Destiny

This really is a crazy series of events. First I watch "127 Hours" about the kid who goes into a canyon and a boulder rolls on his arm and traps him so he carves it off at the elbow and escapes. I'm watching it and thinking that it's such a small chance of that happening. 1 in a billion. But you could say it's his destiny, the rock waiting for him since the beginning of time.
So, there was nothing he could do to escape it....
So, I go to walk to the mail box down the street to drop the movie in the slot. Netflix shuffle.
And what else? So, I wait for a few cars, a truck speeds by and I stop. Seconds are counting. I jog across the street and then shuffle past some kids with slouching jeans and ass cracks smiling hello to the world. I frown at the state of the world, knockout gangs punching Brazilian dishwashers for a game and posting it on facebook to brag. Go ahead, take a swing, I think. Last thing you'll ever do. But the kids walk on.
I stop at a car with a busted out window and a flat spare tire, riding on rims. two seconds tick by.
Then I continue to walk on and smiling and bopping down the sidewalk in my bell bottom jeans....then I see out of the corner of my eye a door open. A furry shape moves toward me and all I hear is, "blah blah blah...won't bite."
The next instant I have a short ball of fur and muscle trying to tear my right arm off...exactly at the spot where Aron Ralston cut his arm off...the exact spot...the dog has circled me and had anywhere on my body to bite but it attacks my right arm at the elbow driving his canines into my muscle and cowering after I aim an Oggy finger into its eyes.
The dog rushes back to his owner who is horrified, a man who had never seen his dog do anything untoward.
"6 years old. Blah blah blah. Man, I'm sorry."
"You never can tell," I mumble looking at the bleeding bite.
I have horrible luck with dogs. I was raped by a huge Great Dane when I was young. Yeah, it's not funny. It hunted me down with 6 foot strides down Richards Ave and tackled me and humped my ass while all my friends pointed and laughed as his sharp claws dug into my shoulders and hips and his slobber and semen covered my neck and back. Real funny.
Then I was walking down a dirt road in Ecuador, stoned out of my mind of South American weed, and I was attacked by a hoard of rabid dogs and defended myself with rocks and screams until the locals came with shovels to save me.
Then I was in Arcata, Ca, and a miniature poodle darted out of a house like a bullet and before the lady could yell a word the dog had taken a big chunk out of my calf and darted back to the safety of the car as I limped away. Oh, I hate poodles.
There was a mother dog in Santa Cruz who attacked an old woman in front of a library, then attacked a homeless person who shattered a bottle in the dog's face after having his entire shirt torn off. One puppy fell through the slots of the wooden pier and drowned while stoned hippies gaped in wonder and my crude redwood branch crutches crumbled in defeat.
There was the dog in Labrador who chased me for the fastest quarter mile of my life. It's a long list that has the latest chapter added to it.
But the circumstances surrounding a dog attack that involves my right arm while returning a movie where a person loses his right arm is too strange to ignore. It's destiny. That dog had been waiting 6 years to cross my path and bite me. He had an exact window of about 2 seconds to walk out of his house and see me and run from his owner and attack me. 1 second either way and that attack never would've happened.
Chances are good that will be the last thing the dog does as the owner had its neck in a fatal choke-hold as I limped away. Midwest people have rules and if you are a dog and bite someone who isn't robbing the house then your next drink will be injected into your neck and you will be cremated and replaced before the sun goes down. There are lots of dogs and it's up to the dog to figure out who is a threat and who isn't. Dogs are tools like screwdrivers and when it's worn out it goes in the garbage. The dog was thinking it's better to bite now and ask questions later but I'm pretty sure there won't be a later for that dog. Unlike that fucking shit ass poodle who definitely lived a long and healthy life, this dog is doomed. But I'm stuck with a one armed deep flesh wound bleeding so I have to type with one hand. Bullshit, but it's destiny.

Cripiltude and Cosmic Rays

The tale of this particular affliction dates far back into an era we called "The Nineties"
No, wait, this started even earlier as the eventual crippling of my toes and foot was actually the result of a totally different injury. I was on the surgeon's table in England as he sharpened his knives to cut tendons off but then he decided it was better to wait. The actual injury is hard to pin down but it involved breaking the heel bone off at the Achilles tendon in the other foot so that the bone rattled around under my skin like a fishing line baiting demon trout. That started a chain reaction that debilitated me in  number of ways as I spent three years on a series of makeshift crutches. That's three years of quietly plotting my adventures, dreaming of when I could walk again. I once limped into the bottom of Death Valley, 97 degrees at 11PM, coyotes and snakes scurried on the perimeter of my campfire and I stayed awake to fend them off by attaching a survival knife to the tip of my walking stick. "Come on, motherfuckers," I yelled like Scarface. It was better than the surgeon's table.
Blah blah blah, bicycle trip to Alaska, blah blah blah, agonizing 6 months digging concrete dust from the bottom of a offshore supply vessel cement tank off the coast of Texas blah blah blah 150,000 white pine trees planted in the strip-mined Kentucky coal country. Santa Cruz was actually the nail in the coffin as I remember limping to the Food Not Bombs kitchens with a bag of day old bread as my donation, eschewing every form of motor vehicle, dragging my juggling pins and plywood guitar along, protesting to return the land to the Ohlone Indians whose clam bakes and deer blankets were preferable to heroin needles in polluted storm drains by the roller coaster, fixing my bicycle in the pouring rain using found objects from the railroad track scrapyard. But the whole time my toes were splaying out like the webbed feet of a duck billed platypus. Permanent damage to tendons and bones. blah blah blah. Abusive girlfriend turns into crack whore...blah blah blah. Boo hoo Oggy.

But the latest chapter was the lobster processing gig that tore the walls of my abdomen, took ten years of cartilage from my wrists and wore a hole into my toe until it was a bloody pulp.

So, I thought this was going to be the end of the toe and I'd have to amputate it with my Leatherman like Aron Ralston did to his arm in the movie "127 hours."
But then I found this toe straightener device in the geriatric section of the goodwill and decided to give it a shot. It's merely three elastic bands that fit around the arthritic toes and pull the down and when you wear shoes the toes don't rub against the leather and tear the skin off.
It doesn't take the years off my once chestnut colored hair or take the meatloaf crumbs from my chest fur but it does provide a little relief and at this end game portion of my heart diseased life when diabetes is sweeping the country like the boll weevil and Asian long horned beetle, I need anything I can get.

On other fronts it's hard to be pessimistic when you see kids practicing baseball in hooded sweatshirts, healthy and looking forward to the new season. I got my Bob Wills songbooks to learn my western swing set. There's a dance club in Europe that uses the kinetic energy of the dance floor to squeeze particles that generates current that then powers the air conditioning machine. And I saw on PBS that rocket scientists have invented a jet powerful enough to reach Mars in 4 months...because Man is not content to look down at his arthritic toes. As one astronaut said of deadly cosmic rays, "There are inherent dangers with space travel. All you can do is minimize them and move forward." We'll get to Mars and beyond. Me and my crippled toes probably won't make the trip but the ravaged planet earth won't be Man's final grave.

Tidal Bore

Like my life, the forces of the universe sometimes allow me to flow into the polluted ocean of my destiny and other times the surging tide forces me backwards over the same clay river bed that I've camped beside countless times before. I only see the missed opportunities of the tidal bore expert who came down to watch the reversing of the tide and I was too timid to ask him if he wanted to be interviewed. I didn't want to exploit his expertise but my own explanation is a boring translation of what he was so enthusiastic about. It was his whole existence to monitor the tidal bore's many variations exclaiming how sink holes formed and whether this bore was stronger or weaker. They were the characteristics he admired and appreciated and I didn't film it because I wanted to maintain boundaries. But you can't make a documentary if you maintain boundaries. Or maybe I saw he was so enthusiastic and I didn't want to ruin the moment by pulling out a camera and asking if he wanted to be famous. People change when they get in front of the camera and I enjoyed his authentic enthusiasm too much to exploit it. It's material for an essay but not film. If you want to meet him then go to the Joggins tidal bore and wait for him. Maybe that's the lesson. Part of my journey is generic enough to share and part of it is too personal and part of it can only be experienced in person. It's up to me as editor to sift through it all and show you enough to churn the riverbed of your mind, flowing backwards and forwards until the source is revealed.

Step One: Call Oggy

What is life but a pursuit of the undiscovered? To take this chrome trim from 43 years ago and generate something else from it?

How exactly would that look on the back of my insulated overall? I was at the Rochester fair looking over the shoulder of the grandmother doing embroidery with my bad breath and Labrador ears wagging in the goat air, leering at the 4H club girls and the midgets with disproportional busts as tin pan alley songs play through blind man's fingers on accordion playing Beer Barrel Polka and the acid of stale lemonade plunges to Oggy's tender throat. 

"Could I simply do the embroidery on the jacket or overall itself?" I asked, skipping the step in Oggy-like fashion saving resources in his useless and abhorrent way that attracted police and hate mail across New England as oceans acidify and Oggy eats stale bread from under the captain's chair of his ego. "No, denim doesn't work very well, and also," said the grandmother with wrinkles and papery hand flesh, "You'll want to save the work when the jacket wears out." Ah! So, if I make a patch then I can sew the patch on the overalls and then take the patch off and put it on my jean jacket. OR whatever. And I can do the embroidery on weaver's cloth, as it was meant to be done....

Plunging into the work.

 I take a picture and then scale it on the laptop computer. Then I place the weaver's cloth over the screen and it acts like a light box. I tape the weaver's cloth to the computer in my dungeon as animals race across the roof and tornadoes plunder the top soil of America's ethanol crops. I trace the words...."Econoline" Doing this instantly breaks the spell that Ford has on America. We're in the twilight of gasoline and Oggy's van is Noah's arc traveling with gypsy abandon through the midwest wasteland.

Now, I've done this twice with white weaver's cloth and now with navy weaver's cloth. And I've also done this fruitlessly with white carbon paper that was barely visible. Now, the long toil of punch pin embroidery with my arthritic hands punching in the beige 3 strand cross stitch yarn. Punch pin is not like rug hooking where you work on the front of the fabric. No, you should work on the back of the fabric with punch pin but that means you need to either put the design on the back (which Oggy failed to do) or you need to outline the design so you can see it and then flip the design over and start to fill it in so the loops are on the other side. Look closely and the outline is layed flat because that's when Oggy worked the front side. The loop side is actually done from the other side and then when Oggy wants to take a picture he will presume to be working the front of it but actually this is all phony like his pitiful attempts to be Eco-conscious and a contrivance and falsity. He's posing with the work to the front when in reality you can't make those loops by working the front because the loops will end up on the back. You must turn it over and work backwards. You could tell this by the fact his punch pin has no yarn in it and he is an imposter and false prophet and hypocrite that needs to have his hypocrisies and flaws and inaccuracies and bad breath and viral toe nails and bleeding asshole and ingrown beard hairs  and gray chest fur pointed out to him because he wouldn't otherwise know about it. He's slow and stupid and writes for his own amusement and aggrandizement and loves to use big words to impress himself and other people. Even this essay is a mere attempt to win the approval of his gutter-dwelling self esteem.

 

 

 

Xanadu - Xanadon't



Xanadu: This two string guitar is out of tune



 I was researching early 1980s film the other day and want to muse on the film Xanadu. That's fitting because the film itself touches loosely on the topic of muses, those Greek entities who inspire artists to greatness. Well, let's see what comes out now or if my muses have abandoned me to their neon kingdoms.

Xanadu had a lot of things going for it. Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver both were producers in the early part of their careers on this flick. Gene Kelly , the greatest singer/dancer ever filmed, had a major role. Olivia Netwon John at the height of her popularity was here. Michael Beck's last film was the sleeper hit Warriors (1979). Songs written by pop stars ELO and John Farrar (Grease) were at their disposal. But that wasn't enough too keep this 90 minute music video above water. The problem comes down to director Robert Greenwald going into the deep end of feature films after a handful of made for tv movies. (He later found his muse in documentaries.) But the killer was working from a script written by Richard Christian Danus and Marc Rein Rubel. How these two untested writers got any responsibility for a major film script is perplexing but how they got all the responsibiity is evidence that there are failures in decision making of big studios. And when producers and executive heads make mistakes bad movies get made. Danus had never written anything and his career basically ended with Xanadu. Rubel also was totally inexperienced but managed to scrape a living as a writer after Xanadu. But the flimsy script itself is their biggest defect. It seems that absolutely no one stepped in to save them...the unbalanced and bland script was handed to Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton John who must've grimaced when reading it. In fact, I'll bet they were certain that after they got the initial check from their agent upon signing that this movie would never be made. As shooting approached I can picture frantic calls made to agents trying to stall, to find some way to avoid acting in this sure fire bomb. I can also imagine Rubel and Danus shaking their heads in absolute amazement that this piece of trash, that they assuredly threw together at the last minute thinking it would be another made for tv flick or else shelved forever, was going to star Gene Kelly, hero of Brigadoon, American in Paris, Singin in The Rain, and every blockbuster musical in technicolor history. This is inexplicable because if you put Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton John in a room together they would write a better script in two hours. So why the fuck are two total amateurs in charge of this script? Michael Beck once said, "Warriors opened a lot of doors for me. Xanadu closed them." The drama behind the camera far exceeds the drama in front.


Pick Your Junk: man package or lady hole



So, I lay the blame on Rubel and Danus for not having any talent. Their atrocious script reads like a first draft written by a teenager. They might've written a movie about the muses but believe me the muses never deigned to visit them while creating this uninspiring and transparent story with totally generic dialogue like, "Want some popcorn?" and "Don't go searching underwater." Then I blame Greenwald for agreeing to direct this one dimensional mess. How do you put two people with no chemistry on an empty sound stage in roller skates and have them skate around while "Suddenly" plays in the background and make that cool? I'll bet the crew itself was bored to tears and they were watching it live. Of course the producers are to blame for believing they could make this entertaining but I suspect they had Gene Kelly and Newton John on the hook for a limited time and pushed ahead despite the horrible material. "The music will carry the film," they probably said, "How can you go wrong with ELO?" they asked. "End with a bang and no one will remember how bad the first 80 minutes were," they argued. Ok. Michael Beck was exposed as wooden and ELO, otherwise a great band, had to live with this crown of thorns for the rest of their existence. Jeff Lynne trusted the wrong person. This film now serves as a warning to anyone making a movie that hopes to be hip and trendy to an audience that has just entered the first year of a new decade. Hold on, do you think roller skates and keytars mixed with Glenn Miller and feathered hair and shirts unbuttoned to reveal hairy man chest is going to be cool in 1980? It wasn't that cool in 1977 so what makes you think spandex and denim vests are still going to be cool? Oh, that's right, you've never written a movie before. Forget I said anything.
 Check out the leg warmers on the female bird!

This is a script about a muse (daughter of Zeus?) (Newton-John) manifesting herself in modern day Los Angeles (wearing a sheer curtain, leg warmers and rollerskates) and inspiring hair-challenged commercial artist Sonny Malone (Beck) to open a rollerskate disco with retired jazz clarinetist Danny McGuire (Kelly). That has "Made for TV" ( and "Failure") written all over it. Forget the animated scenes, it's goofy to start with because it basically involves extraterrestrials interfering with humanity. Not just any humans, a night club promoter and an album painter. Deus Ex Machina is a term used to describe a writing device that solves a problem the writer can't solve by using paranormal events that interfere with the characters. Your story is boring? Give a character a heart attack or have them become a ghost. It means God as Machine and it's usually used by unemployed writers as a way to criticize employed writers like, "His characters boxed themselves in so he pulled out a Deus Ex Machina. What a hack!" Defying all laws, Rubel and Danus use Deus Ex Machina as the basis of their film! But when you have a character who begins the movie abandoning his attempt to be a "real" artist to return to commercial art and ends up being a disco club designer then you have a Deus who doesn't even know how to inspire the characters. So Sonny is content to paint walls in his disco? He's no closer to his dream of artistic expression than he was at the start. Some would say he's much further away. And his wardrobe is still atrocious. Furthermore, he has been convinced to do things by Kira and enabled by Danny's money (that he made in construction after he abandoned his own music career when Kira abandoned him). He's not made his own choices and has nothing personal invested in his decisions. He quits a job he hates! So what? Did the word "sacrifice" never come up in the script workshops?Oh, this script is terrible terrible terrible. If it were only a little more wordy then it would be campy but they run out of things to say in the first two seconds and the lack of chemistry and acting ability starve the screen of oxygen. The animation and roller disco and music are all that validate the producers. It's a perfect tv flick that attracts advertising spots for acne cream. But to foist this abomination on America using Gene Kelly (watching this movie reportedly killed him) and Olivia Newton John was cruel. The only thing more cruel would be to make you watch me watching Xanadu. So, here you go:

The sad part is that if the producers had come to their sense and DONE THE ENTIRE MOVIE ANIMATED BY Don Bluth then it would've been a timeless hit, loved by millions. But by forcing it into the live action arena it destroyed the magic. The story line would've been fine for animated, but the generic director had absolutely no budget to work with so everything seems wooden. Animated in the same magical style as this music video would've been perfect. But they actually went for the worst of both worlds by inserting an excellent animated music video into a terrible live action film. WHY WHY WHY? One or the other. The fish in the video are infinitely more dimensional than the human actors.