Don't ask

Dean Jones: He's looking for a cat-burgler
Suzanne Pleshette: That's ridiculous. Who would want to steal cats?

Pinter

"I might even show you my photograph album. You might even see a face in it which might remind you of your own, of what you once were. You might see faces of others, in shadow, or cheeks of others, turning, or jaws, or backs of necks, or eyes, dark under hats, which remind you of others, whom you once knew, whom you thought long dead, but from whom you will still receive a sidelong glance, if you can face the good ghost. Allow the love of the good ghost. They possess all that emotion... trapped. Bow to it. It will assuredly never release them, but who knows... what relief... it may give to them... who knows how they may quicken... in their chains, in their glass jars. You think it cruel... to quicken them, when they are fixed, imprisoned? No... no. Deeply, deeply, they wish to respond to your touch, to your look, and when you smile, their joy... is unbounded. And so I say to you, tender the dead, as you yourself would be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life."
(Harold Pinter, No Man's Land, 1974. Words requested by the playwright to be spoken at his funeral)

I would love to do Pinter without pauses.

Fish films

The New York Times' Stanley Fish, of all people, has released his list of 10 all-time best American films. Showing remarkable restraint in not selecting a 13-minute documentary from 1924 on labor unease or "Killer of Sheep", he has instead opted to present a deliberately middle-brow list. Let's start by giving Fish a little bit of a break. We expect something idiosyncratic- something we wouldn't find in Bosley Crowther's heart of hearts. We expect that Fish will have done some judicious paring- this being the difference between a list and an inventory. We expect our tastes to be represented and suspect that we might become resentful if they are not but we are not entirely partisan. We don't expect "The Daily Worker" to gush about "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" the way we do when our more....urban friends are not supposed to be nearby. We expect that Fish has seen a large number of American films- we don't require him to have seen everything- the ability to rank films obviously would require less expertise than might be needed to... let's say... decide the ten most important developments in aeronautics.
However as we look at the list we have to wonder if Fish believes that it should require something greater than the ability to recall his own reactions.
There are so many endemic problems with establishing a hierarchy within such a vast archive of amorphous and dissimilar objects. Was "Steamboat Willie" more meaningful, more moving or more cinematic than "Long Day's Journey Into Night"? We've all tacitly (let's leave Kant out of this) agreed that there can be no objective value in art- so given the task of deciding which creative work exceeds the effects of all others- given the duty to select ten exceptional works from the entire history of this particular creative form- why does it seem that Fish abrogates all responsibility?
So Fish, we want a unique response....BUT we have expectations. "Citizen Kane" has been at the top of most such lists for decades. We expect it, or something very like it- a harbinger of modernism, the uncompromising vision of the true cinematic auteur. Fish's list is headed by "The Best Years of Our Lives", a mawkish WWII epic. This star-packed film, (if we count Dana Andrews) bested the sublime "It's a Wonderful Life" and Hitchcock's dark "Notorious" for Best Picture at the 1947 Academy Awards. Its reunion scene between Myrna Loy and Frederick March is about the only widely anthologized moment, but the film is often remembered for plucking the actor Harold Russell from obscurity, reminding us why we had obscurity in the first place. Russell, an actual double-amputee throws the film's particularly theatrical verisimilitude into disarray with his unconvincing performance as a double-amputee. Tellingly, this marks the first time a film with Teresa Wright was ruined by someone else. (Wright is the ubiquitous 40's ingenue whose excessive schoolgirlishness makes every Shirley Temple film look like "Krapp's Last Tape".) There are so many levels of required deception that one must engage to endure "The Best Years..." that watching it inexorably becomes about self-deceit.
You must ask whether Fish being moved by what could be most charitably be regarded as an unintegrated vision means that he isolates the power to manipulate viewers' emotions as the only valid effect produced by motion pictures. Well, what if emotional manipulation exists to achieve higher ends? Is it even possible to arouse the intellect without first registering upon the emotions?
What, after all, should be the aim of film? I suppose it varies from piece to piece, from artist to artist. It gets mighty complicated when you begin to dissect a particularly effective narrative and discover that it is not the result of a single design. How can we evaluate "The Third Man" when the idea came from Korda, the script from Greene, the direction Reed, the music Karas, and the speech on the ferris wheel Welles?
"The Third Man" is emotionally effective though Graham Greene considered it primarily an action film padded with dialogue. It also is a brilliant study in morality, an analysis of love, a dissection of literary celebrity, a history lesson, a detective thriller and a celebration of, and indictment of allegiance. Let's say that the result is a consistent, controlled amalgam of writing, performance, and technical skills producing a coherent narrative (within whatever logical boundaries it decides to make apparent to us). What is its value as a singular work of art? The complexity and variety of one's responses should have some sort of numerical value shouldn't it?
Not so fast! What about "Norbit"? Who can enumerate the countless levels and types of revulsion? "The Third Man" is a British film (mostly) but if the lachrymal melodramas on Fish's list, like 'Shane" eventually invite more exegesis by their ambiguities, does that give them an edge over films that have more readable emotional landscapes? Is that what he is getting at? Could someone ask him?
What else is on the list? Though Fish relies mostly on things from his tender youth, (even singling out the melodramatic moments in such lighter musical fare as "Meet Me in Saint Louis" to justify that inclusion) he has also included the Ramis/ Murray film "Groundhog Day", a light comedy based on a sort of stoner's existential concept which I won't go into. Let's just say it has more holes than Bonnie, Clyde and their goth kid Seth. Its appearance here as the sole comedy (to the exclusion of great screwball comedies "Bringing Up Baby", "The Awful Truth", "My Favorite Wife", and "His Girl Friday" or anything by Capra, Wilder Lubitsch and Sturges or even Fields, Chaplin and Allen) suggests that he expects us to regard all such lists as ephemeral, and his admiration easily given when the subject doesn't really matter much. This can only reinforce the suspicion that Fish does not respect film but enjoys it when it does what he permits it to do.
Part of the point of these lists is to put an ugly girl in with the pretty ones to teach us a lesson about surface beauty. Top Ten lists thrive on citing the inevident, it is the stock in trade of all music, art and film critics to find an obscure moment far worthier than a heralded moment. Doing so naturally implies a depth of knowledge and experience. If a critic's greater exposure has given him a larger sample from which to choose, how can the viewer of one or two films a year deny that there might be more charm in the collateral plot, the oblique emotion or the muddied dialogue? And if critics pretend to have no pre-conceptions, if they accept all finished products as contenders, they necessarily imagine that approving the well-regarded means they have not looked hard enough.
Most critics mix their lists like home-made salad dressing: 50% oil (the well-regarded) 40% vinegar (the obscure) and 10% spice (the things even their friends can't disguise their contempt for). Groundhog Day" is rocky road ice-cream in the recipe. It is not by any definition, not even by Fish's, one of the ten greatest works in American cinema. Wasn't Andie MacDowell still being dubbed by English speaking actresses then?
I do not mean to suggest that competent critics pander to their readers by offering them what they expect nor do I suggest following the above recipe (I buy Wish-bone). I also would never dream of suggesting that a body of critical response should dictate all future critical response. I've never made it through any "Godfather" nor to my knowledge any entire Scorcese film. I would never suggest to find a film superior to Citizen Kane is to dismantle the values of our forefathers. I'll be the first to argue that "Citizen Kane" has almost outlived its usefulness as the film equivalent of Ulysses or Demoiselles D'Avignon (and if pressed even that Picasso has almost outlived his usefulness as Picasso- but just leave Joyce be for now). Even though Welles' methods and manners have become familiar: the Rube Goldberg concatenation of lines, the switchback propulsion, the tonal and aural depth which define its visceral and quasi-intellectual thrills, the film still produces those thrills. It does so with a surprising economy, unlike the turgid epics of recent years. As it ages though, those pleasures are increasingly undercut by the inept performances which have become harder to ignore: the cast often bent and tremulous, clad in age-make-up so poor that it reminds one of an elementary school "Death of a Salesman"- their earnest radio drama line-readings. The film must also suffer as a paradigm of the disjointed nature of truth when its own artifice is so false- and must pall as a model of the destruction of hagiography when later study shows that -whereas Welles selected a perfectly loathsome target in Hearst, Hearst was a monster for reasons entirely ignored in the story of Kane (and the attacks on the widely admired Marion Davies were gratuitously mean-spirited.)
These are opinions that have evolved as the art-form has evolved. The art-form can never evolve enough to make "Groundhog Day" great.

"Sunset Boulevard" and "Double Indemnity" are on the list. These are both films I admire. I can just imagine what these dark, cynical but worldly romances speak to in Fish. Surely there is no more menacing affection on film than that between Stanwyck and MacMurray, but no one gets out of either of these love stories alive or sane. Possibly that's their appeal. At least they brook no chance of sequels though I'd like to think that someone pitched Max and Norma's return in "Sunset Boulevard Day Care". "Triple Indemnity" with Edward G. Robinson? ("See... I took out a policy that pays triple if these two kill each other after killing the original policy holder. I'm putting it all in Flubber"). What of the other great dark romances? Scripts from which at least one person emerges or in which both survive but in less than idyllic bliss? "Casablanca", "The Big Sleep", "The Maltese Falcon"? Even for the love of Jesus "The Philadelphia Story"?
Fish responds best to complex relationships and their complicated geometries, with his citing of "Red River", of "Raging Bull" and never more so than with his selection of "Vertigo", an easily detestable film featuring a woman named Kim Novak who appears to be constantly winded from failing to scintillate while hunching. Fish revels in the complicated "he manipulates me through her so I manipulate her" plot and singles out Novak for praise as he did Russell, the dead-eyed leaden middles that drag these long slogs down. If he likes complicated relationships why doesn't he consider "Chinatown", (was Faye Dunaway her own mother? What was that? Parthenogenesis? ) or the delightfully monstrous "The Little Foxes"?
That Fish gives us a list of movies we already know as opposed to things he wishes us to search out seems to cast aspersions upon more deliberately erudite Top Ten Film lists- lists that might rely heavily on films whose hypothetical later discussion could possibly inform areas of neglected plight: the plights of black Appalachian sommeliers or Hurricane ZsaZsa orphans (they have to use Z at some point). I'm all for giving a leg-up to the ladderless masses, but I suspect, today on the intersections of despair and degradation, you are more likely to have gaggles of ragged production assistants than orphans chase you down the street for change.
I've long believed that the more 'subversive' the publication that employs the critic the more recondite the list. It's not a perfect formula but I'm working on it. A critic in some ways is always assembling a simulacrum of himself- as automatically as he might name his 5 senses. After all, how can any man live his life without imagining the world is just himself, disassembled? The entireity contains the top ten facets of the list-maker's personality. This allows the list-maker to illuminate the aspects of his personality that are so nuanced that no one else has ever seen them. He does this by selecting films that illustrate such nuances in a manner which he presumes is invisible to nearly everyone. The small signs of heroism or despair strike some inner resonance, and the less evident they are the more acknowledging them gives hope that one's own quiet gestures can make a difference.
Fish stresses the piquant buried within the mundane. This is certainly understandable. But how uninteresting must the bulk of the thing be to make those interesting moments worthwhile? If I have been numb for 110 minutes only to find, in two fabulous minutes Mickey Rooney popping out of Victor Buono's stomach and running around the spaceship, I am not likely to forget the earlier pain I endured. But maybe that's me. I am such an ideal candidate for brainwashing, I usually consider the first 20 minutes of every film I see the greatest thing I've ever seen. "Oh my god! I love this! 'The Dukes of Hazzard' is the best mov...." and then minute 21 hits. Maybe it's my metabolism. Pauline Kael must have been built like a Galapagos turtle.
I suppose what is most provoking is how Fish discards the evolutional narrative of film by ignoring its touchstones, ignores the scope of film by wallowing within the major studio projects, and ignores the social utility of film by ranking excellence by his own responsiveness- and does this without admitting that he is doing it.
I suppose it could have been worse. Thank god they screwed Manny Farber's lid tight.

FROM: Middlemarch

As Casaubon courts Dorothea:
"Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was."

Busts

Tobacco cards- dozens more at the NY Public Library site

Ivy Compton-Burnett

The prototypical Ivy Compton-Burnett line, from Brothers and Sisters:
"No, don't dream of troubling Peter", said Sophia, as Peter ceased to dream of it.

FROM: Memories of Montparnasse by John Glassco

Gertrude Stein projected a remarkable power, possibly due to the atmosphere of adulation that surrounded her. A rhomboidal woman dressed in a floor-length gown apparently made of some kind of burlap, she gave the impression of absolute irrefragability: her ankles, almost concealed by the hieratic folds of her dress were like the pillars of a temple: it was impossible to conceive of her lying down. Her fine, close-cropped head was in the style of late Roman Empire but unfortunately it merged into broad peasant shoulders without the aesthetic assistance of a neck; her eyes were large and much too piercing. i had a peculiar sense of mingled attraction and repulsion towards her.

How I started Part 3

My sleeping arrangement quickly moved from the peaty bog sofa to Tim's obsessively tidy bed. If the house was chaos, the bed was strict order. Tim was a bedding afficianado. He spoke of thread count like an alchemist. He valued it more highly than pattern or color. I don't believe he ever fixed on an optimal number. Who's going to say how many angels should be allowed on a pin's head? There could not be too many threads in a sheet. After a long day of being tortured by by demonic furnishings we would kick free and convene at the bed. There Tim would tuck and smooth each layer of the bedding, the corners perfectly folded, the head turned back neatly. I would just stand and watch as each immaculate layer was made to be perfectly flat and I always looked forward to collating myself in. Nothing felt quite so good as a receptive bed, an unwrinkled, undefiant, uncomplicated bed. In my own bed I'd be forced to disentangle a knot of blankets with my feet every night, unsure whether the blankets were on lengthwise or had gotten turned to cross perpendicularly. If more than half the bedclothes had been tugged to favor one quadrant, I would always seem to sense it, subconsciously and only at an inconvenient level of awareness. There's something about an unbalanced bed that troubles sleep. My bed would always be a tangle of its elements, only 75% or less of which fit- if 3 fitted corners gripped the mattress, the 4th would always pop free. During the night my bed boils and heaves like the primeval earth. I have no idea what can be happening but the next day it looks like it was ransacked by foul-tempered dwarves.
Watching Tim make his bed was like watching a impeccable kind of origami being made by someone in a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.
Though they lived just across the street, Tim's family never visited Hulga's house. Hulga only came by once. She was dressed in a heavily embellished sweater, greens and purples, a satin jacket, her voluminous wig and a sort of Peter Pan hat on top. She was cheery and seemed to be untroubled by the incomprehensible number of unusable pieces of furniture piled everywhere. She was something of a pack-rat herself, though it was hard to imagine her in the clothes that she stored in the house- the high-heeled go-go boots and mod print mini-skirts. It was easier to reconcile the gemutlich little woman with all the beer garden paraphrenaila that lay festooning the cartons of clothing, including two sets of plastic Clydesdales pulling a beer van.
When I visited Tim in Sedro we would work on several projects simultaneously- some in the enormous garage, some on the back porch, some in the driveway and many in the house. Tim tried to guide me as I refinished wood furniture but it was hopeless. I was afraid of acetone which he used liberally and my pieces were always clogged with the residues of the original finish or were freckled with numerous spots of paint in minute divots. The finishes I applied were never as well-done as his. When Tim did not like the way a piece was turning out, he would strip the piece again and start over. I could never bring myself to do that. If they weren't turning perfectly, I would just begin to resent the hypothetical shopper who would expect perfection.
Despite my own misgivings I would, nevertheless, take on things far beyond my competence. I refinished an entire Heywood-Wakefield dining set with 6 chairs. Hey-Wake was a brand notorious for the difficulty of reproducing its amber blond finish. Every mark, every misstep showed in blond furniture. I was much more comfortable with metals and metals were slightly more forgiving. I would blithely begin projects that would require days of power sanding and days of hand sanding, vented lockers being a particularly odious example. We would also reupholster chairs or padded benches with a staple gun. And when it was very sunny and dry we would steam clean sofas and upholstered chairs. What was key was drying time. If one contiguous surface dried unevenly the poor result was instantly apparent.
For the most part we enjoyed working on things together. Tim could make me laugh nearly constantly, though the hilarity soon was broken up by more and more bickering. I think our nerves would start to fray earlier and earlier each trip. Our sleep was disarranged which was certainly responsible for part of it. I found, as soon as I had moved into the big bed that as soon as he drifted off Tim began to babble in the night like a mountain stream or a decorative fountain. It gathered volume from an initial split-splat, becoming eventually a sort of moist Flight of the Bumblebee. This gave it the effect of always approaching, like a furtive waterfall. I would push him as far as I could to his edge of the bed.
I think his self-awareness kept him awake nights which allowed him to discover -with what seemed like no small amount of glee- that I sobbed disconsolately in my sleep. It was not working out. I couldn't sleep because it sounded like kittens lapping up a spill behind me; he couldn't sleep because of the hysterical weeping. It eventually occurred to me in the middle of one sleepless night to switch my direction. When Tim woke up and saw feet on the pillow next to him, he was badly startled.

How I started in the business Part 2

My visits to Sedro were always productive, even if they might have been unhealthy. I would skip the gym the 4 or 5 days I was up there and would cleave fairly closely to Tim's all starch diet. In the mornings we would clear away what we had worked on the day before and make a space to grill egg-sandwiches- Tim's unvarying breakfast. The potato bread made them doughy, the butter and American cheese made them unctuous. Bacon on the side. I'd make coffee, but Tim drank local Soda. He actually preferred generic brands to name brands and poor cuts of meat to better. He'd prepare chicken thighs in oily Thai peanut sauce mounded on a plateful of white rice. Dinner was seldom before 11 at night when we would watch the old Kilgallen/Cerf "What's My Line" with a plate on each of our laps. Sometimes we'd eat spaghetti drenched in Alfredo sauce.
The kitchen was also where new purchases were cleaned. Small parts, scrubbed, scraped and buffed. Next to the loaf of potato bread and the pizza rotisserie there would be several open cans of Howard's Restor-a-finish, which was extraordinarily noxious. Occasionally Watco oil too, as we could never seem to predict what would be effective. There was nearly always a can of Brasso as we polished plastics and removed adhesives with it. There were open squeeze bottles of lighter fluid which was a quick label-remover. Gunk-off. Goo-gone. Some of these removers would melt through fiberglass or plastic. Brasso was the safest. There were always lots of soaking brushes and hardware soaking. Lots of tacky finishes. When it was winter the final finishes had to be applied in the house or they would never dry. In summer our final coats were applied in the driveway. The tiny brackets that were scattered on pieces we finished in summer were the legs of adventurous and unlucky bugs.
We started refinishing metal barrister bookcases for the owner of the store where we consigned. He paid well but the work was not easy. Barrister bookcases were manufactured by several firms, most notably Globe-Wernicke who made both the traditional oak stacking units and industrial metal units. The metal ones went through several design changes, and each change brought us a new puzzle in disassembly. It wasn't just Globe-Wernicke cases. Each company had their own proprietary method, and each had their own irreplaceable pieces. The glass was held in place by rubber strips in some, metal flanges in others, thick rubber bumpers in most. the bumpers were particular and a bumper from one side of a pane of glass could not be swapped with one from the other side. The inner sides of the cases had to be pried away in one model, and then slid back after the refinishing without scarring the bottom surfaces.
Some of the units we would brush with sandpaper after we had stripped them and then coat them with oil and poly. They could not be touched after the original paint had been removed, so we would move them with towels. The oil on our fingers would have left ineradicable prints that would soon rust. Other units we would paint with appliance epoxy. It came in white and black only and had peculiar requirements. It could not be touched up. A second coat would begin to dissolve the first. Tim had such a steady hand that he was able to make an initial pass to get the surface tacky and then finish with the exact same amount of paint distributed evenly. We could only do this when the sun was hot enough to bake the paint on in a mirror-like finish. It is nearly impossible to resist shortening the passes with the spray can, and if you were to double back the result would be a glossy, fluid switchback distinct from the rest of the surface. I didn't have the patience to do it well. After a few sets we decided that i would disassemble them and strip them and he would paint them and assemble them.
When we weren't working on these commissioned projects, we'd spend most of each day shopping for our inventory. There were 5 or 6 second-hand stores and thrift shops that Tim would visit daily. He had an eagle eye. He could see things sitting in a undifferentiated mass in front of us that were invisible to me. Even as he pointed them out, they would generally look worthless to me and only as he began to work on them did they appear naturally to possess great quality and value. It was very nearly wizardry: seeing the prince in the frog.

Snow day!

Is it Xmas yet?

Innards

Something is awry inside me. It feels like French farce. Seductors in towels running room to room, doors slamming. It has been going on for a month at least.
Nothing particularly odd is coming out of me. But something odd is going on inside. My intestines feel like a habitrail. My ribs like cat-splayed mini-blinds. Sometimes it is like a stitch in the side. My smoking is nearly imperceptible, my cardio routine is down to the lake with Buddy on sunny days, twice a week. I found an old sample of Prevacid and have begun that. Claire, who lives next door now, is ceding the remainder of her ulcer medicine to me. That should get me through Xmas. If I die I know it will be just when I get my hair just like I like it.
My hebdomadal binges on Friday nights do not seem to affect it.

FROM Memories of Montparnasse by John Glassco

I liked the Bal de Chiffoniers. These pale weedy youths in shabby tight fitting suits, these heavy men with the muscles of coal heavers, these quiet white-haired elders with quavering hand and heads and the unwinking stare of the obsessed- all conveyed the message of an indomitable vitality- a quenchless psychic urge. Never had I felt the force of human desire projected with such vigor as by these single-minded devotees of the male

Walter Scott's Personality Parade

As the Sunday paper is here and is partly responsible for my terrific fire, I thought it would be relevant, as I feed it with the advertising supplements, the real estate section, travel, sports, the comics, and Parade magazine in that order to quote my very favorite question to Walter Scott's Personality Parade, a feature which has appeared on the 1st inside page of Parade magazine for as long as I can recall. I have saved the clipping from the late seventies or early eighties.
Q: I am 82 years old and have poor vision and have believed that June Havoc, sister of the late Gypsy Rose Lee, is married to Fred MacMurray. Am I wrong? I hope my memory is not playing tricks on me. -Mary Louise Covington, Lexington, Ky.
A: You are mistaking June Havoc for June Haver who is Mrs. Fred MacMurray.

The typist

I have begun to mentally piece together a new story. I had a nasty setback when I inadvertently heard short fiction being read on public radio last night. That awful combination of earnestness and nonchalance, the predictable tricks of observation, introspection, supposition and specification are lethal to my ambitions. The attenuated lives of inexpressive people. Of course, fiction should never be read aloud. Performance is an entirely separate skill whose merits are judged independent of the text and in preference to it, like color before form. Unless the thing is in some arcane argot, like Joyce's dialect in Ulysses- where essential clues to the meaning can be revealed by the informed speaker- I prefer to create my own internal reader.
What a strange mechanism it is- to silently reproduce the words one reads as though they are being heard!
Actual recitation is so tethered to the page that you become intensely aware of the ad hoc manner in which the cadences are formed- some by the difficulty of layering multiple clauses so as to leave open room for each of them, or some cadences by the intricacy of the language, alliteration or perverse antiphony. You can sense the ardent beginning and the flattening of the voice as it approaches an elegiac end in the reader's voice. You are always startled at the level to which the dialogue will be embodied and you wonder at the decision that leads to that particular level of commitment.
I still make the notes that will lead to writing another piece, but I am waiting for the circumstance, and the period details that will ignite the scene. To inspire me I have begun reading Katherine Anne Porter's essays, John Barth's essays and Mary McCarthy's essays. My friend David pointed out the general area where Mary McCarthy grew up which is just down the road from me and not very far from where Kurt Cobain killed himself, and my dear friend Rick's ashes were splooged into Lake Washington after his terrifyingly sudden, characteristically tidy death.
The story crucially involves a lady typist. Hazel, who types what the narrator cannot. I thought it might also involve numismatics and picked up a copy of History and its Images by Francis Haskell, which has quite inadvertently hypnotized me with its brilliance.
I might take the Christmas money my parents have sent and get Word installed on my Mac. Because to type the damned thing on a manual would be awful.

How I started in the business Part 1

Across the street from Tim's childhood home, where his mother and brother still live, is a rundown split-level rambler owned by a flamboyant elderly German woman. Her name is Hulga but could possibly be Helga, Ulga or Elka. I'm sure Tim knows but he is famously imprecise about names. She wears blond Eva Gabor wigs that add a foot to her lower five and she fondly recalls Hitler, when pressed even a little. She answers the phone, "That is Hulga". She does not attempt to keep up any of her properties, nor is she particularly attentive to whom she rents. One tenant of hers was later found to have filled the garage with hundreds of liter bottles of urine. Tim rented this house across from his childhood home with the condition that Hulga's piles of Beer Hall kitsch would remain stored in a couple of the several bedrooms.
Having just endured the bird/window crash of a relationship, we agreed that it would be therapeutic for me to drive up from Seattle and stay with Tim for a week. We'd shop and work on furniture together, then load the finished projects into Tim's enormous truck bed with the razor-edged canopy, and drive them down.
My first sight of the house was not promising. Ivy and pestilential vines shouldered up against the roof line. The shiny green leaves were dusted with particles of sanded paint or blurred by cobwebs that had caught billows of sawdust. The ivy crept through doorways and exterior walls and flowed over the discarded tabletops leaning six deep against the house. Around back the ground vanished beneath this sea. Saarinen bases and Eames chair frames that were left outside had become topiaries.
The inside of the house was once beautiful. There were stone floors, a masonry fireplace, handsome walnut panelling concealing built in cupboards and receding to form low window seats. But the house was damp even in summer. In the long wet winter it was freezing and the carpets moldered. It was difficult to keep warm because of the size of the main room with its enormously high ceiling. I suppose that the frugal Ulka had fitted the fireplace with a pellet stove. 50 pound bags of pellets lay nearby, but to warm one evening might take 20 pounds.
Tim had a formal dining table piled with smalls and decrystalled chandeliers with showers of mismatched crystals scattered around them. Two ten foot bank doors leaned against the paneled walls. Stacks of books and magazines were everywhere. Beneath piles of Tim's thrift store buys, most still in their plastic bags was Tim's horsehair stuffed sofa. This was supposed to be my bed, but it was like sleeping on a stiff haystack as it slowly sank into a peaty bog. It was like being gripped by the cold grave.
Tim actively worked on dozens of pieces at the same time, but there were hundreds of projects that were dissassembled, waiting for parts or inspiration. The main room held the latest inductees. Three-quarter framed prints, plugless lamps, knobless nightstands. The bigger things, like wheeled industrial racks were on the back patio. The bedrooms had famously rare Deske and Eames pieces, covered with panoramic photos, stacks of loose numbers and letters. 1 large closet was filled with light fixtures that needed work. The worst cases were in the basement. Things that had outlived their resurgence. Late Deco. You could hardly resist edging between the perilous piles. There were hundreds of pieces- some balanced on their tops if one of their legs was missing. Stray chair arms reached up. Curved ribs of table bases, flayed sofas, skeletal lampshade frames. Lit with a bare, swinging bulb, it was like furniture Guernica.
Tim was always on the search for new substances to surface irreparably scarred tables with. Once he pulled up the carpet in the bedrooms and found that the padding beneath was cork darkened with age and years of lax housekeeping. He began to peel up the cork and use it on table tops. He was amazingly inventive and would cannibalize half a dozen pieces to make one brilliant amalgam. The process looked as inscrutably mad as Doctor Frankenstein's, but the pieces would always turn out gloriously. I remember hours spent piecing together the reclaimed floor from a grocery store for a new table.
He used lethal stripper called, inexplicably, 'Aircraft Remover'. It boiled human skin with a pinpoint splatter and sent both of us running screaming to a sink many times, but it would cut through the plastic-coated metal when nothing short of a grinding tool would. The wood-patterned plastic would boil up and with a spatula we'd scoop and flip it like a fried egg and it would eat through another layer. It seemed endlessly reusable. Tim would scrape the dreck which had become thick like yoghurt from the melted paint into a coffee can, and somehow the exposed concentrated sullied mess would work even better when dumped out on something later. The fumes were unforgiving, dense, heady and toxic and would inspire us to smoke a cigarette.
We are both at the point of giving up smoking now- after many years- maybe 20 for each of us. I am also trying to give up furniture stripper.

Parade

Could we pretend that the British pronunciation of it is "par-ODD"?

Response to Eric's letter to his unborn child upon the election of Barack Obama as President

To Eric's unborn child upon the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State

If you are born a girl baby (and you should know right away- do you want to hold your penis or see "Twilight"?) you can't possibly know of the immensely rich history of women that precedes you. No, you're not stupid! How could you know of strides and paths and ceilings made, blazed and broken by women as diverse as Elizabeth Barrett Browning?
Women were once charged with a lot of the really necessary yet unrewarding tasks under which mankind labored- gathering, cooking, childbirthing, fetching 2 pails of water on yokes balanced on their shoulders, housecleaning, Olson twinning and Pussycat dolling. Women like Hillary Clinton, a hardscrabble prairie lawyer who worked her way up from fiance to wife, and now from Senator to Secretary of State benefitted from the actions of women who challenged what ladies call, coquettishly, the male hegemony. Ladies have graced the office of Secretary of State previously- but if not the first woman, she is the most woman, if you get me.
Yes. Women have not had an easy time of it. How much you would learn if only you could summon a woman from the past! (No, you're not stupid. You can't.) A woman like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "What are these people you call co-eds?" she would exclaim. "Lady astronauts? You're crazy!" she'd exclaim. "A man cooking dinner and styling celebrities? Is this topsy-turvy world?" she'd exclaim.
Oh, there have been what your father might call lagniappes and what your mother might call accessories along the way, but by and large women have been regarded like the 3rd rail, the 3rd overtime or the 3rd Superman. What, you ask, would some woman that I summoned from the past (though it is impossible) feel women had actually accomplished when it seems that women must, in this day and age, constantly testify to their own verity? "They're real!" you hear from bar to tavern to pub, "Feel them!" How this summoned voice, let's say Elizabeth Barrett Browning would cry- "Do not ever feel that you are less than real! Were my struggles and the struggles of other women in history whose names I cannot at the moment remember in vain? A resounding no I say." And it is true. At the dawn of this great new age, when Senator Hillary Clinton is poised to become the Secretary of State for the United States, keep in mind that without Elizabeth Barrett Browning who was a very, very well-known poet, placing her footsteps in the sand although I believe she couldn't walk or did not really enjoy walking, then the women who followed her, like.... like.... Chyna would have to forge their own paths- if you understand me. I am glad that we have had this little chat about a significant historic or historical milestone. I am not doing this for Paul Volcker. I do have a life.

Yours, Mike McConnell

Mom cooks spinach for lunch

watching what I shouldn't

Watching the mirthless Mad, Mad, Mad,  etc. World, the bloated, turned eclair filled with the redoubtable cast. It is frantically unfunny. The only interesting part is the bizarre but brilliant speech given by the delightful Terry-Thomas on the American gynocracy:

"As far as I can see, American men have been totally emasculated- they're like slaves. They die like flies from coronary thrombosis while their women sit under hairdryers eating chocolates and arranging for every second Tuesday to be some sort of Mother's Day! and this infantile pre-occcupation with bosoms. In all my time in this god-forsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don't you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, in advertising and all fields of entertainment. I'll wager you anything that if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight."

Faulkner calls them "mammalian ludicrosities".Of course, my feelings about breasts are complex. There is something vestigial about them. Structurally they have the sophisticated lines of flying buttresses. They seem an after thought, or an inconveniently added necessity maybe- like fanny packs.

After Mad, Mad...'s bizarre end where the comedians are thrown lethal distances off an out of control fire truck ladder, some onto live power lines- I witnessed the equally apocalyptic end of "Kiss Me Deadly"-whose last shot is of a nuclear device that slowly blazes over the girl who opens the box in which it is detonating. It is weird at best- though it oddly prefigures the ark of the covenant scene from Raiders.

Tuesday: Adam's Rib. Judy Holliday was given an Oscar for Born Yesterday when she deserved one for Adam's Rib. The role was the same- her acting method so radically new that it is still startling to watch. Take it away from her for Born Yesterday and give it to Bette Davis for All About Eve. Rip the award from Susan Hayward's cold dead hands and give it to Roz R. Oscar revisionist chess. Truly some of the worst performances captured on film were accorded the damn thing- Sidney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. Cliff Robertson in Charly. Unwatchable. Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly, Harold Russell, Jenifer Hudson- all rotten. Teresa Wright ruined so many great films, there should be some way to digitally replace her. Almost every horrible actor of note has been given one- with the exception (so far) of Candice Bergen (nominated), Cybill Shepherd (Golden Globe) and Screech.

Winnowing

I am paring down the number of books I own. I am trying to read as much of each as I can before their purge. Some have proven instantly unlikable.  I am at peace with getting rid of the Wapshots, but I have given the Forsytes a week to ingratiate themselves with me. Goodbye, unread Kobo Abe. Adios Amos Oz. Bye-bye Scott Bradfield. Go, Timothy Mo. You've worn out your welcome, Fay Weldon. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Joe Keenan, Nino Ricci, Greg MacGuire, John Fowles: after the first dozen to the first hundred pages- they are all on notice. The first editions I have are not really worth listing for sale: Toni Morrison & John Irving have all signed limited run editions that predate my trade 1sts and wholly devalue them.

I am burning stacks of old New York Reviews after tearing out articles that I might find informative later, but again I must only keep what is practical and light the rest in the fireplace because the furnace is not working. I must admit that I will never read long pieces on Marianne Moore or Rabindarath Tagore, Pynchon, or Roth, because I will never ever read Moore, nor Tagore, nor Pynchon, nor Roth. 

I can't settle now on anything absorbing to read for pleasure- I have begun Rites of Spring on Stravinsky, Modernism and War, Martin Amis' House of Meetings, (which opens unpromisingly with an often used subversion of the medium by commenting on the failings of that medium. "If this were fiction, it could never convey... sort of thing. Such a cliche, but who has the strength to avoid it? Amis, one would think-but we get something like: 'after all, what are words on a page? A collection of black marks...') I've begun an enjoyable book on the Victorian medium Daniel Home, & the 3rd volume of the Graham Greene bio by Sherry, whose 1st 2 volumes I believe I own- though they may be buried in trunks in the garage, somewhere I assume near Greene's books themselves, handsome, discreet little cloth-bound hardcovers in uniform editions from Viking. All I can find inside is A Burnt-Out Case.

Please, Dean, no!

Every morning, once I have set the soy milk steaming in the kitchen, I will open Pandora, an online streaming music site, on my Mac. I can wander out, as I did today, and paint a cabinet and an hour later come back to hear a song and artist that reflects the genre, the style or the generation of the artist I had selected as a "seed" station. The seed is analyzed, and it qualities plotted. Pandora chooses the songlist based on similarities. I find it, then, somewhat peculiar that every song, artist or style I have selected inevitably leads to the same fucking song: Dean Martin singing "On the Street Where You Live". This is a song originally from the musical "My Fair Lady". It was covered widely, but seldom to odder effect. For Martin it was given a slow, swinging Big Band arrangement. It seldom matters who I have selected to listen to- after an hour, it has lead to Dean Martin singing "On the Street Where You Live". Blondie to Grace Jones to Sylvester to "I have often walked, down this street before". Prokofiev to Stravinski to Rimsky-Korsakov to "I have often walked, down this street before".  Dinah Washington to Carmen MacRae to Nancy Wilson to "I have often walked....? Copland? Daft Punk? "I have often walked...." Dean Martin has become my online stalker.

It could be worse. I have nothing against Dino, as he was called. He was not the classic songbook type of artist, more of a movie-star personality than a vocalist. For some unrecoverable reason, I loved Matt Helm movies, though Dean seemed the least physically apt hand-to-hand combatant on film. It was, luckily, the era of the glancing karate chop to the neck. Though Martin lacked physical authority, he epitomized a sort of easy-going, boozy, hip, masculinity. Like Sinatra, he turned a lack of athleticism into a sort of non-threatening but unsurpassed virility. They never seemed to take a woman by force. They sort of melted underneath her. They were straight bottoms.

To my unending mortification, the only time anyone ever caught me in the act of um... self-gratification, I was a teen in my darkened bedroom at home watching "Bells Are Ringing" with Dean and Judy Holiday on a black and white portable. Of course at that age, I could have jacked off to a Porky Pig cartoon. 

I remember from a bio of Martin, but only hazily, Dean's inability to stomach the bathos of Jerry Lewis- the false pathos, the disproportionate straining of sentiment to portray great sadness, which he then contrived to bracket by desperate farce- the mannerisms of a clown, without context or reference. Dean Martin's decision to walk away from Martin and Lewis is one of the great artistic abnegations of the 20th c.- like Rothko slitting his wrists, or dating Yoko, or David Foster Wallace hanging himself, although that's a little less Martin and a little more Lewis. 

Alice B. Toklas never embraced- nor to be frank, admitted being Jewish. She fancifully imagined herself baptized by any leaking Catholic, and fervently believed in an afterlife. Always the more practical of the two, Toklas expected that Gertrude Stein, who had not been baptized, would need to be bailed out of Limbo.  This is something that could only be done by paying the Church for intercession, prayers for her soul, candles lit to burn up Gertrude's minor (subliterary) sins. If Gertrude's will had been clearer, Janet Malcolm believes that Toklas would have liquidated all of the famous Modernist paintings that Toklas was given a living from and they would now be in the Vatican Museum.  In Malcolm's Two Lives, we get the lovely story of May Bookbinder (a young woman for whom  Gertrude had conceived a great passion) whose love letters Alice discovered. It is generally accepted now that Toklas had demanded Gertrude remove every instance of the word 'may" in a piece she was writing, replacing it with "can". Though slavish, and particularly jealous, Toklas never admitted that she and Stein were lesbians. What might have constituted sex between the two of them might possibly not be generally recognized. It's impossible to know even when you are told, as Gore Vidal does, who does what to whom. Malcolm suggests that a passage of Stein's writing clearly signals her sexual attraction to women, Alice particularly, which, though I've read it over and over- something about old clocks and bright handkerchiefs, and food and dirty things- and all it does is confirm my belief that I know nothing about the sexual organs of females.
Malcolm, though able to be succinct and meandering simultaneously, has such a clean, refreshing style, that it makes me doubly reluctant to return to Cynthia Ozick's 'Fame and Folly'. Cynthia's sentences are occasionally overwrought, alliterative and provoking. There is a repugnant piece on her own precocity, as reflected in the envy of her classmate, the subluminary Alfred Chester. It is called Alfred Chester's Wig and she compares their brilliant wordsmithing and she compares his hairlessness to her own broad nose and we see her adolescent desires which must have appalled Chester whose homosexuality she sees as spurious.
It has made me realize that though I preferred dead writers, I had conferred a sort of honorary posthumousness on living female authors who were, well... like Welty and Pym and Ozick. I could read them pleasurably without worrying that they were worrying about their own desirability. I would hate to admit that ugliness confers some degree of integrity. I suppose it makes any renown seem to be hard-earned. Of course initially any peculiarity generates curiosity. Odd names stick in your mind. But you can also ask: would a tall Lautrec have the same reputation? What if Emily Dickinson had been the kind of gal that said "Have you heard this one?" and slapped your back when she guffawed. What if Sartre could see what was in front of him? I don't know if this is worthy of exploration. I think it is generally agreed that isolation might breed the talent to promote one's gifts. Let's say that it was Ozick's good fortune to look like Irvin S. Cobb with a mop on his head. Maybe this made her need to prove some sort of exceptional intelligence. So she spars with Chester, and flaunts her Eliot.  She constantly reminds us, she is nothing if not ardent about her enthusiasms. Her diligence in championing Eliot despite his anti-semitism is only partially to accrue some admiration from decoding Eliot's obscure lists of academic references. 
My experiences with Ozick have never come to equal my first happy chance reading of Levitation, which was in a Pushcart collection, I think. One of the things I found in the UALR library. I didn't understand it but I liked it enormously and began collecting her. Now, for the first time I wonder if I should Ebay all the many volumes of hers which stick together in back rows in cabinets. Ozick. Cheever, and Updike and Colette and Maugham and Brookner- books I once valued so highly and that I will never again be able to commit a moment to; I cannot entirely give them up, but then I don't run into them all that often.
In the humidity of Arkansas books didn't last long...but I still have most of the books I have always had. Their decay will likely be slower than the deliquescence of my ability to read them. 

The election

I concealed an aspirin in a piece of turkey and, though Buddy made his suspicions evident, he took it. The result, I suppose of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, he overwagged his tail and has a sort of hangover. Any excitement or activity causes him to lurch reactively then skid to a quick halt- any movement of his tail is agony. Bud and I ran and jumped and played and then soberly sat and watched Obama's speech, and ran and jumped and played some more. I began the night watching the election returns in the "Elite" a louche bar which has gained a sort of ironic following. It was full of people, shoulder to shoulder, nipple to scapula. I cheered Kay Hagen defeating Liddy Dole whose campaign commercials called Hagen "godless" more times than should fit in 30 seconds. No other results were in before I made a stop at Rob and Steve's where, during commercials I was able to see bits of our mutual friend Bill's newly released pornographic debut. Bill looked very handsome but sounded disconcertingly effeminate. He was being questioned by a policeman outside of his trailer while a younger guy knelt between them, I didn't catch why. The three of them moved with all the pulsing sensuality of a line at the bank. It had a strange pace, but I barely saw him unzipped. Just the static introductory scene, staged in profile only, as flat as an Egyptian mural, but most gay porn is staged like that- like an early round in Password.
But Obama was inspirational, yes, and it was nice to see Bill again.
70% of the African-American vote in California was for banning gay marriage. Dicks.

We carve Jack-O-Lanterns

The finished, lighted pumpkin is mine. Dave's looked..... um.....Canadian.

I am letting my hair grow and I cannot shut up about it

I am King of the Chesterfields, if finding 3 makes you king of something

The first Chesterfield in my life was my own beloved tan suede Chesterfield on which I now sit. I seldom sit unless I sit on it. It is straining at its overuse, pulling itself apart at the seams. Buddy's refuge and playground- where I hold and nest with the stray guy I might have over. It is somewhere between 7 feet and infinity and barely fits. The front door rubs against it. The fireplace blisters against it.  

The Chesterfield has shown up in every medium, symbolizing everything from downtown chic (in a Madoona (typo, but let's leave it) video) to entrenched upper class taste (in every Parliamentarian's office in British film). 

They tend to occur in ox-blood red leather. Indeed, my second was the highly worn ox-blood red leather Chesterfield with box cushions seen in the vicinity of this paragraph. The faded and spotty cushions had to be painted many times with leather paint from McPherson's on 12th. Beneath the velcro'ed cushions is a lining patterned with the logo for "The Leather Store". There was nothing that could be reasonably done to disguise this. The damned thing was also missing a button, a problem which has often been about as easy to ignore as a missing jigsaw puzzle piece.  Smooth leather buttons are virtually nonexistent, and finding an upholsterer to recover a single button would damage my self-abasing nature. Luckily, I was able to snip a smooth leather dime-sized button from a bothersome, hobbled Plycraft chair that I was ridding through the auction. I painted it to match with acrylic paint. 

It looked convincing. I tried for nearly 45 minutes but it was impossible to reach the button with one hand while the other hand pushed the button in from the other side. The Chesterfield sat upended in the neighbor's yard. I stared at it with frustration. Finally, I stopped a group of passersby and asked one to push the button in from the front while I tied it to the frame. 

My most recent Chesterfield sofa is the deep red with the tufted seat spotted here grazing in the same neighbor's front yard. It is from the Sodo Salvation Army. I had stopped shopping at that particular Salvation Army because of the highly delusional prices on uniquely crappy items. Astonishingly, this was $169.00. Unsurprisingly, I only had $158.00.

My cashier repeatedly ran my debit card until we found the price that cleared.

The only other thing of note that I have found, other than Chesterfields, is this blog, whose name I had forgotten. The first thing I did after I tracked the damed elusive thing down was to change its name, from (?) Drastic Folly (Lawsy!).

The auction to benefit my fingers