Refrigerator

Posted on by

Bought a refrigerator today. It immediately occurred to me that we had never bought a refrigerator before. There was always one there, in the kitchen, when we moved in. Then this ancient Admiral we’ve had for decades–perhaps you’ve drunk far too many beers from it–went terminal. We went through the usual stages, denial, etc., but the repairman made it clear we needed another refrigerator. A new one, he said, is better than paying the repairman. Then he asked for forty dollars. I sighed and paid up and then did several very dull hours worth of research on refrigerators. There is nothing exciting about refrigerators. Nothing sexy. Married couples don’t post videos of themselves making love on the refrigerator. Washing machines, dryers, even a turned on dishwasher, yes, but never atop the refrigerator. I did so much research on refrigerators that I was able to recognize them by model number alone. Is that the Haier HT21TS45SW? Wow! Consumer Reports raved about that one! (They did, too.) Oh, it’s the HT21TS45SB. The twenty cubic footer. Never mind.

So we wound up at Lowes tonight and got a new Frigidaire for a song…well, a song and five hundred bucks. Model FFTR1821QW. Eighteen cubic feet, top freezer, white (black was more expensive, and the stainless steel seemed decadent.) There are pictures on the Lowes site, both bare and shiny and ethereal or packed full of all kinds of product placement, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. It goes nicely with the brand new bathroom sink, or would, except it’s in the kitchen. And no, it has no ice maker. But still, are these exciting times or what?

My wife spent $14 at Nordstrom

Posted on by

My wife went to Nordstrom yesterday, bought a nice blouse and a some earrings–costume earrings, yes, but very attractive–and somehow spent $14. As in fourteen dollars.  I didn’t even know it was physically possible to spend $14 at Nordstrom. I didn’t think the cash registers went below $100. I once looked at silk handkerchiefs there until I saw they were $105. Each. Those must be some silkworms. They can probably talk. Sears had silk handkerchiefs for five bucks, like you can tell the difference? A piece of colored silk jammed in the breast pocket is a piece of colored silk jammed in the breast pocket. But my wife spent $14 at Nordstrom. The fools sent her a $20 discount certificate and she finds $34 worth of stuff. Hell, I didn’t even know they had anything for $34 dollars in Nordstrom–two things at that. At first I thought she went to J.C. Penney’s. Everything in Penney’s cost $14. Or ought to. But my wife had the Nordstrom sales slip. It said right on it: $14. As in fourteen dollars. So I figure someone must have bought the blouse and earrings for $14 at Penney’s but decided to return them and so returned them to Nordstrom . It’s much easier that way. Nordstrom will take anything. The story goes a lady took a set of tires back to Nordstrom to get her money back. Nordstrom doesn’t sell tires. But the lady insisted that she bought them there. So they refunded her the money. They not only refunded her the money but bought her lunch in the cafe and let talk to the silkworms. Now that’s what I call customer service.

Costco

Posted on by

So a Costco membership is fifty five dollars? You give them $55 for the privilege of giving them more money when you actually buy stuff? Am I missing something? That’s a workable business model? It must be. It’s like Scientology for shoppers. Do they wear the Star Trek uniforms too? No, they don’t, not yet. But the Costco parking lot near us is a little creepy, all those hordes of people with that identical expression. I can’t explain it, sort of a fanatically determined shopping look. A couple weeks ago I was going to one of the restaurants nearby and parked on the Costco side of the lot. Big mistake. As soon as I got out of the car and began walking in the wrong direction I was spotted, detected, sensed somehow, and the people turned on me. We’re going to Costco, come with us. I said no, I was going somewhere else. They said you’re going to Costco. I said no I wasn’t. They said you are and I started to get nervous. But I’m not a member I said. You can sign up, they said. But I don’t want to sign up I said. You don’t want to be a member they said? Not for $55 I said. Why not they said. I don’t feel like paying that much to go to a store. They said sure you do. I said no I don’t. They said come on, just sign up. I said no, it’s expensive and it’s a hassle. They said it’s easy. Easy? Yes, easy. All you have to do is fall asleep. It’s painless.

$55 is not painless. So I ran. They ran after me. You are not of the body they yelled, chasing me down with their shopping carts piled high with 100 roll packages of toilet paper. I ran for my life. Then the siren wailed and they all stopped, turned around and walked towards the store. Weena stop I cried. But she went into the store with them. Down came the iron doors. Weena was in there. Frantic, I ran out into Los Feliz Boulevard, waving my arms and yelling. Listen to me! Listen to me! Those people that are coming after me, they’re not human! You fools! You’re in danger! Can’t you see? They’re after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone on your shopping list! You’re next! You’re next! You’re–and I was flattened by a big Costco Truck. The police opened the back and it was filled floor to ceiling with 100 roll packages of toilet paper. More toilet paper than you have ever seen in your life. You gotta tell them. You gotta tell them. Costco toilet paper is made out of people.

Night of the Lepus

Posted on by

(2010)

I stayed up way late last night to watch the classic Night of the Lepus once again. Janet Leigh, Stuart Whitman, Rory Calhoun, Bones and a whole bunch of huge, crazed, carnivorous rabbits.  We’re talking late night early 70′s eco-horror at its finest. Or to quote the sheriff:

“Ladies and Gentleman, there’s a herd of giant killer rabbits coming this way and we desperately need your help.”

Delivered straight. High beams flash and horns blow in appreciation.

I have to say that it’s been 35 years since I first heard that line and it still packs a punch.  I was young then, a smarmy teen, and laughed in hysterics when I first heard it… But last night I listened in admiration at the hapless little nothing of an actor forced to utter it (through a megaphone no less). I wondered about  the talentless hack who wrote it, and how could he have ever written it, and if he was drunk at the time. Or was he suicidal even, knowing full well that this was his one shot at the big time, any kind of big time, and all he could come up was a line about giant rabbits.  Audiences must have laughed themselves silly. No one blamed the actor the actor with the megaphone…who was far enough from the camera to maintain a degree of anonymity, thank god…but only the youngest children in those seats, popcorn all over their laps and ssssshing their giggling older brothers, could not fail to see just how pathetic that sentence was.

Now, though, I’m older, lots older.  I’m not a rock star, or President, or a world famous writer or world famous anything. I don’t live in one of those big houses on the hill. So I can feel the pain of the actor with that megaphone. He needed the bread. He had bills to pay, mouths to feed (and not rabbit mouths). We all do humiliating things. We have all uttered warnings about metaphorical herds of killer rabbits.  Or something to that effect.  Just not so incredibly stupid.

The wife and I drove across the lonely stretches of the Colorado Plateau this past summer.  It’s that highland — dry grasses, sparse, so lonely– that stretches from the northern third of Arizona to the Rockies, and north into Utah and Colorado. There’s nothing there. Cattle, lean and weather beaten. Some small towns, abandoned farms. Nights are vast and black and full of UFO’s and other scary things. Days are haunted by long vanished Indian civilizations. I love it there. This was the setting for the movie. Way out there. At some point on a trek, when we get off the interstate and head off on some state highway or county road and things get really empty out there, I think of Night of the Lepus. To me, the high Arizona desert and those goddamn rabbits are permanently enmeshed. And at some point on the trek, I find myself saying aloud that there’s a herd of giant killer rabbits heading this way.

Which kinda wrecks the whole mood, since it’s the stupidest line from the stupidest critters-gone-wild flick ever. Dumber even than Frogs, where the vicious racist wheelchair-bound Ray Milland gets his karmic comeuppance from a house full of frogs (not giant frogs either, just frogs) who apparently kill him in some unexplained way. Dumber even than a terrified Marjoe Gortner in Food of the Gods asking Ida Lupino where’s she’d gotten that big chicken. (Though it was a big chicken.)

And if you think about it, and I do, there is nothing so profoundly dumb as killer bunnies. Not even DeForrest Kelly can make it believable. And he dealt with Lizard Men, salt creatures, and hortas. Here he just looked sad in that little mustache. I hope Janet Leigh was nice to him.

But I digress.

There’s a herd of giant killer rabbits coming this way.

There’s a herd of giant killer rabbits coming this way.

Fatty Arbuckle

Posted on by

Poor Fatty Arbuckle. Every time some big star becomes enmeshed in an especially tawdry scandal–and it’s hard to think of a scandal more tawdry than Bill’s Cosby’s right now–Fatty Arbuckle gets dragged into it. The Hearst newspaper syndicate (a prototype for both FoxNews and TMZ) did its job well. Fatty Arbuckle has been smeared for all time.

Of course Bill Cosby, by his own admission, is guilty as hell. Fatty was not. In fact, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was as innocent of the charges against him as it was possible to be. So much so that in his third and final rape and homicide trial, the jury composed the following note that the jury foreman read aloud in court:

“Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed. The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in  no way responsible. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and woman who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.”

The American people didn’t, unfortunately, and Arbuckle was ruined both in life and legacy. Bill Cosby is another Fatty Arbuckle somebody said. Except that he is not. Fatty Arbuckle was innocent. Virginia Rappe, the young woman whose death in 1921 sparked the entire media circus, is buried at Hollywood Forever cemetery. The interment was a spectacle, with throngs of reporters and the morbidly curious. They are still curious. They pass by her grave every year, and the lascivious details are repeated, every one of them as false as when they were first written, and often as not believed.

Fatty Arbuckle died in 1933. Things were finally looking up, and he had just been signed that day to a new movie deal. There was a celebration at dinner with his wife and friends, then home to bed. He died in his sleep. The service was small, after which the body was cremated, the ashes scattered over the Pacific and blown away with the wind.

Elis Regina

Posted on by

I cannot believe I have never seen this before…Elis Regina in an extraordinary take on Águas de Março that I assume was cut during the Elis & Tom sessions in 1974. Crazy phrasing, daring rhythm, and listen to that band, simultaneously so loose and always there. I really dig those drums, I’m such a sucker for Brazilian drummers, and it must be Paulinho Braga, one of the very best. Check out that over the shoulder shot of his brushes dancing off the snare. Cool. I love snare drums. Looking at that but listening to her phrasing, damn, I could listen to this over and over just to hear her phrasing. The track’s ending is a little better realized on the LP, but the gorgeously lilting surdo which propels it on vinyl is here a tad madder, a tad more oblique, more accidental and inspired, pure Elis.

George Sanders

Posted on by

Village of the Damned might not be the greatest movie ever, but the ever great George Sanders does say “Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… I must think of Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… I must think of Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… I must think of Brick Wahl… It’s almost half past eight… Brick Wahl… only a few seconds more… Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… Brick Wahl… nearly over… Brick Wahl….”

Then all goes boom.

Admittedly I would have preferred an Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth or Lena Horne chanting my name, perhaps all three, but you take whatever screen credit you can get in this town, even if it means changing a letter, capitalizing two others and dropping an article or three. I doubt I would ever make the effort had it been, say, Jerry Lewis. But there’s a cachet to George Sanders, who, after all, was the quintessentially loathsome critic Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (“You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.”). As Brick’s Picks wore on I would slip into Addison DeWitt (“After Hef’s personal nurses revived us with smelling salts and feathers we remembered that pianist Josh Nelson is at the Blue Whale on Saturday.”) But even that wore thin.

Life itself wore thin for George Sanders who, one sunny day in Spain, swallowed five bottles of Nembutal and exited, stage left. He left a note:

“Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.”

Night fell inevitably as he lay cooling, and with it another morning, and another night. He was cremated, and his ashes scattered over the English Channel, swirled about by the currents, reduced to molecules, and dispersed across the oceans at the speed of electrons. I wonder if any of the electrons that recreate him on my television now, chanting my name, were ever him.

“You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.”

Turkey

Posted on by

So as always, I just went out to get the turkey. I always wait till Thanksgiving Eve, because I prefer a fresh turkey. The frozen ones are so plebian, so hoi polloi, so common. So I went to the Ralphs on Colorado in Glendale, since our Ralphs is now an empty shell where a Ralphs used to be. Made a bee line for the turkeys. Unfortunately the frozen turkeys were no longer common, they weren’t even uncommon, in fact they were gone. The fresh turkeys were gone too. All that remained were two organic, free range fresh turkeys for those easily guilt ridden, but $66 for a turkey seemed nuts. They had lots of hams, though, and even more chickens, and I briefly considered getting a roaster and a lot of breading. Instead, I got back in the car, and after a winding but traffic free excursion through hills with fabulous views of Forest Lawn, I made it to the Vons on Los Feliz. We used to shop there ages ago, but apparently Glendale is rich now, as the prices were ridiculous. But they had turkeys, lots of turkeys. Frozen ones. Ran out of the fresh ones days ago the guy at the meat counter said. He picked a bird out of the cooler. This one’s thawing nicely already. Just soak it in the sink and watch TV all night. Sigh. A people’s turkey. Feeling the Bern. I dumped it in the cart and headed towards produce. And what beautiful produce it was too. Lush and green and ripe and snappy apple red. All I needed were Brussels sprouts. They had one. One single Brussels sprout. It looked like an absurd little cabbage. All about were the bits and pieces of sprouts, like there’d been a Brussels sprout riot. I considered getting the last one and letting my family fight over it, but no. I even looked for frozen Brussels sprouts, but they too were gone, meaning there are more than a few people in Glendale who can’t cook. No one seemed to be interested in the frozen Brussels sprouts in butter sauce. So I wandered about doing some last minute shopping and marveling at all the beautiful women doing their last minute shopping too. Suddenly the Vons in Glendale, in the wrong part of Glendale at that, is a babe magnet, like an Armenian Beverly Center. Though they were of every race and color, actually, lovely, and young enough to be my daughters. Grand daughters. Life, even in a post-racial society, can be cruel.

In the car again, heading up Brand. How would I face my family tomorrow without Brussel sprouts? The only time anybody ever eats the damn things is at Thanksgiving when it’s the law. Somewhere in Atwater it hit me….Gelson’s. Maybe they would have them. They would be solid gold, but they would have them. Which they did. They even had parking. I grabbed two packages full of the things. Gelson’s wraps their Brussels sprouts in little mesh bags. Very neat. Not a hint of a riot. The pall of familial holiday disgrace fell away and I walked though the aisles full of confidence and swagger, two big mesh bags of Brussels sprouts dangling from my hand in one hell of a manly metaphor.

Incidentally, you can spend $120 on a turkey at Gelson’s. I saw one, eighteen pounds, $120. That’s twice as much as the organic free range bird at Ralphs. Maybe these turkeys were organic, free range and veterinarian-assisted suicides.

What an inane post. I wrote it in my head as I drove between stores. Maybe I need a hobby.

Two Bricks

Posted on by

5 Against the House (1955, from a Jack Finney story published a year earlier) wasn’t that much of a flick, but it does have a cool gnarly macho cynical smart assed brain damaged guy named Brick (Brian Keith). The chicks dig him–the bad women, especially, molls like Jean Willes–and he digs chicks, something the Brick (Paul Newman) in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958, though the play premiered in 1955) was a little weak on. That Brick was a football hero, this Brick a war hero. That Brick had been disintegrating for years, a lush, a loser, a bum knee, while this Brick (who’d apparently taken a bullet or shrapnel in the noggin while earning a medal) disintegrates by the end of the movie, a tough guy PTSD mess, dangerous and out of control. He’s no Tennessee Williams tragedy, in fact there’s nothing Southern Gothic about this Brick at all, rather he’s yankee to the core, efficient, a doer and when he sets his mind to rob Harrah’s in Reno with his Korean War buddies–Robin and the 7 Hoods copped this tale–he gets it done. It’s only then that he totally freaks like Bogie in Treasure of Sierra Madre, consumed by greed and paranoia, and you know he’s gonna go down. Suddenly the plot does a goodie goodie 180° turnaround–like I said, this is not Tennessee Williams–and Brick’s heist mate pals talk him into surrendering, which means a stretch in a padded cell and no Jean Willes. Shit. The other Brick winds up with Maggie the Cat. Shit. Too many guys named Brick winding up losers. Hate to think it’s an omen. I mean I got the bum knee and the brain damage….

5 against the House

Brick (Brian Keith) wowing Virginia (Jean Willes) with his charm, gnarliness and existential nihilism.

It Was A Very Good Year

Posted on by

In keeping with the spirit of Frank Sinatra’s 100th Birthday, I just noticed I have Lee Solters’ number in my little black book. That was back in the day when Lee Solters would return my calls. Me and Frank Sinatra. Well, Frank was dead by then, but Lee wasn’t, and he would return my phone calls. And that, as the man said, was a very good year.