January 30, 2024

I have one movie, "The Bunker"(1981), which I chose despite its 151 minute running time because I could watch it over two nights. I think it was a two-part TV special when it aired in 1981. Back then, my friend Alex at MGM asked me if I'd watched it, and when I said "no, how was it?" he said it was pretty good except for the English accents. I think he may have also said that it depended on what the history really was, because no one really knew what happened in that bunker, but mostly he thought it was good. The problem for me was that I was expecting the Pissed-Off Hitler who explodes in Youtube rants about AC-DC concerts, or Led Zeppelin guitar solos, or whatever anyone wants him to get mad about. I'd forgotten all about the other Hitler bunker movie called "Downfall"(2004), which I'd seen, and I'd forgotten about Bruno Ganz's performance. He was the pissed-off Hitler.

"The Bunker" starred Anthony Hopkins, who used a vaguely German-tinged accent, but mostly spoke British, as did all the other actors (though one used his natural Midwestern-American accent; a German general from Omaha, anyone?) but the main deal, to get back to our review, was that I was expecting a different movie, because I'd forgotten about "Downfall". I thought Anthony Hopkins was the Hitler of Youtube meme fame, and I kept waiting for that scene, and it never happened.

Also, the Goebbles was a New York Treat Williams kind of guy. The Martin Bormann was good, and Richard Jordan as Albert Schpeer (pron.) was the best actor in the movie, which also featured many competent Brits in supporting roles, but some looked too 1981, or too young.

One thing I remembered was how beautiful Susan Blakely was. Remember her? She played Eva Braun, and even did a marginal accent. Her IMDB says she was born on a German USAF base, so maybe that helped.

All in all it was as Alex said: a pretty good flick. Very slow, and focusing on the relationship of Schpeer (spelled Speer) and Hitler, and the inevitable arrival of the Bolshevik Russians, and in that regard you almost feel like the writers had some last-minute sympathy, not for the Nazis but for the world, because no one, not even the Germans, was worse than the commies, a horde who had no dignity nor style.

But the main thing about "The Bunker", and "Downfall", is that both may not be factually true. And that's because, as Alex said, no one really knows what happened in that bunker. 

Hitler, like Charlie Chaplin before him, was, in part, an actor. And have you ever seen anyone with a Hitler mustache besides Chaplin or Ron Mael? No you haven't. But yeah, Hitler was a masterful actor. Watch his speeches, one of which ends "The Bunker", and then consider Josef Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, which is also the name of a Sparks album, and then tell me what we know about history of any kind.

And remember who you're talking to when you tell me.

I'm not saying World War Two didn't happen, or that Hitler wasn't real, nor any of that mumbo jumbo. Puh-leeze. All I am saying is that only three people have ever had a Hitler mustache.

And one of them wrote an album called "Propaganda".

Well anyhow.

I am thinking of Pat, whose birthday would've been today. He would have been 65. He was my friend for 50 years, and yet I think I know him better today than I did just one year ago. My goodness, how time has flown. Pat, of course, introduced me to Lillian, who knew Lys, who lived on Newcastle Street very close to Pat's parents. Lil and Lys went to Corvallis High, which was not far from Moby Disc records on Ventura Boulevard. Maybe a couple of miles. The story, when I met Lil and Lys (and Malia and Luanne) at the Capitol Records swap meet, (and wait a minute, was Luanne there?) was that the girls knew Pat from Moby Disc, where they went after school to browse records. So what a coincidence then, eh? That Lys would turn out to live less than 100 yards from Pat's parents' house. I'm not sure if Pat lived there in October 1980. That was when I met Lil and Lys (and Malia and maybe Luanne), and I say that because Pat moved around a lot. Sometimes he lived with his folks, sometimes not, going way back to when he was 14. But I went to the Newcastle house several times, dating back to high school (1974-77) when I'd go over now and then to listen to a record. Pat always had the latest and greatest albums. I know he was living there between October 1980 and June 1981, because it was in that interim that the Famous Newcastle Street Tennis Match happened. On that day (I've been trying to nail down the exact date) I was at Pat's house, and I left, probably to go home. And I got in my car (my BMW 320i) and I started to drive south, but I only got about 50 feet down the street because the Famous Tennis Match was taking place.

I was forced to stop my car.

And was that when I learned that Lys lived on Newcastle? It may have been. I'm not sure I knew it before the tennis match.

Anyhow, I am pretty sure that Pat never mentioned to me that Lys lived on Newcastle, just yards from his parents' house, where he, too, may have lived in 1980 and '81. When he introduced Lil and Lys at the swap meet, he just said they were two chicks from a nearby high school who came into Moby Disc. That was how he knew them. He apparently did not know Lys as a neighbor from Newcastle, or he would've said so.

Doubly amazing, coincidence-wise, is that the Wilsons also lived on Newcastle Street, and even closer to Pat's house than Lys was, although they were all within half a football field of each other. I used to push Pearl down that street, just south of Lorne, and marvel at the juxtaposition of the houses. I'd say to Pearl, "There's Sean's house, and right there is Pat's house (on the other side) and.....(pushing her wheelchair a little farther)...here is where Lys used to live." Then I'd say "that's perfection, Pearl." I used that phrase a lot with her, not just on Newcastle Street but all day long. I loved being her caregiver and miss her every day.

I don't know, however, if the Wilsons lived on Newcastle in 1981. They might've, but I'm not sure. And Sean, of course, had his Box to Talk to Hitler.

I need to go on a Reseda walk real soon.

Happy Birthday, Pat. Thanks for the memories. And thanks for introducing me to Lil.

January 25, 2024

In putting the finishing touches on one of my two upcoming books, I am trying to obtain permission to use copyrighted material: excerpts from other books and lyrics from two songs. I've had luck with the books; one turned out to be in the public domain, so no permission was necessary. With the other book, I contacted the publisher, who responded and sent me a permission form. But the song lyrics? That's proving to be a little more difficult. Not with requesting permission, but in trying to find out exactly who holds the copyright. On a very old song, it may have changed hands over the years, and in trying to look up the ownership, all kinds of names and LLCs are listed. Heck, I don't even know what an LLC is. I wish I had Lilly's help on this one. She could knock off these two permission requests without missing a beat on her regular job. If it proves too difficult, I could just fudge it, use only the song titles and "write my way" around the lyrics, but it would lessen the effect of the story.

So screw it, I'll keep trying. 

Last night's movie was "Fright"(1956), about a woman under hypnosis who believes she's a reincarnated princess. Nancy Malone co-stars as "Ann Summers", who falls into a trance as a spectator at a crime scene when psychiatrist Eric Fleming, assisting the police on a suicide call, uses "suggestion" to keep a murderer from jumping off a bridge. Because he is using a loudspeaker to talk, the crowd hears his voice, and Malone is "put under", just as Gilligan was when the Professor hypnotised Mary Ann and Gilligan was listening through the window.

Then Mary Ann became Ginger, and Ginger had to pretend she was Mary Ann so Mary Ann wouldn't "see herself" and freak out.

Have you ever been hypnotised? I have. I used to think it had happened to me once or twice, maybe five times. I wasn't sure. Now, I have no idea how many times I've been hypnotised, because it is apparently fairly easy to hypnotise me, if you know the secrets. Of course, you also have to be trained in hypnosis. And, it helps to slip me a Rohypnol. Not that I'll be accepting drinks from anyone anytime soon, but yeah, I've been "put under" many, many times. How about you?

Let's reverse that. Have you ever put anyone under hypnosis? Have you hypnotised anyone? If so, how did you do it? Did you use a mirror? Or maybe a small flashlight attached to your keychain? Was it a high-powered halogen light? I remember one time when the evil David Friedman wanted to show me a small but powerful halogen flashlight he'd been given. It wouldn't have fit on a keychain, but you get the idea. The shrink in last night's movie used a small flashlight in his technique. It looked like a halogen; who knew they had those in 1956?

Okay, so you have hypnotized people before. But have you ever tried to do it and the halogen light didn't work? Or it only worked halfway? Maybe your subject's eyes were still open, or maybe he or she was immobilized but still talking, or protesting, asking "what did you put in my drink?" Or maybe they were saying "I can't move but I can hear everything you are saying". Did that ever happen to you when you were hypnotizing people? And have you ever had to resort to the neck buzzer, or something even stronger like a stun gun?

You have? You've used the neck buzzer? Okay, good. So you know what one is. For those who don't, it's a buzzer, like a doorbell-sized thing but flatter, that a hypnotist holds in his palm and zaps you on the neck with when you aren't expecting it. He or she does this when they want to knock you out and you aren't cooperating. It you are only halfway knocked-out, from the Rohypnol they have slipped you, and the mirror-and-flashlight technique that almost-but-didn't-quite work, you will go down for the count like a good little subject when the hypnotist sneaks the neck buzzer on you.

That almost always works. But if it doesn't, then you're in for the stun gun, which is no fun. Boy, I can tell you about that one.

Now...I'm afraid I do have to ask you: have you ever used a stun gun on a person? Not to hypnotize them but to knock them the F out, when the hypnotism didn't work? You have? Wow. You are hard core.

Wait a sec. You say you haven't used a stun gun? Which is it? You have or you haven't? Now I'm gonna have to ask if you still beat your wife. 

Okay, okay.....so you haven't used a stun gun on any of your hypnosis subjects. But you know about the neck buzzer, no?

Then I say: you are one heck of a hypnotist.

Me? Though I've been hypnotised many times (how many I shudder to guess), I have never hypnotised anyone. I wouldn't know how. 

Let's change course. Here is a term for you: "partying". When I first heard it, in high school, my instinct was that I didn't like it. I knew about parties, like birthday parties.....but when I first heard someone use that term as a verb I thought "what in the world is party-ing"? It didn't sound good, and things that did not sound good did not feel good to me. They gave me a bad feeling. Not that party-ing was a huge deal, but I knew, upon hearing it, that it was not clean-cut like a birthday party with cake and ice cream. Party-ing was something frivolous. I knew this in my psyche, even as a fifteen or sixteen year old, or however old I was when I first heard someone say it. The word sounded silly. Then there was the attached question: "Do you party?" Aside from making no sense in a grammatical context, it just sounded stupid. It sounded cheap, but also intended to lure one into a dark pink undercurrent if asked by girls and a stoned-out wasteland by guys.

"Do you party?" What the F kind of question is that?

Well anyhow, if you're not hypnotizing anyone at the moment, or stomping on anyone's head with your steel toed boots, we can.....what's that? You say you don't wear your steel toed boots anymore? No? Oh, that's right. You've gone vegan and you don't wear leather. Forgive me, I forgot about that. There's so much to remember these days, what with all the information coming in. Yeah, veganism is cool. I'm not vegan myself, but it's admirable not to eat animals or use animal products. But I mean, you could still wear your boots. The cow that provided the leather is already dead. You might as well honor him by wearing him.

Or not. I sure don't wanna get into any vegan political debates. 

But what I was gonna say (and forget about the boots; wear 'em or don't wear 'em, it's your life) is that if you aren't hypnotizing anyone at the moment, maybe we could do something. Like what? Oh, I dunno. Maybe catch a movie?

Okay. I can see you're busy. I can come back another time. Hey - what do you do when you put a person under hypnosis anyway? Do you ask 'em questions, or get 'em to do silly stuff, like Pat Collins the Hip Hypnotist? Remember her? She had a stage show in which she'd take volunteers from the audience, put them under, then have them do silly stuff in front of all the people in the club. It was just for laughs, and it was voluntary. That's the important point.

Say, wait a minute. You don't put anyone under hypnosis without their permission, do you? You what?

You don't? It sounded like you said you do. I don't know why you would say that, or why you would put anyone under hypnosis without asking their permission, because that would be taking advantage, and we haven't got time right now to write a whole treatise on taking advantage of people. I won't ask you again what you just said, but it did sound like you answered "yes" to my question.

And I'm not gonna ask you again if you still beat your wife.   

January 23, 2024

We have one movie, "Chatterbox"(1936) starring the beautiful Anne Shirley. If you've never seen her, you are in for a treat. She often played self-possessed girls (girly girls, my favorite kind), girls with self-knowledge, and in this movie she is a talkative girl who wants to become an actress, so that she can play the same role her mother once played in a now-forbidden show. As the movie opens she appears to be in a locked-in state of performance. She's a chatterbox, thinking out loud, reciting every single thing that's on her mind. She tries out for a play, and desperately wants the local theater boy to take her with him to New York. When he refuses, she stows away in his closed-up rumble seat. Once in NYC, because of her verbal acuity she is chosen for a role in an ironic comedy, in which - without her knowledge - she will be made a fool of for her sincerity. The director even tells the lead actor how to tone his performance. "I want you to play it straight and let her be the clown. The audience will love it." And indeed, the audience laughs in all the wrong places.

This movie is genius, it's ahead of the time we are living in, but perhaps it was apt commentary of the time it was released. It depicts the mocking of sincerity by the ironic of the world, who - in the plot - aren't in theater for money, per se, or even for stardom (fame, attention) but because they do not understand what it means to be human. They are searching for meaning the way an emotionless Space Alien might study love and wonder what it is, or the beauty of nature, or the world. Not finding what they are searching for, or being able to attain it, they mock it. In the movie, these people are called "theater people" and they reside in New York. In "L.A." (as opposed to Los Angeles) they might be known as swingers or porno people. People without legitimate emotion. Ironic people.

Question: do you know what a subhuman is? Not as an epithet, but as a term of classification? You may have heard of the old, and now out of use, Five Classifications of Subnormal Intelligence: moron, imbecile, cretin, and idiot. Those are only four; I'm not sure of the fifth, and on a side note, they were appropriated in the '20s by a eugenics movement, a subject we haven't time for at the moment. But the important point is that the terms in question were clinical. They were not epithets. I know this because my great aunt Margy was a teacher of subnormal children in the 1920s and '30s, perhaps as far back as 1910 when she was 23 and the term "moron" was coined. But we've only mentioned four classifications. What was the fifth? is it possible that it was "subhuman"? Remember, that is not an epithet either, but a term of classification. Just because it is archaic, or has been banned or hush-hushed, doesn't take away the fact that it meant something specific.

To repeat, the use of these terms was not name-calling. They were not terms of ridicule. They were classifications, determined by doctors or those who studied the field of subnormal intelligence. Now, if the prefix "sub" means "below", i.e. submarine means "below the ocean", subnormal "below normal intelligence", then subhuman would be something below a human.

It is also worth noting the possibility that there may be a difference between humans and human beings. I mention this because I think a lot of history is hidden, and that the hidden parts are covered by a publicity sham. As another side note, you hear the word "authenticity" bandied about nowadays. "Show your authenticity!" Have you got your REAL I.D. card yet? You'll soon need one to board a plane. I am a student of the articulation and presentation of the English language, which I believe is by far the most varied and descriptive in all the human race. And there's another phrase for you. What is the human race? What is a race? As far as skin color goes, we can list Caucasians and the Black or African-American race, and others. A particular race, in other words, is a differentiation from another race.  So the human race must be a differentiation also, must it not? Otherwise, why call it a race, if not to underscore a difference from or with another race. But what is the other generalized race that humans are differentiated from? Since there is a human race, is there a human being race? Or something other than a generalized human race?

Just asking.

Because I believe in a high standard of articulation (not always, but when it is called for), and because I believe the archaic has been hidden for a reason.

Has anybody ever done anything without a reason? And there you have another interesting word: "anybody".

As a new author, a field I am hoping to enter soon, I have found myself in the editing process trying to choose between the words "anybody" and "anyone". Depending on the sentence, I go with whatever fits the rhythm. But shouldn't I be choosing between "body" and "one"? Shouldn't I consider the second syllables in those two variations of what seems to be the same word? Or are they the same word? Could they be two different words with two different, and very specific, meanings? Just wondering, because I think the English language is brilliantly constructed, and when I wonder how and why language came into being in the first place, I think it may have had an extremely specific purpose at one time, and that words that seem the same perhaps meant different things. Like any "body" versus any "one".

How (or why) did those differentiations come into being? 

Does the English language mean anything besides just jabbering away? Let me rephrase that. Does the English language have a purpose besides talk? Or in it's written form?

I think it does, and I think that in it's highest form, even above William Shakespeare, that it may be a sort of Magic Key. I am interested in word origins, and I am suspicious and distrustful and concerned about the motives of people, especially academics (a word we need to examine), who want to ban what they term archaic words or classifications. I'll bet my aunt Margy knew one heck of a lot about teaching. She really helped my Dad and his family. My Dad was brought up by three women. and my aunt Margy, whom I never met because she died long before I was ever born, ended up living with my Dad and Mom after they were married. Mom accompanied the ambulance to the hospital on the day aunt Margy died. Mom used to talk about aunt Margy more than Dad did, and I am glad to think of her today, even though I never knew her, because good people should be remembered, and never forgotten, and words should never be forgotten, be they new, archaic, or otherwise.

But back to subnormal intelligence as the possible fifth classification of "subhuman", I am not saying that it was the fifth classification, because I don't know. My Dad used to drive me past the Sunkist lemon factory on the way to San Fernando. I can still see the building near the Mission. All I know today is that I'm sure Dad said there were five classifications, not four. And we've only mentioned four. So it's worth considering whether subhuman is the fifth one.

My Dad did not b.s. about things. Blowhards took advantage of my Dad, because he drank and could be obnoxious, and worse, but - though blowhards tried hard to co-opt him, and draw him out (to learn secrets), and though Dad, due to a diminished capacity due to stress and hard drinking, succumbed in ways that let secret information get into the hands of bad people, he still kept his rock-solid bedrock core. My Dad was Air Force all the way, he was always the top of the top, a champion of all the things I am talking about in this blog, especially scholarship. Remember that one of three main women in his life, the ladies who raised him, was aunt Margy, a teacher. And my Mom, who Dad loved and married, was super smart and strong and they were both the highest of the high. Mom knew stuff that even my Dad didn't know, she was a brainiac, yet had to play dumb for most of her life. Well, not dumb, but she was not allowed to show her true level of intelligence, or chose not to show it, I don't know. She did say she was Dean's List and National Honor Society. Me? I had a 2.1 GPA when I left high school and was 60 credits short of graduating, so I took the Proficiency Exam and got out. I would've never had the discipline or the inclination to make Dean's List or National Honors Society, but Mom did. And yet she never talked about things like mathematics, or chemistry, or robotics or nuclear physics. Those were all subjects I became interested in, later in my life, long after I was out of high school.

I loved my parents beyond measure. And in their human-ness as my parents. Despite hardships, I loved them in ways that only an infant or a small boy would know. And my love for them not only never diminished, despite hardships, but grew over time until it became, as I like to say, "too big for even God to measure". I love you, Mom and Dad. And I love you, Aunt Margy. I feel you today in this writing.        

January 20, 2024

I have two movies, the first being "Cop Hater"(1958), a title I find distasteful but it was a pretty good flick in spite of that, about a dedicated detective trying to solve the killings of his partner and two other policemen in a precinct overrun with crime. A teenage street gang seems to hold an equal power balance with the police, which is strange. Why don't the cops just wipe these punks out? The gang are known as the Grovers, an unusual name (unless they mean it for Grover Cleveland), and their leader Jerry Orbach has no qualms and seemingly little fear about presenting a smug front to the commander of the station. Or maybe a sullen front. Sullen was a great word that has gone out of use, but it perfectly suited the demeanor of some teenagers in the heyday of youth culture.

The power balance in the film seems to stem from the amount of guns the Grovers have stashed around town. The cops are afraid to enter certain neighborhoods or go into certain dwellings due to the possibility of ambush. The commander threatens to wipe the smirk off Jerry Orbach's face and says, "I thought we had a truce with you punks?"

You can tell the police would like to steamroll these kids, but the gang has too much firepower to allow it, and it might erupt into a street war that would endanger local citizens.

But a young, slim Robert Loggia is gonna find the cop killer, because that is out of freaking bounds. First of all, are the killings related? There seems to be a pattern, and Orbach seems to be telling the truth about a recent gang revenge attack that resulted in a cop getting mugged. He says it was mistaken identity. Is there a higher power putting the screws to the Grovers? Loggia is gonna get to the bottom of it, but it's causing him stress which he drowns with a bottle. His beautiful deaf-mute wife is his savior.

Gerald O'Loughlin plays a macho, buffed up detective who walks around shirtless. He's got a swinger wife with a statuesque figure who seems to be supporting their lifestyle.

There's a lot going on under the surface of Cop Hater if you know what to look for. I didn't follow it as closely as I'd have liked to, but give it a shot.

Our other movie is "The Man I Married"(1940), starring Joan Bennett and Francis Lederer as a society couple who, as a favor to a friend, infiltrate the Dachau concentration camp to try and help a man escape. We've seen it before, and one of these days we need to do a Joan Bennett retrospective. She was a unique and uniquely beautiful and very talented actress who deserves more recognition.

I have good news to report at CSUN: signs have been posted on sandwich-board frames around campus, alerting riders of electric scooters of the protocols of using those vehicles. No riding on sidewalks, riders must stop at all stop signs, and no passengers. Hooray! It's a step in the right direction. Good for CSUN, and thank you.

Today was the 60th anniversary of the release date of "Meet the Beatles", which in many ways could be The Greatest Album Ever Made. It was certainly, for me, the record that got me rocking. I'm not sure that many things in any form, or any sensation - of touch, taste, smell, sight or hearing - affected me the way that album did. I'd really have to think about it, but yeah, from the first song (and especially that song) "I Want To Hold Your Hand", I was in. I played that album over and over and over again on my sisters' red plastic record box. I was 3 years and a little over nine months old. One thing that fazed me was that, on the back cover, George Harrison was listed as playing "lead" guitar. I got it confused with lead (the metal) and couldn't make the connection. "What's a lead guitar?" It was kind of like mixing up The Who with The Guess Who years later, and Rush with Mahogany Rush.

Judas Priest released a third song from their upcoming album. I've been very impressed by what I've heard so far. All three songs are great. They've taken their time with this one, and if the rest of the album holds to this standard it could be a JP classic. So far, it sounds like one of their '80s albums, as far as songwriting goes. The solos are all Richie Faulkner, but I wouldn't be surprised if Glenn Tipton co-composed them and said "hey, Richie, play this!" Not that Faulkner couldn't write them on his own, but they have that Tipton melodic counterpart, and Glenn, because of his condition, can't play those fast runs anymore. So he may have co-written them and said "Richie, go get 'em!" I am not a fan of shredding, but when you can do it like this, well....that's what makes it Judas Priest. And I think it was always Rob Halford's true calling to be a priest, not only of heavy metal but of Christian faith. He's bringing that through in his lyrics more than ever, especially in the new song "Crown of Horns".  

I am trying to buy a copy of Celtic Frost's "Cold Lake", the notorious CF "hair metal" album that Thomas Gabriel Fisher (aka Tom G. Warrior) has disowned. I bought a copy right after it was released on September 1, 1988, and at first, I was taken aback. The hairdos, the slick production.....what the hell? But (hey Tom, c'mon) many of the songs are good. Some are very good, in a more generic metal context. "Downtown Hanoi", "Cherry Orchards", "Petty Obsession", "Juices Like Wine". The whole first side is pretty good. It sounds like a commercial version of Celtic Frost, but if they'd have put it on the radio, it would've shook things up at the very least.

The problem is that now, even though it's supposedly reviled by fans and Tom G. Warrior alike, it's a collectors item and you've gotta pay $190 for a copy, which wouldn't be prudent as President Bush would say. I did find a copy for 20 bucks on discogs.com, but try signing in to that website and let me know how it goes.

I had a ticket to the Celtic Frost concert at The Country Club on April 7th, 1989. They were touring in support of "Cold Lake" (or maybe in spite of it), and I was stoked because I'd seen them in Long Beach in 1986 and 1987, both times at Fender's (and they killed), but now they were playing in Reseda, my hometown! Unfortunately I never made it to the Country Club show because of extenuating circumstances. It killed me not to go, and I even drove to the venue, but when I got there I thought it would not be prudent. 

January 17, 2024

I had an amazing experience just now. I went on my walk (my first of two for the evening), and I wanted to pass some earthquake sites, as today is the 30th anniversary. The first place I passed was the site of the Northridge Meadows, which has another building on it (since about 1999) but will always be The Meadows. I wanted to see if perhaps there was a news van parked in front. There wasn't, which surprised me, though maybe 30 years is a long time to warrant coverage of a specific location, even one as legendary as that place. Then I turned left at Plummer Street, and saw that the local Rite-Aid was dark at 7 pm. It has apparently gone out of business, as other neighborhood institutions recently have. The Rite-Aid was at that location for about 25 years, but the reason it was an institution was because it was a Thrifty before it was a Rite-Aid, and it was the same Thrifty that had been located at Reseda and Nordhoff since at least 1968, the one I used to play pinball at, and buy triple scoop Thirfty Ice Cream cones at, and the place where I met Pat F. So, essentially, even though it was now a Rite-Aid, and had relocated to Plummer and Reseda, it was still the Thrifty from days of yore, making it a Northridge Institution.

I then continued to CSUN to see if perchance there was a news van there. There was not. Maybe I went out too late in the day, I don't know. But I continued on across campus to The Soraya (formerly the Valley Performing Arts Center), where traffic was tied up by cars heading into the parking lot for whatever is playing tonight. I crossed the street and walked down Lindley to Osborne, intending to double back toward Etiwanda, and when I got there I continued to 9032, because I wanted to see the house in which I experienced the Northridge Earthquake. That house qualifies as an institution in my book. We lived there for 25 years. I'm sorry to report that it, too, seems to have "gone out of business" as it looks like a fortress now instead of a house, which I reported in another blog. I mean, it doesn't even resemble the house we lived in.

But here is the amazing part: as I walked past it, imagining the quake, and remembering how it felt to ride it out, I came to the front lawn, and something caught my eye, and I glanced down and I thought it was a cat. But in the moment it took for my eyes to adjust (no more than one second) I saw that it was a raccoon. And it was almost at my feet. It had crept up and walked around me, much as a cat might do on it's own property. If you read a recent blog, you might recall I had another amazing raccoon encounter just a week or two ago at CSUN, near my apartment. That one involved three raccoons who stopped and stared me down because I was unknowingly blocking their path to their yard. But tonight, it happened on the front lawn of 9032! I was on the sidewalk, and the raccoon just arced around me, about three feet from where I was, and he or she looked up as if to say, "Visiting your old home, eh? I live here now." It was all the more amazing because the timing had been perfect. But also, there is something spiritual or mystical about raccoons, I think. It's like they know something. The way they look at you. Possums are kind of like that, too. But not quite as much as raccoons. Anyhow, that was my walk. I continued on back after that, past Mike B.s house, and then past Audie Murphy's old house, and then made my way back up to my apartment.

I have a movie, "Ladies Crave Excitement"(1935), which may or may not be a true statement, or may be a generalization, but it's kind of a misleading title for the story of a newsreel cameraman who will chase down any scoop. He does have an exciting blonde girlfriend, but everyone in the flick is exciting, and excited - the action moves at warp speed and doesn't let up from frame one. I didn't catch the plot because of Life 2024, but it looked and sounded good, and you know, a lot of these '30s comedies work well just as dialogue, like a radio show, so if you nod off for a few seconds, don't worry. The movie works almost as well with eyes closed.

One thing that did catch me: they had one heck of a good chase scene with multiple cars, and we are talking big 1930s sedans and roadsters, so the stunt drivers must've been very talented in those days. It looks like they are driving through an old Valley canyon. It's well worth a watch just for that.

As for the Quake, I will always remember what preceded the shaking, something that was not much talked about, and maybe it wasn't heard in all locations, but in Northridge it was loud and clear. I remember that I had gotten up for a drink of water around 4 am. It had been a hot day that Sunday, and I had played football that afternoon. I'm a light sleeper and was thirsty and didn't really fall back to sleep. I had a small, portable black and white TV on the floor of my bedroom, and a rerun of "Dragnet" was playing. I probably had the sound low or off, but I was just lying there trying to fall back to sleep, when: "BOOM!>>>BOOM!" There were two sonic booms, or just plain booms. I would later tell fellow Quakers, "It sounded like a bomb going off". Yes folks, at least in the epicenter, in the heart of Northridge, you heard BOOM! BOOM! (like a gigantic bomb), immediately followed by an upward SLAMMING underneath your house which felt like the devil was punching through your floor. Then came the shaking, which was scarier than you knew an earthquake could be, like you were in a box being shaken by a giant the size of Planet Earth, accompanied by a sound that sounded - literally! - like a freight train running through your living room.

The Northridge Quake was the scariest doggone thing I've ever experienced (well, almost). But for sure it was the scariest natural disaster in my lifetime. It happened so fast, and I've only been in two major quakes (and a bunch of medium to minor ones), but in the first major quake, the Sylmar in February 1971, which happened about seven months after we moved to Rathburn, there was no BOOM BOOM, and there was no SLAMMM!! There was just a rumbling that grew stronger accompanied by uniform shaking (not the "trapped in a box" kind), and then heavy side to side shaking that felt like you were on the ocean in high seas. Excepting the Northridge Earthquake, that's what quakes have always felt like in my experience. They shake and they sway, and every one of them is scary: folks, earthquakes suck. But none of them went BOOM BOOM! Like the Northridge Quake did.

What also got me was the official magnitude, according to the Richter Scale. Lucy the Earthquake Lady from Caltech (who we got to know well from the news) reported that the quake was a 6.7, about the same as the Sylmar quake of '71. All of us at my house thought "hardly not even". It was a 10. You would've had to feel it for yourself to agree, but while riding it out, it literally felt like the whole wide world was tilting, while being pounded and shaken in a giant's fist. Then the whole world went black....

My life became the Northridge Quake after that. Photographing the damage became an obsession that led to my exploration of the Northridge Meadows, and that began a psychic and spiritual and memorial odyssey that I am still undergoing today. The Meadows changed my life, and I am planning to write a book about it, but it will take me a few years to get to. Mister Dave Small accompanied me on that journey, and Ryan, too. The Quake changed my life, in more ways than one. In a strange way, it felt like The Beginning of Something........     

January 15, 2024

Howdy folks, here's another late blog. That might be the norm rather than the exception for a while. I've never done so much writing in my life, and there are only so many hours in the day. In recent days I've just been watching documentaries rather than movies because I can't find anything new on Youtube. Tonight I watched an old Walter Cronkite doc on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. I do have one film, starring our pal Ron Foster, who keeps surprising us, popping up just when we thought we'd seen his entire repertoire. He's kind of like John Agar in that way, we keep finding new movies for him also, and both those guys were great. The movie I watched was called "Diary of a High School Bride"(1959), and unfortunately it wasn't one of Foster's best. He was good as always, and first time actress Anita Sands wasn't bad as the teenage bride in question, but the director or the producer or the screenwriter or someone made the decision to start the movie off as a kind of black comedic parody of whatever in-joke was going on in rehearsals, or in the filmmaker's minds - it seemed like a group decision. As the film opens, Foster and Sands are driving down the highway. To backtrack just a smidge, the title sequence shows them leaving Balboa Island, and that got my attention because my Dad used to take us down to Balboa when we were kids, and I always remembered the pier and a particular stand where they sold chocolate covered frozen bananas. I loved going to Balboa Island on the ferry, so in that respect, the movie started off on the right foot. I'd never seen a movie with Balboa Island as a location.

But then came the highway scene, the movie's first scene, and it looked like and felt sub-Roger Corman. The teenage bride (Sands) almost seems like a zombie or an automaton, riding in the passenger seat while Foster drives them home from their wedding, or maybe it was just the marriage registration, I don't know. I can barely pay attention to what I'm watching these days, though I try. But Sands' character talks like she's programmed, and she has a toy dog she clings to symbolically, like she's a Dolly Figure, and Foster is her master. It might have worked in the context of drive-in hipster cinema circa 1959 - the word "swinger" is used in a coffeehouse - but it comes off as bizarre when compared to other movies from the era, even the ones about teen hoodlums and rebels without causes. The director launches this flick like he's trying to make an interior statement, but then he levels off and steers course toward a standard 50s teenager movie in which the 25 year old Foster is seen as a "square" by the high schoolers, who ride around town with their molls. The conflict pits the former boyfriend of Sands against Foster. The boyfriend is the school stud, and is played by an actor named Chris Robinson, who I thought I recognized from somewhere, and it turned out (according to IMDB) that he was a soap star in the '80s who had a regular role on "Santa Barbara", which my Mom and I watched daily for a while around 1990 or 91. Robinson is the best thing in the movie as the "tough teen" (and of course he looks older than a high schooler) who can't deal with losing his possession (Sands) to the older, squarer Foster, who is also an ex-Marine and can therefore beat him up.

The movie is good as a curio, with some good coffeehouse scenes featuring a flamenco-pop guitarist and a Johnny Rivers type who is really good for one song, but it lost me with whatever they were trying for in the early "zombie bride" scenes, and I was never able to fully recover. But give it a shot for Ron Foster, who is incapable of turning in a bad performance.   

Here's a question: What do you guys think about movies from the '80s? Was it a good decade for motion pictures? Mediocre? Bad? I think overall, it was pretty good, although I'd have to see a lot of the movies from that decade over again to see how they hold up. One thing about movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood (1930s through the early 1950s) is that they hold up very well; every single movie that was good then is still good now, that's why you can watch a studio system movie again and again, and that's because they are stylized, the very thing that 1970s filmmakers, with their emphasis on realism, rejected. The '70s was a very good decade for movies, but maybe not as out-and-out great as we once thought. Realism has it's limits, especially if the actors are "in-crowd" types who are given free reign by an auteur director. The auteur theory (imagine having a "theory" about filmmaking, can you get any more pretentious?) was invented by the Europeans, especially the French directors of the 50s and 60s, who thought a movie should be the director's vision entirely. The American directors who took this stance, when the studio system collapsed, were telling stories through an American lens, and they knew things about a hidden America, an underground "big city" America, that most moviegoers weren't aware of. And so you had a hipster element that, in European cinema, would seem fun or whimsical or merely hip (as in Godard's goofy flicks), where as in Hollywood it came off not as hip but as as hip"ster". A "hipster" is someone who takes "what's hip" and tries to co-opt it by adding a subversive, semi-hidden element (hidden from the public) that only he and his fellow hip-sters, know about. Or so they assume.

Hipsterism is about showing up and making the scene, and using insider knowledge to show that you have a secret and are part of an in crowd, while knowing that nobody cares. But in getting back to 1970s movies, when you have an auteur director from Hollywood or New York, who considers him or herself "inside", and thus "edgy", and he passes this edginess on to his actors, who are itching to show off their edginess also, then you have The Method run amok. But generally speaking, even when '70s movies became too "gritty", with male sideburns on display (does anyone have sideburns anymore?), the movies were still pretty good. I am trying to get a fix on the '70s without relying on Taxi Driver or women's lib comedies. A movie like "The Exorcist" showed that the studio system, what remained of it, could still turn out an all-time masterpiece. Overall, then, we can say that the 1970s was a great decade for movies (but not as great as we thought), and for music it was off the charts. 1970s "rock and roll" music (a very broad spectrum) will never be topped, except perhaps by the pop music of the 1960s. And of course it's all subjective. 

I feel like I'm running off at the mouth, and that's because my mind is going a thousand miles an hour. I am working on my book, and I'm already up to 1989. Of course, it's only a first draft and will take many run-throughs because there is so much detail to remember. It would be great to have other input from other sources, and I'd love to interview anyone who was there.

I am looking for all kinds of details, for instance, yesterday I was trying to remember when my friend Mike B. moved away from Rathburn. Mike was the first kid I met when we moved to 9032. He came to the house just days after we moved there in June 1970 and introduced himself. He was 11, I was 10. When I was 12, Mike turned me on to the music of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. I have him to thank for introducing me to Ritchie Blackmore, my favorite musician. I went to high school with Mike (though he was a grade ahead), but we went to separate junior highs. Mike went to Northridge, I went to Holmes. Mike and I cruised Van Nuys Boulevard on Wednesday nights in the '70s, riding in his blue 1968 Corvette. We also went to many concerts together. In May 1979, I got Mike a job at MGM's Metrocolor Lab, after working there for three months myself. I saw an opening posted for Positive Developing, the department I was in, and mentioned it to Mike, who was working at Malibu Grand Prix at the time. He sounded enthused - it was a job in the motion picture business - so I told him I'd mention him to my foreman Jerry, which I did. Mike got hired shortly after that on my recommendation. We often rode together to work, trading off the driving duties, he in his blue Corvette, me in my blue BMW 320i. You never see a 320i on the road anymore. Someone should restore one. Those were awesome cars, except for the cooling system......

But yeah, I'm trying to pin down exactly when Mike moved away from Rathburn. I think it was in the Spring of '89. I hadn't seen him much for several years by that point, even though he lived just two doors away. That might've been because he stayed in the lab, while I quit in 1982, and he advanced in film processing until he eventually became a colorist, which I suppose was something like a timer. A timer was the guy who adjusted the color in the film, to perfect the imperfections from the camera. I'm sure it was quite a bit more complicated than that, but anyhow, Mike went up the ladder and had a variety of jobs at various places. He even worked at Skywalker Ranch for a short while (but quit because of all the yelling....it might've been like working for Bill Gates.)

Anyhow, yeah I lost track of Mike after 1982, though we did go to the beach one day in July 1984. Mike wanted to go to Zuma just once for old-times sake, because we used to go a lot in 1978. I will never forget coming home that day in '84, though. Mike turned on the radio, and as we crossed Kanan Road, we heard about the McDonald's massacre in San Ysidro. I got home and it was all over the news.

I didn't really see Mike after that, I don't think. His career took off, and I think he moved to Morrow Bay, or maybe he didn't move to Morrow Bay until the early '90s. Or maybe he and his wife (Mike got married) moved to Morrow Bay but his Mom stayed at the Rathburn house. I remember there was a time when Mike flew into Los Angeles (at Burbank) to work for three days, then flew back to Morrow Bay for the rest of the week.

I did see him, though, just before he moved from the Rathburn house for good. I think it was in Spring 1989. I want it to be accurate for my book.

And that's all I've got for today. ////  

January 11, 2024

Yet another unfortunate change in Northridge, this time at CSUN. I went for my walk last night, and when I got to the orange grove, I saw that the Bistro had been demolished. Kaboom, wiped out, completely gone. I wrote about it's coming demolition a few blogs ago, when I saw that it had been enclosed by a blue screened fence. The university has been planning a hotel at that location for at least five years, and I guess they finally got their wish. I can't think of a worse place to put a hotel than at the corner of Zelzah and Nordhoff. I imagine the semi-well-to-do  residents of the ridiculously named Sherwood Forest are none too happy about the development. CSUN: "Wham! In your faces, residents! A big ass hotel, right in the middle of your beloved orange trees."

Note: I don't dislike Sherwood Forest the neighborhood, only the name. We lived there, across from Cupid's (also now gone) before it was called Sherwood Forest. When I first heard of that name about ten years ago, I thought "where does the Sheriff of Nottingham live?"

Mom and I once met Robert Blake while pushing past the Orange Grove Bistro, an encounter you can read about if you search my blogs. We met him and both of us immediately thought "not guilty". Talk about doing jury service. But that's when the Bistro was seated low on the east side of the grove, unobtrusive and fitting in with the landscape. Nowadays, CSUN doesn't give a squat about the neighbors or their surroundings or the traffic, or all the electric scooters ridden by oblivious young people so lacking in the awareness of basic pedestrian safety that it's only a matter of time until someone is killed. 

Well anyhow, I'll shut up. I was just sad to see the Bistro go, even though I never ate there. It started out as a lunch club for CSUN faculty, at a time when the campus (if not the University) was slow-growth managed. It was planned to blend into the landscape, not dominate it. Now, CSUN is all about money, and it is slowly destroying what surrounds it, just like UCLA destroyed Westwood Village.

Me? I'm glad I rediscovered Reseda during the time I worked for Pearl. I still love Northridge, even though it's not what it used to be, and I still love the campus, on which I walk twice nightly. But I don't love the now-corporate University called CSUN. I liked it better in the 70s and 80s, and best when it was SFVSC. 

I have a couple of movies. The first one is "The Thousand Plane Raid"(1969), about a massive daylight precision bombing of Germany by the RAF and United States Air Force. Christopher George stars as an Air Force Colonel who convinces his superior officers that a daylight raid will end the war more quickly. When given the green light, he has to whip his pilots into shape. The storyline features the common "wayward pilot becomes a hero" subtheme. It's a good flick, with superior aerial combat footage featuring some incredible B-17 shots at ultra-low altitude. You can tell when some of the edits use models, but when they show the real plane it's pretty awesome. The acting is okay, sometimes so-so, but the movie holds your interest all the way through. What really got me, about a third of the way through, was when I remembered seeing it with my Dad in the theater way back in 1969 when it was released. He took me to every World War 2 film in those days, and this one may even have been a pre-release screening for the production executives and cast, and if so it would've been at Deluxe Laboratories or 20th Century Fox, because Deluxe did the processing when my Dad was still Vice President of West Coast Operations. Anyhow, check it out if you like WW2 movies and B-17s.

The other movie is "The Voice of Terror"(1942), a Sherlock Holmes flick from Universal starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the best Holmes/Watson team. They're updated in the modern day in World War 2 England, chasing a radio broadcasting pro-Nazi propagandist who has a perfect English accent. They think he may be a British Nazi sympathiser, and they run into a whole gang of Nazi saboteurs who are running British trains off the rails.

My Mom was in a train wreck in a town called Piqua, Ohio. It happened right after the war ended in May 1945. The train was carrying troops just returning from Germany. The derailment was rumored to be sabotage. Fortunately, no one was killed though many were injured. Mom said it was one of the scariest things she'd ever experienced.

I was just in Vons but I walked out without buying anything because a pint of ice cream is now seven dollars.

Do you ever go on Facebook and feel like everybody is speaking some suddenly awakened hive-mind language and you're the only one not in on the joke? Me neither. I get the joke but I still can't stand the Facebook hive mind. It's too smug and smarmy, like everyone's a pretend secret agent and itching to show their credentials.

Well anyhow. ///

Jury Duty

My jury duty is completed. I wasn't selected, but it turned out to be a positive and very interesting experience. I think we all dread jury duty when we get one of those letters in the mail, or at least we don't look forward to it. Or maybe dread is too strong a word. All I know is that when I received my recent summons, about a week before Christmas, I thought "oh geez", or maybe something a little stronger. The previous times I'd been summoned were all when I was caregiving for Pearl or my Mom. I had a legitimate excuse then, and I used it, because both ladies had no other person to replace me on the job, and thus I never had to report for jury duty. Since 2000, I think I've received about 5 summons, maybe 6. But even when you mail in your excuse, you still have to make those daily phone calls, five of them from Monday thru Friday of your jury service week, to see if you have to report. They never actually tell you "we've accepted your excuse", at least, that's the way it worked for me. However, in all the times I was summoned while caregiving, I never had to report. I'd call to check on Sunday night (no), then Monday (no), then Tuesday (no), and by Wednesday, if it was still no: "you do not have to report", I'd be thinking I was home free. Just one more "no" to go. Then when I got it, I'd breathe a sigh of relief. Jury duty avoided once again.

But this time, because I am no longer caregiving, I did not have that excuse. So I just crossed my fingers and figured, "if I have to report, I'll get through it." I do know three people who've been called to serve. One said it was horrible. The other two made it through the selection process and were actually chosen for juries. Both described it as an interesting experience, and one even said it was rewarding. Nevertheless, I wasn't looking forward to my service week, and crossed my fingers when I made those phone calls. The first one was easy. I called on New Year's Eve, knowing I wouldn't have to report for my first day because court is closed on January 1st. One down, four to go. My second call: "you do not have to report." Same with my third call on Tuesday. Only two more to go. On Wednesday: "you do not have to report." Only one more call to go. Surely I'd be home free once again, even without an excuse. So I made my final, required call last Thursday, just after 7pm, when the reporting instructions become available. My fingers were crossed, big time.

(c'mon, c'mon.....anticipation) Then: "You are ordered to report for jury service on Friday, January 5th, 2024. Your location has been changed to Van Nuys Superior Court East". Address, parking instructions, etc.

Okey dokey. I didn't escape it this time. And I am glad I did not, because it turned out to be one of the more interesting (and, yes, rewarding) experiences of my entire life. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. Even though I wasn't selected (and I could've taken it either way) the overall experience was fascinating and instructive, and there was just something about returning to the Van Nuys Courthouse, a place I had to visit on "the wrong side of the table" on many occasions in the mid-1990s. Even then, I always got a good feeling at Van Nuys, located in an old town, a place that feels like a Valley version of L.A. It always felt like an honest and a fair place, and actually describing the Van Nuys Civic Center, would - for me - take much effort and several blogs because I'd want to get the picture just right. But it just felt good to be there in a place were the legal system holds forth, and to be part of that system for two days. If you ever get called for jury service, here is what you can expect. In our courtroom, there were 34 prospective jurors. We were all given numbers and seated accordingly. The judge, in our case a Court Commissioner, asked us personal and probing questions, in order by our numbers. For jurors, names are not used in the courtroom. He told us that the questions would be personal, and added that if a juror felt uncomfortable answering any question in front of the entire group, that person could request a "sidebar" to be held in chambers with only the commissioner and the two attorneys present.

I had one question asked of me for which I requested a sidebar, which was held yesterday.

Overall it was quite a learning experience to be part of the courtroom process, to hear about the workings of a trial, and to answer the attorney's questions, which were presented to each juror, again in order of number, yesterday afternoon after lunch. I was asked questions by both the defense lawyer and the prosecutor, and answered truthfully and to the best of my ability. You learn the value of truth in a courtroom.

One other thing about jury service, if you do get a summons: bring a book. There's a lot of waiting around. But at Van Nuys, and maybe other courts, you get a 90 minute lunch. I took the opportunity to walk around the civic center area, and got three miles of my daily five in on Friday. I am glad they changed my location to Van Nuys, which also has a great view of the north half of the Valley from the upper floors of the Courthouse West. If you get tired of reading, you can watch the jets coming in slow to Burbank Airport. They look like big, colorful birds floating on an ocean of air. It almost looks like they are on a conveyor belt. It's mesmerising to watch them, and it helps make the waiting time go by.

So, in short, if you do get a jury summons, which if you are an adult of voting age, you will and probably already have.....don't dread it. Sure, you'll hope to get out of it, and you'll cross your fingers while making those phone calls to see if you have to report. I was disappointed on my fifth and last phone call, when I was told I had to come in, but again, for me it turned out to be a very positive experience, and one that I am glad I didn't miss out on. ////

Well, another Northridge institution is gone. Angelo's Barbershop, which had been located in the strip of shops next to Vons since at least 1968 when we moved to Northridge, now sits empty of everything except the sinks and counters, and the 1950s paneling on the wall. The classic red barbers chairs are gone, uprooted, leaving a bare floor. However, not to worry because Angelo's hasn't gone out of business, they've only moved across Nordhoff Street to a space by the Valley Federal Savings bank (now known as Chase). Still, it won't be the same without them next to Vons. 

Back in 1968, when we first moved to Northridge, I got my haircut (whenever my Dad made me, which was about every six to eight weeks), at the Northridge Barber Shop across the street by Alpha Beta and Northridge Books. All was well with that setup for about a year. But as I wrote in a fairly recent blog, I had particular things that scared me as a kid, and one day I went to Northridge Barber Shop, accompanied by my Dad, and the barber who cut my hair (regular boys style) had one of those electric vocal cord stimulators for people who've had their larynx removed. It was a little smaller than a transistor radio, and he held it to his throat to talk. "Regular boys, did you say?" And I cringed while saying "yes", because the guy sounded like a robot. I knew it was wrong to be scared of disabled people, but I hoped the guy wouldn't talk again during the course of the haircut. And when he finished and we left, I said nothing, but the next time Dad made me get my hair cut, I asked him if we could switch to Angelo's Barbershop across the street. I'd never have done that if it wasn't for the transistor radio guy, because the boys at my school called Angelo's "Von's Butcher Shop". It was said that they butchered your hair. That was likely false; Angelo was a renowned barber, and I got my hair cut there again in 1979 when I started at MGM and my foreman Jerry said I needed to cut my long hair because it could get stuck in a film developing machine. I got it cut at Angelo's. My friend the late Mike B. kept his hair long, and it did get caught in a machine!

Well, anyhow. That's about all I've got for today. I've also been working super hard on my book (where I am up to early 1988), and I'm trying to watch movies so I will have something to review for the blog. This is starting off to be an interesting year, a little chilly, but hey - that's L.A. Cold, and we all know there's nothing like it. ////

January 5, 2024

Today I started jury duty. My group is still in the selection process, so I don't know if I'll be chosen, but I go back Monday to find out. If I do become a juror, they say the trials usually last 5 to 7 days. I'll try to keep the blog on track, but even this one is several days late. Man, I used to crank out 300 or more every year. How the heck did I manage that? Well anyhow....

I was initially gonna write about bad guys, but I've had so much fun the past few days (before jury), writing about the early months of 1987, that I'll save the bad guys for another time. Or at least I'll try to. One thing about bad guys: they want to feel needed. They see life as a stage play, and they want to be included in the show. They believe that life, in order to be interesting, must have dramatic conflict. In Greek drama, of course, there are the 12 kinds of possible human conflict. Remember that course from 8th grade English? Did you have Mrs. Fields at Holmes Jr. High? She taught us the 12 types of dramatic conflict. There was Man Against Man, Man Against Nature, Man Against Himself....you can look 'em up. I don't remember all the archetypes right now, but the point is that the Greeks, or at least the Dramatic Greeks - the ones who wrote plays - thought that you needed conflict for drama, to make the play interesting, and they identified twelve types, and they made it a standard to include conflict in every play, even the comedies. In theory, then, you had to have something to produce that conflict, or the play would not be interesting. You needed a bad guy, or so it was thought, and the Greeks may well have been right. And the bad guy could even have been the weather, or an earthquake, i.e. Man Against Nature. But usually, the bad guy was a human being, because everyone could relate to that. Everyone has known a human bad guy, and who wants to watch a play where the actors just sit there picking flowers, right? And talking about how wonderful life is. That might not make an interesting play, any more than Andy Warhol's movie of Eight Hours Of A Skyscraper is an interesting movie. What was the box office on that flick? Zero dollars? Or maybe Andy was making a point, that you don't need conflict for a movie.

I think maybe you do, at least for movies and plays, and it doesn't have to be violent conflict. It can be farcical or what-have-you. It could be something to do with the family dog. But that's for movies and plays. You have to have a plot to make them entertaining, or no one will watch.

But what about life? Do you need to have conflict in life, to make it interesting, so that people will watch? I mean, some people do see life as a spectator sport, in which you cheer the good guys and jeer the bad guys, or vice versa. Some folks cheer the bad guys, and even go so far as to mock the good guys. The late and not-as-great-as-he-used-to-be Dave Small wrote poetry, and in one of his poems he wrote a line, a part of which I have never forgotten: "Mocking the heavy burdened." Mr. D nailed it with that line, regarding spiteful people who see life as a spectator sport, where all the world is in fact a stage, and the play is for their amusement.

But I say no to the trivialization of human emotion. Or worse, to the acceptance of actual, physical violence as the bad guy's right to act out what he sees as his role. And that's because I don't see life as a stage play. Whichever Shakespearean character said "all the world's a stage" was wrong, and Neil Peart was wrong to paraphrase him by saying: "All the world's a stage and we are merely players, performers and portrayers, each another's audience inside the gilded cage". Neil may have had another meaning in mind, regarding the fishbowl life of a rock star, but anyhow, what I am getting at is the tenet, false I believe, that you have to have Bad to know what Good is.

Is that a religious concept, or a philosophical one? Whichever, but I've heard people propose it; the idea that you can't know what Good is, unless you have something to compare it to, namely Bad. Or Evil. To know Good, you must have the counterweight of Evil. I think that's a gigantic bunch of baloney, and of course it is offered deliberately by the gigantic Bad Guy of the Universe, who also hopes you don't believe in him. And human bad guys don't believe in him....or do they? No one knows, but for sure they don't believe in God, because God scares them. And that's because God believes in our premise, that you don't need bad guys to make life interesting.

As for me, I don't think you need anything to compare Good to. A kiss is a kiss is a kiss. I don't need a punch in the nose to know that a kiss is good. You get the idea, but I'll bet it was a bad guy who first proposed that notion and got it rolling: "You have to have Bad to know Good".

And that's because the bottom line is that Bad Guys don't want to feel left out. They want to feel included and needed, because they do see life as a stage play, where everything is just ironic Play Acting, that we humans are all just playing our parts and that Good and Evil are just counterbalancing weights, and that nothing really matters, and we need an audience, and conflict, to make life interesting, and there won't be any consequences because it's all a stage play. It isn't real because it's all coming from the Id. The bad guy says, in essence, "I provide the conflict. What would you do without me? Your life would be pretty boring, right?"

And I say, "Yeah, but that's just for stage plays. In real life, we don't need bad guys." Have you ever seen a Squirrel Bad Guy, or a Dog Bad Guy? How about a Crow Bad Guy? No? And they get along okay regardless. I just saw a batch of squirrels today outside the Van Nuys Courthouse. They were running around, scurrying up and down trees, doing their Squirrel Thing. A guy came along and threw them some peanuts. Squirrels seem engaged whenever you see them, but you never see them fighting. So why do humans need bad guys?

The proverbial and perennial Bad Guy doesn't have an answer for that question, and seems depressed at the prospect that he isn't needed, and worse, that life is not a stage play after all.

And that's all I know for tonight. Tomorrow, I will look forward to working on 1987 again, the early months of which were plain fantastic.  I love you, Lilly. ////

Happy New Year, Four Movies

Hello, folks, and Happy New Year. We have four movies to report, the first a Noir called "Spoilers of the North"(1947) with a backdrop of commercial salmon fishing, starring Paul Kelly and the beautiful Evelyn Ankers of Universal monster movie fame. The salmon context is very interesting, involving poaching and Indian water rights, though the main plot is your basic love quadrangle. We also have "Five Golden Hours"(1961), a British-Italian co-production from the era of the United Nations and Pan Am airlines. Ernie Kovacs stars as a professional pall-bearer who preys of the grief of wealthy widows, to relieve them of their money and hopefully "have some fun" in the bargain. But then he meets his match in Cyd Charisse, who's gamemanship outplays his own.

Comedy ensues, and it was instructive to watch Kovacs, who died tragically at the height of his fame in an auto accident not long after this film was made. He was only 43 years old. But in this movie, you can see his influence on so many comedians, especially - in one scene - John Belushi, for whom Kovacs must've been an idol. I'd say John Candy, too, and it's likely that every male actor from the early casts of SNL took bits and pieces from his style. In this flick, Kovacs is low key. He just wants easy money, and has to put up with the hijinx of the other, loaded broads while chasing the ultra-alluring Charisse, who lives in a castle but is broke. What to do? Choose money or the goddess? Being a genius manipulator, he concocts a scheme to save Cyd's castle (and hopefully win her heart in the process) whilst bilking a woman in New York through an investment scheme that involves transatlantic time zones. 

I was only 75% present while watching, and only that much because of Cyd Charisse, a long time favorite. Kovacs was great too, and a surprise because we'd never seen him before. Overall, the movie is a classic jet setting, European-location co-production from the Camelot era. The early '60s were the best, when JFK was riding high. 

Ernie Kovacs died in a Corvair. Those cars were notorious for their rear-mounted engines - in the freakin' trunk, the trunk was the hood! - and due to their rear-heavy balance, they swayed around turns, especially at speed. Many Corvairs wiped out. In 1975, I was with Grimsley in a Corvair owned by one of his early landlords. We got stuck on a lawn in Beverly Hills when Grim tried to cross through someone's circular driveway as a prank. The Corvair's engine got stuck in the soft soil of the lawn and we had to lift/dig the car out. Luckily, we didn't get caught, or have the hard-core Beverly Hills police called on us. But I never rode in a Corvair again, and they stopped making 'em because folks were getting killed. 

Our third movie is "Actors and Sin"(1952). I wanted to like it because it starred Edward G. Robinson, Marsha Hunt and Eddie Albert, but I could tell within the first five minutes that it was gonna be a trial to sit through. It was written by Ben Hecht, who we've commented on before. Hecht wrote many classics, his resume is hard to beat, but he was also a provocateur, a total commie and a pot-stirrer. What we are learning about commies is that they very often have a lot to hide, and their so-called politics are often just a front to cover something shady. It's like when you find out that far-left democrats are embezzlers, and drug running crooks. You're shocked, right? Because they're supposed to be the great crusaders against corruption. So it's the same deal with commies when you find out that they aren't for "the people" but are strictly in business for themselves.

They use all kinds of tricks, and a guy like Ben Hecht knows the language. Part of that language is non-stop irony, and it's what's on display in this film. I noticed something in my mid-twenties, coming out of the half-generation behind me, the one I call the "H.R. Pufinstuff Generation". Nothing against H.R. Pufinstuff, the show's just a reference point, but the kids of this era grew up in SWAS, a communist school system, where they sat on couches instead of at desks. They called their teachers by their first names instead of Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith.

And thus they had no discipline, and grew up thinking everything was ironic. Nothing was serious, it was hip to be jaded. There was no right or wrong, all was subjective, and it was all about getting what you want out of life by setting your own rules. And very dangerously, a new version of history was being taught, in which the good guys were now the bad guys. America was bad. H.R. Pufinstuff grew up scorning his own country, as I did, too, when I was far left in my 20s. 

But the bottom line was nihilism, and I was never nihilistic, then or now. H.R. Pufinstuff was nihilistic, however, and for him, nothing meant anything because everything was ironic. Life was all play-acting, and there was no such thing as God. The teacher was the same as the student. It would be like going to a concert where the band expected the audience to play the songs. The audience would think, "who's in charge here?" Well, no one is, because everything's ironic. It's communism! It's all good!

Remember that one? "It's all good!" That was a big one about 20 to 25 years ago, coming out of the New Age movement. It was "all good", because there was no right and wrong. They had to hedge a bit on the moral relativism because (cough cough) well....ahem...."okay, children, you shouldn't murder anyone"....but other than that? It was All Good!

Try telling that to victims of violence. 

But the bottom line for people who got fooled by this schtick, was that they ended up with No There There. Once there was a hippie chick; at least on the surface, you would take her for a total hippie. She wore peasant dresses, combat boots (because she was also a little bit punk), and she had the whole New Age thing down. She likely wouldn't be caught dead in a church, and you could bet she voted a straight far-left democrat ticket. She was a woman of the people, right?

Wrong. She turned out to be nothing but a prostitute, selling her body for money. In other words, she was a total phony.

So the whole left-wing commie thing is a joke. Commies don't care about any "people" but themselves. And they often have a boatload of hidden money.

The Pufinstuff/SWAS thing was a brainwash. I was fortunate to attend a real school, which taught real history and the values of the Greatest Generation. But anyhow, I'll shut up, because Happy New Year and God Bless.

Our fourth film was a gem, perfect for New Year's Eve. "I Was an Adventuress"(1940) stars a lady named Vera Zorina, who I'd neither seen nor heard of, but who turns out to be not only stunningly beautiful but accomplished in more ways than one. First and foremost she was a ballerina, which - if you didn't know it going in - you won't find out until well into the film. She was married to the legendary choreographer George Balanchine, aka "Mr. B", and was a noted dance teacher herself. But as the movie opens, and for the first half hour, you don't know this. Your introduction is to a gorgeous comedienne in the exotic, quasi-Russian/Nordic mold that was popular in the Grand Staircase pictures of the 1930s. Zorina (she goes by one name in the credits) is always dressed to the hilt. She holds her own with co-stars Peter Lorre and Erich Von Stroheim, no easy task, and she's only 23. She grabs you from the first frame of the movie.

The trio are con artists who team up to sell the same piece of worthless jewelry (a brooch, "not 'broach', Gilligan!") to gullible men who are taken with and mesmerized by Zorina, who poses as a countess. Peter Lorre is a pickpocket who steals the brooch back, so the gang can sell it again on another ocean cruise. Ocean liners were also a big thing in stylish 1930s movies.

What happens is that Zorina scams a handsome gent who is especially susceptible. He loses his shirt and can't afford the loss, unlike the gang's other wealthy marks, and she feels bad for tricking him. Romance ensues, but because she's still in the gang, he gets his heart broken by Zorina repeatedly. Finally, Lorre and Von Stroheim set it up to put them together in marriage. 

It's rare for Erich Von Stroheim to take a back seat to anyone. Normally, he is chewing the scenery in that unusual Midwestern-with-a-touch-of-Boston German accent of his. Here, he lets Zorina steal the show, and it's her movie all the way, including how she is photographed to look perfect from every angle. Boy, did those '30s cinematographers know profiles and portrait lighting, and which side of the face looked best in what light. They were Glamour Scientists, and the actresses knew their own best sides, too. You can't take your eyes off Zorina, with her cute accent and overbite. She gets to show off her ballet skills, too, and finishes the movie by starring in Swan Lake. According to IMDB, her Hollywood career didn't take off as expected. I can't imagine why, unless she wouldn't play the game, because she has talent in every way and would have been box office gold. 

These were our final films of the strange year of 2023. I have no idea what '24 will look like, blogwise. I was struggling to keep it going in the last months of '23, because my life became a torrent of information. I will try hard to keep writing every other day. I might miss a few days here and there, because I am doing so much writing on Other Things, and as I examine my life, its just one shocker after another. 

I've mentioned that I'm working on my new book, and have had a nice time writing about the year 1981, and I also mentioned Lillian, saying I had some very good memories from that year.

Today, I remembered something from July 1989, at a harrowing time in our relationship. And what I remembered was so profound that I want to apologize again to her, on the one-in-a-million chance she's reading, for any hurtful names I have used in these blogs or any hurtful things I have said about her. I said what I said because I didn't know the whole story, and I didn't know the whole story because there were things I didn't remember until just now, literally until just the past few days. I'd prefer to tell her in person or in a letter, but that mode of communication hasn't been possible for many years (though I wish it was), and the reason I'd prefer it is because it's nobody else's business. But all I have is this blog, where other people can read my apology to her (to you, Lillian). I have a feeling you will know what I am referring to regarding July '89.

Anyway, I'm sorry, Lilly, for saying those things in recent blogs. I've been seeking the truth about what happened for many years, for more than a third of a century. I've never given up, because I've always known that the truth matters. I hope you are doing well, and I hope we can say hello one day.  ////