Passings: Walter Cronkite, Journalist

Rita and I spent this Friday night watching All the President's Men, the excellent 1976 drama detailing the efforts of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to uncover the Watergate scandal.

Woodward and Bernstein were bottom-rung reporters at the Washington Post who started out covering a simple burglary at a Washington D.C. hotel, and ended up unpeeling layer upon layer of a conspiracy that eventually brought down President Richard Nixon.

The movie's a riveting view--crackling Hollywood filmmaking seamlessly working hand-in-hand with a profound sense of social conscience--and, ironically enough, exactly what I was watching when news came through the wire that respected news anchor Walter Cronkite passed away at age 92.

Cronkite exhibited the purity of journalism exhibited by Woodward and Bernstein, but on a much more sustained level. He started out as a World War II correspondent, vaulting into the middle of action in the North Atlantic. By the time he retired from the CBS News anchor chair in the early 1980's, he bore witness to several of the key events of the twentieth century--the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King; every agonizing moment of the Vietnam War; the moon landing of 1969; Richard Nixon's ignoble bow out of politics; and the Iran Hostage Crisis, among many others. All along, Americans always felt like they could trust him.

We live in an era where television journalists are treated (often deservedly) like telegenic dunderheads. Cronkite was one of the last TV anchors who did what they did out of a genuine sense of pride, duty, and conscience. He shed real tears when reading the sobering announcement that President Kennedy was slain by an assassin's bullet, and stared viewers squarely in the face with his unflinching 1968 assessment that the Vietnam War was locked in perpetual stalemate. Despite the many horrors and tragedies he saw in his career, he remained by all accounts one of the most idealistic and ferociously compassionate human beings who ever walked the earth.

Our world is that much less rich, has lost some depth, with his passing. And that's the way it is.

Passings: Farrah Fawcett, actress, and Michael Jackson, pop singer

How strange and ironic that two of the pop culture firmament's most massive figures should pass away within 24 hours of one another.

Farrah Fawcett (who died at age 62 after a long battle with cancer) wasn't just a TV star: She became one of the most enduring physical archetypes of the 20th Century, her decade's equivalent of Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, or Madonna; someone whose distinctive look continues to have ripple effects on fashion and beauty perception well into the new-ish millenium. I don't think it'd be difficult to convey the impact she's had to a kid of this generation: Hell, just open up any magazine or turn on a TV set. Some variation of Farrah will surely emerge from the page/screen--that California-girl smile, that trim and tan figure, and most importantly that exquisite mass of feathered blonde hair have all found replication amongst too many of today's actresses and models.

When I was nine years old and just beginning to recognize the strange wonder that was the female of the species, Farrah Fawcett represented a stopgap between wholesome Mickey Mouse-style crushes and the earthy realities of real, grown-up desire. My triggers of feminine beauty may have changed over the years, but for me and many of the men of my generation Farrah Fawcett was Ground Zero for our sexual awakening.

She was also a better actress--and a savvier human being--than most gave her credit for. Hers was such a formidable presence that it's easy to forget she only spent one season playing private eye Jill Munroe on Charlie's Angels, and that beneath the tight sweaters and short shorts was a pretty sharp cookie. Farrah displayed range to reckon with in the Emmy-nominated telefilm The Burning Bed, and even in the failed movie projects she undertook after leaving Charlie's Angels (Somebody Killed Her Husband, anyone?), she possessed a self-aware comic touch that portended the makings of a real career. Too bad that her looks, meteoric fame and extended time in the gossip pages overshadowed her talent.

With a legacy as formidable as Farrah Fawcett's, it'd take the passing of a demi-god to overshadow her death, and in the case of Michael Jackson, that's pretty much what happened. Jackson died suddenly of apparent cardiac arrest at the age of 50, but with all the pressures of his fame and the neuroses that surely wracked him up to the end, it'd be more appropos to say that Michael Jackson died of being Michael Jackson.

Even if you weren't a rabid fan of Jackson, it's impossible to deny his massive impact on pop culture. Only Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Frank Sinatra could boast equal significance as musicians and as (hate to use the word, but it fits) icons. And in this age of file-sharing and fragmented listening audiences, Jackson will likely be the last musician in history to be able to boast selling hundreds of millions of units.

In the coming weeks, we're sure to see the inevitable cavalcade of parasites and muckrakers surface: Indeed, Jackson's personal idiosyncracies had almost completely dwarfed his musical and artistic achievements in recent years. But I'm old enough (and sufficiently immunized to the gossip press) to put Michael Jackson's musical legacy front-and-center.

I'd never considered myself a Jackson fan, but his creative impact still inspires awe. Kids today likely can't comprehend that Jackson's videos helped erase the color lines on MTV in the network's embryonic days; and that the King of Pop prefigured the rap-rock fusion of Run DMC (and, by proxy, much of modern-day hip-hop) when he hired Eddie Van Halen to contribute guitar to 'Beat It.'

In the end, the music and the performances--the stuff divorced from the wagging tongues, from the ancillary hype, from the business and career savvy or lack thereof--deserve to endure. Jackson's gravity-defying appearance on the Motown 25th Anniversary celebration 26 years ago merits inclusion with Elvis Presley's '68 Comeback Special and the Beatles' inaugural bow on the Ed Sullivan Show as one of the most important musical moments ever televised.




And seeing a prepubescent Jackson on American Bandstand, singing and dancing with the uninhibited expressiveness and skill of someone three times his age while his brothers backed him up, just hammers home what a fireball of a presence he was, right from the get-go.




Despite the intense laser-focus trained on Michael Jackson's personal life, he always seemed to be an enigma, a mythically-unhappy figure not quite of this earth. It's fitting that his performances seem to offer more of a window into his soul--and ours--than all the tabloid-fodder antics and innuendo rolled together. Rest in Peace, King of Pop: You've earned it.

An Interview with Joe Dallesandro

(I wrote this interview for Seattlest.com, and it is reprinted on the Petri Dish with their kind permission. )

For a minute, it looks like the perfect photo opportunity.

Joe Dallesandro—former bodyguard at Andy Warhol’s fabled Factory, star of several key Warhol-sponsored cult films in the sixties and seventies, and accidental avatar of the Sexual Revolution—stands outside the W Hotel in downtown Seattle, his back to me. He cuts an almost dangerous-looking figure.

Clad head to foot in black, his compact body sits atop slightly bowed legs in an almost pugilistic stance as he smokes his cigarette. A soul-patched, dark-haired kid stops to bum a smoke, and both figures huddle, almost silhouetted thanks to the overreaching shadow cast by the hotel building, as vaporous off-white ribbons of smoke curl above their heads. But then Dallesandro begins to turn, and I don’t want to come off like some stalker before a formal introduction, so I retreat back into the hotel lobby. The sublime noir image before me goes un-photographed.

Not that Joe Dallesandro’s unaccustomed to having his picture taken. His stormy adolescence in the early sixties was punctuated by a succession of foster homes, a career of petty crime, and a hard-knock education on the streets of New York, but somewhere along the line he discovered that people liked photographing his body. Dallesandro posed semi-clad and nude for several ‘Men’s Physique’ magazine layouts and loops, and then one fateful day in 1967 he (literally) stumbled into movie stardom.

At just eighteen years of age, Dallesandro walked into the Factory while Warhol and upstart film director Paul Morrissey happened to be running a movie camera. The filmmakers asked the charismatic and physically impressive kid to strip down to his underwear and wrestle resident Factory speed-freak Ondine. Joe—never hung up on being photographed in little or nothing—did so. It was pretty much like any of his men’s magazine gigs, but Joe’s 23 improvised minutes wound up in Morrissey’s first feature, The Loves of Ondine. His body—clad only in Jockey shorts—was plastered all over the film’s promotional material, and the exposure ignited Dallesandro’s film career.

For the next seven years Joe Dallesandro served as Paul Morrissey’s muse. The former juvenile delinquent never studied acting: He played hustlers and drug addicts with semi-improvised naturalness partly borne of personal experience (he freely admitted to turning tricks in real life on the streets of New York). Nor did he spend a single second working out: That physique—perfectly-toned, with the faintest hint of androgyny in his sculpted features—just was. He was the first man on American movie screens to appear full-frontally nude in a non-porn capacity, and it was the first time that a male had been objectified so overtly by the viewing public.

His physique etched its way into the psyches of many who saw it: Photographer Francesco Scavullo proclaimed Dallesandro one of the ten most beautiful men he’d ever photographed, and Joe became an accidental rock icon when a shot of his crotch found its way onto the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers album. Gay men and straight women alike found a profoundly beautiful object of desire who photographed like a dream and seemed to represent—in the most ideal way—the utter freedom that the Sexual Revolution offered.

The actor wound down his association with Morrissey and Warhol appearing in two over-the-top horror epics, Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula. He tried his luck as an action hero in Italian caper flicks for the rest of the seventies; then expanded his range in more artistic French films helmed by Serge Gainsbourg and Louis Malle. Finally in the eighties he returned to America, and proved a welcome sight in sporadic character-acting turns for the next two decades.

The culmination of all of this history is what puts the semi-retired actor in Seattle. About fifteen minutes after the near-photograph on the street, I formally meet Joe Dallesandro in the Seattle International Film Festival pressroom to talk about Little Joe, a documentary on his life that screened June 6 and 7.

For a guy who’s lived more in one lifetime than any dozen typical mortals—trouble with the law, sexual experimentation, movie stardom, drug and alcohol problems, divorces, career ups and downs, you name it—Dallesandro’s matured with grace. Age has sharpened the angles of his street-angel Adonis face, lending it a rugged gravitas without compromising its beauty. And the added years have roughened up that high New York drawl slightly, the way passing time lends texture and worn dimension to freshly-paved city asphalt.

The actor’s joined by the film’s director Nicole Haeusser and by his stepdaughter Vedra (who executive-produced the film). Vedra, low-key but smiling warmly, hangs back as the other two field my questions. This interview took place on Sunday, June 7, 2009.


You weren’t looking at being an actor as a kid when you were kicking around in Florida and New York, but did you have any onscreen influences or role models?

JOE: No. I think all children watch a lot of television or go to the movies a great deal…Living in New York, you could go to a theater and watch maybe five different movies in a day. So that’s what I did for most of my childhood when I wasn’t getting in trouble. You’d watch movies all afternoon, You’d start to be able to walk in, and you’d know what the movie’s about, because all the [movies’] stories were very similar. So I always watched movies, but never had the desire to become an actor. That was Paul [Morrissey]’s decision: He told me, “Just do what I say and you’ll have a career.”

Could you describe the genesis of Little Joe?

JOE: This is not a full story of who Joe is…I think it’s more of a personal thing, me and Vedra talking and chatting about my life, her getting to know more about me. We told a lot more stories, with Nicole sitting down putting this all together into something people could understand.

Do you feel like there’s an element of setting the record straight with this documentary?

JOE: I do.

How did Nicole become involved?

NICOLE: I became involved through Vedra: Vedra helped me produce my Thesis Film at UCLA, and she told me she wanted to make a documentary about her stepfather’s life. It was a real education for me, because I was unfamiliar with his work.

Joe gave us so much material that it was kind of hard to decide what not to include. I think we’re going to put [the extra stories] on the DVD. A lot of them are outside the narrative. They were putting us on a different path, but I know some people will enjoy hearing them.

The critical reception for Little Joe has been really enthusiastic. How have audiences taken to it?

NICOLE: Really well. This is actually only our second festival. People are just very excited that Joe has finally done a documentary, and I think we made some very strong choices in not talking to anyone else: The entire film is Joe’s point of view. People really embrace that. I was really excited about the [SIFF] screening yesterday. People paid attention to the details.

JOE: This is the first showing of it with people who speak the language [laughs]. It’s a totally different reaction than we had in Berlin. In America it’s all about my fans. They like anything that I do.

Joe has been rather quiet about his life most of the time, so the fact that he opens up so much in this film is surprising.

NICOLE: Yes, it is. It is Joe without a gag on. That should’ve been the title, ‘Little Joe: Let’s Take the Gag Off’ [laughs]

Joe, there’s a real naturalness to your work in Flesh. Most people perceive male hustlers as being cold and cutthroat, but you play one who’s gentle, a sweet and doting father to his baby, and almost like a sage big brother to the other hustlers. How much of this were you pulling from your life?

JOE: Paul would give us an idea of what he wanted us to talk about, and basically most of the things that I did were reacting to the people that were talking to me.

The stories that I played in the films, they were always Joe playing Joe as a character. It’s not really Joe’s real life—It’s Joe playing Joe in the role that [he] was asked to play. It’s very much a part of me, but it’s not my everyday life. We could go from scene to scene [in Flesh] and I could tell you which parts have nothing to do with me. There are some similarities, yeah, but it’s not all me…

Trash is a really funny film, and you show great unforced comic timing in the movie.

JOE: Thanks. But there’s also Holly Woodlawn…I just react to her most of the time.

This may seem strange to ask in the context of a Warhol film showing an element of junkie life, but was it fun to make?

JOE: Yeah. But there’s always difficulty with Paul, you know. You gotta understand, we shot these films very quickly, and the movies were really made, in the finale of it all, in an editing room. They’d sit down and cut it together. I always told Paul in the beginning, after I’d done Loves of Ondine and Lonesome Cowboys that I preferred to do a movie with some kind of story to it. And that was what he tried to do with Trash. He’d spend all of this time editing the film, cut, cut, cut…Take out something, throw something in. Then he’d say, “You’re such a terrible actor, but I cut that out, all that bad part is all thrown away so you don’t have to worry.”

It’s all him. He made you look good.

JOE: Oh, yeah. [laughs] He’d always remind me.

What was Holly Woodlawn like?

JOE: Holly had never met me until we met each other on the set there—in Paul’s basement.

I don’t socialize with people like Holly on a regular basis, but I have no problem having friends in my life who are like Holly. When we had to go to Cannes, I accompanied her because she needed someone to look after her... She still tries to call me up, [to] suggest projects.

Every one of the people that’ve worked with me over the years, they all think of me as their friend, even though we only had a short time together. Every one of them, including Sylvia Miles, they all looked at me like I was their best friend. I was in contact with them for such a short time, but I’m really open to them…People don’t find it difficult to work with me. I’m a nice guy [laughs].

The Berlin Film Festival presented you with a Teddy Award in February for your importance to gay cinema. It must’ve been a great validation of your work, and of how highly-regarded it is in Europe. The Morrissey/Warhol movies seem to be viewed as real films there, not just as underground art.

JOE: Yes. I was truly appreciated over there.

What were your experiences doing the action movies you did in Italy?

JOE: I went over there with this notion that I’d come back Clint Eastwood. It didn’t pan out that way. The thing is, also, I put a lot of effort into the things I do. I do the best I can do as Joe. When you get to see your work then taken in and you hear someone else’s voice on you, dubbing your voice into English when you’re right there, you’re available to do it…It bothered me. I shot all of those films over there in English so there was absolutely no reason for them to do that. So a couple of things dispirited me about my career over there, but then I had a lot of great movies I did out of France, what I call ‘my artistic films’.

One of those artistic films was Je T’aime Moi Non Plus. Serge Gainsbourg directed it, and you’ve always cited the movie as one of your favorites. Why is that?

JOE: It’s just a great little story. It was very before-its-time. I think [Serge] was striving for the look of America. We shot it in the south of France, and he tried to make it look like it was shot in Texas . It was a fun little movie to make. It came from Serge’s ideas…You have to see it.

What was the transition from European movies to American films like when you returned to the US in the eighties?

JOE: I think, after I’d stayed [in Europe] for ten years and came back to America, I was always under the impression that I’d never be able to work in America having done the Warhol films. That wasn’t the truth, you know. Sometimes our heads tell us things that have absolutely nothing to do with anything. When I came back, it was very easy for me to work here.

What was it like working on Gun Crazy? You play a pretty awful character that’s quite unlike you in real life.

JOE: To work with Drew [Barrymore] was incredible. The character was already described in the script, so there was nothing that I had to create. I just had to be there and be the opposite of what I’m normally asked to play. It was easy for me to do.

I never had a problem pretending to be something I’m not. I like to be an actor, but it’s not something I studied or anything. I’m just given a part to play and I do the best I can do to bring Joe to the part, that’s all. It began playing cowboys with my brother. To live to be sixty and still feel like, yeah, I can pretend…That’s a great thing. All the Italian people will tell you they’re all actors, pretending to be something they’re not.

It was also a nice surprise seeing you in The Limey—How was it, working with Steven Soderbergh?

JOE: He’s one person, like Paul Morrissey, who also has a specific vision…When I was reading the script, it didn’t seem like much. [Soderbergh] sits down in an editing room, though, and makes it something completely different. What I had read in the script and what I had seen on the screen were two different things. He’s another director who knows what he wants and doesn’t have to tell you all about it.

You seem to have acquired a really open-minded and accepting view of alternative lifestyles and homosexuality very early on, even before your exposure to the Factory.

JOE: Twenty years ago or so, I was talking to some young people that were living where I lived, and they had that same kind of attitude that I had as a young person, that same freedom. And I thought, I never knew that that had progressed to that. I was kind of pleasantly surprised. I thought I was just peculiar and that it never caught on, but it did catch on and now a lot of people now are like I was then.

That’s a pretty impressive legacy to leave behind as an actor, and as a person.

JOE: Yeah, I think so. I didn’t expect it!

(all photographs by Tony Kay, except Little Joe poster image, which is copyright Little Joe Productions, 2009)

Gonzo: The LIfe and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: A Goggle-Eyed and Sleep-Deprived Appreciation

I spend a lot of nights staying up way too late, way too long, attempting to find my muse.

The computer screen is often a pupil-less eye that stares at me more mercilessly than any God, Devil, or jackbooted authoritarian figure, and often its cold unflinching blankness will leach the motivation, the desire, the sheer heart-bursting joy of creating that writing gives from me. I allow the simple mundane reality of daily life to become, in its own beige way, a lazily-lethal beast that sucks my soul like a hyena extracting marrow from a zebra's scarlet-caked rib bone.

I've recently discovered that the best thing to do, especially if you can't set the ego aside and just roll your eyes back in your head and create, is to set the ego aside and to look outward for inspiration. So having just finished viewing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson feels like a massive adrenaline shot to my insides, despite (because of?) the fact that it's 4:30 in the AM and I'm running on too damned little sleep in the first place.

Thompson, in case you're too young or too culturally unconcerned to know/care, was a journalist, usually writing for Rolling Stone magazine. He was (in)famous for leading a life full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll as he covered social, political, and personal events that transpired during some of America's most tumultous times. His life followed the pattern of many an artist in the 20th/early 21st centuries: Years of incredible productivity and artistic genius, punctuated by living as far on the edge as his muse took him; that distinctively modern-day affliction of his immense talent and success breeding a notoriety that hobbled/subsumed his identity and productivity; and his own very deliberate, literal (suicide) self-destruction.

But the great thing about Gonzo isn't that it covers Thompson's life and excess. It's that it gives solid consideration and emphasis to the man as a reporter and writer. It places his literary output squarely front and center, and it also provides a fascinating glimpse of American history through the eyes of one of its most cauterizingly eloquent observers.

Yes, Thompson ingested more chemicals than any thousand normal human beings. Yes, he allowed the celebrity generated by his talent to ultimately denegrate, even steal away outright, his great gifts towards the end. And no, he wasn't always a nice guy. But he was an incredibly vivid reporter and storyteller; a man who saw and related in passionate detail such earthshaking events as the pivotal presidential elections of 1968 and '72, the civil rights movement, the clear-eyed optimism that spurred the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, and the death of the American Dream when excess and the stone wheels of establishment politics/thinking crushed that idealism.

As a film, Gonzo's a tight and focused documentary, giving a simple and direct chronology of Thompson's life and work through the eyes of loved ones, friends, politicians, and admirers. In the end, though, the thing that utterly galvanized me was hearing the author's words (read with loving directness by Thompson portrayer Johnny Depp), whether it was Thompson's rough-edged, beat-tinged reportage of the hard-living Hell's Angels, his evolution from court jester to socially-aware firebrand as he made a seemingly insane run for the Colorado sheriff's seat, or the stirring and wrenching fears wrested from his typewriter over President Richard Nixon. Go figure that his words about the latter snake-oil peddler could (and do) easily apply to the cowboy-booted jackass who served as a key architect for this country's current economic abatoir.

I learned a lot about American history from Gonzo. I got a more complete picture of a misunderstood artist and sage from Gonzo. And despite the ostensible sadness of Hunter S. Thompson's ending (God, could we use his voice in these times), Gonzo--and the man's words--fill me with a lot of happiness at the prospect of being alive. Consider the muse stoked.

Zombies on Parade at the Seattle International Film Festival

Regular visitors to this here corner of the Blogosphere surely know of yours truly's ardent fondness for a good--OK, make that any--zombie flick (see this sub-folder of said corner for material evidence of said fondness). So imagine my joy when the Seattle International Film Festival unleashed two--count 'em, TWO--cinematic odes to the living dead as the opening salvo for their Midnight Adrenaline midnight movie series. And imagine that joy amplified by the fact that both zombie movies delivered.

The one with the biggest buzz, Norwegian director Tommy Wirkola's Dead Snow, brought its packed house everything a discerning gutmuncher fan could ask for: Nazi zombies, plasma projected by the gallon, rended limbs, tongue-in-bloody-cheek humor, and--yes--gutmunching.

The Cliffs' Notes setup (as if most zombie movies require something more substantial than a Cliffs' Notes pamphlet for setup): A group of Norwegian med students trundle up to a remote ski lodge for some relaxation. They're visited by a creepy old villager who regales them with stories of the cruel Nazis who ran rampant throughout the nearby village during World War II. He warns the reckless youths to get the heck outta town, but his warnings go unheeded. Then the med students discover a stash of Nazi gold...and the recently-resuscitated Nazi zombies who're out to retrieve it.

Wirkola does not reinvent the wheel here. The setup's pure Evil Dead, the survival scenario sketched out over the movie's running time comes grafted wholesale from any one of scores of horror flicks over the last twenty years, and the only thing distinguishing Dead Snow's zombies from any generic pack of undead hordes would be their snazzy wardrobes.

Then again, you don't watch a zombie movie for radical innovation. Most of the things you do watch a zombie flick for, however, surface in nifty fashion in Dead Snow. After the slow-ish first quarter, the movie puts the pedal to the metal with high-speed pacing, hearty helpings of blood and viscera, and a goofy sense of humor that owes a lot to this generation's Godfather of the Ghouls, Sam Raimi. And while you won't find a lot of outright innovations on display, a few twists to the established cliches liven things up: The paunchy movie nerd emerges as the only one of these sex-obsessed characters to get some nookie (right on!), and one character hastily patches up his bleeding zombie bite with some fishing wire...and duct tape (DOUBLE right on!).

I Sell the Dead, meanwhile, provides a stylish and smart contrast to Dead Snow's low-brow yocks and shocks. It's a good old-fashioned horror flick--in the best, most loving way possible.

Most of I Sell the Dead is told in flashback by Arthur Blake (played by Dominic Monaughan of Lost and Lord of the Rings fame), a young graverobber unjustly accused of murder and awaiting a trip to the same guillotine that claimed his partner in crime Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden). Blake relates the story of his evolution from scared slum kid to professional graverobber to an unconventional monk (played, twinkle in eye, by Ron Perlman), but his narrative soon departs from the traditional Burke and Hare graverobbing skullduggery, giving way to tales of turf wars with a pack of rival body snatchers, and details on several corpses that refuse to stay dead.

Sure, there are some spatterings of Romero-esque undead gore scattered hither and yon, and the influence of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead flicks surfaces occasionally, but I Sell the Dead mostly works a much different side of the street than Dead Snow. The emphasis here is on character and atmosphere: Writer/director Glenn McQuaid spends a good third of I Sell the Dead getting the audience well-acquainted with the resourceful and funny Blake and his slightly addled mentor/partner Grimes before throwing them hip-deep into the monster show.

McQuaid's engaging script doesn't so much travel straight from Point A to Point B as it meanders to said point, sketching out the characters with humor and sharp relief (when was the last time you actually relished, you know, dialogue in a modern horror movie?). He's well-served by a great cast that hits all the right notes. Monaughan makes for a funny and self-aware protagonist, New Yorker Fessenden plays cockney oddball to game perfection, Perlman lends a faultless Irish brogue and wry wit to his clergyman, and Angus Scrimm does his best Boris Karloff as Blake's and Grimes's least agreeable client.

Best of all, I Sell the Dead parlays a carefully-crafted atmosphere totally at odds with current horror trends. McQuaid and company are clearly juggling a limited budget here, but they inject their little chiller with a moody visual style that riffs on Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe flicks of the sixties, as well as the great old Hammer films of the same era (the movie also includes nods to Euro-horror chestnuts like Black Sunday and Eyes Without a Face, and to the EC comics of the 1950's, in case you're keeping Geek-Reference Score). In its own modest way it's as visually immersive as Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, only (likely) done on one-twentieth the budget and with (swear to God) a much better script. It's not some lost masterpiece, but I Sell the Dead is the kind of heartily-entertaining dark comedy/horror film that they don't make 'em like anymore. And that's a compliment of the highest order.

Flight of the Conchords: A One-Two Punch of Humor and Harmony

Every now and then, you get to experience art from someone so damned perfect at what they do, you question whether anyone will ever be able to touch it. Not in a jaded, cynical way, mind you; strictly in a "Man, the bar's been raised to the Stratosphere, dude" manner.

Ironic, then, that Kiwi pop jokesters Flight of the Conchords--two guys who've made a career out of poking fun at their own foibles and shortcomings--inspire that kind of awe in me, and apparently a lot of other people, too. The Conchords sold out three shows in a row at Seattle's sizeable Paramount Theater May 11, 12, and 13, and the missus and I coughed up the bucks to see all three performances. Yep, they're that kind of special; that kind of funny; and that kind of genius.

Calling Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement's act stand-up comedy or rock parody sells 'em short. Sure, like a lot of Weird-Al-come-latelies they co-opt current and past pop music and reconfigure/regurgitate it through a funhouse mirror. And between songs, they can still work an audience into spasms of uncontrollable laughter as capably as any stand-up comics. But the Conchords add two elements that, to date, have largely been forsaken in the 'novelty song' genre/ghetto--musicianship and real, stick-to-your-ribs songwriting. It was all on display in spades at the Paramount last week.


The straight skinny on all three shows:


Arj Barker (who plays deadpan a--hole Dave on the Conchords' hilarious HBO sitcom) opened each set with a stand-up routine somewhere between George Carlin and, um, Dave on Flight of the Conchords. It says something that I laughed all three nights, despite most of the jokes being the same.

Bret and Jemaine played for about an hour-and-a-half each evening. Certain elements remained consistent: The great new cut, "Too Many Dicks on the Dancefloor" (presented by the boys replete with cardboard robot suits) opened each set, the hilarious "Hurt Feelings" came up second on the bill, and all three nights saw a great Johnny Cash riff, "Stana," get stretched like taffy. Their off-the-cuff banter kept things from getting too redundant from night to night, and they weren't afraid to tweak the songs to engaging effect: Jemaine threw a hysterical Ahnuld impersonation into the stew on "The Humans are Dead," and they turned the R and B throb of “Sugalumps” into a slow a cappella jam by welding it with “We’re Both in Love with a Sexy Lady”.

The second show on Tuesday May 12 was my favorite, in large part because the Conchords played the most songs. It also marked the only one of the trio of dates in which they played the mighty “Bowie,” my choice for the best satiric rock song this side of Spinal Tap.

All three nights, in between hearty chuckles, I kept finding myself in ardent admiration over something that these guys don’t always get a lot of credit for: Their musicianship. Bret and Jemaine both play guitar pretty damned capably for a couple of self-proclaimed folk parodists, and Bret switched from guitar to keyboard to drums on a dime. Moreover, the songs they played and sung couldn’t be better. Seriously.

The key, so simple but so blasted important: Write a brilliant pop song, with truly sublime hooks, melodies, and harmonies, and your humorous song grows legs that’ll keep running to infinity. Yeah, “Carol Brown” is a funny riff on a poor schlemiel plagued by a chorus of ex-girlfriends. But it’s wedded to an enchanting tune that the Beatles or Robyn Hitchcock would be proud to call their own. And both Conchords possess genuinely beautiful voices that add to the pop yumminess (even when they’re horsing around).

Which, for me at least, gets back to the whole bar-raised-to-the-stratosphere equation. These guys jab needles into the balloons of pop-music pomposity so effectively that it’s cast a whole new light on every other pop song I’ve listened to since, and they’ve done it with songcraft so formidable that it puts most so-called ‘serious musicians’ to shame. All the while, Bret and Jemaine still come off as regular joes who’re just horsing around.

My favorite example of the week: The recording of “Ladies of the World” (a rib-tickling Kool and the Gang parody) ends with about a minute of acoustic strumming, hand-claps, and the Conchords crooning layered falsetto harmonies. It’s one minute of pop beauty so sublime that I found myself replaying just that minute, over and over again, during one commute last week. The Flight of the Conchords were both probably just horsing around when they recorded it, and they’d likely just laugh at the notion of said horsing-around being taken seriously, but those 58 seconds sorta made me swoon.

Speaking of swooning, the missus surely aroused the envy of many of the ladies of the world on a couple of levels. First, she brought her camera and exhaustively documented the May 13th show (feel free to head over to her Blog for more pics AND video, and please don’t sue her, HBO…). And second, we hung out after that night’s show and met both of these Smart-Girl Heartthrobs face-to-face.

Bret and Jemaine couldn’t have been nicer, enduring a sound soaking from some extra-precipitous Seattle skies with nary a peep of protest and treating all of the fans outside with attentiveness and respect. Music nerd that I am, I had to tell them what great songwriters they were (a compliment that seemed to really surprise and delight the both of them), and Rita just went the gracious and polite route and thanked them for playing three nights in a row in the Emerald City. Swoon away, girls.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine won't give The Dark Knight Night Sweats

There's this stack of papers, about 100 sheets or so. On those papers are letters. Those letters form words; and the words, sentences. Some of those sentences form dialogue--words that come out of the mouths of characters in a film, play, or TV episode--and combined with descriptive paragraphs, they form a story.

It's called a script. And the guys who made X-Men Origins: Wolverine forgot one. 'Nuff said.

OK, maybe not. A few random observations, more interesting than the movie itself:

1) You know you're on shaky ground when one of your movie's superheroes is played (badly) by a member of the Black-Eyed Peas.

2) I dare you to find a cheaper-looking $100-million-plus event movie than this one. It's shot with the workmanlike indifference of a Sci-Fi Channel late-night schlocker, the action scenes looks utterly cut-rate, and the CGI version of Patrick Stewart that surfaces at the film's end makes the cut scenes from the cheapest videogames look David-Lean-epic by comparison.

3) The relative merits of a Hugh Jackman movie seem to run directly in proportion to how much of his admittedly well-defined body is exposed for the camera; in otherwards, the more skin, the crummier the movie. Exhibit A for the Prosecution, your honor: The only film I've seen of Jackman's in which he's shirtless as frequently as this one is Van Helsing.

4) As disappointing as the third X-Men film was, I'd lay dollars to donuts that Wolverine stinks more. The former sported enough ideas for four movies and enough script for a half-of-one: The latter has enough ideas for a quarter of a movie, and enough script for one-eighth of one.

Random Plugs and Frippery

So what, might you ask, have I been doing lately, besides--y'know--working and sporadically microscoping the Petri Dish? Lotsa stuff.

Natch, there's the whole working thing. Seattle Opera opened The Marriage of Figaro this evening, and it looks like a hit, so I'll be a busy man for the next few weeks. But not entirely to the exclusion of creative fun and pop culture imbibement, thank God.

The Petri Dish entry from last October about walking my workplace neighborhood (replete with photos) inspired me to actually do a Blurb book collecting several of my photos. Blurb's incredibly easy and fun to use, a user-friendly bit of layout software that even a thick-neck like me can use with ease. I'm pretty pleased with the resulting tome. Feel free to go here and take a look (you can even preview some of the finished product).


I'm also experimenting with writing (shudder!) fiction and free verse on a new WordPress blog. It's over here if'n you'd likewise like to take a peek. It's been a long time since I've actually cut loose with something like this, and I have to admit it's fun as hell.

Don't worry: There's still more ramblings on Pop Culture on the way. But now you know where (else) I am. Sorry I've been such a stranger.

The Underground Garage: It's the Ginchiest

I winced when Sirius Satellite Radio merged with my cherished XM Radio (creative law number 1: When companies merge, creativity takes it in the shorts), and that wincing devolved into some major cussing when said merger knocked a couple of favorite stations off the air. XM's all-disco channel Chrome, for one, disappeared, and Sirius/XM's exhortation to 'try the 70's on 7 channel ' sent me into a glitterball-and-platform-chucking fit. When you wanna shake your tail feather to some Chic, mewling granola-huffers like England Dan and John Ford Coley do not, nor will they ever, EVER provide adequate succor, guys. Not even close.

But all was forgiven when a twist of the ol' car radio dial landed on channel 59: Little Steven's Underground Garage. Screw Best Sirius/XM Station laurels: It's the best damned channel on the planet. Period. And you'll have to pry the dial from my cold dead fingers.


Little Steven is, of course, Little Steven Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band (and late of the Sopranos ensemble), and the channel he's birthed largely celebrates raw, unadorned rock and roll from the last sixty years. Sure, there are swatches of blue-collar rock a la Springsteen, but the breadth and depth of their playlist routinely sets my music nerd head a' spinning.


You get blues from the forties through the sixties; fifties rock, doo-wop and rockabilly; vintage girl groups from rock and roll's first two decades; even a sprinkling of Rat Pack action. It's a mix put together by folks with respect for the past, but an eye (and a blown eardrum) turned squarely in the direction of the present.


True to its name, though, the Underground Garage straddles the loud and cathartic goodness of--you guessed it--garage rock old and new more vigorously than any other station in the whole wide world.


That means three chords, attitude and energy over finesse, and more primal glee in three random minutes of air time than most of today's 'modern rock' stations can cough up in a year. The Underground spins stuff from the sixties, touching on classic Brit Invasion tracks as well as stuff too raw or weird to graduate to Golden Oldies status; the seventies get a nod, but it's first-wave punk and the sugar buzz of power pop like Big Star and (WOOT!) Cheap Trick; then they hit the eighties via second-generation garage-psych knuckledraggers like the Lime Spiders; and a few truly worthy modern bands make the cut, too. The White Stripes' rejiggering of garage rock's DNA gets play, as do snot-nosed keepers of the flame like Swedish fireballs the Hives and English rascals The Silver Brazilians, whose deliciously cheeky ode to actress Kate Winslet ("I'm no diplomat, but you look better fat/Kate Winslet") will burrow its Dizzy-Miss-Lizzy way into you like a leather-jacketed tapeworm.


Oh, and I double-dog dare you to find a cooler set of DJ's on the planet. Most of 'em are musicians themselves, and all of 'em sport taste (and smarts) to burn. In addition to Van Zandt (always brimming with avuncular wit and stories about everything from astral physics to Count Dracula), there's Handsome Dick Manitoba (former lead singer of proto-punks the Dictators and the best cool New York uncle you never had), Ko Melina (bassist from Detroit's godlike Dirtbombs, and an ace judge of new punk and garage talent), and Andrew Loog Oldham (yes, the legendary British producer who produced the Rolling Stones' best records, and a fount of great stories about those glory years). The chat's never inane, and no one talks over the tunes. Christ laying on a busted distortion pedal, I couldn't program a better station myself.

Lest all this geeking out scare all of you non-music dorks away, give a listen to the current Playlist on this here Blog, which features only bands/tunes I've heard on the Underground Garage in the last month. Or better yet, go to the Underground Garage website and listen to an archived show. If none of this sets your ass to shaking and your fingers to involuntarily cranking the volume, someone needs to take a Defibrillator to you.

Japan Part 5: On Buddha, On Shinto

Wednesday, November 1, Japan time.

We rise early to another mild morning. The pavement outside is slick with overnight showers, but for the duration of the day a cloudless sky smiles down on us. We make a brief hike to the lobby of one of the more toney local hotels to meet up with our tour group.

Today, we enjoy just being two other gaijin on various whirlwind tours of the local temples and shrines. The buildings we see reveal a scenic and magical window into ancient Japan, and serve as a direct link between the land's past and present.

Our first stop, Nijo Castle, served as sanctuary and political fulcrum for the Edo-era Shogunate. The main focus of our visit, Ninomaru Palace, is built from Hinoki Cypress, and its interiors sport elaborate, gorgeously rendered representations of nature. Beneath the tasteful beauty of the building, however, dwell functions and touches that betray the power and treachery that surrounded this Palace in its halcyon days: Entrances to bodyguards' rooms sit in full view of onlookers, and the wooden floors of the palace's corridors chirp like birds when trod upon (an elaborate--and sonically striking--sixteenth-century alarm system to protect residents and guests).

We also visit Kinkaku-ji, Kyoto's renowned Golden Pavillion. Originally built in 1397 as a retirement villa for powerful shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and converted into a Zen Buddhist temple by his son, it's surrounded by immaculately-appointed gardens and grounds. Gold leaf encrusts most of the exterior, and the building sparkles in the sunlight. It's so striking that neither its chequered past (it was burned down by a suicidal monk in 1950, then resurrected five years later) nor the tourist throngs clogging its pathways like cholesterol in arteries take away from its glittering beauty.

Local shinto shrines provide more tranquil loveliness. All is festive and happy: In addition to tourists we see Japanese families coming to pay respects to nature. Thoroughly modern parents dote on their kimono-clad children, and all stop by incense kettles and prayer bells to contemplate and worship. Cherry blossoms envelop the grounds in pink, and vivid orange/red paint covers most of the structures within. You can purchase a paper fortune here, and if it contains ill tidings you can tie the scroll to the branches of a tree, symbolically leaving bad luck behind in favor of a brighter future.

Strict regulations prohibit photography in Sanjusangendo, an agonizing restriction given the sights beyond this temple's simple wooden exterior. In the temple's main hallway, 1,000 life-sized representations of Kannon (Buddhist goddess of mercy) surround a larger statue of the deity. Kannon the greater possesses 1,000 arms, and each of her finely-detailed gold-leaved smaller replicas sports forty arms (one arm, it is said, can save 25 worlds). Carvings of other nature gods populate the front of the hallway, clad in vividly flowing robes and alternately glowering and smiling at dazzled onlookers. The detail, vigor, and unearthly beauty of all of them beggars verbal description.

As the sun begins setting we arrive at the site of Kiyomizu Temple. The tour bus stops about a half-mile downhill from the temple, and we hike toward the structure, up paved walkways through a bustling tourist market area. Craft shops, trinket-packed tourist traps, restaurants and shops encrust either side of the pavement; exotic ice creams and distinctively Nihongo snacks beckon; and tourists, locals, and kimono-swaddled young women pack the walkways and stores--a teeming swarm of humanity that provides a cornucopia of people-watching. We're rewarded with a spectacular view of the Kyoto skyline from Kiyomizu's wooden planks. I ponder what this view must've looked like when the temple first saw the light of day in 798 AD.
Beautiful as it is, Rita and I are forced to make a hasty retreat from Kiyomizu by cab to join our final tour of the night. The driver wends his way around departing tourists and zips down steep narrow alleys like some Far East version of Bullitt, until we're back at our hotel meeting place for the final phase of our whirlwind evening of Kyoto touring.

We hit the Gion District of Kyoto at dusk. It's an area renowned for its proliferation of geisha (more properly known as geiko), its rich artistic heritage, and its tea. Our young guide takes us through a Japanese tea house, outlining the tea ceremony's significance as an oasis of tranquility for everyone from peasants to Shogun. The tour culminates in an authentic tea ceremony in which Rita, three other tourists, and myself enter a small, softly-lit tea room. A petite woman in a kimono enters, grinding green tea leaves in a ceramic mortar and pestle with practiced fingers and adding the boiling water with an artisan's attentiveness. We share the thick, rich, heady brew from a common cup (Japanese tradition): It is, indisputably, the most delicious tea I have ever tasted.

After the tea, our guide spirits us back to the main dining hall of the tea house/restaurant. The meal bestowed upon us, another vegetarian feast, proves nearly as tasty as Koyasan's dinner fare. The restaurant's host--shorn of head and wisened in appearance, but boyishly enthusiastic--vividly describes the meal, the sequence in which it's to be consumed, and insights on the preparation. His passion for every subtlety and nuance of the food is infectious.

We walk a few blocks through the alleys of Gion, bumping into other tourists and locals. It's nearly 8pm, and the moonlight casts noirish shading on the various restaurants and businesses along the stretch. The doors of many are closed, but there are still families walking about the neighborhood. Parents proudly parade their traditionally-clad children, and--good tourists that we are--we readily snap pictures.

A generous helping of Kyoto traditional musical theater awaits us at our final stop, Gion Corner. This Cliff's Notes review of Kyoto's stage tradition is presented with grace and artisan's care. There's a reenactment of Chado (a traditional Japanese tea ceremony). Then there's Bunraku, a 1200-year-old variety of Puppet Theater which tells the story of a young woman's heartbreak. The elaborate and beautiful puppet, a vision in multicolored robes atop a porcelain face, moves wraithlike thanks to three skilled puppeteers. A dancer in orange robes and a wildly-vivid feline mask performs to Gagaku, (a Japanese variation on Chinese-imported court music). And the broadly-farcical Kyogen variety of comic theater combines rich symbolism with flat-out slapstick silliness: The players execute their shtick (involving a bound man, his arms lashed to a wooden pole, turning the tables on his captors) with the finesse of far east Marx Brothers. All of these venerated performance styles reveal much about the audiences for which they were created, whether it's Bunraku's wounded romance, Chado's infusion of tranquil comfort, or Kyogen's apt rib-jabbing at authority.

We cab back to The Oyado Ishicho, utterly exhausted. Tomorrow, Rita and I will go from exploring Japan to turning Japanese. Really.

(all photos, copyright Tony Kay and Rita Bellanca, Taken November 1, 2008)

Who Watches the Watchmen? Me...

...Soon, at least.

I fully intend to see Watchmen, Hollywood's latest attempt to capture comic-book lightning in a bottle, despite the disparate opinions it's generated (a Dark Knight-style critical and financial slamdunk it ain't). I'm fresh off of reading the original graphic novel, and my curiosity has the open-minded better of me.

For those of you who actually possess, you know, lives and don't know the comic's/film's basic premise, Watchmen follows the multi-layered saga of an estranged superhero team, in the wake of the murder of one of their number (a thug of a crimefighter named The Comedian). Some of The Comedian's former compatriots attempt to solve the mystery; others attempt to live normal lives in the wake of public outcry against them; all of them are pretty messed-up pieces of work, thrown into machinations much more complex and frightening than solving the murder of one slain 'Good Guy'.

Dave Gibbons' art undeniably gets the job done--it's solidly rooted in the grand olde tradition of comic book pencilling, and also includes panels of haunting beauty that transcend those four-color limitations--but Alan Moore's story is what made/makes the Watchmen graphic novel so amazing. It is at equal turns, a whodunnit; a barrier-breaking deconstruction of the superhero mythos; an epic surrogate-familial saga stretching four decades; a damning indictment of Reagan/Thatcher-era social hierarchy (the graphic novel saw original publication in the mid-1980's); a thought-provoking examination of the mentality behind acts of heroism; and a whole lot more.

Moore intersperses the already-ambitious narrative with representations of police reports, psychiatric evaluations, excerpts from one superhero's autobiography (replete with pages laid out and illustrated exactly like a typical tell-all autobio), and a ghoulish comic-within-a-comic that lays out some profound and downbeat symbolism for a pretty profound and downbeat work. Watchmen, in fact, bulges so thickly with layers that it welcomes (hell, commands) repeated readings.

I'll avert being that arch-villain Spoilerman and just say that the final denouement of the comic will give fans of the old Outer Limits TV series some ripples of deja vu, and Moore sorta sells his female characters short (then again, a lot of graphic novel creative forces could be accused of the same shortcoming). But warts and all, the original Watchmen earns its rep as a groundbreaking and resonant achievement...And as damn near unfilmable source material.

The great thing about Moore's and Gibbons' work is that it works sublimely within its own medium. The rapid-fire flashbacks and flash-forwards; the marriage of static images with crackling dialogue and haunting narrative; Gibbons' subversion of traditional iconic superhero imagery in his artwork (let's hear it for the pot-bellied but no less heroic Nite Owl!); all could well lose something in translation to the big screen. Two big concerns etch themselves across my skull as I peruse Fandango for a theater near me that's screening the movie.

First, there's the technically-polished but green-ish director. I haven't seen Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead (though at least one person whose opinion I respect highly was decidedly underwhelmed), but I did see Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel, 300. The latter surely did all that a boy flick worth its salt should do (namely, ladle striking visuals straight outta the comic atop copious blood, viscera, nudity, and ripped abs), in a duck's-ass slick package. But in the end, it felt a little hollow to me. And way too literal a filmic interpretation.

Which brings me to Big Concern Number Two; namely, that Snyder's trying to slavishly carbon-copy/reproduce onscreen what Moore and Gibbons did, in graphic format, just to please the fanboys. This assertion's come straight from the mouths of several pundits, and the lower-than-anticipated returns at the box office seem to bear this out. Dogged devotion to upbeat popular source material is one thing; being too faithful to a dark and dense novel whose ostensible heroes include psychopaths, an impotency sufferer, and a borderline rapist is another entirely. You'd better be bringing some major artistic vision to the pot when stirring together such a bitter brew.

The Dark Knight and Iron Man proved that you can capture the spirit of a great comic book or graphic novel without treating it like Biblical text. I sincerely wish this kind of quality experience from the Watchmen film, but I proceed into the local multiplex uttering one cautionary Aesthetic Commandment: Be not thuddingly literal, Zack Snyder, lest mine expectations fall short.

Passings: Lux Interior, lead singer of The Cramps

Damn, was the party weak.

The swinger's pad sported beige walls and even more beige sounds. Everyone lolled around the bland rooms, sucking on fancy drinks and huffing cocaine like Hoover vacuums, and the soundtrack to the party was buffed to a tiresome, glossy sheen. Rock and roll had feathered its hair, bought itself some quaint matching furniture, and had moved way uptown. The Conceited Jackass Party that comprised the first half of the seventies was like that.

Suddenly the roar of a loud, unmuffler'ed car engine impeded on--then entirely drowned out--the genteel tinkle of expensive cocktail glasses and the inane whirr of Me-Generation small talk. A rusted-up ghost ship of a Cadillac--all fins, oxidation, exhaust plumes filling the air like brimstone byproduct, and deafening growls--ground its way from the street into the immaculately coiffed lawn outside the pad. The front doors of the ride popped open, and two figures emerged amidst the off-white smoke.

Some kind of Va-Voom came outta the passenger side, a flame-haired hellion of a woman with Vegas-stripper curves and the coolly-menacing eyes of a succubus. She carried her cherry-red Stratocaster by the base of its neck as she strode up the wallysville driveway, Stiletto bootheels clacking against the asphalt like the hammer of a massive clock.

But the driver...He made her look like a wallflower.

He didn't seem to exit the car, so much as appear outside of it like a vampire in an old horror flick. The black latex and leather that his lanky body had been poured into etched themselves through the exhaust clouds like India ink streaked against linen. Predatory dark eyes peered though jet-black bangs, and his black boots echoed in syncopation with his hell-woman's footfalls. He walked beside her like he owned the earth.

Soon they both stood in front of the pad's open door, and in a second every bit of activity inside skidded to a halt. Poison Ivy picked up her axe and began coaxing lipstick-smeared Link Wray bottom notes from it. Like really great sex, the noise was sweaty, dirty, and mesmerizing.

Then, like a creature of the walking dead abruptly energized by a lightning bolt, Lux Interior started twitching, gyrating, and shambling in response to the twanging snarl of the six-string. He declaimed in the middle of the audio vortex like a fire-and-brimstone preacher fixing to lose his frock to The Sinister Urge. Elvis and Iggy Pop yelped in horny 4/4 time on the tip of his tongue. A trickster's sneer rose from those marble vampire's cheekbones as he spat out vocal buckshot, animal lust, and insolent rebel cool at the complacent lemmings in that L7 shack with each glottal cough.

That was what The Cramps did during the self-important siesta that was seventies mainstream rock-and-roll, kids. They kept it lean, mean, and full of libidinous joy: Real rock and roll played under a full B-movie moon with no apologies and a twinkle in its dark eye, for three decades.

And now, Lux Interior's gone to the Hereafter; not the quaint puffy-clouded harps-and-halos dentist office of an Afterlife proffered by the bluenoses of this world, but the one bathed in throbbing crimson and populated by the misfits, horndogs, and beautiful degenerates that make life on this chunk of dirt worth living. Some fools'd call it Hell. I'd imagine it's more like Rock and Roll Heaven, especially if Lux is fronting the House Band.

Grown-Up Symphonies to God: A.C. Newman, Get Guilty

If you don't want to hear blather about my life outside the pop-culture-appreciation firmament, feel free to skip to the sixth paragraph or so: I won't be offended.

Sorry so silent for so long. Sure, the 'day job' eroded many of my January evenings and weekends like so much hydrochloric acid to the kisser, but much of the last month also saw the missus and I in an epic drama involving our dog's health.

Disco contracted a major kidney infection in late December, and for a few weeks she hovered closer to checking out than she ever has. Thankfully we brought her back to fighting trim with a lot of lost sleep and funds, aggressive treatment with antibiotics, and our sheer willpower (knock wood). Rita's and my current running gag around the house? Including provisions for care of our happy and insanely-spry near-sixteen-year old dog in each of our respective wills.

I've also been experiencing a bit of a paradigm shift on a personal level lately. I'm fortunate to work at a respected arts organization that I care about, surrounded by creative and committed people who care as much about the art as I do. But for a lot of years I've squelched my own creative impulses and experienced that faint bit of soul-death that comes from defining myself as nothing more than My Job (even if it's, for the most part, a Good Job).

The last few months I've been working on rediscovering that essence rare--you know, creating stuff myself instead of just writing creatively about cool things that other people have created. Of course, I'm still an agonizing perfectionist about what ends up in this here Blog and (yep, I'll be brutally honest here) a bit of a slacker during non-work time, so creating vs. writing about others' creations has sometimes become an either-or proposition.

All of which serves as a rather lengthy preamble to the fact that I love A.C. Newman's new CD Get Guilty so much that I can't NOT write about it.

Newman sings and writes songs for a pretty terrific band named The New Pornographers: The band plays caffeinated, smart, catchy pop that sort of sounds like a college-educated version of the Archies gone new-wave. Here, though, Newman's crafted a record cut from the same aural cloth as The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle or The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds. The last Pornographers record, Challengers, reached for some of the horn-and-string-laden craftsmanship displayed here, but it sounded pensive and dour--the product of an unhappy spirit at a crossroads. By contrast, Get Guilty bursts at its seams with joy and breathtaking loveliness.

I've spent hours trying to describe this record here, and the challenge has been frustrating the hell out of me: Capturing its spell with a few snappy sentences seems utterly beyond my verbal grasp. Really good music often defies such compartmentalizing. But describing what I hear and feel, through the prism of my own moods and perceptions, as A.C. Newman's pocket symphony fills my ears? Now that I can swing.

The nerd in me loves the clever and quirky musical turns Newman takes with his Pornographers work, but here he wraps those oddball smarts in sheer gorgeousness--haunting strings, exotic instrumentation, and old-fashioned irresistible harmonies. I'm a total sap for such loveliness if it's served up right, and it is here. It's not just some retro-contrivance, either: Rather than cluttering things up, the orchestration and arrangements lend a timeless and warm quality to some already great pop songs. And amazingly, his orchestral touch never comes at the expense of getting to the point. Newman knows that brevity is the soul of great pop (only one song on Get Guilty exceeds four minutes in length, and even then, it's only by nine seconds), and none of these songs overstays their welcome.

And I love Newman's lyrics here. His verbal style--abstract imagery punctuated by shards of disarming emotional frankness--has never been woven more effectively with his melodies. On the exquisite 'Young Atlantis', he even crafts a song rife with nautical/mythical imagery that doesn't just beat oceanic cliches to death.

Ultimately, though, what I hear on Get Guilty is unbridled and uncontained happiness. The creator of this collection of songs must be in love. Whether it's with a person or the sheer act of making music, I'm not sure which (both, likely). But there's so much joy here that even at the disc's most bittersweet moments, beauty and optimism break through the melancholy like shards of sunlight through cloud cover.

Every song on Get Guilty makes me indescribably happy as I listen to it, from the playfully silly Beatle-y lope of 'Submarines of Stockholm' to the clattering David Bowie-gone-bubblegum glee of "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer," to the Brian Wilson shimmer of "The Palace at 4am". But my current favorite is the album's majestic closer, 'All of my Days and All of my Days Off'. On it, Newman layers the chorus's one simple, nakedly truthful sentence ("And I give you my days, all my days/and all of my days off") with cascading grand piano notes, beautifully urgent boy-girl harmonies, and a galvanizing sense of purpose: Cumulatively it sounds as luminously, soaringly romantic as anything in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. Someone who moves me that deeply with three ninutes and 51 seconds of pop music really is creating grown-up symphonies to God.

Passings: Eartha Kitt--Chanteuse, Actress

You were completely and totally into me, and I into you. I know that now. And that thought, that fleeting instant of magical chemistry, consoles me as I think of your voice being silenced forever.

We met a decade ago, but the night reverberates in me with the heady urgency of the last breath that just escaped my lips. I waited for you jadedly, with no more expectation than mere entertainment--just the amiable passage of an hour or two passively listening to you. But you elegantly strode out and bewitched me and everyone else in that dimly-lit little class-A joint. Cheekbones so haughtily elegant and defined that they could cut diamonds; gams too perfect to have any right gracing the body of a 35-year old, never mind that of a septuagenarian; hourglass figure poured into a gold lamé dress by God in one of his most continental moods...That utterly unique and enchanting package alone was enough to have the whole lot of us eating out of your hand that night.

Then you opened your mouth and sealed the deal, tossing bon mots at us all with a subtly-erotic synthesis of purr and growl. With an arch of that slender back and a fluid twirl of your arm you crooned out everything from Edith Piaf to Brecht/Weill to "I Will Survive," rewriting even the most familiar throwaway tune in your own image--an organic sculpture at once magnificently sophisticated, wryly humorous, soulfully powerful, and exquisitely feminine. Once or twice you looked my way as you sang, and once or twice the vibrato in your divine voice hit me to the very core...And I knew, with all my heart, that you were looking at me; that you were singing only to me.

The spotlight dimmed, and the house lights came up. Divorced of the cabaret accoutrements, I fretted that you'd be somehow diminished, but no. Even the assembly-line cattle-directing luminescence seemed to be bowing in your homage. Those dark feline eyes still sparkled. Prisms of light refracted from the gold lamé draped over you like twelve-thousand compact suns. Then you stepped down from the stage and walked towards me.

Do you remember? I can almost hear your kittenish chuckle, for I know I'm just one of a mountain of enchanted broken hearts that you've left in your wake. But that night, you made me feel like the most blessed man on the planet. You walked straight in my direction. I stood, just one of a crowd of admirers, but you parted that sea of humanity like a sleek blade until no one stood between the two of us.

All of my surroundings lapsed into a diffuse, fuzzy haze: All I could see was your captivating eyes and playful smile as you grasped my right hand, shook it in the most firm-yet-ladylike manner, and purred, "Thank you for coming." Every internal organ in my body turned to jelly, but somehow I stayed on my feet.

Then you continued to glide past me and into the hallway. A crowd gathered between us; all as smitten as I, all eager to bask in your effervescence. You were gracious, and ever the lady, as you signed autographs and accepted the barage of compliments. But when I humbly strolled forward, your eyes widened playfully. You remembered me, from all those many minutes previous.

My memories of what I said to you have faded like old newsprint in the sun, but your response never will: "Thank you, Darling."


Darling, you called me, in that same velvet purr that you wrapped around Kurt Weill's melodies. You signed your name in sophisticate's cursive for me, glancing up with that feral twinkle in your eyes. It was like an anointment from Venus.

Farewell, Eartha Kitt. Your exit aches immeasurably within me. But we'll always have Jazz Alley.

Japan, Part 4: Wide-Eyed (and Blue-Haired) in Kyoto

This morning is Halloween, October 31, Japan time.

Crisp mountain air and hazy skies greet us as we arise. Buddhist mass begins bright and early at Shojoshin-in, and we attend the ceremony along with a small group of fellow gaijin.

The chapel/worship room (formal terminology escapes me) contrasts sharply with traditional Western worship halls: The compact space includes ceilings no higher than those in your average room in a typical private home. A single shade of deep flaming red lines the walls, and golden statues--Buddhist iconography, dragons, and other ornate statuary--occupy nearly every foot of floor space. The size and the striking two-toned hue of the room and its contents lend a surreal air to the space as the monks enter.

The two youngest of the monks sit opposite one another, chanting in a low, two-layered hum. The third, older but similarly shorn of hair and robed, sits further to the left and adds another layer to the lulling thrum of the prayers being chanted. Then an older woman attired in what looks like a grey business dress sits at the far right. She too begins chanting.

The pathway of sound they generate utterly hypnotizes: Repetitive, low, lulling, and oddly beautiful, their chants can't help but immerse an onlooker. My eyes involuntarily close--not from the boredom or drowsiness that frequently scuttled me during catholic masses as a kid, but from what's best described as a state of otherworldly zen. The rest of the world disappears in an infinity of beautifully thrumming Buddhist prayer and a blur of gold and red. Amazingly, none of the visitors break the spell by snapping photos or chattering during the service.

Before we realize it, an hour has gone by. Reluctantly, we leave this magical pocket universe for the central dining area, where we're treated to another phenomenal vegetarian meal.

After breakfast, Rita and I pack up our belongings and leave our bags in the checkout room as we take one final turn back through the Okunoin graveyards. This time we traverse much of the same area from the exterior of the park, walking just outside the graveyard's walls and fences until we cut back in about 2/3 of the way through. Much loveliness still greets us. Moths cling, nigh-invisible, to the stones that comprise the borders of the graveyard, and an exceptionally lanky spider dances across the rocks with deliberate and surprising grace. The dark body shored up by its long legs looks like a smooth and shiny polished black stone.

The shaded tranquility of the first two thirds of the Koyasan graveyards gives way to a more open and bright area of the park. A haiku shrine and several modern graves and memorials populate the park's extreme end. The trees and foliage display their most ravishing autumn colors, and brightly-colored gateways and structures accompany them. It's an appropriate coda to our exploration.

During the afternoon Rita and I make our way back to the hanare, passing through downtown Koyasan (its modest, tourist-friendly, picturesque layout feels a lot like the faux-Swiss-Alps ambience of Leavenworth, Washington) en route. Then we grab our bags, bid a most reluctant farewell to Shojoshin-in, and hop the bus back to the cablecar.

Our final destination for today will be a repeat, extended stop in Kyoto. Rita's booked a room in a ryokan (a traditional Japanese bed-and-breakfast) for three days, and we'll be touring several Buddhist temples throughout Kyoto proper. The superlative Japan Rail System whisks us from Koyasan to Osaka, then back to Kyoto. At Kyoto Station we hop a cab for our ryokan.

Our taxi traverses the streets and alleyways of downtown Kyoto, in a labyrinthian path to the ryokan. Soon we're taking nothing but alleys, and the stark atmosphere makes me feel like we're minor characters in a sixties-vintage yakuza flick.

The Oyado Ishicho ryokan sits inconspicuously in a clean but spare alley, hidden from the main drag just two blocks away. Right away, Rita's arrival is trumpeted with the fanfare of a foreign dignitary, as a huge personalized sign posted at the front glass door greets her.

A tiny Japanese woman--pepper dominating her short salt-and-pepper hair and sandalled and stocking'ed feet scurrying demurely under her kimono--rushes over to scoop up our luggage. Again, we've packed light, but our bags in toto must weigh at least half this woman's body weight. I reflexively reach down to try to wrest the heaviest pack from her, but this smiling warhorse of a lady will have none of it. She totes all three bags to the elevator unassisted, and leads us to our room.

A small, laminated booklet in English on ryokan etiquette in our small but comfortable room proves useful (even though we'd already done some homework back in the states). In addition to the required removal of shoes in the main portion of our lodgings, having our bedding (a futon) made nightly requires leaving your key at the front desk and specifying a specific time for bed-making. The booklet's humorous illustrations, replete with loutish westerners acting out the do's and don't's of things like public baths and when to tip (which is basically never) have Rita and I in stitches.

Once we settle in, Rita and I hit Kawaramachi-Dori (Kawaramachi Avenue), one of downtown Kyoto's main drags, on foot. The city proper displays the glorious schizophrenia inherent in many a Japanese metropolis--shiny modern shops and buildings co-exist amiably with rattletrap alleyways, down which everything from mom-and-pop restaurants to pachinko parlors to seedy nightclubs reside. Even the most ostensibly mundane sites--convenience stores, pharmacies--prove fascinating, thanks to the exotic filter of Japanese culture. The embryonic stages of a headcold have Rita a little logy, so we turn back around and head back into the ryokan.

My tired wife turns in for some shut-eye, and once she's settled and comfortable I head back out, solo. Both cameras stay back at the ryokan (a wise move in the long run--more on that later), so it's just me and my, um, photographic memory.

Music nerd that I am, I make my first stop at Jet-Set Records, a small vinyl purveyor on the fourth floor of an office building. It's a tiny but impeccably-stocked and cool little store. The bare white walls and shelves brim with vintage jazz, reggae, and disco records, and Cannonball Adderly blows fluidly in the background. Two guys--one a DJ type sporting a wool cap, the other an obvious jazzbo with a perfectly-tousled mop of black hair--man the counter and graciously help me search their shelves and database for choice Japanese rock. Most of their vintage vinyl is way out of my price range ($26 to $30 US), but I score a CD by Japanese pop/noise duet Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her for a cool 790 Yen (a little over $7 US).

Back along the main drag, several Halloween revellers weave amongst the locals, partying tourists, and commuters along Kawaramachi-Dori. Halloween has yet to be the cultural event in Japan that it is in the West, but I see quite a few teens in masks, and one or two in costume. All of these youths are blindingly beautiful (if Rita were here, we'd be playing 'J-Pop' until our arms bled), and so stylish that they look like they've stepped straight out of a manga. Willowy girls with slashes of red/brown hair and omnipresent wool caps, and their chiselled and immaculately-coiffed beaus, stroll the sidewalks like they've got personal stock in the asphalt. A point pondered: Do all Japanese emerge from childhood straight into fully-formed and gorgeous adulthood, without a single pubescent speedbump? Some of them stare at me like onlookers peering at a strange animal in a zoo. I chock up their gawking to my hirsute caucasian appearance and walk on.

The roar of several motorcycles emerges just behind me as I cross the intersection of Kawaramachi-Dori and Aneyakoji-Dori. I look up just in time to see eight hogs, each done up as some Japanese pop-culture/anime icon. The sinewy rider at the front sports an absurdly-festive helmet topped with a Doraemon cap, as he straddles his blue-and-white-striped cycle; a real-life Kamen Rider follows, insect-headed and riding a green-and-black bike; yet another wears the silver-and-red fighting colors of Ultraman, with a tricked-out bike to match; and so on. After drinking the surrealism of the scene in fully, I glance around to gauge reactions from the rest of the people on the street--they're all totally nonplussed.

It's around 9pm as I reach my personal Kawaramachi-Dori holy grail--the Kyoto Tower Records. Since Tower's dissolution, it's been re-christened Noise, but most of Tower's yellow-and-red signage stays in place. It's on the eighth floor of yet another tall office building, and I wind my way off the sidewalk and through its glass doors. The swarms of people on the pavement shrink as the glass elevator whisks me upward. Just as I exit the lift and reach the front door of the store, a smiling sylph of a counter-girl runs to me and blurts out, "Sorry! Closed! Come back tomorrow." She's as smilingly stubborn as our baggage carrier from earlier, so I turn and leave dejectedly.

Near the store entrance sits a pile of free in-store magazines. At least I won't leave empty-handed, I think as I sulkily pull one from the top of the heap. It takes me several seconds to realize that my right hand is completely covered in blue, apparently the byproduct of some wiseacre's crafty placement of some ink or dye amongst the periodical pile.

Suddenly I remember a large video arcade across the street that clattered and blipped its presence earlier. It's one of the few places open after 9 on Kawaramachi-Dori, and--thank God--it's got a public restroom. I run into the men's room and stake out space in front of the sink, scrubbing feverishly at my blue mitt like Macbeth gone Nerd.

At one point I reach into my jeans pocket, and pull my pen...my exploded blue pen...from within. Also wedged in said pocket: My comb--the comb I'd used in my hair earlier--and a couple-dozen Japanese coins--now also a sticky blue--of various denominations. I look up in horror at the bathroom mirror and note the sizeable blue streaks in my hair that charmingly match my cobalt-saturated right palm. No wonder I garnered so many stares from the locals--shambling, blue-haired, unshaven caucasians in ink-spattered hoodies don't exactly run a dime-a-dozen in Kyoto.

There's too much clean-up required for me to stick around in this public place scrubbing like a lunatic, so I exit the arcade and begin heading back to the ryokan. En route, thirst overcomes me and I duck into a 7-Eleven for a cold bottle of green tea. The counter-person's love of American tourists is surely cemented as I hand him a two sticky blue 100-yen coins to pay for the beverage.

My first night in Kyoto winds down with me hunched over the bathroom sink, scrubbing gobs of blue ink out of my hair, off of the two-or-three-dozen Japanese coins in my pocket, off of my right hand, and out of my jeans pocket. Midway through my Macbeth routine Rita awakens and chortles sympathetically at the spectacle of me in my underwear massaging blue coins in our ryokan sink at midnight.

Fortunately, she takes no pictures with which to blackmail my doofy blue tourist ass.

(The Kyoto at dusk photo can be found in this excellent Flickr photo book; the Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her CD cover and Doraemon pics are copyright their respective sources. All other photos by Rita Bellanca and Tony Kay, taken October 31, 2008.)

Not-Snow Day! Snow Day!

Every year, our local news media turn into a bunch of yabbering ninnies the instant the temperature drops anywhere near freezing. "STORMWATCH 2008!" they were screaming on Monday, when the temperature was in the low 30's, the weather was clear, and the downtown roads perfectly navigable.

I happened to have a camera, so I snapped a few pictures during my lunch break. Love's Forever Changes danced in my ears (there's your obligatory pop-culture reference, however obscure, friends) as I walked and snapped photos.

The area around my work has been transforming at an insane rate, but amidst all of the toney shops and shinily anonymous buildings sits the frequent highlight of my semi-daily, sanity-preserving walks--St. Spiridon's Greek Orthodox Church. It's an austere and beautiful building, and a bastion of the organic and the spiritual in an area rapidly losing its human face. I'm not religious, but the presence of this church (which, incidentally, I've never entered) consoles me that 'progress' and 'urban upgrade' haven't entirely anesthetized the 'hood's soul.

But the weather can change on a dime here in Seattle. And today Mother Nature gave the local news jabberjaws plenty to clack on about. All of Washington state is under a blanket of snow today. The daily routine of this entire state has ground to a halt, and I could care less. It's breathtaking.

So this morning, I went out with my beat-up Pentax Optio and snapped some shots of our house and environs, in the embryonic stages of Winter Wonderland status.

It's an honest-to-God blizzard now. Really. Another trek out, camera in tow, may be in order later.

If you like seeing all this, you should definitely take a look at Rita's Blog, Atomic War Bride. She's a much more adroit shutterbug than yours truly, and has taken some terrific pictures of the snow, and of the world's greatest dog (that'd be, um, our dog, Disco). The first picture of our noble beast on this entry is probably the most beautiful that anyone's ever snapped of her. Kudos, Wife.

And keep warm, all.

Passings: Beverly Garland, Bettie Page, Van Johnson

For anyone of a certain age, or anyone far-sighted enough to appreciate film or pop culture of an era other than this one, the last couple of weeks have been especially heart-breaking.

Bettie Page, who died at age 85 on Thursday, left an indelible impact on the country's--nay, the world's--collective sexuality that can't be overstated. Oh, and any man who does not harbor a hemisphere-sized crush on her is a fool.

In a world so celebrity and pop-culture saturated that the word 'icon' gets tossed around like used Kleenex, Page was the real deal. Like most pioneers, she received little recognition (even outright derision) during her pin-up model prime, but her striking signature look--jet-black hair and bangs, crystalline eyes eternally generating playful sensuality in those Irving Klaw photos--generated a major aesthetic and erotic ripple effect.

And now that she's gone, it's awfully easy to see Bettie Page as a martyr for the Sexual Revolution. Aside from her brief heyday as a Klaw Cutie, she led a pretty harrowing life--abuse from family and spouses, chemical dependency, mental instability, trouble with the law--while this ass-backwards world caught up with the sexual frankness she represented, and she went utterly unrewarded for it until her last few years on Earth.

Careerist parasites like Madonna and Britney Spears pretty effectively walked on Page's back (metaphorically speaking) to achieve their cynical brand of financial and sexual freedom, but they never clued into what made (and continues to make) Irving Klaw's most enduring cheesecake/fetish model immortal. One look at her in photos or on film brings home the point in full, saturated color. That smile, those beckoning-yet-strangely innocent sparkling eyes, and most importantly (really!) the strategic concealment of The Full Monty by lace/cotton/ostrich feathers in most of her photos--the cumulative elements manage to capture the mystery, the allure, the fun, and the magickal joy of sex more vividly than a warehouse full of Jenna Jameson videos ever will. Thank you, Bettie Page: You were a revolutionary and a liberator...And you looked way better in fishnets and g-strings than Che Guevara ever woulda.

Unlike Bettie Page, Beverly Garland never seemed like a mythic archetype, or a martyr. In fact, a significant part of Garland's legacy (she passed away on December 5 at the age of 82) has always been her utter lack of pretense. In her work, she was every inch a real woman, whether she faced zipper-backed monsters in B-horror flicks, crooks as TV's first lady cop in the syndicated TV series Decoy, or a small phalanx of cute sitcom kids as adopted mom to My Three Sons.

Garland already received hefty career appraisal in these electronic pages during last year's Horrorpalooza, so feel free to go here for a more detailed overview and film recommendations. Today, all you'll get is a celebration of what a terrific lady Beverly Garland was to me personally.

We met in the early nineties in Seattle. I was finishing a shift at a thankless telemarketing job in the University District, when I got a call from Rita that Beverly Garland was appearing at the Northgate Mall (just three blocks from our apartment at the time). I rushed to the mall as fast as Metro Transit could carry me.

Garland made the trek from her Hollywood stomping grounds as part of the mall's Senior Health Fair, and she made one great living testament to good senior living. She looked terrific--healthy, downright youthful despite being in her late sixties at the time, and elegantly dressed in an incredibly chic black-and-white pantsuit that any twenty-something model would've killed to wear so well. It was in the spring at one of the mall's lowest sales ebbs, so there were probably six people in attendance besides Rita and I, but Garland greeted us with the same genuine delight she'd have given an audience of two thousand.

After an articulate and engaging talk about her life, health and exercise regimen, she opened up the floor to questions. And being far too much of a nerd to pass up the opportunity, I barraged her with them. Garland let fly with candid, vivid, and frequently hysterical stories about working in low-budget cinema, and the many great talents she'd shared screen time with, for about an hour. This was a few years before she'd committed her storehouse of wonderful stories to Scarlet Street and Filmfax magazines in detailed print interviews, so Rita and I felt immeasurably privileged.

Afterwards Garland stayed on to sign autographs. She was (thank God) tickled pink at the questions I'd fielded her, leaning close to me as she signed my copy of The Movie World of Roger Corman with a wink as she stated proudly, "That's me--a B-Movie Baby!" Then she thanked us sincerely and earnestly for coming out to hear her speak, and gave Rita and I a big hug. It was probably the most wonderful talk with a professional actor that I've ever had in my life.

Years later, I sent Beverly Garland an autograph request, including a postcard with an image from her 1957 opus Not of this Earth. She sent it back signed, along with an 8 x 10 repro of the poster, also signed, and in a larger envelope that she provided and paid for the extra postage on. She was that kind of dame.

Class acts like that are rare birds nowadays, but such good-egg-ness seemed to come naturally to movie actors who came of age artistically in the forties and fifties. Van Johnson, who passed away December 12 at the ripe old age of 92, epitomized that graciousness. He was, by all accounts, as genial and nice off-screen as the characters he frequently played.

His career spanned six decades, and he worked alongside some of the greatest legends in Hollywood, but with his freckled, boyish good looks and amiable manner it was easy for audiences to take him for granted. He represented--with a refreshing absence of pretense, irony, or condescension--the archetypical all-American Nice Guy.

But Johnson could--and frequently did--turn in performances that easily rivaled those of his more mythologized co-stars: A double-feature of 1949's war movie Battleground, and the 1954 classic The Caine Mutiny handily proves it.

The former details a US army batallion's harrowing tour of duty in Bastogne during The Battle of the Bulge. It's a straightforward action drama (deftly directed by William Wellman) that turns a surprisingly unflinching look at the alternately tedious and terrifying ritual of World War II active duty. Johnson nets star billing here, but his Sgt. Holley feels solidly and effortlessly like one of the guys (always a generous actor, he's totally at ease as one member of an ensemble that includes Ricardo Montalban, James Whitmore, John Hodiak, and a lot of other dynamite character actors at the top of their games). And when fate forces him into command, Johnson lets the viewer see the transformation of this carefree guy into a hardened leader with downright contemporary brushstrokes.

Of course, The Caine Mutiny stands as an unparalleled classic, but even if you've seen it a million times, pop it in again once more and pay extra attention to Johnson's work. God knows it's easy to get lost in the celebrated fireworks of Humphrey Bogart's Captain Queeg, and (to a lesser extent) Jose Ferrer's power in the film's final courtroom scenes. But Van Johnson does the movie's heaviest dramatic lifting, almost without you noticing.

His Lieutenant Steve Maryk, a stand-up Naval officer put on the spot when he decides to overrule his insane captain's edicts, undergoes the movie's most complex character arc as his faith in Captain Queeg (and by extent, the U.S. Navy) gets shaken to its roots. The moment that sells the tautly-edited and starkly-lit mutiny scene comes precisely when director Edward Dmytryk hones in tight on Maryk's face, and the executive officer makes the decision to wrest control of the Caine from Queeg's grasp. Every fiber of doubt, conflict, fear, and resolve that plays inside of Maryk courses over Johnson's face in the space of a few seconds: It's a phenomenal moment of film acting, and again as Johnson was want to do, he brings it off with such unforced naturalness you almost don't notice it.

Rita, incidentally, had a mammoth crush on Johnson as a kid, so his loss registered extra-strongly for her (see her brief but eloquent tribute here). That loss was amplified by the great kindness Van Johnson showed her through the mail.

Rita sent Johnson a heartfelt fan letter about ten years ago. He replied with an autographed 8 x 10, and a handwritten note on the envelope. "Nice letter! Why aren't they all as easy as you?" he wrote, punctuating the note with a smiley face.

Good question. Especially in the context of a guy as nice as Van Johnson.

Passings: Forrest J. Ackerman--Magazine Editor, Pioneer of Fandom, Favorite Uncle

As I write this, DVDs of many of my favorite horror and sci-fi films sit on a shelf next to me--a library of fear at my fingertips. Exhaustive information about even the most obscure little genre films is just a mouse click away, and horror and sci-fi geekdom is a megalithic, multi-billion dollar industry. Thing is, literally none of it would exist without Dr. Ackula, Forrest J. Ackerman.

Ackerman, who died on December 4 at the age of 92, wasn't a household name to most folks, but he left a massive thumbprint on the horror and science fiction genres. He essentially created fandom, purchasing his first science fiction pulp magazine (Amazing Stories) in 1926, creating the first Science Fiction Fan Club in 1930, and popularizing the term 'sci-fi.' He spread the gospel of the fantastic to the world as a literary agent, editor, sometime author, and was a close friend to everyone from author Ray Bradbury to horror movie icons like Boris Karloff and Vincent Price.

But to me and two generations of horror-hungry kids, he was and will always be Uncle Forry.

Ackerman founded Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, the first periodical to exclusively cover fantastic films, in 1958. From its inception, the monthly mag was never a showcase for incisive cinematic analysis or cogent critical dissection, and Forrest Ackerman never pretended it was. No, FM was Uncle Forry sitting all of his surrogate nieces and nephews on his knee and sharing his wide-eyed awe and joy at fantastic film, in printed form.

Forry's personality imbued every page of the magazine. Many of the photos that covered its pages came from his vast personal collection, and he wrote a lot of his periodical's articles in a genial kid-friendly spirit peppered with loads of deliciously lousy puns ("You AXED for it!"). And he never failed to make fans feel part of the magazine, publishing photos of them on the Letters page and encouraging them to guess horror movie titles from Mystery Photos. One of the highlights of my eleventh year on the planet (1978) was opening FM #143 to see my name proudly printed alongside the couple-dozen other kids who'd correctly guessed the movie from whence the previous month's Mystery Photo arose (incidentally, the Mystery Photo was from Beyond the Door, and of course I still own my dog-eared copy of that issue).

It's hard to convey just how important this magazine was to me, and to so many other nerdy kids back in the day. I first discovered it as a horror-hungry first-grader circa 1973: There was no internet to spoon-feed reams of information to fans; no DVRs, DVDs, no VCRs. If you wanted to drink deep from the flagon of fantastic film, you either hit the first-run theaters, or you checked your TV Guide and made damn sure you were in front of the TV when Night of the Blood Beast aired, once, on one of the six channels sharing space on the analog airwaves. And if, God forbid, you actually wanted to read about (and see pictures from) horror or fantasy movies, there was literally one--and only one--source: Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Every month, I dragged my parents to the Book King bookstore in the Parkland Fred Meyer strip mall for the latest copy of FM, and then the rest of the day would be spent poring over the new issue with the intensity of a papal acolyte scrutinizing biblical passages. Still images from six decades of fantastic cinema--vampires, werewolves, alien invaders, zombies, giant bugs, and all manner of strange and scary things--stared back at me from those pages, ensnaring my imagination. FM irreparably turned me into an obsessive horror archaeologist, shrouded under a makeshift tent of a blanket so as to conceal the cathode glow of the TV as I watched Frankenstein's Bloody Terror into the wee hours of Saturday morning. Yep, I am the freak that I am today thanks to Dr. Ackula and his magazine.

As unassuming as it was, FM's largely non-judgmental style clearly conveyed the wonderfully non-snobby notion that all of horror cinema was a glorious continuum; features about outright (if entertaining) garbage like The Incredible Melting Man and The Giant Spider Invasion sat right beside coverage on silent masterworks like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. That open-hearted outlook still colors, in the best possible way, my view of the cinema of the fantastic. And I wasn't the only one: Famous Monsters of Filmland amassed a small but devoted fanbase that included Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, Peter Jackson, and Tim Burton (to name a few).

Changing times and decreasing sales induced Forry to quietly fold Famous Monsters of Filmland in 1983, but he continued to keep himself plugged into all things horror and sci-fi--editing short story collections, putting out autobiographical books of his own, and making periodic and welcome cameo appearances in genre films like The Howling and Innocent Blood.

Rita and I had the pleasure of meeting Forry in person twice. The first time was in 1993, at the 35th Anniversary Famous Monsters World Con. We and about ten other lucky fans had breakfast with Forry, and he readily shared stories about Bela Lugosi, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, and Ed Wood with robust enthusiasm. He wore Lugosi's original Dracula ring on his finger, and in a gesture worthy of anyone's favorite uncle, he pulled the ring off and let each of us at the table hold it and/or try it on (imagine the paranoid OCD packrats who comprise today's collectors being so trusting).

A palpable melancholy tinctured our second meeting in 2004. Rita and I were on a two-week sojourn to LA and Hollywood, and we'd specifically carved out time to visit Uncle Forry at home. He'd just had a stroke a few months previous, and in 2003 he'd been forced to sell most of his priceless collection of fantasy film memorabilia in a yard sale: An odious toad who attempted to steal Ackerman's intelllectual copyrights in the mid-nineties lost the legal battle, but took Forry's finances down in the process.

The tall, hale, and hearty bon vivant that regaled and charmed us eleven years prior now stood shakily before us, physically enfeebled (per his request Rita helped Forry button up his shirt when he greeted us) but still sharp as a tack mentally. Uncle Forry answered our questions about his old friends Peter Lorre and Vincent Price with joyous enthusiasm (despite the fact that I'm sure he'd fielded such inquiries dozens if not hundreds of times), and let us take in his truncated-but-still-impressive collection of memorabilia. That he let two dorky fans stand within an inch of Lon Chaney's original prop fangs and top hat from 1927's London After Midnight just conveyed how generous he was with his collection, and with his love of the fantastic. Rita and I both hugged him before we left, and I for one embraced him so hard that I'm surprised I didn't crack his ribs. It couldn't be helped: The guy just inspired that kind of emotion in me.

Uncle Forry, I love you and will miss you more than I can possibly say. And fangs for the memories.

Tom Jones, 24 Hours: The God of Pump returneth

Japan will have to wait for a spell. The Petri Dish, you see, is black and white and Tom Jones all over. Not that it hasn't already been, once or twice. But a couple of especially great reasons for it have popped up recently.

Firstly, the leather-lunged Welsh Wonder's album 24 Hours just dropped. And it's nothing short of phenomenal, a glorious crystallization of everything that is life-affirming and great about The Man and his voice.


On the face of it, this new release follows the basic template of most of Jones's discs since the mid-nineties--original tunes gilded by a few well-chosen covers, all garnished by those world-class pipes--but 24 Hours presents the formula to perfection. Much as I adore The Man's body of work, it's often necessary to do some wheat-from-chaff separation on his records. Here, every track just knocks it outta the park.

The new tunes (quite a few co-written by Sir Tom hisself) are a revelation. Many of them capture the escapist fairy-dust of his best sixties output--the swath of warm horns punctuating "If He Should Ever Leave You" and the loping Stax-Volt groove of "Give a Little Love" add vintage texture, even as the sharp modern Future Cut production keeps those elements from feeling transparently retro. The masterful title track, meanwhile, presents a stark and empathetic elegy to a fallen soldier, delivered by Jones with quiet drama and subtlety.

The Man can still belt it out, of course (he works Tommy James and the Shondells' "I'm Alive" into fighting Memphis Soul trim), but he's learned how to temper that force-of-nature voice brilliantly when the song calls for it. On Bruce Springsteen's wrenching boxer's-eye-view story-song "The Hitter," the burnished roughness of those distinctive pipes builds the story of the bloodied-but-unbowed title character with cinematic texture, and Jones delivers the lilting bossa-nova shuffle of "We Got Love" with the most gentle of touches.

All that, AND Tom Jones still packs 24 Hours with enough testosterone to fertilize half the eastern seaboard. He earns his God of Pump mantle in spades on the awesome U2-co-written "Sugar Daddy," a funky strut that lays out The Man's libidinous mission statement with bad-assed confidence. "You don't send a boy to do a man's job," he growls. Damn straight.

The second big item of import on the Jones front comes this Saturday. You see, I'll be interviewing Tom Jones...Sort of.

Sir Tom will be on NPR Radio's Saturday Weekend Edition, answering questions from fans about his life and career. One of those lucky fans will be me, so you'll actually get to hear yours truly chat up The God of Pump for a scant minute or two. Exact air time of the segment is still TBD: Stay tuned for more details. Oh, and run--no, sprint like Bicentennial-era Bruce Jenner--to your nearest retailer for a copy of 24 Hours. Yer a blasted fool if you don't.

In Japan, Part 3

October 30, 2008:

To Koyasan.

In the morning, we're escorted to the proper ticket purchase point in Osaka Station by not one but two helpful Swissotel staff members. After picking up our admissions we head over to the terminal for our train to Koyasan.

The Station holds a similar feel to London Station, with its open spaces and daylight filtering in over the metal framework that spider-webs the train gates. A lone, dilapidated pigeon lopes near us. One corner of his beak looks crusted with calcification, and in place of his right foot is an equally-calcified stub. He's charming as hell in his scruffy way, and soon he's lured several scraps of pastry from Rita and I.

The train arrives, and we're off to Koyasan. The journey offers the same humble-but-palpable pleasures as the Tokyo-to-Kyoto ride: More birds'-eye views of some of Japan's non-touristy quadrants flit by, but this time the sardine-packed suburbs gradually give way to much more rural and placid areas.

All of the surrounding terrain grows more lush, green, and panoramic with the speed of a time-lapse sequence from a wildlife documentary as we get nearer to Mt. Koya and Koyasan. At various points in the train's ascent it slows to a near-halt, brakes squealing as it traverses corners that open up spectacular vistas of verdant trees and plant life. The area bears some resemblance to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest (give or take appearances by bamboo and other exotic flora/fauna).

Once the train reaches the end of the line we take a cablecar up to Koyasan proper, ascending past carpets of bamboo, conifers, and ferns. We're just two of a pretty large mob of tourists (mostly Japanese) at the top, and Rita and I maneuver our way into the bus that's to take us to our lodgings. Between the absurdly-tight seats and our bloated carry-along luggage, we're so crammed into the coach that laughing at the absurdity of the situation imperils our ability to breathe.

Koyasan is one of Japan's most religiously significant locales. It's a center of Shingon Buddhism, a sect of the religion introduced circa 805 AD by reformist monk Kobo Daishi. Over a hundred monasteries dot the Koyasan area. One of them is Shojoshin-in, the monastery that will house us overnight.

We arrive at Shojoshin-in early in the afternoon. It's along a quieter stretch of the main road that remains tranquil despite the tour groups that occasionally pop in to flood the well-stocked gift shop across the street. We visit the aforementioned tourist trap ourselves to admire the rows of knick-knacks, postcards, and toys. My favorite portion turns out to be the food wares--I gleefully sample the many exotic gelatinous snacks stuffed with fruit and bean paste proffered by the clerks, while Rita picks up my slack and souvenir-shops for friends and family.

The monastery itself sits with quiet modesty, its simple wooden exterior surrounded by immaculately-kept grounds and gardens. Most of the lodgings for tourists are communal housing, with shared houses and baths. Rita and I presume this to be our arrangement, but we luck out and our request for the hanare (the one private guest residence just outside the main monastery) is successful. It's a beautiful traditional-style Japanese home, all sliding paper screens exquisitely filligreed with traditional mythological and Buddhist imagery. It's sparely but tastefully furnished, with a single table for eating/tea and a futon for slumber. The hanare includes western toilets (a profound relief to Rita, who was rightfully shuddering at the notion of a traditional squat toilet) but has no central heating (space heaters fill in fairly well).

The monks who tend to our needs feed all of us an all-vegetarian dinner that evening in the main dining room. The meal is, unequivocally, the most delicious food we are to have for the entire trip. As Rita eloquently states, if all veggie cuisine is this good, meat-eaters'd never go back to carnivorous dining.
The gardens surrounding our hanare are gorgeous, and best of all, we're just a few hundred feet from the Koyasan graveyards. The Graveyards house some 200,000 graves, and in striking contrast to the often-dour and sad final resting places of the west, these graveyards envelop one in a contented serenity. Perhaps it's because Buddhism's centered awareness of nature compliments Japan's other principal religion (the nature-worship faith of Shinto) with grace and acceptance. Huge trees shade a seeming infinity of tombstones, stone gates, Buddhist effigies, and statuary. For some 1,200 years nature has been crafting abstract masterworks over the surfaces of these markers in the vivid greens, oranges, and browns of the moss and the ambient plant life. The groundskeepers of these massive cemeteries keep the surrounding pathways immaculate, but rather than scrape away or clean up the statuary and markers, the plants, mosses, and lichens are allowed to become one with the man-made--to often mystical effect. We spend over two-and-a-half hours leisurely wandering through the graveyard, all without reaching the end.

The Graveyards are one of the most 'idiot-proof' tourist attractions imaginable, meaning that I could probably send my mom in blindfolded with a disposable camera and she'd come out with amazing photographs. This place is that kind of magical. The photographs (which, incidentally, are copyrighted by us and should not be used without permission, Friends and Neighbors!) should bear that out. Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I hope the next several are worth a few million, at least.

Postscript: The evening is relaxing, beautiful, and chilly. We take a turn in the graveyard after dark--Rita dilligently films while I tell an improvised ghost story. We return to the hanare, and before turning in for the night I decide to wander out to the graveyards alone, journal in hand:

"I am in the graveyard, alone...It is alternately tranquil and unnerving. I am at a fully-lit crossroads: There is darkness--infinite darkness--just beyond the well-groomed, well-lit pathway. The figures, markers, and stones that were so placid during the day are now shaded by the strange magic that the presence and the chill of the night induce. No cars are driving along the nearby road. All is silent: Indeed, the scrawling and scratching of my pen against paper sounds deafening amidst the silence. Tiny flies swarm 'round the lamp silently. I think I shall venture forward, just a bit more..."

I do indeed walk further down, to a darker point on the path, largely to face my own fear. How often, after all, does one get such a chance to immerse ones' self in something so atmospheric and magical? Leaning against a lightpost in the dark, I gaze up into the multiple tiers of graves and memorials as they dissolve into the surrounding blackness. After a few minutes of steeping in the atmosphere I rush back to the hanare, and I join Rita for several hours of restful slumber.

Tomorrow morning, we will be granted a special window into a ceremony oft-repeated here over the last thousand years...