Monthly Archives: December 2017

Edie Adams

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Man, Edie Adam’s did a devastating Marilyn Monroe parody. If Marilyn hadn’t been so fucked up she might have sued. It surpassed even SCTV’s Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin at their cruelest. I saw it on the Edie Adam’s box set, I imagine some one has put it on YouTube as well. Also, among the many long buried treasures revealed in this collection is a solid dozen minutes of the Woody Herman Big Band c.1963, and what a blazing aggregation that was. You could hear that music in a club now and it would still sound state of the art. Were I Scott Yanow I could rattle off the soloists, but alas I ain’t. A smoking young bunch they were however. And in that very same program the daring Edie gave Jack Sheldon six or seven minutes to go a surreal monologue about falconry that was as hysterical as it was weird. Clean, though. She must have warned him.

I met Edie Adam’s several times. Had a few extended conversations. Wonderful stories, wonderful lady. 

Merle Haggard Christmas album

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This Merle Haggard Christmas album begins with a cheery If We Make It Through December and stumbles along in boozy haze till everyone’s miserable. His rotten kid is demanding a puppy and tell me that’s not the most self pitying Silent Night ever. And that’s just one side. Think I’ll flip it over and see if he gets insulted by a drunken Santa. It ends with Daddy Won’t Be Home Again For Christmas, which hopefully is about prison. I’ll probably be playing this every Christmas.

You need to write as well as they play.

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Ran into Louis Van Taylor last nite. Damn what a player. Had one of those casually intense conversations that are the hallmarks of jazz players, and I remember how I had to earn my way into those conversations by writing like a motherfucker. I gotta say I miss that rarified air. I vividly remember the moment I realized I’d been accepted into the fold when me and some of LA’s finest players were sitting in a Glendale bar between sets, surrounded by drunks and Armenians and insulting each other. You’re one of us, they said. Fuck you, I said. Mutual respect, be bop style. If you’re gonna write about jazz, you need to write as well as they play.

Coffee

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Most vile cup of coffee I ever made was in 1979  when my percolator went berzerk and reduced a whole pot to an an ounce or two of bitter meth. I downed it in a single gulp since I was cramming for a final in some ridiculously difficult class, and while catching a couple hours sleep in the wee hours of the morning had one helluva seizure and when I got to the class for the exam had amnesia and couldn’t remember a single thing. I turned in an empty paper and flunked the course. Never managed a cup of coffee like that again.

My fave Christmas LP

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Peace by the Rotary Connection is still my fave Christmas LP, a psychedelic hippie stoner funky soul celebration of my fave holiday, complete with groovy Hendrix inspired guitar and Santa so stoned he can’t find the door and comes down the chimney. Minnie Ripperton sounds great on it too. Recommended. I found my unopened copy for a dollar.

Julie Newmar

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I don’t know what movie this is, but Julie Newmar looks like she could hurt James Mason. In fact, Julie Newmar looks like she could hurt me. Pretty good Swedish accent, too, quite musical. Though imagining Julie Newmar hurting both me and James Mason in a Swedish accent seems weird.

Dunkirk

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Saw Dunkirk. Quite a let down. As an action flick it was pretty good, and a lot of it was gorgeous, but as far as being in anyway a reflection or retelling of the battle and rescue at Dunkirk, it flopped. It failed badly as history, which wouldn’t be an issue except that it presented itself as a historical epic. The three primary narrative threads–the RAF pilots, the soldiers on the beach, and the boat–all avoided showing the evacuation completely. The pilots engaged in dog fights over the channel, the soldiers spent the entire evacuation in the hold of a beached fishing boat acting like a cowardly mob instead of a platoon of Royal infantry, and the boat picked up soldiers without getting anywhere near the beach. All three subplots were arranged so that we never saw the evacuation off the beaches at all. It’d be like shooting The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan without showing the D-Day landings. Perhaps there was no financing. So we get an action flick instead of a historical drama. But it’s a shame, as it was an epic operation,  some very high drama, and an extraordinary tale, and we miss nearly all of it in this film that promised all of that. Imagine what David Lean could have done with such material.

Scenes From the Class Struggle In Beverly Hills 

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Just watched Scenes From the Class Struggle In Beverly Hills for the first time in decades. Funny flick, man, though I suppose it’s even funnier if you’re from L.A. It’s kind of a really fucked up Philadelphia Story. It ends and I turn it off and switch on the radio and there’s Dwight Trible and my mind tripped over itself shifting from one to the other.

Washington Capitals

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I would love to know the Deep State machinations behind the Washington Capitols games being televised more than all the other NHL teams combined. You only get to see a team if they play the  Caps. It’s weird. In fact, right now I’m watching the Washington Capitols vs the Washington Capitols. I knew this would happen.

Charlie Barnett

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About a decade ago some ancient record geek died and the grandkids dropped off his perfectly maintained collection of swing albums at a Goodwill. Without telling Fyl I bought over a hundred of them. We’ll write it off, I told her later, which we did, helping to undermine the economy. Anyway, I listened to a mess of them, the Basie and Ellington and Artie Shaw and scads more, gave some lame ones to Alan Hambra, who is still mad, and tucked a sizeable proportion into my closet, awaiting the hipster big bang revival when they’ll be worth a zillion dollars. That hasn’t happened yet. So sometimes I dig though the box and pull out a few obscure albums. It really is hard to feel hip and with it listening to Charlie Barnett but damn if Roy Eldridge didn’t burn the place down on that opening solo, and the band is tight and swinging, Buddy DeFranco is on clarinet, Dodo Marmarosa on piano, the drum and bass and guitar section almost like Basie’s, and I’d forgotten how wonderful a singer Kay Starr was. August of 1944 this was, and the Yanks are racing across France to this stuff. Swing helped win the war, or didn’t lose it anyway.

No Cherokee, though.