The world was a much better place when you could get licorice. Well, maybe it wasn’t better, but at least you could get licorice. Not that red stuff, either, or the blue or green or pink or yellow. Banana licorice? Watermelon licorice? Fruity berry licorice? I asked the lady behind the counter if they had any licorice. Sure, and she pointed to the red, blue, green, pink and yellow. No, I mean real licorice, black licorice. They have black licorice? What flavor is it? Licorice, I said. Licorice is a flavor? Well, it was.
Monthly Archives: February 2017
A Thousand Clowns
A Thousand Clowns. I saw this in a hippie movie theater when I was maybe 17 or 18 and it ruined my life. Jason Robards as worthless bum writer Martin Burns is great, as always. So is Martin Balsam as his brother (and won an Oscar for it). William Daniels. Barbara Harris. The thing oozes and crackles with smartassery and stagecraft. Barry Gordon won the best supporting kid ever award, or should have anyway, he is beyond terrific. And Gene Saks does a monologue wearing chipmunk ears that is to monologues in chipmunk ears what Charlie Parker was to the Great American Songbook. He’s flying so high and so fast that Jason Robards retreats to the window sill mid-monologue and looks offstage, laughing, so not to blow the take. And you know that was one take, had to be. One glorious take. If I had to pick one scene and one scene only in all of filmdom that was my favorite scene ever, it would be Gene Saks in chipmunk ears, raving. It’s not on YouTube. It’s not in the IMDB quotes. It exists only in the last twenty minutes of this flick. I sit here watching and waiting.
Herb Gardner wrote this thing. It was a play, on or off Broadway, one of those early sixties thing, a hit with bohos, jazzbos (Gerry Mulligan and Judy Holliday wrote the number under the credits), folkies, beatniks and New York intellectuals. Gardner wrote this screen adaptation, too, when they filmed it in 1965. The screenplay has that pre-hippie pacing, sharp, twisting, ironic, bitter, funny as hell. Lots of ultra loud John Philip Sousa and crazy cuts, segues shattered like shards of glass. It’s not surreal so much as bent. The script anyway. But Gene Saks takes it to another planet in his big scene, like a Catskills comedy club in a galaxy far away. Dialog and trialog and quadrilog, even, all follow the script. It’s Gene Saks’ monologues I worry about, they are so crazed. The other players scatter out of the way. Some of his lines, surely, were written. But they’re the bare melody, the head arrangement, as he must have winged (wung?) most of those monologues with Rod Steiger abandon, if Steiger were funny and Jewish and had body language like Dick Van Dyke in a nuthouse. Sometimes Saks’ schtick is demented Yiddish stand up compressed into a rant. Other times it’s jazz baby, riffing on words, alliterative triplets and quatrains going on and on till dropping back into the head arrangement, goofy and breathless. Damn. Like I said I was sixteen, or seventeen, something, when I first saw this, tucked into a Depression era seat in a beat up hippie art house theater. I’d gone to see some Woody Allen flicks, I think. In between was this. A bunch of it went over my idiot head, the rest left an indelible impression, like the brown acid they warned about, and I think it damaged my chromosomes. Hell, just look at this essay. If things aren’t funny then they’re exactly what they are, Murray says at some point, and then they’re like a long dental appointment.
Tooth.
Gene Saks and Gene Saks.
Thoughts on a few seconds of The Third Man
Interesting bit in The Third Man that few probably pick upon anymore…after Holley Martins (Joseph Cotten) first meets Baron Kurtz, they go walking down the sidewalk together. Kurtz has vaguely Mediterranean features and it dawned on me that the character might be Jewish. It had never occurred to me before because Austria had been thoroughly Judenrein by an especially efficient Nazi administration. Apparently this Kurtz would have been one of those who had either survived the death camps or been in hiding in Vienna for six long years. Now he was making his living in a vaguely Fagin sort of way, Graham Greene falling back on an old and cringeworthy English literary trope. Then again, perhaps I was imagining all this. Perhaps Kurtz represented some sort of Austro-Hungarian Balkan-Mediterranean blend. After all the Hapsburg empire, though officially German speaking (outside of Hungary, but that’s another story), had been a swirl of ethnicities, never been even close to the Germanic stereotype. If you listen you can even hear bits of Italian in the German dialogue, unthinkable in Berlin. Now we watch Baron Kurtz and the Joseph Cotten character walk down the street. An Austrian policeman on his beat walks toward them, still with a Gestapo-ish hint of a Hitler mustache. The cop pays no attention to either of them, nor does Holley, with his American film noir disrespect for cops (I hate coppers, as Cagney seemed to always say), pay attention to the cop. Kurtz does, however. He looks up, sees the cop, and with the alacrity of experience steps out into the street. The cop passes and Kurtz gets back on the sidewalk. What might be taken for a little common sense courtesy had, I’m sure, a much darker meaning. Nazi law forbade Jews to walk on sidewalks. Jews on sidewalks were beaten. In Riga they were killed on the spot. I saw that microcosmic scene within a scene, those few steps, and knew that Kurtz was Jewish. Sometimes a few seconds of film illuminate vast crimes and unspeakable tragedies, throwing shadows you never noticed before.
About me
TCM is weirding me out. First there were giant ants in the river behind me. Now there’s a guy named Brick bossing John Wayne around. Next up is the Thin Man, which I haven’t been in a long time. Then a loser writer in the Third Man, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and I do little enough as it is, and finally A Thousand Clowns, about a do little writer. What is Robert Osborne trying to tell me? If this is narcissism, you can have it.
Lou Christie
I don’t recommend it, especially if you used to do a lot of acid or are prone to bouts of schizophrenia or maybe just missed a dose of your epilepsy meds, but it turns out that if you play Lightning Strikes five times simultaneously, beginning each about five seconds into the one before, it will build into this high pitched polyrhythmic cacophony somewhat reminiscent of the Shaggs backing the Four Seasons with Rashied Ali on drums. For maybe ten seconds it is out there heaven. Then it just gets stupid and you take your epilepsy meds and swear you’ll never mention this to anyone.
Great song, though.
Yes L.A.
I loved this album and somehow never bought it and it disappeared from the stores quickly. Believe it or not, there was no internet then, and no way to get a record once it was gone from the stores. Life was brutal, cave men like. We lived in holes in the ground and ate meat raw and listened to punk rock. And of all my favorite albums I never owned, this was probably my favoritest.
New Lows
Any fans of heavy, raw Aussie old school punk rock like X (aka the Australian X), etc, need to check out the cd by the San Francisco trio called the New Lows. Chris Guttmacher on drums. It’s maybe twenty years old with a power trio stripped down all to fuck kinda sound as the defrocked jazz critics say and I have no idea where you can find it besides Blue Bag Records in Cambridge. No, Massachusetts. If punk rock this past twenty years were a clarinet solo then the New Lows would be Pee Wee Russell to everyone else’s Benny Goodman. I’ve been switching off between jazz and the New Lows today, which while probably not healthy, has been bonecrackingly eclectic. In fact, as Joe Henderson just did His Thing, I think I’ll listen to the New Lows and listen to the bones crack again.
Pete Christlieb
(2004)
On Friday Henri’s in Canoga Park was cooking. The John Hammond Trio–with Jim Hughart on bass, Ralph Penland drums—has been together a helluva long time, and they play like a real unit…to top it off, tenor sax ace Pete Christlieb has been playing with them for a long time now, probably for hundreds of hours. They come together for some pretty intricate ensemble like arrangements that you just won’t see in most clubs. It’s an older, more relaxed style of jazz, some classic Blue Note feeling, and then sometimes it reminds me of even older sessions, like the feeling that is on that Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio record. Reaching back, these guys, to Prez and Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. Christlieb is just a superb saxophonist…he sits there on a stool between solos grinning and bouncing about like an oversized cherub, and then he picks up his horn again and blows these long, bluesy cadenzas just packed with ideas, and then suddenly sails into an effortless–my vocabulary is failing me here–an effortless flight that just fills the room with so much energy. And he makes it seem so easy. I had been listening to that record he did with Warne Marsh, Apogee, on the way out there and damn if he didn’t quote it once or twice. Christlieb with Hammond and his trio is yet another absurdly underrated jazz experience that this city offers, and they seem to play at least weekly.
Classic Rock
What Classic Rock Band Are You? asks the Facebook quiz. My friend said he was the Beatles. Another was the Stones. Another said he was Led Zeppelin. One guy said Jimi Hendrix, but I think he lied and was just trying to get laid. He’s more a Supertramp in real life. But try to get laid as Supertramp. Dreamer, indeed.
I wanted to join in but I hate those stupid what kind of whatever are you quiz things. Doubtless there’s a jazz one out there somewhere. All these jazz buffs coming up Kenny G and claiming to be Miles.
But this was the What Classic Rock Band Are You quiz and I was feeling left out of the Facebook fun–that’s what Facebook is all about, fun–so I lied and said I was Widowmaker. None of you have ever heard of Widowmaker. I think there was somebody sorta kinda somebody in Widowmaker. I could look it up. I could. Anyway I remember back in around 1976 they were getting a push from whatever record company had signed them and I can still hear the hook of their smash hit song. I think it had two chords, though mostly one. It had a plodding boogie beat and a boring singer. Maybe twenty seconds of that. It was a short commercial. I remember thinking I would never buy that record ever, even with that smash hit song. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who thought that. That smash hit song was never a smash hit. And I knew I would never ever have to think about Widowmaker again.
In stepped fate. I saw them. There I was in my seat and the emcee announced England’s newest sensation, Widowmaker! Scattered applause. The only thing I remember was that twenty seconds of their smash hit song. The rest is a blur. Well, not a blur exactly, more a blank. I don’t recall the audience being excited. In fact, by the time the band was finished everyone just seemed depressed. Even Santana seemed depressed. I’d just seen Santana tear the roof of the Swing Auditorium in San Berdoo twice in a row, a pair of the greatest rock concerts I ever saw but here they were just sort of there. It was like Widowmaker had sucked the air right out of the room. And the Starlight Amphitheater is an outdoor venue. So it was like Widowmaker had sucked the air right out of Burbank.
That’s all I know about Widowmaker. Which is why they are the Classic Rock Band that I am. But only because it’s Monday. Tomorrow I’ll be the Five Man Electrical Band. On Wednesday I’ll be the guys that did that song about I’m your Vehicle, baby. On Thursday I’ll be the Band. Friday the Mahavishnu Orchestra. And Saturday I’ll be Jimi Hendrix. Watch out ladies.
OK, not the real Jimi Hendrix, not at my age, but Mahogany Rush, who I saw once and made me permanently deaf even though they were lousy. At least Widowmaker didn’t hurt me.
Widowmaker. Just try to make them laugh.
Polly the parakeet
(2013)
So when I flipped on the TV last night to watch Earth vs Flying Saucers again, George Burns faded into a parakeet. A mechanical parakeet. Name of Polly. Polly turns its head and chirps. That was about it, head turn, chirp, head turn, chirp. It really sent the people in the commercial. The old lady cooed, the kids were wowed, and the young woman reached into its cage and petted it. Petted a mechanical parakeet. Petted and whispered sweet nothings to a mechanical device. Somewhere in China they’re churning out Polly’s by the boatload, and somewhere in America people are keeping them in cages just like real parakeets.
I told myself, no, no they aren’t. No one has a cage with a mechanical parakeet in it.
In ancient China they did. Palace gardens with fountains and flowers and mechanical birds. They were marvels. But that was back then. A mechanical bird was quite a feat of engineering. Now, it’s positively primitive. But nevermind the bird. What’s with the woman petting and talking to it? And why the cage? Polly isn’t likely to fly out. All Polly can do is turn its mechanical head and let out a chirp. It’s that woman I worry about. Of course she’s an actress. She’s being paid to talk to that mechanical parakeet. Not paid much, I’m sure, but a gig is a gig. It’s the ones who aren’t actresses that weird me out. The ones who paid good money (plus shipping and handling) to talk to Polly. Coo at Polly. Pet Polly. Sit there hour after hour, teaching Polly to say hello. Of course if they’re sweet old ladies, it’s not an issue. Sweet old ladies who talk to mechanical parakeets are not really a problem. Sweet old ladies do things like that, and Polly the Parakeet doesn’t smell like a house full of cats. But if you see a guy my size talking to a mechanical parakeet, it’s time to move to the front of the bus.
Somebody should break the news to this lady, but gently.
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