"Never thought much about broke things until I got smashed up myself"

The source material Lucky Star (1929, Frank Borzage) is based on is called Three Episodes in the Life of Timothy Osborn. In the film the first episode resembles the other late silent era films Borzage made while at Fox, but the rest turns out to be a disappointment.

The German expressionist influence gives the opening dairy farm the Gothic semblance of a domestic black hole of a nightmare for Mary (Janet Gaynor). This is expressionism in one of its most enjoyable forms: she has to milk cows, but the low-key lighting and foggy production design make it look like she's in hell. Of course, the mundane is a living hell to many.

It is early dawn as the film begins and soon Mary has to go deliver milk to a crew of blue collar types. She travels down to their work site where Tim (Charles Farrell) has to take the job none of his other co-workers want because he's a pussy. So it's repairing high tension power lines for him while the others loiter down on the ground where it's safe.

Aesthetically the power lines work site looks amazing. Every time I watch it I think about how some sets just work way better than others and the backlot set is even more exotic than the sewers we first encounter the Farrell character working down in during the beginning of 7th Heaven (1927, Borzage).

The next episode is a hurried obligatory tour over to some unnamed WWI battle with no where near the level of attention given to the set piece as of those in 7th Heaven. And Tim's time as a soldier is no different from his civilian life. While back home Tim was pushed around and bullied to do all the hard work by his supervisor Wrenn (Guinn Williams), on the front lines Wrenn acts as Tim's commanding officer and similarly cons him into doing all the dangerous work while he goes off to look for girls with another soldier (played by Jack Pennick, the extra with that face you can't forget from countless John Ford movies).

After all this, about twenty-five minutes into the movie, the narrative plays out as a sentimental story about a crippled vet and his physical rehabilitation during which time he emotionally "rehabilitates" the poor farm girl Mary.

The first time I watched this film I wondered what happened to all of Borzage's creative camerawork. Why no dollies? No cranes? At first I mistakenly presumed it was a brilliant decision designed to depict the immobility of the wheelchair bound Tim. Now I doubt that it was anything that intentional. I am guessing that it is more likely because the film was shot with a camera that could record sound (even though I am reviewing the silent version, I've read that a part-sound version was produced simultaneously and a very common practice during these years) and was so big that it was not possible to move it the way Borzage had during the prior years up to this point.

Anyhow Tim pines over Mary. This script is based on a story by the same author who wrote the story The River (1929, Borzage) was based on, Tristram Tupper. And like The River this film is obviously an erotic male fantasy where a simpleton lusts over a girl he encounters all alone in a cabin in the woods somewhere. The difference is that instead of being seduced by a wanton sexpot, like in The River, the guy transforms a teenage girl from a broken home into a knockout whom he wants to domesticate--disturbingly, like a pet or object--employing the hokey subtext of fixing broken junk he finds as his objective with her.

There is also a hilarious scene where Tim bathes Mary near the brook outside his home. As he talks her into it, she undresses and he concernedly asks "just how old are you?" and after she replies "almost eighteen," he quickly decides not to look. This scene is funny in the context of pre-code Hollywood and because he was planning something in the way of foreplay apparently, but also because soon after this he ridiculously uses egg wash to turn her hair from mousy brown into a blond bouffant in the matter of a single conspicuous elliptical cut.

The ending is very predictable considering that Borzage is the quintessential romantic, especially when he's working with Gaynor and Farrell.

And finally, the title does not in any way relate to the film itself--something that always bugs me.

05/31/2011
--Dregs

ol' Tin Ear rides again

Getting pretty sick of this beat, but my first trip to ESPN in a couple weeks has me scratching my head for the millionth time about the long leash given Bill Simmons. Best content-moment in his recent drivel about wrestling is this:

The Birdman also did a dead-on Savage impersonation, even better than mine,

That was Randy Savage. Signal features of his voice include "husky growl" and "chest voice".

There's your Bill Simmons speaking voice, just as throatily resonant and rough-hewn as you could ever wish to hear. Hard to believe he could find somebody to do a Savage impression that was even better than the one his golden pipes could pull off. That he found such a gifted mimic just one dorm room over simply beggars the imagination.

Special note for those of you who, like me, have a background in linguistics: that headline is the weirdest construction I think I've ever read.

At its apex, Macho Man was wrestling

I've never seen this, I don't think, a cataphoric reference in a topicalizing construction referring to a matrix clause object. Compare "at its sweetest, kids like food". It's not ungrammatical or anything, but it's sure a non-standard way to package this information. As always, the lesson here: Bill Simmons--underrated prose stylist.

If you want to read something less idiotic about the meaning of the Macho Man, the Masked Man did maybe his best work yet on the topic. The Masked Man is great. Even if he didn't ever respond to the HILARIOUS dick joke I sent him.

it's still warm; it still moves; they're still here

Dramaramarama:
no-one wants to pay me for my broken heart

In dickhead mode, when I can't keep myself from arguing tastes with people, I occasionally have said "I could make you a Dramarama mix tape that would make you forget about the Replacements.".

That's probably false. I probably can't make you that tape. But I can claim that Dramarama has been more important to me than the Replacements, and that for my money, the two bands' top and second tiers are comparable.

Unfortunately, this Rhino/Elektra Traditions comp on my lap is doing a fairly shitty of bolstering my second claim. Sure, there's the world-beating single "anything, anything", now so well-established as great that it probably bores most people who were around when it was fresh. There's the late semi-hit "last cigarette", which is probably when I climbed on board, full of knowing that side two of Tim and most of Pleased to Meet Me were about as good as songs got. (Seriously: in 1987, it was not uncommon for me to lie on the shitty carpet on my bedroom in front of my tiny boom box, singing along to "here comes a regular" and nearing tears. In 1987, I was 13, and not terribly acquainted with the growing-old-in-a-bar scene described in that tune.)

And there's are a couple other songs here on 18 Big Ones that were frankly revelatory for me. Since I'd never succumbed to my completist fetish with Dramarama, I'd only known "scenario" from youtubing it at work the last 2 years, and I'd never heard the essentially perfect moved-to-California lament "it's still warm", which is my favorite song about me in close to 10 years. Having those tunes to hand justifies the purchase entirely for me; if you like good things, they might justify the purchase for you, too.

I picked up Stuck in Wonderamaland and fell in love with it when it was new. 1989. It doesn't excerpt as well as I'd like. The album is a start-to-finish kind of piece. A little moody, a little diffuse, but that's a frame I fit in well anyways. On the comp, though, it's represented only by "wonderamaland", "no regrets" and "last cigarette", the more-or-less hits, the mid-tempo rockers I guess you'd call 'em. These are good songs. Their selection helps the compilation. I bitterly miss the cover of "I wish I was your mother", though, and the pitch-perfect "'70s TV". (Maybe the Platonic ideal of the B-side.) And while Dramarama could well be accused of a degree of over-consistency, inclusion of a couple of the fragments off of this record (onepart ballad slivers like "pumps on a hill" or "stuck in wonderamaland") would have helped fill out the diversity quotient a little bit.

Vinyl was even more important to me, a few years later, and was in my headphones the day I first got fired. It's criminally underrepresented here, with only the long and dull "train going backwards" and the lovely catchy singalong screed "classic rot" to back up the two singles, which (a) aren't as great as the band's other singles and (b) aren't as good as the other songs on the record. Want to know why Vinyl wasn't a hit album? Because the best songs on it are things like the bouncy, ebullient "until the next time" and the stingingly specific "ain't it the truth", which weren't singles and didn't make the cut onto this comp.

One of the great skills of Dramarama is their ability to do pointed portraits of suburban life--particularly of women's experiences in suburban life--that contain but never succumb to sentimentality and condescension. "No regrets" and "scenario" hit those notes on this comp, but Vinyl's "in quiet rooms" really needed to be here alongside them. Missing are the untouchably great Stones rarity "memo from Turner", psychedelic-Who nod "I've got spies" and, again, variety-contributing "(I'd like to) volunteer please".

If you care to, you can spend a lot--like, a lot--of time with Dramarama playing Spot the Reference. A band of fans, collector/historian types, they context artists in a way, blending in snippets and snatches and swathes of what they liked, loved, grew up on. I spend more time with John Easdale's lyrics, though, than with the band-as-collage. And that's a maneuver that gives with one hand and takes with another, I'm afraid. Don't get me wrong: Easdale is one of my favorite lyricists of all time, and I will defend him against anyone you care to name.

But that defense will require me occasionally to acknowledge a filler rhyme that made it wax (Easdale's Achilles heel). Personally, I think they work (and nobody bitches when Dylan does it, for hell's sake) and I prefer them to the slightly over-common "yeah yeah yeah"s that waft across the soundscape, but, yeah: what I am literally saying is that one of rock and roll's best lyricists started off one of his best songs:

hey hey it's been so long since I have written with a pen
and though it's sharper than a saber, I don't feel like Errol Flynn
got no computer, I can't type the letter "m"
you're not responding right, I guess I better start again

I see I've been mostly critical of this record, and of the band. That was not exactly my intention. Dramarama is one of my most reliable musical pleasures, and has been for long enough to buy a beer anywhere in America. John Easdale is, again, maybe straight rock's most underrated songwriter, and one of the rock dudes I'd most like to say "thank you for making stuff that made my life better" to. His work touches greatness often, and in uncommon ways: he may be better with specific-detail-creating-universally-shared-emotion lines than anybody else. If you have room only for one Dramarama record, I'd suggest one the ones before Hi-Fi Sci-Fi. You'll miss some songs, but, then, if you only buy one record, you're going to anyway, right? If you want just all the ones you heard twice on shitty pre-alt-radio, 18 Big Ones will do that for you, and will throw in one or two you missed along the way, like the strangely affecting "work for food". I just wish it better represented the tunes that were, in some better world, big enough hits for these guys to retire on. Fully paid for their broken hearts.

Like the band, this comp comes really close to greatness and blows it. I like it: I'm glad I bought it. But I love this band, and a much, much better case for them could have been made.

nor are we out of it

we are out of it

Still those barely conscious years in Lawrence (909 E. Rhode Island. Weird how some things stick in your head.) some evenings I'd while with our next-door neighbor, Kerry, referred to in my house invariably with the epithet short-order fry cook. Mostly in those pre-video days we'd play board games--Dogfight, maybe Risk, Battleship, squares on lined notebook paper.

Sometimes I'd burn out on the novelty of somebody to interact with and just veg in the corner with a book.

I have no idea why Kerry had Alan Dean Foster's novelization of Dan O'Bannon's not-particularly-significant first feature Dark Star, but something about the cover--tattered 'star suit', waves of orange-red flame, frayed debris pressed into service as a surf board--captivated me. So I stole it.

In my leaden, dogged way, I plowed through it again and again, a rereader even then. Most of it I naturally didn't get--phenomenology jokes were over the head of a boy who, that summer, was so scared of the poster for Christine that he had to take the long way home from the Varsity so he didn't have to walk by the used car lot.¹ I did get some of the jokes, though--the isolation and loneliness somehow butted up against the claustrophobia and contempt of being around the same people in the same place day after day. And I really liked the idea of killing yourself burning up entering a planet's atmosphere on a surfboard fashioned from your shattered ship's ruined hull. I really liked that death.

The movie holds up okay. Impressive technical achievement for what started as a student film--as we'll see later, nobody did better sets than Dan O'Bannon. Great tone--Kafka in space--funny--absurd--redolent-of-doom. The premise is great: four men on a ship whose mission is to find planets with unstable orbits and destroy them. That's it! The backstory is that they've been out for three subjective years--20 back home--and have minimal contact with Earth. The captain is dead, killed by a short-circuit in his chair. (May all our leaders be electrocuted in the ass.) One survivor is in complete retreat already, isolated from the others, fully checked out. The other three are in various degrees of withdrawal. Everybody is constantly subjected to indignities: eating "ham" as a purplish fluid in a flat plastic tube; a cargo hold self-destructs, destroying the ship's entire complement of toilet paper.

This is not one in which the metaphors are terribly...metaphorical.

Everything's falling apart; nobody likes you; nobody knows who you are--or who they are; nobody cares; you can't escape them; eventually, the device you constructed to blow up and annihilate blows up and annihilates. There are consequences.

It's not heavy-handed, though, just blunted and stunted and paranoid, and style counts. There should always be room for an apocalypse heavy on idiots in avid pursuit of their petty agendas, oblivious to their impeding oblivion. There should always be room for lines like this one: "Don't give me any of that intelligent life stuff--find me something I can blow up!"

Star Trek this ain't. Afghanistan it might be.

I will leave you with a found poem. It's the protagonist's lament, delivered to his video diary.³

I do not like the men
on this spaceship
They are uncouth
& fail to appreciate my better qualities.
I have something to contribute to this mission if they
would only recognize it. Today,
over lunch, I tried
to improve morale & build a sense of camaraderie among the men by holding a humorous round-robin discussion
of the early days of the mission.
My overtures
were brutally rejected. These men
do not want a happy ship.
They are deeply sick
& try to compensate by making me
feel miserable.
Last week was my birthday.
Nobody even said happy birthday to me.
Someday this tape'll be played
& then they'll be sorry.

¹ (I was just a little kid--those years, I was often possessed by a full-body terror when walking anywhere after dark. I'd start imagining some silent, stealthy monster² following me, towering over me. So if you were across the street and you saw me inexplicably start running home? That's why.)
² Frequently this monster was a spider whose belly would just clear my head as it walked. I knew instinctively that the behemoth spider was exactly the size of all the spiders I'd ever killed, and that it would kill me.
³ Relevant that the protagonist is played by writer/director/editor Dan O'Bannon? Possibly.

Fright Night

A talisman of my childhood and a representation of it at the same time. Fright Night has a callow dipshit love the late-night host of horror movies on local TV; then the callow dipshit flips out when two wafting men move in next door--because when two men live together at night next door they bring sinister elements of menace and contagion to your suburban idyll.

When I saw this again--as an adult--maybe five years ago, I was gobsmacked: I'd remembered it as a rompy paean to latenight movie madness turning into a quite good kid-against-the-vampire-evil picture--with real loss!--but it was actually a meditation on Gay Dudes Living Next to You. This is a film where the Gay Subtext is actually drawn so clearly and so thoroughly that it very nearly becomes just the text.

The vampires recruit both the girlfriend and the best friend. The elder with his big swinging cross and his fine robes proves little help, if any. This really isn't subtle at all.

The rewatch beyond the gobsmack didn't do much for me. Something like what John Carpenter once called 'taking a tour of your living room'. I found myself thinking

yeah, it's all here...movies are artifice and sometimes cheesy but still influence us/lives...gay dudes walk among us, sometimes you get let down, sometimes people come through for you, heavy shit changes everything, even if you're okay on the far side.

These are trite messages, all of them. I knew that five years ago. Growing up gay is trite, dirt-common and dull, and loving the movies is as controversial as liking food, and sharing those things that are cool with your child? that's just flat square. Or so do scaly aging eyes see. I did not always look through such eyes. I don't look through them now, either--Richard Hugo once said¹

Is this corny? Okay, it's corny. But so what? All great art has some corn in it.

Fright Night is not great art. It has some corn in it. But it has sincerity and generosity, it tries hard to be good without being humorless, and there's a lot of talent, a lot of craft snuck into the genre exercise.²

My dad is dead. He was gay, and he loved movies. It was because of him that I saw Fright Night: he picked it out, put it on, played it. A child celebrated it, an angry depressive sneered at it, and now I nearly cherish it. It was because of my dad that I watched locally hosted horror movies on TV. It is because of him that I understand that the gays next door--or the otherwise different anywhere--pose no threat and deserve no fear or loathing. I loved my dad. This movie Fright Night reminds me of him.

¹ From memory. In his lovely The Real West Marginal Way.
² Mostly speaking of the cast here.

everyone is here

When I was a kid, every kid had seen Poltergeist. We had only three moments to our horripilated appreciation.

1. ghastly grinning man all in black
   
2. "they're heeeeere"
3. a man and a mirror, idly, then intently, then desperately picking and digging at his own skin, pulling his face roughly, pulling his face off

Not sure how this movie got its hold on the entire country: kids on the playground shared "they're heeere" not just with each other but with the entire culture in 1982. What is sure is that this movie bridges the gap between my first two--it's the secret world bursting into ours, it's the evil in us spilling out, manifest and unavoidable forever.

all this doom

all this doom
OR
god damn these vampires
AKA
happy death men

Manhattan, Kansas, 1984. Crematia Mortem on channel 41 out of Kansas City. I'm watching something sunbaked, vaguely Italian with reddish browns and clay. Oppression.

Slow. Doom. I'm tucked into the far corner of the room, in bed for a change, not sleeping on my beanbag chair, beside the bed, 'way closer to the TV. I want to be far away from this.

After years, all I really remembered was blood-in-milk-cartons, walking down smalltown streets, and an image of horror--more than horror, an image of dread--consisting of a woman huddled, hugging her knees and screaming in a room's corner, as...something pushes the walls in, not caving them in, just dimpling them somehow, closing in on her. Literal depiction of those things behind the walls coming after you? Helpless soul-scathing scream I can still hear. This entire town is vampires; and now so am I.

Crematia Mortem I've written about before. Cute microinterview here. All praise to dB for figuring out what movie I was half-assedly describing.

serpent-skinned

When I was a kid, my dad ran movie theatres. Since he was was a whiz at cheapo promotions, I got to witness things like Scrap the Caddy night, where, in honor of a double feature of Any Which Way You Can and Every Which Way but Loose, people got to whack at a junkyard Cadillac with a sledgehammer. Since I was a hammy little boy, and easily pressed into service, I got to stand around downtown Lawrence wearing one of my dad's many masks, handing out flyers. Since he was an alcoholic, he got transferred/demoted/moved around a lot. After his stint managing the Varsity, he spent some time at the drive-in. I didn't make it out there very much--it was way the hell out of town, and my clanking blue Schwinn with the clouds on the chain guard wasn't great for my chubby legs on a long jaunt. I remember getting screamed at for whining that I couldn't keep up one muggy summer afternoon; probably the last time I tried to get out there by bike.

But when I did make it out past the edge of town, there was always something awesome going on. I could barely swing the sledgehammer, but I gave the Caddy a couple feeble thumps. I thrilled to Megaforce, and sat gape-jawed at Escape from New York--so agape that the next day I went to Woolworth's downtown, bought a pirate's plastic eyepatch, and wore it for a week or so, until the headaches got too crippling. A bully named Chad--absolute scourge of my year in second grade--shoved me off a light-speed merry-go-round. Deft, I managed to get my hands completely behind me so that I could absorb the impact with my face; neither the first nor last time my face would be home to the mud & the blood & the tears.

Sitting on the grey gravel staring at the screen in cooling air. A lot of moments got under my skin--maybe none so much as this one, from Alien ripoff Galaxy of Terror:

Shards moving beneath the surface, body invaded and turning against you. Anything even close to this revolts and disturbs me to this day.

(The movie is remembered--more or less--now only for a giant-worm-humps-a-woman's-clothes-off-and-then-to-death scene that you can look up for yourself. Even as a larva, I remember being nonplussed. My favorite Alien ripoff: George R. R. Martin's Haviland Tuf story, "The Plague Star".)

resume the resume

Great moment from another media outlet failing to question an agent moving into a front office.

Riley, 66, has more than two decades of NBA experience as an executive, scout or coach with Milwaukee, Vancouver, Dallas and Golden State.

You know, model franchises.

Why bother worrying about this seemingly lateral career move? I dunno, but it seems like a junior-grade version of our nation's seemingly insatiable appetite for setting the wolves to guard the henhouse.

Okay, I won't actually just phone this one in. Besides the gratuitous diss of the general manager, we find the following unquestioned glinting gems:

"Plus, no one knows talent and understands contracts like the agents."

Now...that's not an unreasonable thing for Warrior Dorell Wright to say. A player needs to believe in his agent's understanding of contracts and talent in exactly the way a defendant needs to believe in his lawyer's understanding of the law and commitment to the case.

But it's absurd for anybody else to hew to this line. The purpose of an agent is to extract maximum possible compensation for his client. Period. This means that a correcter version of the above would be something like:

Nobody knows overstating talent and understands exploiting contract loopholes like an agent.

It's an adversarial system, by design and by practice, and expecting a specialist on one side to make a seamless transition to the other side is about as sensical as promoting your shotblocking center to point guard. Expect to see former clients signed to slightly head-scratching contracts.

From former UCLA coach Jim Harrick:

He was a B student with an A character, rather than an A student with B character.

I guess it would be out of character for the Warriors to shoot for an A student with A character. And I guess it would be out of character for the SF Chronicle to ask any of these crushingly obvious questions.

sayonara

As of today, FreeDarko is shutting down. There's a big final post--I had a (small, angry) hand in it--so make double-sure you head over there and help Haverford College's finest get the ship-on-fire finale they've earned.

--Fat