last day at the ca state fair

                                                 welcome! 

lowriders!

check out this gorgeous dude!

not far from the madding crowd

where can i find a cocktail?

until next year

one crazy summer [1986]

 

now this is a goofball movie!  want plot?  want sense?  want a reasonable likeness to reality?  look for them in some other film!  for this flick is one of my favorite summer movies because it is like an aimless hot summer day when you have nothing to do but manage to have one stupid adventure after another in the company of your friends &, if you are very lucky, either boyfriend or girlfriend.  this is the second movie penned & directed by savage steve holland.  his first film, better off dead [1985] also featured a very charming john cusack as a young everyman slacker in search of love. 

holland has a knack for putting in zany details in his films, such as a mom in holland's first feature cooking dinner in an otherwise ordinary late-20th C middle-class kitchen but out of the stew pot are a few waving tentacles.  summer is peppered with these dadaist details.  part of the delights of watching this movie is watching the backgrounds of the frames to see what weirdness is unfolding before our eyes. 

the macguffin of a plot is cusack plays a sadsack named hoops who is a cartoonist & the hapless beast hoops repeatedly draws is a rhino who just can't catch a break in love or in life.  oh yeah, his name, hoops, is a bit of a slight-of-hand of the screenplay because with a name like that you'd expect hoops to be an excellent basketball player.  well then, hoops & friend graduate from Generic High School.  his friend, george calamari, played by joel murray, invites hoops to spend the summer with him, his little sister & her dog who is always wearing a cone, at his grandma's house in nantucket.  

off they go!  on the way the group meets the gorgeous cassandra, played by demi moore, a musician who found a summertime gig at a bar on the island.  actually, hoops rescue her from the silliest looking biker gang one could ever conjure up in your loopiest of fever dreams.  why was the gang after cassandra?  she stole their money!  but later it is explained why she needed the bikers', or perhaps they stole it from her, money.  hoops, of course, falls head over heels for cassandra.  

the wonderful billie bird plays grandma calamari.  her house is killer!  right on the water.  she even makes dinner for hoops & her grandkids & only charges a fair restaurant price for her food & service!  then there is bobcat goldthwait as tow truck driver & mechanic, egg stork, & tom villard as his brother, clay.  it takes some fortitude to sit thru the entire runtime of a movie & listen to goldthwait's vocal tics that are very much part of his comic persona.  his comedy is like eating salt licorice.  a little goes a long way & the aftertaste lingers.  it takes training!  my stamina is up to speed i think i can now sit thru a roster of bobcat goldthwait films.  

the reason cassandra needs money, about a grand, in a week, is because the bank will foreclose on her family home.  the evil developer, aguilla beckerstead, played by mark metcalf, wants cassandra's house, & other properties so he can build a resort cum condo unit.  will he succeed?  i'm on pins & needles!  oh, & there is an annual regatta that is important for the beckerstead, pere et fils, the obnoxious, teddy, played by matt mulhern, to win.  hoops & co., including the stork bros., george, ack-ack raymond, played by curtis armstrong, decide to refurnish their own boat to race against the beckersteads.  

& so it goes down to the wire.  i would be remiss to not note that holland cast a terrific group of funny actors in this movie.  such as the wonderful taylor negron, rich little, rich hall et al.  another little detail i enjoyed were the scenes at the local drive-in theater with the old-fashioned speakers that were placed on the window of your car.  summer is too brief a time.  but sometimes it feels like a lifetime.  & sometimes you just wanna watch a movie that has that carefree, madcap, goofy summer feel.  when anything is possible & love is felt on the pulse of a warm breeze.  when summer can be, in the best ways possible, crazy.  

living in the dew drop world

 

my own 'master of reality'

i've taken this week off work on account of recovering from an infection that is boring in details & uninteresting for me to talk about.  needless to say, i'm on the road to recovery, tho still feeling weak & symptomatic.  so it is perhaps my mental state was already mush when anna told me this afternoon that ozzy osbourne died.  i did just as thousands upon thousands of people did today when they heard that the prince of darkness passed away: go online & listen/watch my favorite black sabbath/ozzy songs.

& when i did i went down a deep rabbit-hole of songs from albums i have not listened to in ages.  it was when i was listening to 'the wizard' from black sabbath's debut album the eponymous black sabbath from 1969 is then the tears flowed.  because for me, & for a great, great lot of others like me, ozzy was my own 'master of reality.'  he was the voice for us misfits who loved things dark, spooky, hard, sludgy, & thrilling.  along with tony iommi's killler guitar riffs & a rhythm section that could rock the hinges off hell, bill ward on drums & geezer butler on bass.  this was my very own band.

a friend of mine & my brothers introduced us to black sabbath perhaps in 1980.  i was either 12 or 13 years old.  i think the first song i heard was 'black sabbath' that haunted house of a song that ratches up the tension to a crescendo that even beelzebub would find scary.  even when punk rock changed my life the band black sabbath, & ozzy as a solo artist, would remain by my side.  

i remember i had a huge crush on a girl when i was 14.  there was a party at her house.  i was invited along with my friends & i think my brothers too.  at any rate, this girl loved metal & her parents had a VCR.  they played a concert video of black sabbath.  i was fucking entranced.  enchanted.  mesmerized.  i have not seen that concert since.  tho you can find performances & recordings of black sabbath, & even their earlier incarnation when they were called earth, stretching back nearly 60 years.  i'd think i maybe hallucinated that videotape but no, it was real.  it must've been recorded in the 1970s because of the bandmembers style of dress, e.g. ozzy was wearing a jacket with fringes on the sleeves as he performed often with both arms stretched high & fingers doing the peace sign.  today i looked for that concert film & found a great many performances but not that one i remembered so vividly.   

my youngest brother would soon become a metalhead so we also had ozzy's two solo records on cassette, blizzard of ozz & diary of a madman.  both of these records featured the wild blistering guitar of the late randy rhoads.  these recordings were always on either mine or my brother's cassette player.  these were the songs of heartbreak, horror, love & ecstasy.

ozzy was, which is well-known, a larger than life personality who did a great many things, & drugs, that made it seem he would die an early death.  i remember seeing him live at the old Arco [Echo (because its design & sound system really sucked)] Arena in 1989 on the no rest for the wicked tour with zakk wylde on guitar & geezer butler on bass.  i thought bill ward was on drums too until i looked it up this afternoon.  no, on drums was randy castillo.  still, it was thrilling to see ozzy & geezer live on stage.  but even in 1989 was the rumor that ozzy was so erratic & dangerous to himself that he might not live so long.

but then came the early 2000s & the wild man ozzy was supplanted by the lovable, goofy, yet endearing husband & father on the reality TV show the osbournes.  was that show accurate to the osbourne's real life.  probably not because it was TV & even reality shows are make-believe.  even so, it seemed ozzy beat the odds & tamed a few of his demons.  it felt like he became, like keith richards, an immortal. 

not so.  even if keith richards might seem he would survive the heat death of the universe he is, ozzy is, we all are, mortal & fragile.  ozzy knew he was dying.  the original members of black sabbath, geezer butler, bill ward, ozzy & tony iommi, played one final gig a little over two weeks ago, on 7/5/25, in their hometown of birmingham, england.  the show was a tribute to black sabbath, one of the greatest metal bands, indeed they founded metal, but also to ozzy with guest performances that was a veritable who's who of rock&roll artists.  you can find these performances easily online.

ozzy osbourne died today at the age of 76.  it was both a good run & too short a time for the prince of darkness.  i love rock&roll.  i very much love black sabbath.  i will listen to their music until i can't any longer.  all i can say, i feel great good luck to live in an age at the same time as ozzy osbourne.  & that we have the tech & means to continue to watch & listen to ozzy for as long as we can.  until the wheels fall off.

godspeed, sweet prince of darkness

it's saturday nite & you want to hear a song about happy sadness

this starts out as a damn good song.  when the horns kick in it becomes a great song

i shit you not

q&A

 after julian schnabel

q: how long does it take you to write a poem

a: simple arithmetic: take the number of years you are alive, & add 5 minutes

q then how do you know you are successful.  how do you know the poem is good

a: you can labor on a poem for years & never know if it is good or bad or meh so keeping going is the better action

q: you seem to love pop & lo-brow culture.  do you distinguish between hi & lo culture

a: yes

q; what is the distinction

a; yes

q: is that answer a distraction, an evasion

a: yes

q: you do say 'yes' a lot

a: yes

q: anything to add

a: sure, & yes

i saw the figure

i saw the figure

                  of a vole

in the talons

                   of a bird of prey

today in a photograph

                  that went viral

the bird flying like a rocket

the vole with such an expression 

in its eyes

staring

straight into the camera

a one in a million shot

beauty & brutality in one frame

from the notebook

 

the 40th anniversary of live aid

i turned 18 a little over a month before this historic concert held on two stages in two different countries.  july 13 1985.  it was a saturday.  i don't remember seeing any ads or promos for this show.  but then i was a bit of a knucklehead & wasn't keyed into the schedules & itineraries of pop culture of the day.  still, i found myself watching this concert live on TV & remember phil collins who was dubbed the hardest working man in rock&roll for performing both in london & philadelphia, on the same day.  below is a snippet of collins being interviewed as he flew on the concorde going from the london gig to the philadelphia show.  an extraordinary feat of logistics, at the time.  a proof that we reside in nations, but we live in a global civilization.  the internet is further proof of it.    

as for the 40 years between now & then, that is the thing about time.  it continues to flow, at least for us humans, in one direction, which is the future.  still, the 1980s were hardly the dark ages.  indeed, it set up the world we live in now.  namely, that we do live in a global civilization.  in 1985 a call to the concorde to phil collins as he flies across the atlantic to play a show on both sides of the pond on the same day is proof of that.  

peace

the funhouse [1981]

 

i watched most of this flick last night & the remaining 20 minutes today because i was in the mood for a gritty early 1980s slasher.  instead, i found a kind of slasher that belies the tropes that were in development at the time of this movie's release.  tobe hooper (Texas Chain Saw Massacre [1974]) directed this film from a screenplay by larry block about four midwestern teens - two couples - who double-date to a traveling carnival.  they decide to stay after closing & spend the night in the dark ride, the funhouse.

hooper really knows how create a tense, sweaty mise en scene.  the carnival is gritty.  hooper employed real carnies.  i got flashbacks to when i was a lad going to similar traveling carnivals, & even the CA State Fair, in the 1970s with same attractions, like the Freaks of Nature, & the barkers who try to entice you inside their tents to see the freaks & wonders of the world.

even so, hooper enjoys his own inner monster kid.  the final girl, amy, played by elizabeth berridge, has a younger brother with his bedroom decorated with horror & monster paraphernalia.  even her parents are watching on TV, as she sits with them waiting for her boyfriend to take her to the carnival, Bride of Frankenstein [1935].  so it comes as no shock to find that the dark ride the kids sneak into is a melange of old-timey carnival tropes & horror movie things. 

berridge does a fine job as the final girl, vulnerable, resilient, tough & lucky.  the FX was overseen by FX maestro rick baker.  the slasher is not a creature of fantasy or the supernatural.  yet he is a monster.  complete with a hideous visage & mien.  as for the plot, it is well-constructed.  the teens in peril seem to do what teens might really do in their predicament.  this was hooper's first major studio movie after the success of the TV miniseries, based on stephen king's novel, Salem's Lot [1979].  

the denouement might seem forced but after what we, & berridge, have been thru it might be best to let it go as it will.  all in all, this is a worthy slasher that unsettles the viewer & recreates the genre just as the slasher genre was finding its feet.  proof that tobe hooper is no mean director of my beloved genre of horror!

once upon a time a poet tried to sell you jeans on TV

a brief, ordinary scene

on my way to work, between i & 24th st, deep in my stride, mind empty but for the tasks waiting for me.  she had all her gear on the sidewalk in a black garbage bag.  'good morning. love your hair.  slicked back & silver,' she said to me.  'thank you very much.  that is kind of you to say.'  'i have colon cancer,' she said.  'that sucks.  i am so sorry.'  'thank you for saying that.  i don't get to talk to many people during the day.'  

self-portrait with crow

 

california nite

 

lo-fi poetics: 4th of july

fireworks 

sounds like gunfire 

outside the window

it will go on 

till 2 AM or longer

ordnance of the holiday

while we make BBQ dinners

& roll up on our 

fixins & misgivings

listening to

'4th of july' by the great punk band X

again

that you repeat your last name

both syllables

allow it to roll on the tongue

the mouth-feel of a name

your name 

& what is your name

those two syllables

are they controversy or outlaw

a name by any other 

as the neighborhood explodes 

in the faux drama of exploding bombs

wars & not-wars

ongoing 

for your name is like everyone else

your name is american

saturday the 14th [1981]

 

finally!  i watched this flick & lived to tell the tale.  & boy!  as the bard sez, it is a tale told by an idiot full of hubbub & amounts to nothing.  still, call me loco but i enjoyed this parody of the classic monster movies of yore.  the plot goes like this: married in real life couple richard benjamin & paula prentiss play john & mary hyatt.  the hyatts inherit a haunted house from their dead uncle.  a house of their own, finally!  so they pack up their things, & their kids, debbie hyatt, played by kari michaelson, & billy, played by kevin brando, & move in.

but you see we find a vampire couple, waldemar, played by jeffrey tambor, & yolanda, played by nancy lee andrews, complete in cheesy pancake makeup & black capes, trying to buy the house before the hyatts can move in.  why?  because inside the house is a book on the occult that if opened can unleash monsters that will destroy the world!  but our vampires are law-abiding citizens that cannot stop the hyatts from moving in.  they can only watch the family while sitting outside in their car.

lo!  young billy finds the book, unleashing, you guessed it, monsters galore.  one of these monsters is so fiendish he cleans the house & does the dishes for the family!  horrors!  still, waldemar is determined to get that book & will sneak in the house as a transformed bat,  mary hyatt thinks the bat is an owl until she gets a pair of puncture wounds on her neck from waldemar & starts to act a little goofy.

meanwhile, the monsters do what they do best by scaring the younger hyatts.  one scene has a shark fin swimming in a bathtub when young debbie is taking a bath.  another scene is a monster in billy's room.  when billy calls for his father to rescue him the monster hides, literally, hides, behind hyatt pere so that each time dad turn around the monster turns too.  dad can't see the monster, so everything is a-ok.   billy is left alone in his room with a monster.

what the hell are we gonna do now?  how about throw a housewarming party on saturday the 14th, a date, according to the van helsing, played by severn darden, who was brought in earlier by the family as an exterminator for their bat infestation, when all hell breaks loose if the monsters are allowed to roam free.  van helsing needs both the book & young billy to prevent the world from ending.  

but enough of the plot.  if my summation of the plot lacks coherence well blame it on the script.  directed, barely, by howard r. cohen, & produced by julie corman of new world pictures, this is a flick that can be appreciated by the most masochistic of horror movie lovers.  like me!  all principals ham it up big time.  benjamin & prentiss are game & make the most of a threadbare plot.  tambor is, as always, a pro in whatever role he plays.  young debbie can really scream her head off which makes me wonder why kari michaelson didn't become a scream queen.  

you could do worse than spend an evening with this pic.  especially if your evening involves copious amounts of mind-altering substances.  i kid!  i kid!  or do i?  since this is a movie that calls to mind the mom&pop video store era where you can judge a movie based on its VHS box art.  the run time is a merciful 76 minutes.  the plot is incoherent & goofy.  but the leads are fun.  there is a twist too at the end.  not every bad buy/good guy are what they first appear to be.  you could do worse by watching this movie.  but you could do better!

peace!