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
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
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
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’.
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