Hail & Farewell.

Lest we forget.

Having Writ, Moves On…

Author: August 25, 2023 5 Comments

When I heard Netflix was ending its DVD-by-mail service at the end of September 2023, meaning no more red envelopes, my first thought was, wait, they’re still doing that? And then I thought how it marked not just the end of an era for Netflix but also yet another change in how we relate to the things we watch: movies and TV shows, documentaries, even home recordings, although that last term itself seems anachronistic.

It feels strange to remember a time before VCRs, before even cable TV, a time when there were, for us at least, only four channels—maybe five if we had the local UHF station. And while I think I’ve always been conscious of the changes the time it really hit me just how much things had changed was one night when my wife and I were babysitting one of my nieces. The Wizard Of Oz happened to be on. I remembered when I was a kid there was usually an annual showing of The Wizard Of Oz on some channel, around Easter, maybe, or Thanksgiving, or maybe in the middle of summer. Some time when whatever network was showing it needed a boost. Anyway we turned on The Wizard Of Oz because we thought my niece, who was pretty young at the time, would enjoy it. It was on one of the cable channels—a basic channel, not one of the premium movie channels. And as we were watching the opening my niece asked, “Can we fast-forward through this part?”

No, we couldn’t. To be able to fast-forward we’d have to have it on videocassette—this was before DVDs—and we didn’t, and if I did I probably would have have had a version with “Dark Side Of The Moon” as its soundtrack, but that’s another story. And we couldn’t fast-forward through those pesky commercials either.

When DVDs came along they weren’t that much of a transition. We had to have new players but, hey, we’d already been through that with CDs, and we were able to buy a combination VCR/DVD player so we wouldn’t have to throw out all the videocassettes just yet. And you could use the media player in your desktop computer, or your laptop, if you had one, the player you used to burn CDs, to play your DVDs. I never tried but I suspect you could also use a CD player to play a DVD. There just wouldn’t be anything to see.

Speaking of CDs I remember what a revelation those were in terms of audio quality, but, like DVDs, they really didn’t change anything as far as how we owned and consumed music. I say the changes I’ve seen feel strange to me but then I think about the changes people just a couple of generations before me saw. In Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf the main character hates radio and the gramophone, which were still relatively new in 1927 when Hesse wrote the novel, because he feels they defile music. The technology of the time layered music with pops, hisses, and crackles, which was part of his frustration, but they also made music transportable. You could listen to a full orchestra alone in a room, or while eating, or making love, something most people wouldn’t want to do among a group of live musicians–not that there’s anything wrong with that.

It must have been extraordinary, a revolution I couldn’t imagine because I was born into a world where portable music, purchasable music, was everywhere, available to almost anyone.

And I was born just eight years after Herman Hesse died.

I’m not trying to sound like an old man yelling at clouds—a joke that’s only been around since 2002, and that’s only been a meme since, well, whenever memes became a popular form of internet communication, but I do wonder where the current changes are taking us. And they’re not necessarily bad. To go back to CDs, actually to go back all the way to gramophones, a recording for the first time allowed a person to, for lack of a better word, own a moment of time that would have otherwise been lost. A recording captured what had previous always been ephemeral. It also turned those moments into commodities—something that could be sold, but you could also keep it.

Now we’re moving, more and more, into a world where you don’t own a recording of a song or a TV show or a movie—you lease it, and your ability to watch it whenever you want depends on the company that holds it. Hey, sorry your favorite movie got pulled from the streaming service you’re paying for. On the bright side there’s a lot of other stuff you can watch.

Streaming only seems strange to me if I stop and think about how I used to have to go to a place to buy an album, a cassette, an eight-track, a CD, to rent or buy a movie on laser disc, Betamax, VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, and while I tell myself, hey, at least I owned those things, I also know they had a shelf life. Some of my older DVDs might as well be coasters.

I also think about a time that, for some reason, feels like the distant past but was really only eight or nine years ago, when someone said to me, “Libraries are like Netflix for books.” And I had to open up a card catalog of whoop-ass on them because libraries are so much more than that. Libraries look to the future because their interest is in preserving the past, curating it. If libraries make mistakes in what they preserve, or fail to preserve, at least the idea is to have a shared archive for both the individual and the community.

Also you can still get DVDs from the library.

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

The Secret Word.

Author: August 2, 2023 4 Comments

Source: Dutch Toast

In high school I was in the Latin club—the Junior Classical League to those in the know. Like other clubs it had conventions, mostly on college campuses, where we took part in Latin and classical-themed competitions, including comedy sketches. Here’s a fun fact I learned in JCL: the famous Roman orator Cicero was nicknamed “Chickpea”, cicer in Latin, by his friends. There was also a kid in JCL named Jonas who could do an absolutely spot-on impersonation of Pee-Wee Herman. This gave his entire Latin class to put on a sketch called Chickpea-Wee’s Big Adventure Or Cicero Goes To Rome.

You might already know where this is going and if you do the story will sound familiar: Cicero’s special sedan-chair, sella in Latin, is stolen. He consults a soothsayer who tells him it’s in the basement of the Coliseum. He sets off for Rome, meeting a lot of weird and funny characters along the way, and although it turns out there is no basement in the Coliseum he still manages to find his sella and everything ends happily.

I’ve never forgotten that—it was one of the highlights of my time in JCL, even better than the time I won a prize for dressing up as Caligula, but that’s another story.

When I heard that Paul Reubens had died and all the tributes started I realized something about that JCL sketch, or, more specifically, about Jonas. He was a small kid for a high schooler—he might have even skipped a grade, or three, and he didn’t just do a Pee-Wee Herman impersonation. He looked a bit like Paul Reubens: same dark hair, which he kept cut short, even the same complexion and dark eyes. Watching him walk around the stage in a tunic—at one point he passed a road sign with markers all labeled “ROME” and he said, “I guess it’s true—all roads do lead to Rome!” and did a classic Pee-Wee laugh—it seemed like he really was Paul Reubens.

As a small, kind of odd kid—admittedly we were all odd in JCL—he might have been picked on but impersonating Pee-Wee Herman was a way he could fit in, even outside of Latin class. It made him cool.

Something I don’t think has been said in all the tributes is how much of an antidote Pee-Wee Herman was to the crass commercialism of children’s entertainment in the ‘80’s. Sure, you could buy Pee-Wee’s Playhouse toys and figures, but unlike He-Man, Transformers, or The Care-Bears, which were created just to sell toys, Pee-Wee Herman started out as a character for adults, appealed to children because he was childlike, and spanned generations because he encouraged everyone to be imaginative. And he gave kids like Jonas and, I’ll just say it, me, too, a way out of a world that at times felt pretty dark and cynical. He’s one of those standouts of what seemed like an oppressive time who didn’t just say, it’s okay to be weird. He made being weird cool.

Hail and farewell, Paul Reubens, and Jonas, wherever you are, I hope you’re doing well too.

Hail & Farewell.

The Storyteller.

Author: July 14, 2023 5 Comments

When I heard that the novelist Milan Kundera had died the first thing I thought of was the time I met his wife. It was partly a chance encounter. I was in Paris and I’d gotten his home address from a writers’ directory. After a lot of wandering and checking the map—his street was short and narrow, almost an alley—I found his apartment building. There was an intercom next to the door and someone had just pressed the buzzer and gone in so I could see a courtyard, but I stood there, realizing I didn’t have any plan beyond just finding his home. After a few minutes a dark-haired woman came out and I said, “Pardon, je ne parle Francais. Parlez vous Anglais?” And she said, “Yes, I do.” We both laughed and I said, “I’m looking for Mr. Kundera. I’m a great fan of his work and I was hoping to meet him.” She softened a bit and said, “I’m so sorry. He’s out of the country right now. I’d invite you in but I have to go as well. Do you have a note or something I could give him?” She probably saw I was holding a copy of his novel Life Is Elsewhere, fitting, since he was elsewhere. I didn’t have anything but I said, “Could you please just tell him a young poet came to pay his respects?”

I realize now that she might have been politely saying, “My husband doesn’t get a lot of stalkers but I’m seriously thinking about calling the police.” But I still took the hint and, after saying it was nice to have met her, I went to explore the rest of Paris as it should be explored: without any plan.

At home I wrote him a letter saying I was that young poet and I was sorry to have missed him. I don’t think I apologized for showing up unannounced at his home, but I did say I’d read all his novels except his latest one, Immortality. About a month later I got a package from him: a copy of Immortality, inscribed to me with a message and a weird picture of a hand. Why a hand? In my edition of Life Is Elsewhere, translated from Czech, there was a forward by Kundera about how the translator had gone back and redone his original translation, making it better. Kundera said he was grateful and added, “I offer him my hand as a friend.” It was his own personal signature and he was offering me his hand as well. At least that’s how I interpret it.

Of course I sat down and read Immortality immediately, enjoying all its rambling strangeness. There’s a character in it named Mr. Kundera and he talks about how he’s writing a novel. Someone asks him what the title of his novel will be and he says, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” When the other person says, “I think someone’s already written that,” Mr. Kundera replies “I did! But it should be the title of the novel I’m writing now.”

I’d always approached Kundera as A Very Serious Writer, a preeminent example of postmodern fiction, who wove deep philosophy—Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre—into his work. But I’d never thought of him as funny until then. I went back and reread all his other books. I’d always understood that, as a postmodern author, he played with fiction and the power of stories to make anything happen. Stories can shape history, or even invent things that never happened, and everyone is a character. Parts of Immortality imagine what Goethe is up to in Heaven. I realized what I’d been missing when I reread The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting which includes a story about his own life when he was labelled a dissident in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. He had a set of astrology books that he kept on his desk where friends could see them and he even told them he’d been an assistant to a French astrologer—which wasn’t true. As a dissident he couldn’t get work as a writer but based on his “experience” an editor gave him a job writing an astrology column under a pseudonym. Then a high-ranking government official contacted the editor, discreetly, and asked if the astrologer could—just for fun, you understand, because it wasn’t something any rational person took seriously, you know—do some horoscopes for him. Kundera said he wondered how many government decisions his “horoscopes” influenced.

It’s a funny story but the first time around I was too busy trying to understand the meaning in the context of people who fly when they dance in a circle. What I realized the second time around—weight replaced by lightness–was that there was a deep vein of humor running through all his work. Hey, his first novel is called The Joke and while it’s not exactly funny he did understand the power—and danger—of satire. Life Is Elsewhere is a tragicomedy that pokes fun at the pretentiousness and naivete of young poets and as I write that now my twenty-year old self feels attacked. But also amused.

Back at college I was taking an Eighteenth Century Literature class and one day, sitting in the student lounge, one of my classmates and I got into a discussion of how much the novels of Henry Fielding, Swift, even Samuel Johnson, and especially Laurence Sterne, resembled postmodern novels, with rambling, sometimes bizarre plots, and asides where the authors directly address the reader.

“The difference,” my classmate said, “is postmodern novels just aren’t funny!”

I proceeded to open up a whole can of Kundera right there. Humor is subjective thing, but I pointed out several scenes from his books I thought were pretty funny, ending with the short story “Symposium” and a young doctor who sneaks out to the garden at night. He hears someone he thinks is a woman he thinks is in love with him. When he says, “I knew you’d come,” he’s greeted by the voice of an older male doctor who replies, “Yes, I prefer peeing outside.”

The classmate faded away into the wallpaper and I was sitting by myself when I heard a heavily accented voice say, “That was quite the speech.”

I looked over and immediately recognized the gray hair, the heavy brow, the strong chin from his author photos. It was Milan Kundera, sitting right across from me! He must have known I couldn’t speak Czech so he spoke French which I couldn’t speak either but understood anyway.

“You know,” he went on, “all these critics, they focus on my characters, their relationships, philosophy in my work. Sometimes I think I know how Kafka would have felt if he’d known Max Brod turned him into some kind of ascetic who suffered for his art, rather than a person who just loved telling stories.”

Completely stumped I came out with the most irrelevant question I could think of. “So what brought you here?”

“A plane. A smart young man like you should know you can’t drive to Indiana from France.”

Hail & Farewell., Not Non-Fiction, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval.

The Game Master.

Author: January 14, 2023 6 Comments

I have a painting that was made by three artists. All three signed it but I wish I had a fourth signature: that of the person responsible for making it happen. His name was Rembert Parker.

I’d been introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by my friend John and, early in our freshman year of high school, he invited me to go to a weekend D&D convention with him in Evansville. His father drove us and when we got to the hotel John introduced me to Rembert—an older guy who was just a little taller than me, with lanky hair, round glasses, and a friendly smile. John had met Rembert at a previous convention and they’d become friends but then, as I quickly realized, Rembert was friends with everybody. In the few minutes we chatted at least two dozen people said “Hey Rembert!” as they passed by. Rembert was also one of the organizers of the convention, so it wasn’t just because of his outgoing nature that everyone knew him.

Then John and I got invited to join a D&D game and we went off to a hotel room with a group of strangers. The game was part one of a module, called something like Road To Verangia, that would be played over the weekend. At the end of it everyone would vote for the top three players who’d then advance to part two. Those who didn’t advance could find another game.

The next morning all the attendees gathered in one of the hotel conference rooms. Those who’d advanced—including my friend John—went off to play Road To Verangia part two. Alone and unsure what to do with myself I sat down at a table and was soon joined by a friendly group of strangers. We chatted a bit and then a guy came over and said, “All right, looks like everybody’s here. I’ll be your Dungeon Master today. Let’s start the game.”

“What’s this one called?” someone asked.

“It’s called Certain Death To Your Characters” the Dungeon Master laughed.

Oh, thank goodness, I thought. For a moment I’d been afraid it was going to be a repeat of the previous night’s game.

Character sheets were passed around. I looked down at mine and realized I’d been given the same cleric I’d played the night before. I panicked and looked around, but the room was empty. Not knowing what else to do I just played dumb, and stayed dumb, not using my knowledge of what was to come to my or anyone else’s advantage.

Later that day I’d go to lunch with John and his father and they’d talk about a guy who’d been in the previous night’s game and who’d tried to sneak in to a repeat of part one and how terrible it was that some people just couldn’t obey the rules.

“I won’t be surprised if Rembert kicks him out,” said John’s father.

“And he’ll never come back to a convention where Rembert’s in charge,” added John.

I chewed my chicken sandwich glumly, certain that my own crime would be uncovered, wondering if I should throw myself on Rembert’s mercy immediately. But I decided to keep playing dumb instead. And, somehow, over the whole weekend, it went undiscovered—or no one said anything if they noticed.

I went to a lot of conventions after that, most of them organized by Rembert. He and John were still friends but I kind of avoided him. He was a good guy and fun to talk to but, silly as it seemed even at the time, I still carried a slight air of guilt. Over time I just assumed he forgot who I was. Everybody knew Rembert but he couldn’t be expected to keep track of everyone.

Every convention had an art room and on Saturday night there’d be an art auction. I liked a lot of the paintings and would usually bid on one or two. After losing a bid on one someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. It was Rembert.

“Hey Chris, I noticed you liked that painting. I’ll talk to the artist and see if he’ll do one for you.”

This was surprisingly generous and, because Rembert was involved, a couple of other artists got interested and all three of them collaborated on the painting. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten the names of all three artists, although they signed the back as well as putting their names on the front so I can always open the frame if I ever get it appraised.

I’ve never forgotten Rembert, though, so I was sad when John told me he’d passed away earlier this month.

I didn’t realize Rembert had a blog where he wrote mostly about old and mostly forgotten songs “that the radio seldom plays”. Here’s his last entry:

Sadly, I’ve been in the Hospital with Cancer for a few weeks.
I hope to return to daily posts within a few weeks!

Funny and optimistic to the end. When John and I talked I brought up the painting, and John, who still goes to gaming conventions regularly, said that the ones Rembert organized were small—at most there’d be about two hundred people, which made it easy for Rembert to know the artists, and everyone else, unlike modern gaming conventions that have thousands of attendees. There used to be a stereotype of D&D players as socially awkward loners, but the small conventions really showed how untrue that was. We all got to know each other, even if it was just in passing, although they were just big enough that some noob who’d never been to one before could accidentally play the same game twice and have their mistake be forgotten while they were remembered.

Hail and farewell, Rembert. You were, as Nat King Cole sang, unforgettable in every way.

American Graffiti., Fun With Cancer, Hail & Farewell.

Imagine That.

Author: October 14, 2022 6 Comments

The death of Tony Dow a few months ago reminded me that, for as much as I claim to be an Edgar Allan Poe fan, I’ve never read one of his most famous stories, The Murders In The Rue Morgue. If you’re wondering how those things are connected you don’t know me very well because anyone who knows me just takes it as a given that my mind makes these bizarre leaps—and maybe yours does too, if you think about it, especially if you think about making bizarre leaps. Anyway there’s a throwaway line from an episode of Leave It To Beaver where Wally tells his younger brother—and I’m paraphrasing from a distant memory—“I’m reading this story called The Murders In The Rue Morgue. It’s pretty good. It would be even better if I didn’t have to read it for school.” The line gets the standard canned laughter to let viewers at home know it was supposed to be funny, but a lot of kids still, I’m sure, hear that and think, Yep, he’s right. It stuck with me too at the time I saw it because on the show, I think, Wally was in junior high and so was I, and, like him, I was getting my first introductions to Poe in school, although for me it was a really creepy recording of The Tell-Tale Heart that the teacher played because it was close to Halloween, and, in class textbook, The Cask Of Amontillado, and I liked them both so much I went to the library and read half a dozen other Poe stories—the horror ones, although I kind of fell off after The Fall Of The House Of Usher left me cold, and not in a good way. I’ve learned to appreciate it much more since then.

Somehow, though, I never had as much interest in Poe’s mysteries, maybe because I started with The Gold Bug, a story that’s problematic to say the least. It’s strange because a whodunit should be a lot more interesting than the horror stories which are more often howIdunit and, in the case of Monsieur Montressor, howIgotawaywithit.

The Murders In The Rue Morgue is also kind of intimidating in its length. As much as I loved Poe’s stories as a young reader his archaic language could be kind of hard to muddle through, and even in an annotated edition that provides translations of Poe’s regular lapses into Latin and French and explanations and background for some of his allusions Murders is kind of a slog. His narrator, who is, as is the case in so many of his stories, nameless, starts off with a long, rambling introduction before getting to how he becomes friends with Monsieur Dupin and they move into his crumbling house together and spend most of their time staying up all night reading and having philosophical discussions.

It’s only by coincidence that their attention is caught by a newspaper report of two women being murdered in a house in the Rue Morgue. One of them is thrown out of a window, the other is stuffed in a chimney, but, in spite of a lot of jewelry lying around, there’s no sign of a robbery and how the killer got into a room that was locked from the inside is a mystery. When a bank clerk Dupin knows is charged with the crimes Dupin decides to investigate.

And this is the point where it becomes what it’s famous for: the first modern detective story with the narrator playing Watson to Dupin’s Holmes, which is an easy metaphor since Arthur Conan Doyle said Poe was his inspiration. It’s not surprising, then, that Dupin is supposed to have solved the crime using deductive reasoning. What is surprising is that what Dupin concludes is so ridiculous and the fact that he turns out to be right is just completely bonkers. He’s sure an orangutan did it. How he knew specifically what kind of ape was responsible isn’t explained, but he’s correct. An orangutan had been captured and brought to Paris by a sailor. When the orangutan put on shaving cream and picked up a razor to try and imitate the act of shaving the sailor pulled out a whip. The orangutan, terrified, ran out into the street and murdered the two women. It then threw one out the window and stuffed the other in the chimney to hide the evidence and when all that comes out the fact that the sailor knew what had happened and didn’t report it sooner, goes on his merry way is probably the most plausible part of the whole affair.

For a story that started with a brief essay of mental analysis, comparing and contrasting its use in chess and card games and giving us an example of how Dupin could seemingly read his friend’s mind, only to provide a detailed explanation of how observing the right clues led to his conclusion, I came out the other end wondering, what was Poe thinking? Maybe he meant it as a joke. Most modern readers don’t think of Poe as a funny guy but that’s mostly because his humor and satire pieces don’t hold up as well as the horror. Sometimes he altered or wholly invented the “quotations” that preface his stories, maybe to give them some credibility, maybe for his own amusement, or maybe both.

It wasn’t a story Poe thought was one of his best and I suspect it’s so long, with a lot of repetition and extraneous detail, because he was being paid by the word, and it’s also possible that Poe, having read accounts of captive apes attacking people, thought it was entirely believable that an orangutan would act the way it does in the story and that the whole thing would make a good yarn.

As for the writer who slipped it into an episode of Leave It To Beaver, there likely wasn’t much significance to it. Maybe the writer liked Poe’s stories and included this subtle nod as a tribute, and my generation was hardly the first to read Poe in school.

I know they’re a stretch but my mind leaps to some other—well, not connections, but similarities. Poe only got a reputation as a major American writer, especially a major horror writer, after his death. Leave It To Beaver, now a cultural touchstone that’s know for its idealization of postwar American life, had dismal ratings initially and changed networks after its first season. In spite of gaining more viewers it never cracked the top thirty. It only gained popularity in daily afternoon reruns.

Leave It To Beaver is also wholesome to the point of ridiculousness, a white bread suburban world where the stakes of every conflict couldn’t be lower, where no one smokes, drinks, swears, or even dies. So it was funny to have a little Poe thrown in—a writer whose characters smoke, drink, swear, and live in a world where death, especially murder, abounds.

Leave It To Beaver is a show where you know everything is going to turn out all right in the end. With Poe’s stories you also know that things are going to resolve—even if it’s resolution by death. It’s all escapism, and there’s nothing wrong with the occasional escape as long as it doesn’t end with murder.

Hail & Farewell., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Just A Poet.

Author: June 18, 2022 8 Comments

Cowboy poet Baxter Black, on the right, with Baxter the Dalmatian, at a Nashville bookstore.

Way back in 1999 my wife and I brought home a new puppy and were trying to decide what to name him. She wanted something with a poetry theme and, well, there was only one poet we could think of with a name that would fit a Dalmatian. We named him Baxter, after Baxter Black, the cowboy poet, whose occasional commentaries on NPR always brightened up our morning drives. He’d be introduced as a “former large animal veterinarian” and my wife would always ask, “What’s a former large animal?”

E-mail was still a fairly new thing back then and we didn’t have a digital camera yet but we did take pictures of Baxter. My wife scanned one, found Baxter Black’s e-mail address, and sent him the picture. He replied with, “Makes me wanna ride a fire truck!”

Not long after that he came to Nashville on a book tour for A Cowful of Cowboy Poetry, and, with a bookstore manager’s permission, we brought Baxter in to meet Baxter. They both seemed to enjoy it.

We lost our Baxter a few years later to cancer—much too soon, although there’s never enough time with any dog.

As for Baxter Black, while it’s been a while since I’ve heard him on the radio, I pull up some of his recordings occasionally if I want to chuckle—his poem “The Oyster” always makes me laugh.

And when I heard that he passed away I needed a laugh.

Hail and farewell, Baxter Black. I hope you enjoy meeting Baxter again.

 

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell.

Miniature Memories.

Author: June 11, 2022 10 Comments

The last Howard Johnson’s has now closed and I’m shocked that there were any still around. There was one near where I live that hung on for several years, then sat empty and abandoned for several more years, but its bright orange roof could be seen from the interstate and stayed in pretty good condition in spite of being left. I guess they were built to last even if the franchise itself wasn’t.

Of course I’ll always associate Howard Johnson’s with miniature golf. None of them, as far as I know, ever had golf courses, but when my family would take summer trips to Florida there was a miniature golf course called Gulf Golf on Treasure Island, and after putting through eighteen holes of windmills, concrete alligators, and around palm trees, we’d go and have ice cream. I’d get a root beer float with coffee ice cream which was the perfect combination.

I don’t miss Howard Johnson’s—I can get a root beer float any time, even if I have to make it myself—but I do miss miniature golf, which is more fun and has less pressure than regular golf. There’s still one in my old Nashville neighborhood that I would pass by regularly going from my house to the now defunct Hickory Hollow Mall. It was an expensive course, though, and had an elaborate castle, a lighthouse, and other buildings. At least it still has the lighthouse, and it may be worth playing a round. I played there a few times with friends many years ago. The main thing I remember is that the castle wasn’t part of any hole. It just stood off to one side, which seemed like a terrible waste. One of my friends said the course was really hard, but he was the only one who noticed. I don’t think the rest of us even bothered to keep score. If you’re playing miniature golf competitively you’re playing it wrong.

Even closer to my home was a, well, a weird miniature golf place, tucked away in a wooded area. The intersection of Nolensville Pike and Old Hickory Boulevard was, and still is, a major shopping center, but many years ago, just to the south, it all suddenly gave way to farmland, woods, and, for a long time, an old rundown bar with a gravel parking lot. Some time in the mid-80’s the bar finally closed and the property owners got the bright idea to build a miniature golf course there.

There were two nine-hole courses that could be played separately. One was a seemingly random assortment—a life-sized plaster gorilla, a lighthouse, because of course every miniature golf course has to have a lighthouse, and finally a tic-tac-toe board where the center square was the hole that took your ball. The other side was supposed to be a country music theme but was really just painted portraits of Dolly Parton, Charley Pride, and Minnie Pearl on wooden panels that probably came from the old bar, providing backgrounds for simple putting greens. Once we actually saw the legendary country music disc jockey Ralph Emery there with his family, and I wondered what he thought of the pictures since he knew most of the performers personally. 

It was only two bucks per game which was ridiculously cheap, and at first my friends and I laughed at the shabbiness of it, but it was fun to spend a summer afternoon just knocking balls around the greens under the trees and strings of multi-colored lights. We never bothered to keep score, or worried about what we’d do afterward. The playing was all that mattered.

American Graffiti., Hail & Farewell.

Late Night Friend.

Author: April 13, 2022 8 Comments

Source: BoingBoing

Back in my early teens I was alone a lot on Saturday nights, which isn’t as pathetic as it sounds. My friends and I would spend the day together but then there was a point when we all had to go home but, being teenagers, that didn’t necessarily mean going to sleep. Sometimes I’d sit up most of the night and, with cable TV still a pretty new thing, going through various channels looking for something. The USA Network at the time was an oddball channel that filled late night time with The Ray Bradbury Theater, the sort of counter-culture variety/anthology series Night Flight, and various low budget and cult films like Eating Raoul.

And then they started packaging the low budget and cult films as USA’s Up All Night and added weird, quirky host who immediately caught my attention. He squinted and had a raspy voice and the classic “this movie is terrible, folks, but let’s make the best of it” attitude that most late night TV hosts have.

That host, of course, was Gilbert Gottfried, and he really did make the best of some terrible movies. Yes, Sorority Babes At The Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama is a real movie, and, no, I wouldn’t recommend watching it. In fact there were nights when I was either out or went to bed at a somewhat reasonable hour and would tape Up All Night, then fast-forward through whatever the movies were and only watch Gottfried’s bits, which usually had nothing to do with whatever the films were.

One night his segments were filmed in, I think, New York’s Dino Roar Valley. Was it a dinosaur movie? I have no idea. I’m not sure it mattered. I only remember a segment in which, after being billed as a “Dr. Gilbert Gottfried, Dinosaur Proctologist”, he held up a giant pill and said, “Boy, do I hate these dinosaur suppositories!”

Another time he hosted the show from a tattoo parlor and imagined himself getting inked and turning into a motorcycle-riding rebel. Then he got one of the tattoo artists to paint a design on his arm while he sat going, “Ow! Ow!”

He was in his thirties when he started hosting Up All Night—and already had a good career at that time, including a short stint as an SNL cast member, which I somehow missed, and he’d go on to, well, better things. But it’s Up All Night that I’ll always remember best. On those Saturday nights I was never really alone. Gilbert Gottfried was goofy and weird and funny, and though I was never lucky enough to know him or even meet him he was my friend.

Hail and farewell, Gilbert Gottfried.

Hail & Farewell.

Born To It.

Author: November 17, 2021 2 Comments

Source: Wikipedia

The 2003 reboot of Battlestar Galactica was full of surprising plot twists even from the beginning, but, for me, the most surprising moment was when Dean Stockwell showed up at the end of season 2. It’s a pretty dark series, but Stockwell was one of those actors who, whenever he appeared on screen, could change the atmosphere entirely. Would change the atmosphere entirely. He didn’t have to be serious to do it either. On Quantum Leap he was second banana to Scott Bakula but, with the exception of that show’s finale, the producers wisely made Stockwell the one who knew everything. He was there to be a father figure, or, really, more like a funny uncle, with his cigar in one hand and, well, an early smartphone in the other, and off-the-cuff references to his ex-wives.

I didn’t realize how long his career had been until I watched the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement a few years ago and saw Stockwell’s name in the credits. I kept looking for him, expecting him to, well, appear as a funny uncle probably, waving a cigar around, or maybe a dark, shady character. It didn’t occur to me until later that he would have been ten or eleven at the time of filming, and that he’d played Gregory Peck’s son who sits at the breakfast table quizzing his father about why anyone wouldn’t like Jews. Even as a child actor there was something compelling about him—not just the way he delivered his lines but the seriousness with which he carefully sliced a banana into his cereal and sprinkling it with sugar. His actions were natural yet deliberate.

His onscreen presence got me thinking about the craft of acting and something I’ve thought a lot about when watching really great actors at work. Is it something that can be learned or is it innate? Stockwell had plenty of time to learn—he was acting on stage before he was eight years old and worked pretty much non-stop until just a few years ago, but was he in high demand because he worked so hard or did he get so much work because he was such a talented actor? Maybe it’s a little bit of both. And no matter how effortless he seemed in his roles he worked very hard at the craft of acting, giving special attention to detail. He has a hilarious story about the inspiration for his character Ben from Blue Velvet:

You know that thing that I do with my eyes? Carol Burnett had a character of this super snooty woman and she was always like this. I stole it and I told her one time and she laughed her head off when I told her.

Maybe great acting is a little of both: it begins with natural talent but that talent has to be honed and crafted until it just seems effortless, and that’s what he did.

And, on an unrelated note, when I heard he died I texted a friend and said, “Sorry to hear it. I know you’re a fan.”

He texted back, “Yeah.” Then a few minutes later he added, “But isn’t everybody?”

Hail and farewell Dean Stockwell.

Hail & Farewell.

One More Thing…

Author: September 17, 2021 4 Comments

Source: New York Times

There’s been a major revival of interest in the detective series Columbo, and since I’ve been a fan ever since I was a kid and discovered late night reruns watching my black and white TV in my bedroom, and since September 16, 2021 would be Peter Falk’s 94th birthday let’s talk about it and why the possibility of a reboot needs to die. Right now. Even if I have to kill it myself.

What hooked me from the very beginning, and why I still love Columbo, is really Peter Falk’s charm. He was rarely angry and had a quiet, unassuming demeanor that set him apart from other detectives of the era, which is also why I think he’s still popular today. Other ‘70’s detectives—Kojack, Rockford, McCloud!—were darker and grittier and, well, there’s a lot of that around, which may be why they don’t get as much attention. It’s telling that one of the other exceptions, Murder, She Wrote, is also getting a new surge in popularity, with its stories of a mystery writer who lives in the quaint New England town of Cabot Cove where the leading cause of death is living in Cabot Cove, maybe because Angela Lansbury is also the woman who murdered Sweeney Todd put Sweeney Todd’s customers in pies, but that’s another story.

There’s also Columbo’s appearance. He spends most of his time in a shabby raincoat and smoking cigars, although at least once he switched to cigarettes and coffee when he was up all night doing research. Some people point to the show’s fashions as being very ‘70’s, but some of the same looks are still around today. I think it’s more a sign of when it was made that Columbo could smoke indoors and there was an ashtray every three feet. He’s also different in that he pretends to be absent-minded, wandering around, frequently talking about his wife, whom we never see, and, as an aside, I’m going to say Kate Mulgrew deserved better. And got it, first in space, then behind bars.

The fact that we never see Mrs. Columbo has spawned a fan theory that she doesn’t exist, which is funny, but the evidence doesn’t back it up. Other people in the series also talk about her and, once, she tries to replace Columbo’s trademark gray raincoat with a bright yellow slicker that he “forgets” and leaves behind several times.

And while Peter Falk became a producer, working hard on the show behind the scenes, Columbo deliberately makes himself small, staying out of the way, often hunched over. Even the show itself frequently makes use of long shots in big rooms or outdoors, making Columbo appear even smaller. When asked what his first name is he only says, “Lieutenant,” although sharp-eyed fans know his first name is Frank, from one of the few times he flashes his badge.

The show also has a not so subtle anti-establishment streak, which I think is a product of its time but also part of the show’s ongoing appeal. Most of his suspects are wealthy, powerful people, and though there’s always a deeper motive—a fear of losing their wealth or their position, mainly—they still feel they can get away with murder, and it’s satisfying to see them get taken down. In spite of that Columbo does seem to like, or at least respect, some of the suspects he trailed. In “Any Old Port In A Storm”, when the murderer is a high-class winemaker played by Donald Pleasance,  Columbo seems to enjoy showing off his newfound knowledge of wine. Drinking while on duty—and, let’s face it, Columbo is always on duty, even when he’s on vacation—may be a violation, but in every other respect Columbo stays well above the law. And, okay, he goes out drinking again in “The Conspirators”, when he joins the Irish poet (and IRA sympathizer) Joe Devlin, and tries to impress him by reciting some limericks, including “The Pelican”:

A rare old bird is the pelican.
His bill holds more than his belly can.
He can take in his beak
enough food for a week.
I’m damned if I know how the hell he can!

And then there’s “Swan Song” in which the murderer is played by Johnny Cash, who starts with a good performance of “I Saw The Light” and ends with him being arrested for sending his wife down in a plane crash. But what also makes the episode memorable is how Cash and Falk have such natural onscreen chemistry, complimenting and complementing each other, that it’s not hard to believe actor and singer hung out together after the filming.

Even in “Murder Under Glass”, which is notable for being one of the few times Columbo comes out and says he dislikes his suspect, a professional food critic, but still wants to impress him with veal scallopini a la Columbo.

I’ve been using all this to lead up to why I want to kill a proposed reboot. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reboots in general—I even think some have been great—but, while Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and even Sam Spade, among other famous detectives, have been played by other people, and while Peter Falk didn’t originate the role, he made it his own. It’s hard to imagine the producers originally wanted Bing Crosby, and I just can’t picture Columbo as a blue-eyed sophisticate standing over a corpse crooning, “Bet she was a beautiful baby, buh buh buh…”

It’s because of Peter Falk that Columbo makes such effective use of the inverted detective story in which we know from the beginning who the murderer is and how they did it. How the detective unravels the mystery is supposed to be what draws us in, although, really, it’s just the pleasure of hanging out with Columbo for an hour or two.

What would a reboot look like? Even the innumerable Law & Order clones that have firmly planted the idea that most crimes are committed by the special guest star look ridiculous when we have darker, more complicated dramas like Broadchurch and The Sinner that explore how crimes don’t happen in a vacuum and are never really resolved, especially after just an hour.

Source: Atlas Obscura

And let’s not forget that part of the appeal of Columbo is that it’s always funny, or at least tongue-in-cheek. The murders may be serious but Columbo isn’t. He drives a broken down Peugeot, and occasionally brings along his Basset hound named “Dog”—I’m pretty sure Mrs. Columbo has given their pet a more elegant name. Columbo and Dog both are immortalized in a funny statue in, of all places, Budapest. Columbo even has his own amusing theme song, “This Old Man”, which he occasionally whistles to himself. Outside of Columbo Peter Falk is best known for comedic roles–the grandfather in The Princess Bride, opposite Alan Arkin in The In-Laws, and an aging performer in a made-for-TV remake of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys.

The show also sometimes really strains credibility with Columbo picking up on farfetched clues like a pair of not sweaty socks, or an episode like “Troubled Waters”. While it’s a great story with a great cast that includes Robert Vaughn and Dean Stockwell, what are the odds someone would commit a murder on the same cruise ship where a great detective just happened to be taking a vacation?

A reboot would almost certainly heighten the comedy, but then it would be too much like the MAD Magazine parody “Clodumbo”, where the punchline is that twenty-seven innocent people have turned themselves in just to get away from the detective pestering them.

Source: Columbo Site

Columbo himself says it best at the end of the best episode, “The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case”, when he’s asked if he’d ever consider another line of work. ““Me, sir? No. Never. I couldn’t do that.”

Let that be one last thing.

Hail & Farewell., Happy Birthday., The Weekly Essay