Another Whack at the Family Tree

Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, aside from having a really annoying title if you have to type it out multiple times, is Robert Aldrich’s followup to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (you can read my review of that film here), and although it can’t be faulted in terms of the talent and skill on display, it is nowhere near as interesting as its predecessor.

Made two years later in 1964, it was originally slated to have Davis and Crawford repeating in the starring roles, but Crawford had to bow out due to “health issues” -- or was it just because she was making a pain in the ass out of herself on the set? -- and was replaced, greatly to the benefit of the movie I think, with Olivia de Havilland. Others of the Baby Jane repertory cast returned, especially including Victor Buono, and were joined by Agnes Moorehead (seemingly having a wonderful time in the part of Velma, sort of a blunt instrument as Faithful Retainers go), the always-wonderful Cecil Kellaway, Joseph Cotton, a one hundred percent unrecognizable Mary Astor (is this really the same femme fatale who played Bogart for a fool in The Maltese Falcon? It hardly seems possible), and, most briefly, Bruce Dern.

Charlotte has all the same cunning sadism, the same crisply photographed patterns of shadow and light that Baby Jane had and then some; unfortunately it is also far more visceral and in-your-face with its shock scenes, and far more predictable and ordinary in its plot and conception. Although based on a novel by the same author, it just isn’t as clever, and without the cleverness to wink at us from behind the veil, so to speak, what we’re left with is just a really ugly story populated by really ugly characters who make you feel dirty just by spending time with them.

Which isn’t to say that it’s not well done; it is. Aldrich handles the affair with the precision of a cutting laser, and the cast are all uncomfortably effective in their roles. Once again, Davis performs valiantly in a deeply unglamorous role, not just in the spectacular pyrotechnic displays of mental breakdown that are frankly disturbing to watch, but in the kinder moments that her character is sometimes allowed. De Havilland, with her nice-girl looks and manner, turns in a shrewd and, by the end, deeply mean-spirited performance. Meanwhile, Cotton moves in like a smooth-operating machine, Buono brings the full force of his physicality to bear, and Kellaway just does that smooth, languid thing that he does. 

The picture opens with a scene of violence that is far more graphic than fans of Baby Jane have any right to expect, and indeed I wondered how Aldrich could even get away with it until I reflected that this was 1964, right around the time when directors were beginning to experiment with more explicit depictions of sex and violence; this, after all, is what gave rise to the MPAA’s still-infamous ratings system. Britain’s Hammer horror films were already weltering in gore, and Aldrich must have felt that he couldn’t afford to seem quaint in the shock department. Instead, Bruce Dern’s messy exit almost kills the movie in one, shall we say, chop. It stops the show before the show has even begun. 

Beyond that, Charlotte may disappoint fans of Baby Jane just by belonging to a different gene pool. The two movies are really only related in superficial ways. Baby Jane was a Hollywood Gothic and as such belonged in the same family as Sunset Boulevard, with a flavor, with twists and quirks and freakishness, that only Hollywood, only modernity can bring to bear.

Charlotte on the other hand is pure Southern Gothic and no two ways about it, and if you like that sort of thing, this is your -- ehm -- meat, but at it’s heart this is a very different animal. Southern Gothic is all about Tradition and wisteria and magnolia and long-buried secrets dragging “theyseffs” out of the bayou muck to haunt the living, and that’s what Charlotte does. The cousin-to-cousin manipulation and mental torture is merely a colorful add-on, and a predictable one at that.

I do appreciate the climax, however. Without, I hope, saying too much, and speaking as someone who has personally ventured rather too close for comfort to the edge of madness in the past year, it is enormously gratifying (though telegraphed from a million miles away) when the Crazy Lady pulls herself together and gives Them Bad Folks the message from On High that they have coming to them.

In the midst of its carnage and its very conventional Southern Gothic hugger-mugger, Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte does contain one really lovely, exceptional passage of dialogue, beautifully played by Kellaway and Davis in a rare tranquil moment as the pair walks back to the house from the family plot. Quoth Kellaway, “You’re my favorite living mystery.”

And Davis draws herself up. She turns; for a moment we can see a ghost of her youthful loveliness pass flitting over her face like one of those lacy Southern Gothic curtains wafting in the summer breeze. Quoth Davis:

 “Have you ever solved me?”

-- Freder.

Replay Value

Seems like every morning a song called “Box of Secrets” by British singer/songwriter Zarif gets at least two plays on my iPad “Juke Box” whilst the Quats of The DuckHaus get their morning meal. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to it; it’s a recent discovery, one of “those” songs that I never get tired of.

We all have them, right? Especially when we’re young. The songs that we play over and over and over again until our parents come around and holler up the stairs at us, “Don’t you have any other records up there?” Nowadays you can just set your MP3 player to “repeat” and either zone out or dance and sing along to your hearts content until you’ve burned out in that happy way that’s almost like the aftereffect of good sex. When I was growing up, we had to physically take the record out of its sleeve, put it on the record player, lift the tone arm, then lift it again, move it back to the beginning of the cut, repeat as necessary and wait for those first notes. Wonderful stuff. There’s something to be said for having that level of personal involvement with the playing of music.

In those days, among the singles that I played the most were “Hitchin’ a Ride” by Vanity Fair, “Ride Captain Ride” by Blues Image, “For You Blue” by The Beatles, “Vehicle” by The Ides of March, “These Eyes” and its flip side “Lightfoot” by The Guess Who -- oh, and so many more. Being a teenager of a Certain Age in a Certain Time I harbored a Guilty Fondness for The Archies and The Partridge Family, but don’t pass that around. We’ll just keep that between you and me, okay? 

The point is that it wasn’t enough to listen to any of them once. I had to listen until they were imprinted in my brain. I guess that was the point; I guess that’s how our music becomes Our Music, how culture becomes personal. We begin to feel that the music (and the comics, and the TV shows and the movies) actually belong to us, and not to their original creators. At a certain point, the stuff that we love becomes grafted on to our DNA.

That’s less true now that I’m older. I’m more or less fully formed, and so it’s rare these days that I encounter a work of art that impacts me in that soul-changing, DNA-molding way of youth. When I listen to music over and over again, I’m still making it a part of my life, but it doesn’t become something that Mister Satan would get in the bargain if I signed my soul over to him next week (which could still happen, by the way; I’m open to offers. Where is that SOB when you need him?).

What sort of music are you re-playing lately? iTunes (which only tracks what I listen to here at the computer) tells me that “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train is far in the lead of my repeat plays with 88 hits, followed by “Reflections” by the Supremes with 46 and “Little Arrows” by Leapy Lee with 41. Nat King Cole’s rendition of “Stardust,” which will bring tears to your eyes if you have any kind of a soul at all, has had a measly 36 plays, while the “Batman” TV theme song has had 29. But none of this is scientific. I do much of my music listening elsewhere. 

For instance: “Hang On Sloopy” by The McCoys and “I’m Gonna Be” by The Proclaimers weigh in at just 14 plays each. This is an Incorrect Statistic if ever there was one. If there are any two songs that have a claim to splicing themselves onto my genes after I became an “adult,” these would be them. I can’t listen to either one of them just once. I defy anyone to listen to “I’m Gonna Be” just once; like a certain brand of potato chip used to claim in their advertising, you can’t do it. The song is actually drunk on itself. It’s so full of life that you can’t put it down.

Some songs are like that, just Made to Be Played More Than Once. What are yours? 

-- Freder.

Notes From the Inside

After my experiences this year I cannot help but come to the conclusion that America’s approach to “justice” is completely broken, a system not so much consciously devised as merely grown like a crazy mold over too many generations of contradictory and sometimes nonsensical laws enforced by an army of licensed bullies and thugs and devised by a two-hundred-year-long parade of self-serving politicians, officials and administrators, most of them corrupt, nearly all of them working at cross purposes, having at their core a set of social values that is diseased at best.

You say “diseased” is too strong a word to describe our social values? I say not. I say any culture that still puts people to death is diseased. All life is sacred, and none can be replaced.

I feel for the families who have lost a loved one to murder, but two wrongs don’t make a right, and demanding the blood of the perpetrator is not justice. It is asking someone else to become a murderer in order to satisfy your own lust for revenge.

As long as governments are in the business of taking lives, we are all at risk.

We live within this myth of an egalitarian society where all things are equal, except guess what, they aren’t -- and this includes crime. You wouldn’t give a child who swipes a pack of bubblegum from a supermarket the same sentence that you’d give a twenty-year-old who robs a couple at gunpoint, but blanket laws for operating under the influence do just that. I did some research on this. It doesn’t make any difference if you drive a mile or ten miles, or even if you never leave the parking lot. It doesn’t make a difference if you only drive a foot and a half. If you get into a car with keys in your pocket, but crawl into the back seat in order to sleep it off (in other words, if you’re doing the right thing), you can still be arrested for OUI and suffer the same consequences as someone who careened down the middle of main street at fifty miles an hour and took out a lamp post. 

I want to spell out the bleeding obvious right now and make it clear that I’m not defending drunk driving. What I’m saying is that in order for “justice” to have any meaning whatever, all cases need to be judged on their individual merits. Blanket laws make that impossible.

I have friends who were so badly injured by drunk drivers that they nearly lost their lives. Like the families of murder victims, I feel for them: but they need to let go and listen to reason. All incidents of operating under the influence are not created equal, and should not be treated the same, and it defies reason to suggest otherwise. 

In most, but certainly not all cases, it is plain crazy to throw alcoholics and drug addicts into jail. These people are not criminals.

They have a problem. You might just as well throw someone in jail for being fat. Are they guilty of being stupid? Indeed, they often are. But if we jailed everyone for their stupidity, then everyone would be in jail, including you.

You say that the law is meant to be a deterrent: but that’s not how it works. Because alcoholism and drug abuse are not “bad behaviours” like robbing a store or punching someone in the face that one can simply choose not to do. I met a man in AA who lost his business, his house, his family, everything he had, not just once but three times. He didn’t do that because he got out of bed one morning and said to himself, “I think I’ll get pickled today and then go out and smash my car into a police cruiser.”

The only thing that jailing alcoholics and drug addicts does is to clutter and crowd the prison system, and sometimes to set these people up for more failure.

What they need is help. I was very fortunate to land first in 4 East, where I received medication, treatment, counseling and, this last time, a ticket into an extended outpatient program that finally nailed down my recovery. If I had landed in jail instead, I guarantee you the outcome would have been different.

But then, based on my personal experience with our jails, I’m not convinced that any but the hardest, meanest, worst offenders belong in there. 

If you have not spent time as an inmate in a jail, you have no right to an opinion on this subject. You cannot understand what it is like until you have been through it.

The fact is that any significant amount of time spent in one of those places will turn anyone into the kind of person who is unfit for any other kind of existence, someone who is unfit for life on the outside. It is the ultimate vicious circle. You can put someone in there whose only crime is to have a self-destructive habit: and they will come out a menace to themselves and society.

God forbid that someone fragile or mentally challenged ends up in one of those places. I’m sure it happens. God help them. It must be a shattering experience.

Actually, if they treat other people in the long term the way they treated me in the short term, I’m surprised that there aren’t more fatalities. I won’t go into most of the gory details, but I will say that, just for starters, I was denied my necessary medications. I shudder to think what would have happened to me if I had stayed any longer without access to my meds. 

Just don’t call them “correctional facilities.” There is nothing correctional about them.  By the time I entered jail, I was already determined never again to get behind the wheel of a car while under the influence of alcohol, and so for me jail was just an unnecessary slap in the face. But I met two addicts while I was in there, and both were repeat offenders. So you see: jail doesn’t change anything or anyone. If you’re like me, the “correction” has already occurred internally; if you’re like the other fellows., or like the young man I met in the Seton IOP who had no less than five OUI’s under his belt, jail time won’t correct you.

Ask any alcoholic. The change has to come from inside you. And there is nowhere, nowhere on earth that is less conducive to helping a person make that internal adjustment than the inside of a jail cell.

-- Freder.

PS, I also have a “friend” who said, and I quote, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” a comment that I thought unconscionably flippant and arrogant, not to mention ignorant. And not only that, but, hmm, I don’t recall him saying anything like that when George Bush was the perpetrator. Oh, and by the way, Bush got off scot free because -- oh yeah -- he was George Bush and remember, we live in an egalitarian society. Yeah. Right.

Tommy Doesn't Know What Day It Is...

Last night I revisited Ken Russell’s whack job of a movie version of Pete Townshend’s even wackier whack job of a Rock Opera called Tommy. It wasn’t one of my better entertainment choices.

I’ll get my cheapest shot out of the batting cage right at the outset: Ann-Margaret got a Best Supporting Actress Nomination for this? The nominations committee must have been desperate. She actually won the Golden Globe in the same category. All I can say is that there must have been a baked bean fetish going around Hollywood that year.

Tommy is Of My Time. I’m not sure what that says about My Time, but we’ll let it go at that. The movie was released in 1975, just six years after The Who unveiled this most ambitious project and three years after the London Symphony Orchestra recorded a smashing full-cast version of the piece. The LSO record was my entry point, and it’s still my favorite Tommy, although there’s something to be said for the (much toned down and cleaned up) Broadway version of the ‘90s.

There isn’t a single production of Tommy, including The Who’s original 1969 album, that isn’t flawed at some level, and sooner or later you have to realize that at least some of the flaws are built into the material. Tommy is neither deeply thought nor deeply felt by its author, and I don’t think that we remember it today for being a Great Work. We remember it for its top-to-bottom audacity in conception, content, and style. Townshend was the leader of a second-rate band that would be forgotten today if he hadn’t had the temerity to devise the whole concept of a “Rock Opera” and then actually write one that took a cynical look at the cult of personality, infused with pimps, perverts and pinball. Looking back, historians could almost be forgiven to think of Tommy as a dark, nasty parody of Jesus Christ Superstar -- if if didn’t pre-date Superstar by almost a year.

In its original form, Tommy is the musical equivalent of a long, cynical, dirty joke told by a resentful genius in the back room of a dive bar. Most of its audience didn’t get the joke. Ken Russell did -- but as a comedian, Russell has all the subtle comic timing of a Sherman Tank on a playground. To Robert Stigwood, it must have seemed like Russell, with his equally audacious screen career, was the perfect director for this material. At the time, not even the critics thought that he was wrong. But he was wrong, and in a big way.

In a purely structural sense, Russell did some good things with the material, shifting the action from WWI to WWII and seeing to it that it was the lover who killed Tommy’s dad and not the other way around. He devised two really spectacular visual sequences around a couple of the numbers (in the first, my favorite, arcade-style bombers flying in formation turn into crosses one by one as they are picked off by missiles). But beyond that, Russell’s approach to Tommy is almost unbelievably pedantic. Many are the times when his camera doggedly depicts, primer-like, just what the actors are “singing” about. Ironically, the only musical highlight of the film, “Pinball Wizard” as performed by Elton John, is also its worst-directed scene. This may not be fair, but it’s true: the rankest, least-experienced music-video director of today could do a more competent job directing that material with those performers than Russell managed.

Oddly, a scene that offended me on the film’s initial release is now, I find, about the only reason to watch the movie: in “Eyesight to the Blind” Eric Clapton plays an electric priest in a rock-and-roll church where supplicants worship at the feet of Marilyn Monroe and pills and booze are given as sacraments in the communion. In both its conception and execution, it’s the only sequence in the picture that stands the test of time and has just as profound an impact today as it did in ’75.

It doesn’t help that the movie of Tommy is accompanied by, hands down, the most execrable musical arrangement of this material that I’ve ever heard. “Pinball Wizard,” the sole standout here, is performed by Elton John, who did his own arrangement and brought his own band members along. The rest is all lumbering synthesizers plodding in the night. That Pete Townshend arranged the material himself just goes to show that an author is not always the best person to handle his own arrangements. As overbearing as the London Symphony Orchestra recording sometimes got, at least it had dramatic focus and weight. At least you could make out the melodies. For the movie, Townshend turned his own music into synthetic mud. 

Russell compounds this injury with outrage by casting the picture almost exclusively with non-singers. Jack Nicholson barely tries. He cocks his eyebrow for five minutes then grabs his paycheck and beats a hasty retreat, thank you very much. But Oliver Reed tries very hard indeed, and is very trying. Reed is a favorite of mine whom I would watch in almost anything (excepting only a certain other abominable Ken Russell movie that will go nameless here), but there’s a reason why the singing role of Bill Sykes in the film version of Oliver! was cut to, well, nothing. Ann-Margaret, on the other hand, normally can sing, but in Tommy she is so busy over-emoting and rolling around in waves of baked beans that she seems to have forgotten how. Even Eric Clapton, Roger Daltrey and Townshend himself get their voices undercut in the final mix.

It’s almost as if, in post-production, Russell actively said: “Oh, this person can actually carry a tune. I’ll have to find a way to undermine that somehow.”

It’s not Russell’s fault that the final third of the story, the “Rise and Fall” of Tommy as a Cult Figure, is also its least interesting and most perfunctory section as originally composed by Townshend. Russell handles the nonsensical climax as well as anyone could have, and sandwiches his film with faux profound opening and closing shots of a figure against the sun. Like the rest of the movie, the Messiah sequence has moments of goodness, moments where it snaps into focus and promises to actually go somewhere and accomplish something... only to fall back on some bit of desperate excess that drowns the audience in ugliness, baked beans, and, ultimately, pointlessness.

No, most fun I had in watching Russell’s Tommy last night was in noticing how young everyone looked. Turning back the clock is the kindest thing that film can do. But seeing Tommy again for the first time in a whopping thirty-five years, I realized something: I didn’t like this movie then, and I like it even less now.

-- Freder.

My "Our Gang"

‘Ja ever make a Happy Discovery only to have it shot down a moment later — then find a little ray of hope about your discovery only to have that rug yanked out from under you? Just like a seesaw, as the facts reveal themselves they take you up, down, up, down; if you were a child reacting verbally to the situation, you’d be saying “YAY! — oh. YAY! — oh. YAY! — oh,” and so on, until you got tired of the suspense or until the Balance of Power shifted one way or the other...

It’s usually about small things, but things that would bring us Joy nonetheless. My latest “YAY! — oh” moment was centered around The Double Deckers. No, not the London-style bus. Well, yes, in a way, but... 

A long, long tome ago, Hal Roach put out a series of two-reel comedy shorts starring a loose-knit bunch of kids he called “Our Gang.” The gang was made up of iconic types you’d find in any neighborhood, and one of the many remarkable things about the series was that neither Mr. Roach nor his writers nor directors ever looked down from above at these kids: they got down on their knees and tried to make pictures right from a kid’s-eye point of view. 

The kids always had the greatest clubhouses loaded with makeshift gadgets (like a treehouse elevator powered by nanny-goat), got into the greatest adventures... and of course, the biggest messes. After many years, along with all the rest of Roach’s cinematic holdings (including Laurel & Hardy) the Gang was passed on to MGM, where they became known as The Little Rascals. Spanky and Alfalfa had already joined the group, but this was where they gained their transcendence, and the series effectively became the Alfalfa and Spanky Show. “I’m the BAR-BURRR of Suh-VEYULLL! FIIIIII-garoh! FIIIIII-garoh!” Calgon, take me away!

Fast forward to 1971. Somehow, an odd duck of a British kid’s TV show called Here Come the Double Deckers made it onto American TV, Saturday mornings on the ABC network. I was arguably getting a little old for the Saturday morning cartoon scene. But this was no cartoon. 

Beginning in 1968 as an actual theatrical movie series under the title The Magnificent Six and a Half and moving to TV in ’71 with a partially different cast, this followed Hal Roach’s recipe for the Our Gang comedies almost exactly: but the children were somewhat older, there were pop-style musical numbers, and the series was infused with (for me) that most wonderful of things, a very British comedy sensibility. 

By the time the series moved to television, the gang had made its headquarters in a heavily modified (not to say fortified with very clever gadgets!) retired Double Decker London bus parked in an urban scrapyard. Hence the name.

Because I had a Dad who grew up watching the original Our Gang comedies on the big screen, and because I grew up in the sixties, when Roach’s two-reelers were frequently syndicated and used as filler by local stations, The Double Deckers wasn’t my first exposure to this sort of thing. But it was my generation of Our Gang, my flavor of it, wholly modern in its time.

I have to stress in its time.

And I loved it. I was already an Anglophile and just about the age of the gang’s leader (Peter Firth, the only Double Decker who has stayed and thrived in the acting business... long before Daniel Radcliffe “grew up” onstage in Pater Schaeffer’s Equus, it was Firth who originated the part both in the West End and on Broadway). There wasn’t one single thing about this show that didn’t tickle me: the jolly design and all the useful detritus filling the scrapyard; the gadgets, the comedy, the music, the accents and “exotic” locales, and the kind of light adventure that didn’t pit Us Kids against adults so much as it proved that we could be Just As Clever.

Plus, I had a crush on Gillian Bailey, who played Billie, one of only two girls in the gang (and the other was Tiger, who was more a Mascot).

Well. Fast forward again to the digital age, and here I am a crusty old alcoholic in his fifties wanted by the law, and who on earth has heard of or remembers The Double Deckers? Fox holds the distribution rights, but would you give odds on an American DVD release of this thing?

I did actually write to them about it once. I know. Broken down Olde Farte, Windmills, believe me, I know. 

I mean, there wasn’t even a British DVD release, and it had an audience over there.

Still, from time to time, when I was in the kind of mood to prove to myself that the Universe and I will Never See Eye to Eye, I would search a certain Evil Spiderlike Interwebs Retail Entity for it... and, you guessed it, just about a month back, there, quite unexpectedly, was my YAY! moment. An actual real DVD release of Here Come The Double Deckers!

I was all set to hit the BUY button when I saw it: — oh. British release. Won’t play on American TVs. But I looked closer. Hmm. It appeared to be a Region 1 disk, meaning that I could play it. YAY! Took a risk and bought a used copy for ten bucks. Turned out that it wasn’t a Region 1 disk after all. — oh. So sorry, the gang will not be coming out to play after all. Had a look on the interwebs. Seems that there are ways to bypass region coding. YAY! Waitaminnit ... the disk is British PAL format, my set and DVD player are both NTSC. — oh. Dang. Still no soap. There were more “YAY! — oh” moments ahead of me, and they were all heading me in the direction of Ultimate Failure.

But wait -- 

Folks, I’m here today to tell you about a nifty little free program for both Mac and PC called simply VLC. Google it. It’s a miracle worker. It’s a tiny little program. With no muss, no fuss, it automagically strips away the barriers that Evil Corporate Broadcasters put into place when they sought to divide the nation’s Creative Types. Just insert the disk, drag one icon onto another, and in moments you’re viewing content previously forbidden to you by the DVD Gods.

‘Course that means I have to watch my Double Deckers DVDs on my computer rather than my TV -- but at least I get to watch them.

...and suddenly, like stepping through Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine, it is 1971 again, I am only just barely a teenager, and Here Come The Double Deckers once more.

Does the show hold up?

Quite astonishingly, I think it does. Once you accept that it’s as dated now as the Our Gang comedies were in 1971, the idea behind this doesn’t change. It never changed. It never will change. I assume that kids still knock about together and get into trouble. I assume that kids still like gadgets. I assume that kids still like music and want to make movies and do grown-up things their own way. That’s what this is all about. The cast is still charming. They mug and overdo it just the way that Roach’s Rascals used to. Their problems have more to do with hovercraft and invisibility and tramp pop stars than they do with anything real. It’s very very British despite the presence of a Token American Kid. It’s well-executed. The songs are bouncy. It is oh so Seventies in its flavor, which is a plus if you grew up right around then.

Not your cup of fur? *shug* Then we won’t let you into our club. So there. On the other hand, if you like this sort of thing (and I still love it), this is a real Tonic. For me... after forty years away from my old gang, it feels like I’ve come all this distance, and now all of a sudden I’ve rounded a corner and there they are, just the same, a million years ago, and just like yesterday.

Oh, and filming in Fast Motion pretty much does make anything funny.

*

Away, away, I’ve been away from the blog for too long, and not all the reasons have been unhappy ones. Work on the new “remastered,” revisited and heavily revised edition of Persephone’s Torch continues at a good pace, and we should have news for you concerning that title, and more, soon. Watch the skies. Not for news about my stuff, silly: because you can see a lot of interesting formations up there.

-- Freder

After Much Wrestling, An Old Ally Comes to My Rescue with Final Words on the Subject...

Spooky

Am I a Real Boy? That is, am I a writer/cartoonist/designer or am I just unemployed? The jury is still out on that (remind me to stop using that expression. It raises the ugly memory of recurrent nightmares as October approaches, dragging my court date along with it); either way, the overwhelming fact of life right now is that my body gets to make its own schedule without any interference from Morning People, the outside world, or even my own better judgement -- something it has been longing to do for years and years.

And so I was up until after three AM again for who knows how many days in a row; when I woke at eight this morning, it was just after the middle of the night for me. Still, pussycats must be fed and antidepressants must be taken on their usual schedule or Bad Things Will Happen to me. And so, bleary-eyed, I pushed my feet into the rotten pair of slippers that trip me up every few yards, marched downstairs to do my chores, then marched right back to bed and crawled between the sheets. The rain and humidity had made everything clammy. Still, Honey joined me and curled up between my chin and shoulder.

It wasn’t so much a dream that I had as just a picture. I saw, quite clearly, my ex-cat Pooky sleeping in my bed, right in my spot, all curled up, the way that she used to all the time, on the sneak, when she thought I wasn’t looking, when I was asleep or when I was out of the house.

When I woke again the image stayed with me, and I remembered that it is now almost exactly a year since she died. Maybe not a year to the day, but certainly a year to the week.

Another reminder of the strangeness of all things.

And of how quickly time passes.

That cat made my life a misery with her incontinence; it wasn’t her fault, but she dribbled and dripped excrement absolutely everywhere all over the house, and the places that she slept became toilets, including my bed. I had to cover every piece of furniture with towels and newspapers. I was always chasing her out of my bed. When I got home from work, she howled and yowled at me like a harpy until I got her food down.

And yet I cared for her and considered it my duty to do so in the wake of my mother’s death, and as she was dying I sat beside her in the porch doorway and stroked her fur. I do still think of her from time to time, and somehow, against all reason, I do sometimes miss her. But how odd to have that picture in my head, out of the blue on this particular morning.

*

I sat up in bed and opened my tablet to make a note of the thing in my journal, and the little program that generates daily Creative Visualization thoughts made its alert sound at me. When I clicked on the program, this is what it said:

“The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts: and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.” — Montaigne

I thought, Gosh I’m not off to a terribly good start this morning!

On the other hand, Pooky had looked comfortable in the little image that had come to me when I was half asleep. Her incontinence was gone, her body weight was healthy and fullish, not that paperweight Auschwitz Cat that she had looked towards the end. Her manner had been relaxed and peaceful. 

I don’t believe in the Christian afterlife, in part because I refuse to accept Hell and its master, refuse to accept a God made in Man’s image, refuse to believe that Death is just like this only Nicer. I believe that we come out of The Nothing and go back into The Nothing. Elsewhere on the blog, I invoke Robertson Davies and his Great Theater of Life. We step onto the stage, and then off of it, and that’s all.

But the thought of Pooky comfortable at last; that was pleasant enough.

I buried her out in my back garden, wrapped in one of the towels that I’d used to cover the furniture. Her grave is marked with one of the painted wooden flowers that formerly belonged to my mother. I went out there just now.  The weeds had grown up so thick that it was completely invisible even when I was standing right over the spot.

I fixed that.

-- Freder.

Back in the Strato-sled Again

It’s here! It’s here!

Well, not here. I haven’t seen my copy yet. But it’s out. It’s published. And aside from being A Good Thing on general principles, it has a profound personal significance for me.

The Library of American Comics’ Definitive Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim Volume 2 is a gigantic, lose-yourself-in-its-pages volume that reprints Alex Raymond’s space fantasy classic along with its brother strip just as they originally appeared in the Sunday pages of the Hearst family of newspapers back in the distant world of the ‘30s, all those years ago.

If you’ve ever seen even one of the LOAC books, you know that these folks do it up right, and then some: vintage newspaper comics have never looked so good, or been such a tactile pleasure to read. I’ve waxed enthusiastic about their Little Orphan Annie and especially their King Aroo volumes here on this blog, but Dick Tracy and Bringing Up Father are also notable favorites, and if you visit their website you’ll find that this just scratches the surface. I can personally testify that Mullaney, Canwell and Co. have been busy. 

But I’m especially excited about this release. Why? Because I’m in it! 

Yes indeedy do. After a publication hiatus that is far longer than I care to think about, I am Back in the Saddle Again, thanks to a friend who thought of me when he could have gone to dozens of equally, if not better qualified writers. Not to mention writers who would have come with a lot less Personal Drama.

I was offered the gig to fashion a piece about Universal’s great Flash Gordon movie serials as part of the introductory material for this volume, and although I’m sure that Associate Editor Bruce Canwell would tell you differently (yeah, he would), from my particular angle of repose I needed relatively little coaxing before I was all over that assignment. OK, I turned it down at first, but I turn everything down at least once. 

For Flash, Bruce hardly had to twist my arm at all. In fact, I got carried away, ran way over the allotted word count, and Bruce had to jump in heroically, Flashlike, and wrestle the Octosac, I mean the piece, back into line.

I’m told that it was cut even further before the publication; oh, well. I wear many hats as a writer/cartoonist/designer, but when it comes to my enthusiasm for the Flash Gordon serials I am a writer first; plus we were able to dig up some interesting material for the piece, much more than i expected. So, not being paid by the word, my hope was to provide LOAC with as much bang for their buck as I possibly could.

On the other hand, I do understand the needs of the production line, having spent many years working in production-focussed design jobs. When it comes to packaging the books, Editor and Designer Dean Mullaney  is a designer first. I mean that in the larger sense, really: The Library of American Comics definitely has a Grand Design and Lofty Goals, and it’s the larger picture that matters here, not my ego or my silly little piece, which I had fun writing anyhow, and which still exists as I wrote it here on my hard drive. 

So however it looks when the stork lays it down on my doorstep, it’s still my baby and it still has my name on it and I’m still excited to have a byline again after Tao knows how long. 

How excited am I? Well -- this borders on being an inside joke, but I’m so excited I can hear Freddie Mercury in my head yowling “FLASH! AH-AHHHHH!!!”

-- Freder.