There was the night about a decade ago that I was hanging out at Hollywood & Highland with a multi-Grammy winning pal and then sharing a table at a jazz dive with three other Grammy winners watching an Oscar winning pal playing some terrific saxophone. At the time, tho’, that didn’t seem anything special. I don’t know if that sort of jazz scene exists anymore, cool digs where Grammy winners and brilliant musicians and stoners and writers and fans and movie stars mix together like it was the most natural thing in the world, and the music cooked and sometimes was so in the pocket that the murmur of voices and laughter subsided completely as a saxophonist reached the essence of a melody and then released it into the ether with a final drawn out breath.
A zillion notes all at once
Just heard Lady by Beck Bogert Appice for the first time in several lifetimes. When I was about fifteen that was my all time favorite song, even more than the live Highway Star or Panic in Detroit or Why Does Love Have To Be So Sad or Rock and Roll Queen or Love or Confusion even. It hasn’t aged as well as some, I guess, a little thin and slightly ridiculous, and the rest of the album was stone weak aside from the killer version of Superstition, but it has the frenzied tempo and zillion notes all at once that I dug as an adolescent awash in testosterone. I guess I get that rush from be bop now. Some people never grow up.
Mitch’s sticks
Watching the end of Jimi Hendrix at Monterey and amid the smoking wreckage Mitch Mitchell rockets his sticks into the stunned stoned freaked and tripping crowd and every time I see it and (and I’ve seen it a hundred times) I think that I would have given anything to have been in that crowd and caught one of those sticks, it would still be my most treasured possession, that stick, even now, that half a century before had rolled across those toms with absolute abandon and bounced with loose wristed splats off the snare and set the cymbals roiling and splashing and crashing with Jimi’s every move and sound and look and thought. Airborne for only a second or two, the sticks disappear into offstage darkness, first the one, then the other and Mitch, laughing, steps out of view. I turn off the TV right then, before the interviews begin and reduce the music to history, and I wonder again about those sticks.
Low Country earworms
How Do You Do by Mouth and MacNeil is earwormage at its worst. It’s always mostly wordless: How do you do/oo oo/oo oo/oo oo/oo uh/oo oo. It goes on like that, till I hear “I’m living for” and it loops again. Try it yourself.
When you find yourself looking up your earworm on Wikipedia it’s time to do something about it. Mouth and MacNeil were Dutch, it turns out. I have a history with Dutch earworms. Little Green Bag was actually little greenback but was misunderstood by somebody no doubt stoned. I found that out a few earworms ago. And Plastic Bertrand was Belgian so maybe I actually have a history of Low Country ear worms. Plastic Bertrand. That worked. Ca Plane Pour Moi moi moi moi moi….
Psych-out
It’s Psych-Out and Jack Nicholson is out of his mind high in the Haight hanging psychedelic posters. Outtasight he says.
Jack Nicholson and his band doing an inverted Purple Haze riff and the light show flashes liquid colors and everyone’s dancing and tripping and his guitar solo sounds like a theremin I swear or maybe I’m just getting a contact high.
Bruce Dern does the best acid damaged hippie. For a second I thought I met him out back of Raji’s. Must have been the Essence.
Deep Purple
I had always figured that by this stage of my life I would know why it’s spelled My Woman From Tokyo but sung Tok-A-yo, with that one hell of a long A phoneme, like a misplaced Canadian. After nearly a half century I just have to ascribe it to mysticism, one of the mysteries, some grokked chakra thing, some stupid with a flare gun, whatever. I hung with Funky Claude once, we talked, I forgot to ask him, he died, and that was that. Some things are perhaps best left unknowable.
In the middle of nowhere
That ten minutes of in the middle of nowhere halfway through North By Northwest is one of my favorite scenes in a movie ever. Not sure why. I know exactly where it was shot, too, I mean exactly. Beyond Bakersfield a stretch, not far but a world away full of nothing but space and silence. I live surrounded by old movies here in Silver Lake, they filmed hundreds within just a mile or three of my pad. But a jillion things have happened since, a big crazy city full of big crazy Brownian motion all the time year after year after year. Nothing is as it was. But the fields surrounding Cary Grant in 1959 are still there, just fields, the horizon geometrically perfect and bare, the air still and hot, and distant cars spawning dust devils that swirl and spin and disappear as if nothing between then and now happened, nothing at all.
Puff
From Here To Eternity not on TCM and they don’t let Ernest Borgnine call Frank Sinatra a little wop. Instead his lips move like a puff of air. Remember Maggio? Monty Clift asks, all methody emotingly understatedly enraged. Ernest Borgnine exhales. Puff. As if puff was a word. It could be, why not? The Bushmen click, the Arabs gack, there are languages in the mountains of Southeast Asia that poing and bong. So Ernest Borgnine puffs. But it’s his penultimate puff. He dies a moment later with the last puff. Two puff’s worth of Ernest Borgnine, and no Italians offended.
Citizen Khan
Watched Tartars last night. It’s one of those sword and sandals epics, 1961, with an all-Italian cast and crew and extras. Well, the director was American, or maybe English, and had actually done a classic or two, of which this was not one. I recorded it solely for the leads. Incredibly Italian looking Victor Mature was the Viking chief Giuseppe the Red, though the only thing Viking about him was, well, nothing actually. Surrounded by extras with wigs plucked from the reject pile in a broom factory, he struts around in moccasins and short shorts, giving commands. An’ I told you ya gotta…, gesturing frantically, wassamattayou? Well maybe not wassamattayou.
Here come the Tartars, aka the Mongols, who look just like the Vikings, oddly enough, but for the black wigs. Their citizen Khan is Orson Welles, yes that Orson Welles, squeezed so tight into Mongol armor he looks set to explode. He had make-up do him up so he does look creepily like, if not Genghis himself, then his son and successor Ogodei, who fat and merry and alcoholic as he was, conquered more of the world and killed more people than the Black Plague. You’ve never heard of him, though, because he died just as the Mongol armies were to about to reduce Western civilization to smoking ruins and pyramids of skulls, the way he’d left the Middle East, from which it never really recovered. But the invasion of Europe was postponed until a new khan was chosen and by then the Mongols were more interested in China than Europe. Talk about luck.
Anyway, Orson Welles had himself made up to look remarkably like the portraits of Ogodei, and rendered his silly assed lines with terrifying enunciation and sneers of cold command and you realized that Orson Welles simply couldn’t act bad, no matter how lousy the movie. And this movie was lousy. Victor Mature throws himself into it too, and if all the rest of the cast had drowned in a tragic boating accident on whatever Yugoslavian river the Viking ships were floating on, it would have been a fun flick, just Orson and Victor Mature. Alas, two actors do not a historical epic make, and certainly not a sword and sandals action flick, so we get to see some feeble battle scenes and goofball catapult hi jinx and unseen frantic steppe lust as well as an ugly off screen rape. Khans will be khans. The actresses all have those oddly blank and vaguely emotive expressions you see in European films back then and are impossible for an American to tell if it’s some sort of Bergmanesque understatement or just lousy acting. My guess is lousy acting. If only Europeans would smile. Sophia Loren smiled. Marcelo Mastroianni never smiled. Neither are in this movie however. But if Victor Mature could be a Viking, Sophia Loren would make a terrific Viking Queen. Marriage Norwegian Style.
I had completely lost track of the plot, if there was one, when about a third of the way in a manly Viking display by Victor Mature faded and suddenly we’re in Orson Khan’s stately pleasure dome watching one heck of a dance, hints of Bob Fosse, people leaping about swishing scary swords and culminating in a man and woman rolling across the floor in choreographed coital ecstasy. The dance ends in more leaping and sword swishing and the dancers freeze. Orson Khan glowers, his thoughts a menacing mystery. Rosebud indeed.
Then I switched it off.
‘Twas the lunch after Christmas
So found the leftovers from my plate that I scraped into a Tupperware container—mostly mashed potatoes with a little rutabaga, some stuffing, a couple fragments of candied yams, the stray carrot or three, a chunk of turkey, like that. I microwaved them to a zillion degrees. They cane out a metamorphosized mess with a surprisingly appetizing aroma. Then I inexplicably sprinkled it with grape nuts, apparently for the breakfast I missed, and splashed the mess liberally with Tapatio. The result was something vaguely healthy but weird. Fortunately that dystopian glop of a recipe is unlikely ever to happen again.
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