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.
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
Washington Capitals
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
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.
Sticky
Just noticed that the bottle of maple syrup in the fridge was from 1992. We didn’t buy it, it’s one of those inexplicable corporate promotions that seems completely unrelated to pure maple syrup. As we have pancakes about once a millennium and waffles even less, not to mention my phobia of anything sticky, the bottle is still in there, in its third refrigerated universe. Still viably liquid and sweet. The same bottle you pretended to chug-a-lug while drunkenly searching for beer at an Xmas party long ago.
Habs
Montreal Canadiens are having their worst season in seventy eight years. Pretty cool when you have to dig that deep into history to find out how lousy you are. There might be no one alive who can say, in French, you think these guys are merde? You shoulda been here in 1938….
Amboy Dukes
Ted Nugent’s guitar playing on the Amboy Dukes Migration lp can be best described as tasty. Even tasteful. I found the record amid a pile of Artie Shaw rarities in the closet. Must have been a thrift store find. It’s all very musical and eclectic and psychedelic. Except for Rusty Day who sounds like Grover of Sesame Street, and maybe is. Was. One of those long forgotten rock’n’roll mass shootings.
That’s it.
Artie Shaw records
These Artie Shaw records are great. A whole mess of them, broadcasts mostly, in beautiful condition, like the obsessive uncle died and the kids dropped his boring old records off at the Goodwill. That must be how they wound up in my closet with my old shirts and Ted Nugent. Anyway Dodo Marmarosa is cooking and Little Jazz blows high and Dave Tough–another epileptic–keeps it swinging as Artie is between Ava and Lana.
Too Late For Tears
Saw the 1949 film noir Too Late For Tears last nite. Great LA location shots, money is the root of all evil, Dan Duryea was a drunken bum with a yellow streak down his back wide as Wilshire Boulevard, you used to be able to rent motor boats in MacArthur Park (then still Westlake Park as MacArthur was hadn’t yet faded away) and that dame Lizbeth Scott is up to no good. Also way less trees in town back then. You wonder what they did for shade. Much harder to lurk in all that sunshine. And in film noir, one lurks.
Also saw Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) for the zillionth time. I had a dream, a scene stealing Kirk Douglas (even more cowardly than Dan Duryea, with a yellow streak wide as the San Fernando Valley) says to quintessential everyman he man Van Heflin, and you were in it. You did not make a handsome corpse. Van Heflin was too cool to care, and Barbara Stanwyk slithered into the room, the most beautiful snake ever. No anklet tho’.
Big TNT Show
Speaking of Boomers, we watched the Big TNT Show at our neighbor’s pad last night. Never seen it before. My faves were Bo Diddley (who I saw open for the Clash a zillion years ago), The Lovin’ Spoonful (who were incredibly loose and high and actually fucked up and had to start over again, giggling, it was beautiful), Donovan, and Roger Miller, tho’ it was nearly all great, and judging from his conducting chops, David McCallum didn’t have a musical bone in his body.
I sprained my pinkie sleeping yesterday (my lamest injury ever, a big man with a sprained pinkie) which could give me the excuse to watch Monterey Pop, Don’t Look Back, Gimme Shelter, Woodstock and A Film About Jimi Hendrix in one long pseudo acid trip on TCM today. Some of the same acts as the Big TNT Show, though much, much higher. Tina Turner was in the Big TNT Show (with a big bruise on her arm), but I remember seeing her in Gimme Shelter at the Wilshire Theatre when I was sixteen and thinking I wanted a girlfriend just like that, or even a school teacher.
I had no idea I used my pinkie to hit the tab key until just now.
Gibbsville
(2014)
You can have all your fancy foodie artisanal cheeses, I’m a Gibbsville guy. Pure Wisconsin cheese. And though a Wisconsinite completely weirded me out the first time I was ever offered one, I came to adore cheese curds. They remained a mystery to me, though, I had no idea how they came to be. Are they some off bi-product of cheese making? Do they fall upon Gibbsville like manna from heaven? Maybe it’s a high tech technology. Something as impenetrable as Sheepshead, full of digital tuffets and industrial weigh. Way. Whatever.
Then wow…I come across actual photographic evidence of the Gibbsville cheese curd machine! I’ve never seen it before. I’ve been to Gibbsville many times–it’s just past Sheboygan, by the big tree–but the cheese curd machine was hidden from view. I always figured it was huge and top secret, like the Hadron Collider. I guess not. Still, this picture is exciting. It’s so atomic age. Not a cow to be seen. Not even a bratwurst. Nor an unsmiling Norwegian working a butter churn. Maybe it’s Friday night and they’re all at Fish Fry. Even the Norwegians go to Fish Fry. They turn off the Lutheran for the night and join the Poles observing Lent. Another round for Olaf here! And ya still got some of dat schnapps dere? Schnapps? You betcha!
Sometimes I really miss Wisconsin, and I never even lived there.
One time we forgot to get cheese curds for the Christmas party and there was a riot.
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