hello writing group
you could call her bazooka betty
based on those big butts she smokes
like she wants to cram nicotene years
into every last breath
like her overstuffed pocketbook with the hoops
where tobacco flakes cake the bottom
and hard candies and crinkled wrappers
are caught up in a tempest
could she open up her bag
and catch a ride home on the winds
she'd have to take with her
those buses she always takes
wrapped in the neon pink jacket
worn season to season to season
and all the drivers' names
she keeps stored in jars
behind her big tinted glasses
along with the rest of the world
the haunting of me
if you have comcast cable, you're probably familiar with the on demand service, a tivo-style feature that allows you to view a bunch of stored programs and free movies. you can find an awful lot of fun stuff on there, and the number of free movies on tap is surprisingly generous.
so this past saturday night, it was time for a little creature double feature.
first up was
the devil's rejects. i remembered hearing some good things about it, and i was hoping i was in store for a fun, freewheeling romp with lots of carnage and a bevy of one-liners as charming as they would be lame.
nope. what i got instead was a movie that plods along, step-for-step, the tracks laid down by the old texas chain movies and spends altogether too much time congratulating itself for delivering debauchery that is neither as effectively shocking nor gruesome as it would have you believe. i do get why horror fan boys would dig the movie and the clear homage it pays via throwback, though, and i have to admit i enjoyed watching bill forsythe once again tear into the role of depraved character with his usual relish, this time playing a self-righteous small town sheriff with a bone to pick with titular characters. looks like diamond dallas page had fun in the small role he played, too.
the second movie was a ghost story called
the haunting of julia (aka full circle).
i'm kind of a sucker when it comes to supernatural horror flicks from the seventies. there's something hardwired into this kind of movie that stirs me up on some level ... maybe it's in their soundtracks and the queasy feeling those typically rubbery synths induce, or maybe it's in silences (muted soundtrack, no background noises) that can cause small eternities to seep into your mind, or maybe, at the risk of getting too heady for my own brizzitches if i'm not doing so already, it's in the tint of the visuals, which gives these films' characters and environments a weird verisimilitude.
even a BAD 70s ghost movie can be strangely compelling to me, and the haunting of julia would probably be just that -- a straight from the mold, tepid thriller with forgettable characters and scares coming squarely on the usual beats -- if it weren't for a couple of things:
1 -- mia farrow, who plays julia, is terrifying to look at. only sissy spacek (thinking 'carrie') and shelley duval (thinking 'the shining') could give her a run for her money, and
2 -- the movie is bookended by two incredibly unsettling scenes.
within the first 3 minutes of the movie, we get to watch mia farrow's young daughter choke to death on a piece of apple at the breakfast table. this is an agonizing scene to sit through, and it only gets worse when julia attempts an improvised tracheotomy as a last resort. much of this scene is up on youtube if you'd like to upset yourself.
for the sake of limiting spoilers, i won't get too much into the details of the last scene, but the fact that the majority of users on the imdb page make reference to it is testimony to its power. the camerawork and the final lingering shot that it sets up are gripping, and absolutely worthy of hitchcock.
that last scene is pretty unforgettable, even in spite of my best attempts to do so. see, when i watched it this past weekend, i remembered that i had actually seen it before ... about 20 years ago. when i was around 8, i was flipping through the television channels one day and landed on this last scene as it played out. i was mesmerized, even though (or perhaps because) i was missing the context of having seen the rest of the movie leading up to it. and for a good few weeks after seeing it, i remember, i played it out in my mind over and over again, hoping that chewing on it for long enough would eventually make it lose its terrible flavor.
i guess i managed to bury that memory somewhere down the line, but not so deep that seeing that scene again didn't pull it right out of the grave. it's that affecting.
still, seeing it in context and with maybe a little bit more wisdom under my belt, i was able to detect a poignancy to it (just as some of the folks on imdb have), and, taken in its proper perspective, this boogeyman has finally ceased to be.
eerie?
i snapped the below picture at the airport t stop one day after my guitar lesson with the turkish tornado and self-proclaimed turkish spider-man (long overdue post on him soon).
the picture is of a photograph from the 1920's of three boys sitting on a bench along a path in an old boston park. the scene runs along one of the walls of the subway platform, and it caught my eye as i waited for my train.
what grabbed my attention was the little guy in the middle. the kid looks remarkably similar to what i looked like at his age. here was a little me, circa 1926.
the coincidences didn't end there. to the kid's left is a boy that looks like a young scott. it's not even a stretch. and to the kid's right is a boy who, upon close inspection and with perhaps a TAD stretch in light of the bushy-lookin eyebrows and cleft chin, could pass for a young justin.
am i going out on a limb? can YOU see it?
[update: the pic was taken in 1910. the setting is belmont park.]
my favorite jimi ever
at the 1:30 mark.
i know he's only reacting to how out of tune his guitar is, but i just look at that expression on his face and can't help but think, "oh shit, he's getting psyched up to conjure something mind-fuckingly awesome, and we'd all better watch out." it's that flamboyant, larger-than-life boogeyman-ish jimi from foxey lady, comin' to get us all.
then, later, he just takes the cream and turns it into something nasty.
(also, notice subliminal george harrison at the 4:04 mark?).
i just picked
this up, and as you can probably guess, i can't wait to dive in.
this really deserves a full rundown,
but i'm getting to this a little late in the day, and so i'm just copying and pasting a missive i sent the old prospector earlier in the day about my experience at the kool keith show at harper's ferry on friday night:
mike g and i got pretty good buzzes going before the show.
there wasn't a huge crowd, so we were able to get right up front
my buzz was big enough to tell me that it was a good idea to stage dive in the middle of kool keith's set
towards the end of the set, kool keith was pointing at me and saying a bunch of stuff ... no one remembers whether he was dissing me or giving me props for my redd foxx tee [ed. note: i actually, genuinely like redd foxx and sanford and son, and have since i was young]
after the show, mike gee and i jumped up on stage for photo ops and all. there was this groupie (the one in the picture with me) who was selling keith on coming to an after-party in central square. he had his hands full with her, but when she went to get her friends to take a picture of her, a bunch of us on the stage jumped into the shot, and mike snapped that pic. kool keith handed me a pen that he'd been using to autograph cds and said "i think this is yours" (it wasn't)
[necessary post-script: the groupie and the hard sell on the after-party were like something out of a made-for-tv rock star biopic. a little surreal to see that in person.
also, kool keith having a normal conversation with someone sounds exactly kool keith rapping. not remarkable, but funny to have the voice that raps "Keith look in the club for your celebrity jump shooters / Tall lean men who can't read books to they kids need tutors" on record be the same voice that tells you he has your pen, and here you go.]
