the lone guitar of the apocalypse

 

today is halloween!

it's a few minutes past the witching hour but it is halloween!  the day when the membrane between the living & the dead is at its thinnest.  so welcome your dead.  it is a good day.  anna & i will need to make a candy run before those trick 'r treaters arrive.  forecast calls for rain.  but that never stopped trick 'r treaters!  so but then, however you observe, or not, this wonderful day i wish you a very haunted & happy halloween!

boo!

let us have a cup of earl grey, hot

when i found out the death today of sir patrick stewart my mind immediately replayed one scene of his from all the roles stewart has played.  stewart was a shakespearean-trained actor who brought wit & grace to even the smallest role.  he was better known as capt. jean-luc picard of the starship enterprise.  he was magnificent as picard but one must remember that the great speeches & lines of dialogue spoken by stewart as picard were penned by some of the finest writers of any TV series.  but you need a voice & presence to say them.  stewart had those in great abundance.  & as we remember sir patrick stewart as capt. jean-luc picard let's remember too his favorite drink, earl grey served hot.  i can list so many movies great & small, so many TV series as well that were lucky to have stewart play in them.  we all can, i believe, & we all have our favorites too.  stewart lived to a good age of 86.  not a bad run, indeed.  but it is his part as a maitre d' of the restaurant l'idiot in the steve martin vehicle, L.A. Story [1991] that i instantly thought of this afternoon when i read the news that sir patrick stewart passed away.  

stewart is simultaneously hilarious & menacing.  his exquisite voice gives this encounter just the right amount of absurd humor.  & he brilliantly balances menace with the other brilliant comedic actor in this scene, steve martin's wincing befuddlement.  these couple of minutes of this movie have tattooed itself onto my memory.  in short, stewart steals the show!

godspeed sir patrick stewart

everyday is halloween: the brain that wouldn't die [1962]

 

those fucking mad scientists.  getting all weird & obsessive.  a crazy idea, or technique leads them to commit atrocious acts of violence.  & this movie is proof of it.  dr. bill cortner, played by jason evers, is a master surgeon who synthesized a solution that can reanimate dead tissue.  he also has surgical skills par excellence.  but his methods, to quote another movie about another madman, apocalypse now [1979], dr. cortner's methods are unsound.  

you see, this flick starts out with a surgery.  cortner & his surgeon father, played by bruce brighton, is doing some kind of brain surgery.  the father takes the lead on the operation but loses his patient.  but wait, bill says he he can bring the patient back from the dead.  he does with his magic solution & messaging the dead guy's brain.  sure, this brings the patient back to life but bill's father is freaked out by his son's methods.  & of the doggedness of the younger doctor's unorthodox ways.

still, what the hell.  bill gets a telephone call from his assistant.  come to their hidden compound in the mountains, where bill & assistant had been working in secret, right away.  something terrible has happened.  so bill & his lovely fiancé, jan compton, played by virginia leith, race thru the mountain roads with bill behind the will.  bam!  a car wreck & jan loses her head.  no worries, bill takes her head & tootles off to his compound.  

what now.  bill fixes jan's head in a tray with his magical potion pumped into it.  yep, a disembodied head.  while bill's assistant, kurt, played by anthony la penna, shows our young mad doctor that the thing they've been working on, a kind of frankenstein's monster, has mutated into a homicidal maniac.  kurt keeps the monster locked up in a room adjacent to the lab where jan is just gaining consciousness.  but bill has other plans.  he needs to get a body so he can graft jan's head on it.  he leaves jan, kurt & monster to go hunting for a suitably sultry young woman.  where does he go?  to a burlesque show!  why not.  

turns out kurt is a victim of bill's earlier work.  the monster is a collection of sewn together body parts animated by bill's magic liquid.  & jan, now simply a head, can communicate telepathically with the monster locked in the room.  you can see where this story is going.  the movie is short on action & long on dialogue.  while watching the exchanges between kurt & jan i wondered how samuel beckett would craft these scenes.  cuz this movie is bleak.  but it is also, despite its salacious nature, kinda boring.

bill is a putz.  kurt is a dimwit.  the monster is a mere thought by the writers.  & jan, the most interesting character in this movie, is given very little meat to chew.  beckett would've created speech, i think, of such profound existential despair that would shake the core beliefs of even the most hardened viewer.  the movie is dumbly directed by joseph green.  the production must've cost only a couple of bucks while the sound design is atrocious.  but hey!  who is complaining!  this movie was shot in 1959 but released in 1962 when it almost immediately went into the public domain.  this flick is flawed for sure but i sitll can't stop myself from thinking about it.  i even think there might be poems in it from both the monster & jan's point of view.  this is must-see movie for those of us that demand a fair chunk of cinematic cheese.  it's not fine cheese.  it is more like velveeta, in all its anti-glory, rich, gooey & so delicious!

boo!

everyday is halloween: heatwave! [1974]

 

how about a made for TV disaster movie.  i was gaga-crazy for disaster flix when i was a lad & i tried to watch all of them.  producer irwin allen had a lock on this sub-genre of horror-melodrama with movies like the towering inferno [1974] & the poseidon adventure [1972] in the '70s but there was a rout of these pics such as this one under review.  it is a curious document of life in 1970s america.  for in this movie it is the women we see at the supermarket doing the shopping, or at the laundry mat.  while the men are doing the he-man shit by going into the office.  & when the shit hits the fan it is the men who are expected to take on leadership roles.  

still, this is an interesting slice of life of a twentysomething couple, frank & laura, in the midst of a 17 day & counting heatwave in los angeles.  how hot?  the cut shots of a digital clock & thermometer, the type you'd see on a bank display from the street, tells you not only the time of day but how miserable you are going to be with temperatures hovering between 116-117 F [47 C].  that's surface of the sun hot.  top it all off is a wonky grid that makes for brownouts & blackouts, along with disruptions of the municipal water supply.  in short, frank & laura, who is seven months pregnant, are having a tough time.  

did i mention frank is played by ben murphy & laura is essayed by bonnie bedelia?  they do a serviceable job as an ordinary american young couple.  frank works as a junior stockbroker.  laura is a stay-at-home wife, natch.  but when laura's mother offers the couple their mountain cabin shortly before the city suffers a blackout, bam!, our young couple is soon driving the mountain roads in their VW bug worried about running out of gas.  man, that was the '70s!

still, this is not an apocalyptic movie.  the world continues to function.  people are not cutthroat, blood-thirsty goofballs.  the couple's bug is stolen but not by some faction of a killer road gang.  & when they finally get to their cabin in the woods, they are met by some good people, not crazed zombies, much to my disappointment.  still, the director, jerry jameson, keeps the narrative flowing.  we care for frank & laura, & their baby.  this is essentially a chamber piece focused on our young couple.  & it is interesting to note that these two young persons are utterly & uniquely ordinary.  just like you & me.  

boo!

everyday is halloween: the stanford mansion 'the curse of the gold miner's necklace'

anna & i are determined to get out of our beloved casa de bronson/lopez & do more things.  like walk to the nearby taphouse for a couple of beers.  or day trips to cute little towns like murphys.  or long weekends in mendicino, monterey, & most recently at a wonderful inn called nick's cove on tomales bay.  it is the spooky season so anna got us a pair of tickets to a haunted tour of the stanford mansion.

leland stanford was a robber baron, california governor, & founder of the university that bears his name.  the stanford mansion, located on 8th & N streets, is now a state park but it was for much of the 20th C an orphanage that closed its doors as recently as 1987.  it is a grand house that carries much history.  indeed, the great flood of 1862 saw about 6 ft of mud in the mansion.  you can still see the water line in one of the rooms.  stanford had to crawl out of a window & paddle his way to the capital for his inauguration.  this flood was so severe, so biblical in its destruction, that it changed the city.  all buildings were required to raise to 12 ft.  there are still places in Old Sac & other downtown areas that have underground tunnels of the original building elevations.

& but so, we decided to walk to the stanford mansion.  around 2 1/2 miles.  it was a lovely evening.  the weather decided to cool down.  it was raining yesterday & the day before.  it's also saturday night.  midtown is gonna be alive!  so it was.  not crazy wild but people were out enjoying a night on the town.  but downtown is somewhere else.  quieter.  less action.  even if the buildings were taller with more lights on them like every skyline in every mid to large city.  still, we made it to the stanford mansion for our haunted tour in plenty of time.

the mansion was decorated for the spooky season.  the docent was decent.  the haunted tour was an interactive play based on a few deaths & a missing necklace.  the story made little sense.  it was more of a macguffin to get us thru the mansion in a way befitting the spooky season.  was any of it historically factual.  i don't know & really don't care for when things go bump in the night you go, as frank o'hara said, on your nerve.  it was cheesy but the players were game & the decor of the rooms provided just the kind of halloween ambience this dude enjoys.

i've lived here for all my 59 years & i had not, until tonight, stepped foot inside the stanford mansion.  sure, i've walked past it thousands of times.  i remember when it was an orphanage.  it was fun, if very brief haunted tour.  the decorations were terrific.  i wanted to take a few pics of the layout of the rooms, including the desiccated bodies set out on display, but i didn't want to disturb the flow of the story as it was told to us in real time.  i mean i was standing right next to gov. stanford's butler, mr. platter.  taking out my phone would've seemed rude!  

when the tour was done anna & i meandered thru downtown & midtown.  we walked down the R st corridor & stopped into a gallery showcasing the paintings of several local artists.  there was one painting by jian wang that i thought was extraordinary.  so was its price.  $14500.  fuck me!  then we found our way back to our own place in the great swirl of life, casa de bronson/lopez.  but the evening wasn't done with me quite yet.  i needed to go to Safeway to get a few items like breakfast stuff etc etc.  because that's how our world works.  first there are 19th C ghosts looking for a lost necklace & then there are the immediate needs of the magic of ordinary living in the 21st C.

boo!

everyday is halloween: 'wuthering heights' by kate bush

i've been on a kate bush jag the last couple of days.  i swear this woman's music shreds me.  pure fucking genius.  but for this song, i think, goes well with the spooky season.  bush sings from the perspective of catherine earnshaw's ghost plaintive cry to her beloved heathcliff at the window wanting to be let back into her home.  gothic fiction at its finest.  & when bush gets to the chorus, holyfuckingshit, a sudden irrigation of the eyes.  this is art at its most human in its yearning, desire, & ecstatic pain.  when bush sings in cathy's voice, 'heathcliff, it's me, i'm cathy' goddamn art doesn't get finer.  & again, cathy is a ghost.  who still bone aches for her lover.  spooky as fuck.  & beautiful.  

boo!