Where Quats Come from: Remember B. Kliban?

I use the word "quat" a lot here and on Facebook. Most of you already know this, but just in case you really were born yesterday, I didn't make it up. The late B. Kliban did.

He once said, "I like cats all right. I just don't like drawing them."

In that case, what a curse it must have been, making pots and piles and truckloads of money from his drawings of Quats!

I'm sure he derived more satisfaction from being a Playboy cartoonist, and Hefner paid better than anyone in the business. There's one particular Playboy cartoon that I remember that combines Kliban's interests: two male Kliban Quats are standing on the street, watching a fetching female Kliban Quat go by, and one quat says to the other, "There goes a heckova nice pussy."

When I tell my little Honey that she's a heckova nice pussy, she pirouettes and swishes her fluffy tail around as if it was a boa.

-- Freder

Paris in Polychrome

An American in Paris really is just like a straight-up shot of Happiness. The songs are among Gershwin’s best, the design and settings are so vibrant and full of life (if unrealistic -- the final ballet makes it clear that Mr. Minnelli isn’t making any attempt to show us Paris; rather, he’s putting us into an Impressionist painting of the city); this really is the way color should be utilized in cinema.

Gene Kelly is such a cool cat that I can’t even hate him for being such a cool cat. Leslie Caron is possibly my favorite movie musical leading lady (why in God’s name can’t they get Lili out on DVD? That, my friends, is one of the best ever). And Oscar Levant is a hoot essentially playing a milder version of himself.

Kelly’s choreography is free and easy and full-blooded. Unlike Astaire, whose style is so light and airy that it’s almost other-worldly, Kelly is earthy, flaunting his physicality and his All-American enthusiasm.

The story? Feh. It’s just boy meets girl. But what a boy meeting what a girl in what a place, in dazzling clothes against dazzling backdrops, in dances that caress, collide and withdraw.

Kelly even comes with his own personal spotlight: that big, unending smile. An American in Paris is just infectious, and it accomplishes that which modern cinema seems to have forgotten how to do, even with all the bells, whistles and computers at its command: It charms.

P.S. – Y’know, I never thought of it this way, but if Fred Astaire is Air, and Gene Kelly is Earth, then Cyd Charisse is definitely Fire and Ginger Rogers has got to be smooth, flowing Water. The four elements of Movie Dance!

-- Freder.

Introducing Quats of the Duck House, part one

This is my little Honey. I love her so much.

She was a spring kitten born to the outdoor "feral" cats. Early on she contracted a terrible eye infection. Long, long ago, we had decided that caring for the indoor cats was enough, and that the outdoor cats would get food, milk and water -- but beyond that they were on their own.

So this little kitty, who did not even have a name, was condemned to a summer of terrible suffering.

She kept to herself, or was ostracized, and lived all alone under the bushes in front of the house. The eye infection was advanced and a terrible and pathetic thing to behold. I didn't even like to see her. I wanted to take her to the vet to be put out of her misery, but somehow that never happened.

Then, as summer drew along to an end, her eye infection began to heal. In a relatively short time for something so horrible, it cleared up entirely. She was obviously blind in that eye, but it didn't appear to trouble her and we agreed that she was quite cute.

But we didn't bring her in. We had enough indoors cats to last a while!

One morning in November, my mother didn't make her rounds as normal. I found her in the kitchen, in terrible pain from her right leg and foot. After two visits to the doctor who had done the bypass in in both of her legs, and a round of tests and X-Rays, Dr. B_______ told us that my mother's right leg would have to be amputated.

My mother was very brave. I don't believe that she ever cried in front of me. She came home and tolerated the pain as long as she could. In December, just at Christmastime, she went into the hospital.

She did not come home for three months, and I spent the winter alone in the house. Every morning and afternoon I visited my mother (usually bringing food!), and every night I came home and fed the cats indoors and out. The little kitten who was blind in one eye was always out there, alone. She never went to the barn or tried to find real shelter. She sat behind a drift of snow, as much out of the wind as possible, close to the house, waiting.

One night I could not stand it anymore. I held the door open for her. If she came in of her own volition, she could stay.

She came in.

I set up a cat tray in my bathroom and kept her closed up in there for the first week, during the days. She was so happy to see me at the end of the day; and at bedtime I would let her out to walk around a bit.

She started sleeping with me every night, right on top of me, curled up on my chest under my chin. I named her Popeye, but that didn't take. She was too cute and huggy for that name. In the end, she just started answering to Honey.

She's much too big now to sleep on my chest, but she still sleeps with me every night, snuggled up at the head of the bed, right beside me, under my arm. I always wanted a nice kitty to snuggle with on a cold night. It's strange to think that the poor sick kitten that I wanted to put down would turn out to be my favorite cat ever.

-- Freder

Playing with Paper, and a Petrified Pussycat

More photo prints of the defunct house and a big ol' jar of India Ink arrived Wednesday night.

I dove right in, using the India Ink to blacken the pages of the ledger book I am turning into a photo scrapbook of the house. This is better quality ink than the last bottle I had (love the name: Black Cat), or else the stuff in my original bottle was just so old that it had congealed a bit and lost its potency. It covers  everything! By the time I had finished about eight pages in the front and back of the book, my fingers were black all the way down. With much scrubbing, it came off of my skin, but my fingernails made it look like I was headed to a goth club! All day at work I tried to keep them hidden. "It's not black nail polish, people! It's India Ink!"

I've probably typed it before, but working on the scrapbook is what Martha Stewart would call A Good Thing. It's a positive activity that allows me to look back without regret.

Along with the prints, I got five more 8 X 10 enlargements. These turned out wonderfully well. Much more so than the regular size snaps, they really convey the physicality of the house and its contents. I wish I could blow them up to room-size and paper the walls with them!

Actually, I could project them onto a wall and do a mural. That's not such a bad idea for the new house, whatever it turns out to be.

One of my student workers said that I could get one of those "I Spy" books out of these pictures, and the enlargements have convinced me it's a smashing idea. Too bad that higher quality pictures can't be taken. It's history, now.

Tiger Whitestockings is in the house. Unsupervised. I hope the place isn't getting torn apart while I'm at work. I didn't mean to keep her in for the whole day, but that's how it worked out.

It was raining cold and hard when I got home last night, and Tiger Whitestockings was soaked through, crying at me out of the dark. Still, she wouldn't come in when I held the door open for her. I finally said, "I really think you should come in," and grabbed her!

I showed her the food and the cat tray, and she promptly disappeared. She stayed hidden for a couple of hours. I was watching the final episode of Farscape (with John finally proposing to Aeryn just before they are blown to smithereens, yes, smithereens, by a UFO -- no wonder the fans were pissed when Sci-Fi canceled the  show!) when I suddenly noticed her at my feet. I pulled her up onto my lap and she settled right down and purred and purred.

But when I went in to work on the scrapbook, she disappeared again, and I haven't seen her since. There was no time to look for her this morning: I overslept and was running dramatically late. No time to clean the cat trays. The house will be a pit when I get home!

-- Freder.

By the pricking of my thumbs. . .

I've thought about it, and decided that Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes must be one of the ten greatest novels in the English language, and one of the five greatest American novels. Its horror is set in the American heartland, but Cooger and Dark's sideshow is about much more than just giving you the shivers. It asks all the big questions about life, death, youth and age, time and history, regret, and the setting aside of regret.

The dark ones feed off tears, and I have been giving them an awful lot of sustenance lately. That has to stop. Tears do not honor the dead.

All of this is due to my recent viewing of Jack Clayton's film version of the book, scripted by Mr. Bradbury himself. It's just about as good as any film adaptation could be, at least on this budget, benefiting greatly from a deeply felt performance from Jason Robards and a tightly controlled one from Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark.

Their main confrontation in the town library, with Dark literally ripping the pages out of Robards's book of life, is probably the film's best scene, coming straight from the book, a confrontation unlike any other I can think of on film. Robards plays a man choked with regret, but one wise enough to refuse Mr. Dark's offer of "help."

For Mr. Dark only gives gifts that take away. He lives to turn children into sad old people, and to bait victims with dreams come true in order feed on their pain when the dream turns to ashes.

This was to be my movie for Halloween night, but it was delayed until two nights later. It was exactly the right story to revisit in the fall of 2010. I thought it would make me sad, but it had the opposite effect. When Robards urges his young son to stop despairing -- "That's what they like! Come on! Whoop it up! Make some noise!" -- it's almost a moment to make one leap out of the chair and applaud.

And now with the October Country behind me it's time for me to turn away the dark in more ways than one.

-- Freder.

Fly away home

It doesn't look like much from the air. And the photo was not taken during a green season. This has been my home for almost 35 years. Under the Purchase Agreement that I signed on Monday night, I have the right to stay until June (in fact, the new owners would prefer it if I could stay that long. They cannot take occupancy until that time, and would have to drain the place if I wasn't there). Then, ready or not, I have to leave forever.

My head tells me that it's for the best. I do not have the resources or abilities to restore the house to its former condition, and it makes little sense to sink money from the estate into it, money that we most likely could not get back out. It's too much house for me, clearly. We always said that it needed the efforts of more than one person, and I've been doing it essentially alone now for more than five years while my mother gradually failed and faded away.

The new owners can bring everything to the place that I can not. They're decent people and big Disney fans -- so Mom would like them.

But I'm so tired of saying good-bye. It seems as if this year has been about nothing else.

Snow in October

It was not a good Halloween, but Halloween had a good one on me.

I woke to a heavy snowstorm blanketing the yard. It ended by 11:30 and melted away shortly after, but it's the principle of the thing, damn it! Snow on  Halloween day! Another punch in the face.

This was going to be my day for me -- some time to get a few things done, but also some time to write: not just emails or the blog, I wanted to start in a small way on completing a short story that has been sitting on my computer desktop for a year.

It didn't happen. Phone calls, emails, chores that took longer than they should have. I was just sitting down to warm up by doing a blog post when my sister turned up in the yard.

She wanted to go through Mom's clothes. I felt like telling her that she'd had her chance. But I figured that letting her do this would get it out of the way, and then I would never have to see her again.

The whole time she was going through the clothing, she kept asking me when I was going to move. I kept answering "I don't know." Because nothing is final yet and I'm not packing one box until I have a completed deal. And then I am going to move at my own pace. I am tired of being pushed on every damn thing.

She asked if I'd spoken to my neighbors about selling the place. I said no, and for the same reasons. I don't want to have the place sold out from under me when I have nowhere else to go.

She seemed unwilling to accept this answer and started pushing me again to go down there and speak to them. I said I didn't want to. She said, "I know R____, really well, I'll go down and talk to him. Do you want to come with me?"

I said I wished she wouldn't. She chose not to hear me. She demanded that we load up her truck with all the clothes it could carry so that she could "help" me by taking it all to Goodwill. I said I didn't need or want her help. She chose not to hear that, and started loading up her car.

I gave up at that point. I just wanted her gone. I started helping her load just so that she would go away, let me have what remained of my Sunday, and the next time, if there was one, it would be easier to control the situation just by not letting her in.

It must have been three-thirty or later when she finally left. I breathed a sigh of relief, and started to try to pick up where I'd left off. I had a load of laundry in the washer and a VHS that had finished duping, so I set about shutting down those operations for the day.

She hadn't been gone ten minutes when there was a knock at my door.

It was her again. She hollered in at me, "R____ wants to see the house, it's his step-son that's interested and they're leaving for California tomorrow!"

I couldn't believe it. I started cleaning up. My sister hollered in at me to get the keys to the barn. She started going through my key rack. "Which one of these is the right one?"

"None of them," I said. In truth, the keys on that rack (which my mother made many years ago) are for decorative purposes only.

There were two men standing in my yard. One of them introduced himself as the step-son.

They walked through the barns and then they came into the house, Claudia leading the way, giving them a hard-sell sales pitch the whole way, never shutting up. They went into my mother's room. They went down the basement and into the outrooms. Claudia said nothing about the window I'd boarded up after she broke it entering the house illegally.

I didn't want her to go into the main house. I didn't want her to see what I had kept and how I was making the place comfortable again. But there was no way to stop her without making a scene, she was in full carnival barker mode.

When she entered the living room she saw the head of the lion costume and said, "Oh, there's my lion costume! -- Ours!"

It never was hers or ours. It belonged to our mother. She merely let us use it once in a while (usually with reluctance!). It's not mine even now. I'm just its caretaker. That means I have to protect it from my sister.

She didn't remember half of the things that Mom had made, just as she hadn't remembered her own WAC costume from her childhood when we found it in Mom's closet. But she kept saying "Our mother made most of this stuff!" to the men as if it meant something to her.

They went upstairs and looked in all the bedrooms. When they looked in what had once been Claudia's bedroom, but which has been an extra room for me now many years, I heard Claudia exclaim, "Oh, you saved my old desk! My desk! Hmmm, I wonder what I could do with it. How could I use it?"

I thought: It hasn't been your desk for thirty-five years, you bitch. Now it's coming with me, or it's going to the auction house.

When they were done, Claudia took them down through the back field to see the pond, and I stood just behind the closed door and sobbed.

But I wasn't rid of them yet. Ten minutes later I saw them in the front yard, all talking. They went out into the driveway and talked some more. I kept going back to the window and finding them still there and thinking to myself, Why don't they go?

After what must have been twenty minutes I saw them coming back to the door.

I made the mistake of opening it. The guys were very polite and friendly, and I suddenly realized that they were a gay couple.

"J____ and J____ have something to say to you," my sister said.

Pop Culture blather: just to take my mind off of all the other stuff...

Where have John Brahm and Laird Cregar been all my life? More to the point, with all the old movies I've watched and all the time I've spent reading about them, why have I never heard of these two men before?

With Cregar, at least there's an excuse. He died quite young, not even living to see the release of his final picture, Hangover Square.

But Brahm appears to have had a long and varied career, and if the three films I watched this weekend that bore his name as director are any indication, the man was a true stylist, and a great unsung talent.

First up was The Lodger, Fox's 1944 version of the often-filmed story about Jack the Ripper. You know that you're in the hands of a master from the opening shots, with the camera creeping about London's night streets, following its inhabitants through a variety of tableaux until the first murder happens right under everyone's noses. The papers immediately rush out a new edition and the newsboys carry the word from the slums to the homes of the once-wealthy.

And then Cregar lurches out of the darkness to select his new name from a gaslit street sign. Cregar was a giant of a man, six foot three and three hundred pounds, and his presence is imposing to say the least, even when he's playing mild-mannered. His performance as the Ripper is mesmerizing and covers a wide range of emotional territory. At no time are we in doubt as to his guilt; only his motivations are in doubt, and these seem to be driven by a sweeping Romanticism fixated around his own brother. You get the sense that Cregar is a runaway horse straining to control itself. I won't spoil the final scene, but I will say that Cregar holds it all in his eyes and on his very considerable shoulders.

Sir Cedric Hardwicke is also in the movie, almost unrecognizable under a beard, and Merle Oberon does the blithely seductive thing: she is the meat dangling as bait to draw the Ripper into final confrontation.

The whole picture is so striking that I wonder why it has been so little shown and is so little known.

But wait, the goodness continues. Hangover Square is a virtual second helping. Cregar (who was desperately trying to remake himself in ways that directly led to his death) had slimmed down considerably by this time, and gets to play for more sympathy in this picture, but he is no less imposing in stature and his performance is no less remarkable. This time the killer is a somewhat meek composer who is driving himself so hard that sometimes experiences blackouts -- periods in which he does things that no one ought to do.

Once again, Brahm is directing, and once again the opening sequence contains an exceedingly well-staged and chilling murder. Once again there's no doubt as to the identity of the perpetrator. And once again the "hero" ends in a smashing self-inflicted downfall, this time to the music of the great Bernard Herrmann. It's all so well done that you feel like you're waking from a dark dream when the end title rolls.

And oh, that Linda Darnell!

But wait: the goodness doesn't stop: The Undying Monster is a nifty little murder mystery cum werewolf story (again directed by Brahm); it's so restrained that you don't even see the monster until almost the final shot -- and what a shot it is. There's no Laird Cregar to give a crashing performance that roots it to the floor, and the investigator is played particularly poorly. But there is a very strong heroine to drive the picture, and many, many wonderful shots of characters plunging through the darkened moors, both in pursuit and being pursued.

These three pictures were all brand-new to me, and hands-down the best part of my Halloween weekend. They come in a box set from Fox, and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes, em, this sort of thing.