakin' Wolf Man. Talbot is distraught; he too wants a cure.

What are the odds that not just one, but two Universal Monsters would travel all the way to Visaria to be cured of their conditions, and that they'd have the same doctor? Man, that Edelmann must be a miracle worker (he ain't no quack that's for sure).

So there you have it. The doc has his hands full but he's up to the task, with the help of his two nurses, one of whom suffers from a severe curvature of the spine. Over the course of the next 67 minutes, Lantos/Count Dracula will revert to his old ways, first hypnotising one of Edelmann's nurses and then the doc himself, who he turns into a murderous proxy. You didn't think Dracula was sincere, did you? Lawrence Talbot is, though. He genuinely despairs at the coming of each Full Moon. He hates being The Wolf Man as much as Dracula loves being a vampire, and they couldn't have cast a better actor for the part than Lon Chaney Jr. He was so great at pathos.

At one point, Dr. Edelmann and his assistant are exploring a sea cave on the coast near his mansion. They are looking for the body of Larry Talbot, who's tried to kill himself by jumping into the ocean. Well, not only do they find Talbot - alive, no less - but as they are bringing him to safety they also discover Frankenstein in the same cave, buried in the sand. Now, I know what you're thinking : "C'mon Ad.....what're the odds of that"? But it's not as big a stretch as you think, because it turns out that Victor Frankenstein's castle was not far down the road from Dr. Edelmann's house, and when the townspeople burned the Frankenstein place to the ground, Frankie's body - over the years - migrated with the rubble into the sea, and finally into the sand inside the cave. But - and it's a big but - though he appears to be dead when Dr. Edelmann finds him, he isn't. It turns out that he cannot die, so in that way he is even more indestructible than Count Dracula, who by now is controlling the proceedings.

You can't go wrong with "House of Dracula", you get three Monsters for the price of one, and you get a Mad Scientist thrown in for good measure. And, you get John Carradine and Lon Chaney. ////

And this part of the blog was written on Thursday night, November 12 :

I'm back home, and it's a good time for a list, even though we've probably done this one a couple of times already. Let's run through The Top Ten Singers, shall we? I hope it's cool and not too boring. You can add your favorites, too. I was just thinking today that in my case, it's as notable for who isn't on there as for who is. For instance, Geddy Lee would not make my list, even though Rush is probably my favorite band. I loved him as a screecher on the early albums, and of course even when he changed his style and began singing mid-range in a kind of meandering way, he still got the job done and then some (even if on the last few albums he wasn't that great). But even at his best, and as much as I love Rush, Geddy would not make my Top Ten.

Same with David Lee Roth, same with Ozzy, though I love Van Halen and Black Sabbath and both are great singers for those bands.

My Top Ten is based on singers who strike some chord in me that has to do with emotion, and/or originality, and with their ability to turn a song into a story. Ian Gillan is not on my list, nor are any of Ritchie's singers. Doesn't mean they aren't great - incredible, even - it's just that there are ten I like better. For the record, David Coverdale is my favorite Blackmore singer. Even if you only took "Burn" into consideration, on that album alone he captures the flag.

But without further ado, here are my Top Ten Favorite Singers. The first three are set in stone as The Holy Trinity. The other seven are in no particular order, I'm listing them as their names occur to me. As a final note I should mention that Beatles are not included. Beatles are an entity unto themselves and thus are never included in Lists of Musical Favorites.

The Holy Trinity :

1) Greg Lake

2) Rob Halford

3) Doug Pinnick

These guys need no introduction nor explanation.

The Rest of the List :

Todd Rundgren

David Gilmour 

Jon Anderson

Peter Hammill

Russell Mael

Alice Cooper

Eric Johnson

You'll notice that there aren't a lot of what you would call classic lead singers on there, guys like Robert Plant or Paul Rodgers. My choices are esoteric - as yours might be - and they are based on what the singer makes me feel, in relation to the music he is performing. Some folks might say, for instance, "Eric Johnson"? How can he be one of my favorite singers, right? It's all because of the feeling - for me - whereas Ronnie James Dio, while no doubt an amazing singer, just didn't do it for me in the same way, or not enough to include, in his case, in my Top Twenty.

You can't just belt it out. You have to bring the feeling. You have to bring the lyrics to life, or at least elevate the song or lead the song, even if the lyrics are not at the forefront.

Do you wanna know a great singer? Nick Drake. He barely whispered his vocals, but the effect was goosebump inducing.

I could go on and on, because to me, singing makes a song, even more than guitar playing or any other instrument. I'm not talking complex progressive or instrumental music here, but basic pop and rock. And in those formats, you've gotta have good singing. In the 1960s, the vocal melody was emphasized above all else, which is why you have so many indelible pop classics from that era.

I'll stop now, and I know it's all subjective. I could list a few dozen other singers. These just happen to be my very favorites.  //////

See you in the morning. Tons of love.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)

Rock Band T-Shirts

 I've got a new hobby : collecting band shirts. It started a few months ago when I was absorbed in my Gentle Giant craze (which hasn't ended). In August, I was listening to Giant every night, cycling through their eleven studio albums over and over again as I engaged in a rediscovery of their music. It seems I wasn't the only one doing this, because over the Summer a GG revival appeared to take place. There was the fan video of "Proclamation" that played on FB and featured all the original members in cameo slots. Then one day, the Giant page on Facebook posted an announcement : "In honor of the 'Proclamation' video, the band is offering it's first ever t-shirt, with a screen print of a tour poster from 1971 on 100% cotton". I paraphrase, but they posted a pic of the shirt, the band's first, and it looked good. It was also was said to be high quality.

This last part is important, because now, in online reviews I've read, there appear to be too many instances, with merch being a big business, where a shirt looks cool on your computer screen, but when you get it in the mail it's really thin, or it's a cotton/synthetic blend. In the old days, when you bought a shirt at a concert, it was cotton and it was good quality. Not every shirt was a "Hanes heavyweight" (though some were), but most all were 100% cotton and were durable. That's why you saw so many Led Zeppelin and Yes shirts throughout junior high and high school, because kids could wear 'em for years. I mention this because I would never have started my new hobby if the material of the shirt was cheap. If there's one thing I love, it's my t-shirts.

But I hadn't bought a band shirt since I Don't Remember When. When was the last time I bought one? It would've been at a concert, sometime in the early 80s. I know I had a Motorhead shirt, and a Judas Priest. Back then you could get a band shirt for ten bucks at a show, and not a bootleg either, but an official one. Even earlier than that, back in October 1974 I bought a Golden Earring shirt for five dollars at their Santa Monica Civic show. The very first rock shirt I ever bought was at the Rick Wakeman concert a month earlier, in September '74 at the Hollywood Bowl. That one probably cost five bucks also (don't remember), but the thing was, I wore it for years, until it had holes in it, and even then I kept wearing it for a while. Finally in the mid-80s I threw it out, but I wish I hadn't. Even as a tattered rag it would have sentimental value now.

But I stopped buying band shirts for two reasons. The first was, by around 1986 most shirts had gone up to fifteen bucks, and the second reason was that, in the 80s I very often didn't have fifteen bucks to spare. And also, there was a "been there done that" aspect. I'd gone through the shirts of most of my favorite bands and artists, and over time had worn most of them out. And I had other ways to show my devotion, especially posters, and my collection of rock magazines : Creem, Circus, Circus Raves, Hit Parader, and the English weekly newspapers, Melody Maker and New Musical Express.

 But considering t-shirts, you didn't always have to pay a high price at a concert. Down in Hollywood in the mid-1970s, there were a few shops that specialized in what were called "iron-ons", where you would go into the store and select an iron-on transfer of your favorite band's logo or a band photograph, and then the employee would run it though a heat press that would seal it squarely on the front of a colored t-shirt. Iron on shirts were very popular in the 1970s, because they were cheap and long lasting. It's fun to think back upon that time, when on a few occasions my friends and I literally rode our bikes from Northridge to the Sunset Strip, just to check out the rock 'n roll scene in Hollywood. It was a 40 mile round trip, but well worth it to a fifteen year old, and part of those adventures was stopping off at the Iron On stores. 

Well anyhow, it had been roughly 35 years since I bought my last shirt at a concert, when I saw the Facebook post for the Gentle Giant shirt. I was so excited by what was happening with my rediscovery of their music, that I decided I had to have it. I figured that what I was saving in concert money in the year of covid, I could spend on the occasional band t-shirt. So I started with the Gentle Giant, and figured I could afford one a month.

My second shirt was a very beautiful Alcest tee, for their "Spiritual Instinct" album. Right now I'm trying to go for bands that not many people know about. For my third pick in October, I wanted a really bitchin' Triptykon shirt, but all they had left was Small size, so I went for an Emperor shirt instead. This was at the Rockabilia website (free plug), where they do the "recommended for you" thing. I have two Emperor albums, both of which are classics in the Black Metal genre, so even though they're not one of my very favorite bands, I felt legit in buying their shirt, especially because it looked awesome. :)

And finally, because of another Rockabilia recommendation, my t-shirt for this month was for "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Yeah, I know it's not of a rock band, but I had to have it. The thing is, I had me a Texas Chainsaw shirt back in 1988. For real. I've even got a pic of me wearing it somewhere. So when they recommended this new one, which featured the original movie poster on the front, I had to have it. It just came in the mail today, and it's heavy duty cotton. I'll be able to wear it for many years.

What should be my next pick? I'm thinking Bill Nelson or Van Der Graaf Generator, if they have shirts available. I'll let you know. I haven't actually worn any of my shirts yet. For one thing, it's suddenly become freezing in Los Angeles; the dreaded L.A. Cold is upon us, and from what I see we are twenty degrees colder than Wisconsin right now. So I can't break out my new band shirts just yet. But soon, or maybe in the New Year. We often get a warm spell in January, right around Super Bowl time, and that should be a New Year in other more important ways for all of us. 

Maybe I'll break one out around January 20th, when it will be time to have fun again.  /////

Much love, and I'll see you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):) 

Character Matters

This part of the blog was written on Saturday night, November 7 2020, on the day the election was decided:

This afternoon, just as I pulled out of the parking lot at my apartment, I saw a double rainbow, crossing the sky beneath a break in the clouds. In Los Angeles, and especially the Valley, Summer ended today. It literally went from t-shirt weather to very chilly overnight. Thursday was 95 degrees, yesterday around 80, today 55, with rainclouds on the horizon. So there was the rainbow, with another, fainter one inside it.

All I could say was "wow", because............well, because today. :)

We've known it was coming since Wednesday night, but today it became official, and the weight of one man's hate filled psyche fell away from us. Some pundits have proposed that Trump will remain a "kingmaker" in the Republican party, and that he might even try for a comeback in 2024, to avenge his "rigged" defeat and stand tall before his cult members.

I say "haha" to all of that. Trump is toast. It feels as if he's already gone, and while he might end up with a tv or radio show if he avoids prison (or when he gets out), he'll never be back as a candidate again. I mean, are you kidding me? He just got creamed. But enough about him. Did you see Joe Biden's speech? He knocked it out of the park. It's pretty amazing that a guy who grew up with a stutter can do as well as he did. But more than that, he's a man who lost his wife and daughter in a car accident, and then one of his adult sons to brain cancer. Biden himself had brain surgery in 1988 to repair an aneurysm that could have killed him. He's run for President twice before and never made it out of the primary. So if ever there was a man who lives by the motto "never give up", it's Joe Biden.

Again, as I said yesterday I'm not here to stump for him, though I do find myself liking him more and more already. I know he's a career politician, and we're supposed to hate all those guys, right? "They're all crooks" is the saying. Corporate America runs the show, and it doesn't matter who is President. But I don't believe that, because the tone of politics is just as important as the policies that are set by any given administration. Also, I must add a quick aside, once again, in favor of the center over the Far Left and Right. We get things done in this country in increments, by cooperating. But beyond the job of administrating,  our leaders - and even our artists, sports heroes or simply your boss in the workplace - set the tone for the culture they preside over. Just as John F. Kennedy set a tone of class, intelligence and high expectations, what he espoused was reflected in our culture. His image was "Camelot". He said we would go to the Moon, and we did. The other side of the coin was Trump, who spewed hate, lies, arrogance and stupidity, and during his time in office it was those qualities that were reflected in our culture. So yes, while Corporate America and Wall Street may dictate the economics in this country, and pull puppet strings to an extent on Presidents from either party, it nevertheless does matter who is President. Politicians may be a tainted bunch, but they are not all crooks, any more than the general population are all crooks. So I'm gonna trust Joe and I think he'll do a damn good job. ////

And this part of the blog was written tonight, Sunday November 8th, 2020 :

If you saw my Facebook yesterday, you saw my post that Grimsley delivered flowers to Joni Mitchell on her birthday. Pretty cool, right? Especially on the day Trump was defeated. Well today, Grim texted me to say that he was about to leave on another delivery, this time to the house of Alex Trebek. The flowers were for his wife. Grim had blown his mind a few months ago, because he had delivered to Alex himself at the same house. It may have been in July on Alex's birthday, I can't remember for sure. But Grim could barely believe it at the time, and he texted me that day right after it happened. He said Alex came to the door himself to get the flowers. And now today, Grim was delivering to his wife. R.I.P. not only to the greatest game show host of all time, but also to a man whose picture should be in the dictionary next to the words "class" and "gentleman".

Life is unique and strange, and you never know what's going to happen, even when it seems like every day is the same. Me, I've gotta get back to writing my FOIA requests at some point, because if I don't I'll be kicking myself one day. I'm not saying that they'll do any good, but you never know. It's just that I'm now 60, and I don't wanna be 80 one day and say to myself, "you didn't try hard enough". I used to try very hard, in the late 90s, but I got ignored, or called names. One person shouted me down and hung up on me. But the truth is the truth, and as the saying goes, "The Truth Will Out". You can walk away from the truth, you can ignore the truth, you can deny the truth, you can bury the truth, and most often if you do those things it is because you are aware of the truth and frightened of it. I'm the only one who is not frightened of 1989. The truth, over the course of history, has a way of rising to the surface, and one day it will do so in this case, which I am certain is the biggest secret in America. It is without a doubt the most highly classified secret in the CIA's records.

That's why I haven't tried as hard as I should have, though I did make a request in 2017, and then wrote a detailed letter of what happened in response to their denial, which came in the form of a Glomar.

Now that the political crisis is over, I wanna get back to reading books and watching movies and hiking on my days off, but I say all of the above because we see, in 2020, that life can get unpredictable. You never know what can happen. Neil Peart died when the year started, then last month we lost EVH. Today we lost Alex Trebek. I speak on my own behalf because no one has ever spoken a single word about what happened in 1989, and the fact is that many people who know me know something about it. A handful know much more, and of course the hierarchy of the CIA knows exactly what happened. Bill Clinton knows. I'd much rather be writing about movies, books, music, and benign things, but I'd like to let those folks know - the ones who know but have never said a word on my behalf - that I'm still here, and I will never give up.

What we see with Donald Trump is that it's not your ambitions in life that matter, or what you've achieved from a material standpoint, it's what kind of person you were. /////

And that's really all I know.

See you in the morning.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):) 

Another Political Rant, Sorry But It Must Be Said

 I've got nothing to report, but I'm checking in anyway just to keep the blog going. I'm as sick of all this waiting as you are. I haven't watched a movie since Halloween, nor begun another book since I finished Rob Halford's "Confess" about ten days ago. Before the election I was too nervous to read or watch, and now I'm too distracted. I keep switching from MSNBC to CNN, and even to Fox, looking for any available updates. Steve Kornacki has become the man of the moment for the entire nation.

But please.......somebody call this thing already. We need to get rid of Trump, but just as importantly if not more so, we need to get rid of Trump-ism, to get the focus off all the chaos and unpleasantness brought about by one man's deranged psyche that encouraged his nuttiest followers to come marching out of the woodwork. I can understand (sort of) the rank-and-file Republicans, "Ma and Pa Conservative", who voted for Trump because he represents their party and they feel the need to keep Democrats out of the White House. Even though I disagree vehemently with most Republican ideas, I can still respect folks who hold basic, conservative views, and who vote Republican no matter what. However, in a quick aside, I must ask myself a question : "Hey Ad, what would you do, if the Democratic Party nominated a dangerous kook? Say, a Far Left version of Trump. A full-on Communist megalomaniac". I can answer that question without flinching. If the kook's Republican opponent was a standard issue politician, a professional in other words, I'd vote for him instead of the kook. I'd vote against my own party, in other words, to avoid helping a crazy man become President.

Now, I'm sitting here wondering why Donald Trump still got 70 million votes. We all know about his core, a worrisome percentage of people, a lot of them gun nuts and 'Muricans, who voted for him precisely because of what he espoused, not in spite of it. But how many militia members and rednecks are there in this country? I'm talking "full on", like full on AR-15 maniacs and hard core racists? How many exist? One million? Five million? Ten? If it's the latter, that would mean that one in seven of Trump voters is a full on crazy person, and that's pretty scary. I'd like to think the number is not that high. The FBI, or at least the non-Barr faction, would know for sure, and I hope to God they are monitoring these people like they always did in the past. 

I ask because Trump is like Charles Manson. He's quite a bit like him in fact. He's a con man with great charisma and a force of personality who is able to project his psyche onto other people in order to use them for his own purposes. Trump has an enormous psychic reservoir, which in his case was enabled by the media, which allowed him to spread his personality and his message on a nationwide scale. Manson had no tv coverage until he was caught, but he was still able to get young hippie girls to kill for him, by convincing them to do so. We have evidence of what a powerful sociopath can do, and I have thought for a while now that it would behoove us, not just as a nation but as a world society, to undertake a Major League Study, on the level of a psychiatric Manhattan Project, to identify the signs and traits of a blossoming psychopath in the same way we identify autism or other behavioral disorders. I mean, I'm sure that is done already, but it needs to be done most assuredly on men (or women, though they seem less susceptible to sociopathy) who seek power, or any position of authority.

The prime trait of a sociopath is the ability to deceive, to fit in as "normal" and hide their intentions. Trump was not a classic sociopath in that sense, because he always telegraphed to his followers exactly what he felt. But remember that he had spent the decades previous to his run for the Presidency simply as "The Donald", a semi-handsome rich guy who was known only as a bling-bling celebrity real estate magnate, who appeared in People magazine. He was quiet in those days, other than talking about his fabulous wealth and building projects. But as a true sociopath, he had a plan to gain power. And ultimately, he achieved it, and as he did his true personality came out, and we saw the monster.

Make no mistake (and I'm sure you won't), Trump is a monster. He's not just a whiner or a racist or a crook.

He's a very bad guy. The only thing that held him in check is that he was operating in America, where we can say "Fuck You" to the President, and where half of us can spot a sociopath coming a mile away.

For me, reading Mary Trump's book was quite enlightening, and I believe it will be the final word on Trump. Mary Trump asks the question, "Why does the media treat him as if he is normal"? What she means is "why do they treat him as if he is merely an asshole, rather than a certifiable sociopath"?

As noted, she is a PhD, a clinical psychologist. She's got her Uncle nailed down.

He's a psycho, and he's brought the crazies out of the woodwork.

His personality disorder is not all that different from Charles Manson's.

It's no joke, and he cannot be allowed to remain any kind of force in American politics. He, and his cronies like Steve Bannon, absolutely must be dealt with , because they are not joking in what they say.

I hope Joe Biden will reinstate a strong Justice Department and go after these people. They need to be brought to account. To do otherwise, to let them linger in the American political conversation, would be to everyone's peril.

Sorry for yet another political post, and I apologize also for unfinished thoughts. I am too tired to edit a rant right now, haha, and I hate all this stuff to begin with. But I was born in 1960, and I grew up during a time of idealism, in politics and in culture. JFK and The Beatles. I went to an integrated elementary school in 1967 that had every kind of kid you could imagine. But all we ever thought of ourselves as, was kids.

What kills me is the regression in this country. We were already moving forward in the 1960s! Black folks were moving into the middle class, becoming doctors and lawyers. We even had a black congresswoman, Shirley Chisolm, who ran for President. What Trump has done has been to take everything backwards, and to make people think it's always been this way. But it hasn't.

We were moving forward, forward, forward. I've been there to witness it.

All of this is why we absolutely cannot allow Donald Trump to walk away. He's got to pay a price for what he has done here, and so do his henchmen.

I hope the Biden justice department is listening. /////

Hallelujah and Good Riddance

 Like everyone else, I'm exhausted tonight. Exhausted but relieved. Last night at this time I was a nervous wreck, certain Trump had won but not knowing anything because I had turned the TV off early on election day. Once I heard the morning reports of super long voting lines in the battleground states, and the commentators' remarks that they were made up of likely Trump voters, I just felt sick. "Here we go again", I thought, and I turned the news off. After that, I assiduously avoided a tv set all day, and the only site I used on my computer was Amazon. I just didn't want to hear a thing about the election, for fear of having a stroke.

I even went to bed at 11pm, unheard of for me. Before I did, however, I wrote a tirade of a blog, decrying the pollsters, predicting a Trump win, and just generally venting my spleen. Like you, I despise Donald Trump. And I still decry the pollsters, particularly Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, whose word on anything in the future won't be worth a plugged nickel. But I'm glad I didn't publish that blog, because......

I couldn't sleep. When I woke up in the middle of the night, sometime during the wee hours, I decided I had to know. So, I did what I always do when one of my teams is playing in a big game, say the Super Bowl. If the game is close, or my team is losing, I always turn it off. I'm like Jerry West, who used to leave the building during Lakers games when he was general manager of the team. He said it stressed him out too much to watch, so he'd get in his car and drive around until the game was over. Then he'd come back to The Forum and find out who won. I'm the same way. If the Rams, Dodgers or Lakers are winning a blowout, no problem. But if it's close or they're losing? Off goes the tv set. Like Jerry West, I just can't watch.

So you can imagine how much worse it is with a Presidential race, when Satan is in the White House. The pollsters have all predicted a blowout. "Everyone will vote against Satan". Right? Only - as of yesterday morning anyway - it wasn't turning out that way. Almost half of American voters love Satan, or at least the privileged minion who serves him from the White House. Pretty spooky, eh?

But late last night (or early this morning, still dark outside), I woke up, came out to the living room, and turned on the tv. I muted it right away, so I wouldn't be able to hear any bad news. I also closed my eyes. I knew it was already set for MSNBC, so after steeling myself, I opened my eyes for a quick peek, expecting to see American flags waving like crazy at a Trump victory celebration. Instead, I saw James Carville sitting in his living room, wearing an American flag shirt. He was being interviewed, and speaking, so I dared to unmute the remote. Here's what I heard :

"And I'm confident enough with where we stand now, that we'll have enough to win when the other states report. I've waited four years for this, I can wait another four days".

And with that, the weight of the world fell from my shoulders.

It's not just that four more years of Trump would've killed me (and all of us), it's that four more years of Trumpism would've killed America. This past summer was crazy. Citizens fighting each other in the streets? With assault rifles? This is something we've never seen before, and it very well could have led to a mini-civil war. But now, as it is clear that Joe Biden will win the Presidency, we can slowly begin to reinstate law and order, to once again have a legitimate justice department, and to reduce chaos all around. Joe was exactly the right candidate to defeat Donald Trump, calm, experienced and running from the center. I've heard some complaining today that he didn't have a blowout. Well hey, he was running against the most meat-and-potatoes, drink raw blood son-of-a-bitch the Republicans have ever nominated, not to mention The Biggest A-Hole Who Ever Lived. The Right loves him for those very reasons! He's their #1 guy, he's Satan. So of course the pollsters were wrong! Of course the Repubs were gonna turn out in record numbers. They freaking worship Trump.

But look what Joe Biden did : he not only beat Trump in the popular vote by an even bigger margin than Hillary Clinton did, but he's gonna win the electoral college, too, and therefore the Presidency. He might wind up with 290 or even 300 votes if he can win Georgia and Pennsylvania.

He got more votes than any Presidential candidate in American history, even more than Obama, his former boss. And think about it : Joe was running against Trump, the Republican equivalent of Satan. Obama had it relatively easy in comparison. His opponents were McCain and Romney. Repubs don't like it when their nominee is a gentleman, and/or a R.I.N.O. They see those qualities as wimpy. That's why they didn't turn out for those guys. But give them a dirty rotten bastard for a candidate, a sociopath and a mean mf-er, and they'll show up in droves.

Joe had to beat Donald F. Trump, who was so much worshipped by the Republican party that every single one of their Senators and Congressmen bowed down at his feet, even guys he had belittled during the campaign.

And Joe did it. He beat this monster. The world is now rid of Donald Trump. So what's not to like? I say "Hallelujah"! and "Three Cheers For Joe Biden"! Three cheers for all the young people, also, who helped put him over the top. Three Cheers to the Midwesterners who helped restore the Blue Wall. Way to go Michigan, way to go Wisconsin! Good job, Elizabeth! And thanks to Bernie, also, for giving his endorsement to Biden. He wasn't my guy, but I know he was for a lot of Democrats, particularly younger folks, so Three Cheers to him also. I'm sure he will be rewarded in some way by the Biden administration.

And finally, Three Cheers for the African-Americans who always come up huge for the Democratic party. They might wind up being the final nail in Trump's coffin if we can overtake his rapidly shrinking lead in Georgia, and win that state tomorrow. 

I'll be honest, I wasn't a huge Joe Biden fan going in to this election season. I was hoping Hillary would run again, defeat Trump and get sweet revenge. I love the Clintons, and it would've gotten Bill back in the White House, too, as First Man. But when it became clear she was not gonna run, I began to listen to what the pundits were saying about the crop of Democratic candidates, and I started to watch Joe Biden. And by last March, when we had our primary, I was ready to vote for him. He looked like a good old fashioned American political candidate, steady and experienced. And he turned out to be pretty energetic, too, not the senile old fool the right tried to paint him as.

Way to go, Joe. You rock, as far as I'm concerned.

Now, I know I need to add the disclaimer that it's not officially over. In fact, there is still at this hour a horrific scenario in which Trump could overtake Biden in Arizona, and also hold on to his leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The cable news networks, especially MSNBC, like to keep everyone on tenterhooks, because it keeps viewers watching and raises ratings. But at this point, I am trusting experts like David Plouffe and James Carville, who were respectively Obama's and Bill Clinton's campaign managers. They are not mere pollsters - who as we now know are a joke - but real, on the ground right hand men to former candidates, both of whom became President. I trust what they say.

As you know, I don't like politics, so you won't be hearing from me on that subject during the Biden administration. My life is about a thousand other things besides politics, and even when George Dubya won the most contested election in history, and beat Al Gore (who I think would have been our best President ever), I eventually got over it. I knew Bush was gonna beat John Kerry and got over that, too, even though I certainly did not like George W. Bush. But I got over it because, in the final analysis, even though he sucked, he was from a professional political family and he at least tried to run things in a semblance of a dignified way, even if it didn't seem so at the time. But now, compare Dubya to Donald Trump, and you can see what I mean. I can accept a Republican presidency, if the President carries himself in a reasonably decent manner, and if his administration is not a complete circus. Even with Dick Cheney as his vice president, and a bunch of evil neo-cons as his henchmen, I could still ultimately forget about George Dubya Bush, and his Presidency, and live my life while it was happening. Because at least they were professional.

Not so with Donald Trump. I was never able to forget about him, not for one single day for the last four years, because he was in our face the entire time. He was not only The Biggest A-Hole In World History, but also The Biggest F*** Up, and The Biggest Liar. He very nearly destroyed our country, and Good Lord may we never forget that.

But soon he will be gone, and I hope we will forget him as a person, after he taxed so much of our attention on a daily basis. I hope he winds up in prison, where he belongs, in a cell with William Barr. There, they can line up for chow and sit on their bunks and reminisce about the good old days, locked down 24/7 like the children they caged, and we will never have to think about them ever again. Good effing riddance. ///// 

I Don't Like To Talk About Politics But Tonight I'll Make An Exception

 So whattaya think? Is it okay to be optimistic, maybe relax a little bit, or are they gonna pull the rug out from under us again? MSNBC has already begun their election coverage, they're pushing Biden of course, and their anchors are trying hard to keep the smiles off their faces as they note his leads in the various battleground states and especially in the all-important Pennsylvania, where they say he's all but guaranteed to win. Without coming out and saying so, they're acting like it's in the bag. James Carville says the networks will declare Biden the winner by 7pm (pacific time) tomorrow night. And Michael Moore, who against all odds predicted a Trump win in 2016, says that the only question remaining is the size of Biden's victory. Will he eke out a win or will it be a landslide?

Me, I'm not ready to let my guard down just yet. I mean, I'm not saying Trump is gonna win, only that we've been down this road twice before, in 2016 and also in 2000 with Bush/Gore, when NBC infamously named Gore the winner on election night, only to go back and retract their proclamation later on in the wee hours. That one was a gut punch, but the shock of Trump - of all people - beating Hillary Clinton four years ago felt like a decapitation.

I remember writing, right here at this blog, something to the effect of "Get ready to wake up to our first woman President. She's also gonna be one of the best Presidents we've ever had". I wrote that on election eve 2016, then around 7pm the next evening I sat benumbed in front of the tv as the CNN anchors, who did nothing but promote Trump the previous 18 months by giving him wall-to-wall coverage, soberly announced his electoral college victories in state after state. The map was filling up with red, and I just remember turning the tv off and shutting down inside, not just thinking "here we go again", but "what in the hell has happened to America"?

By now, we all know what has happened to America. The only question is will it happen again?

I really don't think it will, but..........

If it does, we're doomed, or if not doomed, we're well on the way to being so.

But what concerns me just as much, if Biden wins, is what our response will be to the Trump presidency once it is in our rearview mirror.

I don't think we can afford to let it pass, to just allow Trump and his cronies to walk away as losers. I think they need to be indicted, and indicted for every single crime they committed while in office. This includes Trump and William Barr of course, but I think it must extend all the way down the line, to Mike Pompeo, to Jared Kushner, and to every member of the Trump administration of whom it can be proved committed criminal acts.

These people need to be held accountable, or else someone will try it again at some point in the future. We were very lucky that Trump was a buffoon, rather than a man of determination and focus like Adolph Hitler. Trump is a wannabe, and we should thank our lucky stars for that, but what if we just brush off his aberration of a Presidency? What if we just say "whew, thank God that's over", and allow him to retire to Mar-A-Lago, and allow William Barr (a criminal of the first order and committer of treason) to walk free as well?

We will be inviting a far worse right wing candidate to run at some point in the future, and to run unscathed as Trump did. Think about it : while the media lambasted Trump on a daily basis for four years (after they helped him get elected), no one, including the much-hoped-for hero Robert Mueller, was ever able to make anything stick to the man. The Mueller Report amounted to nothing, the impeachment didn't remove him. He was able to publicly insult and belittle members of his staff, which included a four star General. He publicly encouraged violence, which resulted in death and with armed militia members openly parading in the streets.

So no, if he loses tomorrow, we cannot just let him walk away. He needs to be made an example of, as a warning to anyone who would try this again. Because here's the deal : we have a democracy, right? So what would happen if a majority of the population decided that they wanted to elect a ruthless dictator? Would that result be allowed to stand, even if the guy got the majority of votes and the electoral college? What if the guy ran on a platform of total domination against people the far right hates? Would the result be accepted, just because we live in a democracy and the vote was the will of the people?

What if one day, we elected a man who made Trump look like Mr. Rodgers? I'm not talking about a dictator who rose to power through a military coup or some kind of takeover, but one who was elected by the people, like Trump was.

We've seen that impeachment doesn't work to get rid of such a man, not if he's got every Senator and Congressperson in his party under his spell.

In short, what I'm saying is that if we just shrug, and let Trump slide, we could be opening the door down the road, for a far worse candidate, one who could become an elected dictator. A real dictator, like Hitler, not just a wannabe like Trump.

So, I think we have to show America and the world that candidates like Trump will not be tolerated in the future. I know we have free speech, etc., and we need to keep that right above all, but Trump won in large part because of all the coverage CNN gave him in 2016, and the things he said during his campaign appealed to the most base instincts in the people that became his unwavering "core". Those people suddenly felt justified and vindicated in their racist, hateful views, and they came out of the shadows to strut their stuff in full view, because Trump was their President. Again, witness the openness of the militias. Those groups used to hide in the woodwork during the tenure of other administrations.

We need to go back to having an FBI that has the edge over these groups. We need to send the fringe elements in this country back into their holes, where they can be infiltrated and kept at  bay. I'll get off my soapbox now, because I don't like to talk politics in the first place. I end up going off on every tangent imaginable and end up ranting. And that gets me to my final point for this blog.

I wish everyone would stop ranting, both on the Right and Left. I don't like rants. I don't like sides. As I've mentioned many times, when I was 20, up until about age 28, I thought I was a communist, or at least toyed with the idea, but even then my thoughts were not entirely devoted to politics, as seems to be the case for so many people these days. Yeah. young Me wanted to be a Commie, or as Far Left as I could go, but eventually I learned about Uncle Joe Stalin and Chairman Mao, and - "Hello Ad"! - I discovered that these guys and their systems were as bad or worse than Hitler's. Fascism, Communism, it's all the same, just located at two opposing ends of the spectrum : the Far Right and the Far Left. In reality, minus a few fine points, they are the same goddamn thing. And I don't want any part of either one, because all they want is to fight.

So the final point I wanna make is that I hope this country will move back toward the center. That's where I wound up, once Bill Clinton became President. I think he was one of the two best Presidents we've had in my lifetime, the other being John F. Kennedy. Both were centrist Democrats, and both presided over a time of prosperity and high optimism. Neither was perfect as a human being, but then who is?

The point is that they were great Presidents, and they governed from the center. Obama was pretty good too, and if we're gonna be fair, I'll include George Bush the First and Jimmah Carter. Both were decent men, and of course JC has gone on to become a great humanitarian. Even President Reagan made peace with Gorbachev and helped end the Cold War. 

I hope we can get back to civility in this country, and can stop all the hate and name calling, and that goes for the Left as well as the Right. Stop hating on people, people. The Internet had been a huge part of this problem, but just let people have their views. Most folks, Republican or Democrat, aren't killers. They just wanna live their lives.

So let's hope we end the Trump era tomorrow, and may we never return to such an awful place. A price must be paid for what has happened here, but it must be paid by the man himself, and his cronies, his co-conspirators. If there is justice, they will wind up in prison, and it will send the message to Never Try This Again.

As for the American people, we must come together, stop hating, and stay away from the fringe.

That's all I know and all the politics I hope to talk for quite some time to come.

See you in the morning. May it be a wonderful day, the day we've all been hoping for.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)

Happy Halloween + "The Devil Rides Out" (semi-jibberish review because of tiredness)

 Happy Halloween! I hope yours was a good one. Pearl and I had fun even though there were no Trick or Treaters this year. We still carved a pumpkin, and went for a walk around the neighborhood to check out the decorated houses, of which there were many. I don't know if other folks were doing trick or treat, or if they just decked their houses out for the fun of it, but in our area at least, there were actually more Halloween Houses than usual. I think people just wanna have some fun after all we've been through this year. Elizabeth, I hope you had a good Halloween, and were able to do something fun. Post a pic if you dressed up!

Shakespeare By The Sea streamed a live performance of "Titus Andronicus", one of The Bard's gorier plays. As you know, I'm a big fan of SBTS. I really missed seeing them live in the park this Summer, so it was cool to watch at least part of the broadcast, which I did in between my usual evening duties. If they leave it up on Youtube, I'll watch it uninterrupted next week.

But the piece de resistance for this Halloween was a screening of another Hammer Studios classic, "The Devil Rides Out"(1968), based on the novel of the same name by the late English occult author Dennis Wheatley. In a quick aside, it says on Wiki that some of his books, featuring a character named "Gregory Sallust", were a main inspiration for Ian Fleming's James Bond, a poignant connection to discover on the day Sean Connery died. At any rate, it appears that Wheatley was a best-selling writer during his career. I've only heard of him through this movie, but if it is any indication of the quality of his writing, I'll be looking into his work very soon. As for the movie, it was yet another film I came across through the constant hounding Amazon does, via it's recommendations. If you buy stuff or even click on a dvd from Hammer, for instance, Amazon will then hammer you with recommendations for Hammer. You already know this, of course, having your own list of recommendations I'm sure. But for me, two that they Hammered Home were "Plague of the Zombies" (reviewed in the last blog) and "The Devil Rides Out", which, like "Plague", was a rare find and high priced collector's item until Shout Factory released it, too, on Blu-ray a year ago.

Because I got such a good deal on "Plague" (as noted in the last blog), I figured "what the hell". It was Halloween and I needed to finally obtain both of these movies that have been bugging me for a few years. So, I kicked George Bush to the curb and went ahead and bought the Blu-ray of "Devil Rides Out", full price but free shipping (because Amazon), and even though it wasn't cheap, I'm pleased to say it was money well spent. I am new to Blu-ray, but these things look incredible.

The colors and photography alone on "Devil" are worth the price of admission. In another aside I must mention that both "Plague of the Zombies" and "Devil Rides Out" are Color By Deluxe, and when those films were made, in 1966 and '68, my Dad was vice president at Deluxe, so that was kind of cool to see.

But the thing is, we've been sticking to only the most evil films this Halloween, and "The Devil Rides Out", while very beautifully filmed and well acted, and made by a highly respected British studio, is nevertheless a sick and twisted story of a devil worshipping cult, led by a maniacal sociopath who has the power to call up old Splitfoot himself.

Christopher Lee stars as a good guy for once, which made me happy because I just saw "The Wicker Man" on TCM, and he makes me so mad as "Lord Summerisle" in that film. If there was ever a horror villain you wanted to punch, it's him. But he redeems himself as the Duc de Richeleau, who at the beginning of the movie has met up with an old army buddy from the Lafayette Escadrille. I don't know what they're doing in England if they're supposed to be French, but they're gonna go meet up with the son of a former third colleague who is now deceased. The trio had fought together in WW1. The third man was killed. Christopher Lee and "Rex", the second friend, have sworn to take care of the dead man's son. 

But when they arrive at his house in the English countryside, they discover that he's caught up in a Satanic Cult. This happens right at the beginning of the movie. Christopher Lee, as the Duc de Richleau, recognizes on the spot what is taking place. He's a hardcore Christian but has experience in black magic, so he immediately tries to pull the young man out of the cult he's immersed in.

In doing so, he crosses the Grand Wazoo of the cult, played Charles Gray, whose ice-blue eyes show the temperature of his blood. As badass as Christopher Lee is, and with all his horror credentials, he's gonna have to call up everything in his power, including a long lost Latin invocation, to deal with this guy.

"The Devil Rides Out" plays like a thriller for much of the way, but retains that pastoral English feel. The movie takes place in the late 1920s, but England is timeless, because of it's landscape. While it doesn't have the unrelenting grimness of "Plague of the Zombies" (which is downright brutal), it does give you that sharpness of Brrrittish intellect, where they see themselves as naturally above all other humanity, at least in matters of resolving good and evil.

The last paragraph probably sounds like a bunch of jibberish. That's because I'm super tired after a long day. But, I had a blast and I love Halloween, and tomorrow we get an extra hour to sleep, so I should be slightly more coherent in the next blog. I will definitely check in before the election. See you in the morning.

Tons of love!  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)