WHEN I'M RICH.....

I guess if I were rich I'd engage in the same mixture of shrewd investment and philanthropy that most rich people engage in now...but what if I was a special case? What if a rich benefactor left me his fortune, but only on the condition that I spend it for luxuries? Does that ever happen? It must have happened to somebody, somewhere...why not me? I've already prepared for the day the phone call arrives!

First off, I want to be surrounded by an entourage of naked women (above). They should go with me everywhere I go. 

I make an exception for the mens room. In that case they should wait outside (above) and cheer when I come out. 

But let's be practical. During the winter months it gets cold and then I'd permit them to wear little mini-fur coats (shorter than shown above). I would wear only pajamas and they would keep me warm by bundling all around me when we walk. 

 
I must have a pet lion....

...but I think I'd prefer to walk it while slowly driving in some kind of cool car with my women. I'd drive only on the sidewalk of course...my taxes would entitle me to that.

 

Lots of rich people live in castles or mansions.  Not me. I want to live in a super-modern house high atop the middle of a large and interesting city. 

I'd expect my architect to come up with something exciting and different.  How do you like this hallway? Not much room to walk, but it's sooooo cool!!!!!!!

And furniture? Only the best! 

HOW TO EAT A TANGERINE LIKE ZORBA THE GREEK

"Hi everybody! here's a quick tutorial on how to eat a tangerine like Zorba the Greek!  You remember Zorba don't you? He was the Greek guy in the book and the film who really knew how to live! Zorba had a passion for the moment!"

"Begin the way Zorba would, by smelling the fruit.  Even the skin of a tangerine is fragrant!  Notice the little lunar bumps and valleys. This is the way your skin looks to a flea!"

Don't just peel the tangerine...violate it!  Risk going to jail over it!  Be Zorba the Greek!  Rip that little sucker apart!

"Oops! I forgot about the strings! Isn't life always like that? Just when you're having fun you discover the strings!"

"Well, there's nothing for it but to let the strings fall willy-nilly to the ground.  Don't be a dweeb and put them in the wastebasket.  Zorba rips his fruit and doesn't worry about the consequences!"

"Now lovingly apply the fruit to the tongue.  Tomorrow everybody on the net will have photoshopped a penis into this picture, but I include it anyway, because I like the angle."

"Ooooh! Feel the flavor burst out of the little flavor sacks! That's the taste of liquid sunshine!"

"Feel the citric acid burn your mouth!"

"Man! That's good!"

"Huh....?"

"OK, there's seeds!  No big deal!"

"Yummy!"

"OK, there's even more seeds. Actually they never end.  Every tangerine has more seeds than the total volume of the fruit.  It's a mystery.  Don't try to understand it."

"What would Zorba do with the seeds?"

"Now, you may have noticed that by this time your fingers have gotten pretty sticky."

"Zorba would have just wiped his hands on somebody's sleeve,  but I have a six month-old restaurant towelette, so I think I'll use that."

"Rip it open with gusto...."

"...and marvel at how they manage to compress a whole wet towel into a small space like that."

"Smell the exotic perfume. How many camels in how many caravans were necessary to bring this precious scent to the West?"


"Now wipe the fingers, taking care not to miss a single spot." 

"Amazing! It's just a little Beatrix Potter-size towel but it gets the job done."

"Well, that's it! Join us next week when we eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich Michael Eisner-style." 

A DELICIOUS COMPARISON!

Everybody I know hates re-makes but I love them! There's no better way to study film than to see the same story handled differently by two different directors. The old argument, "If they have to do re-makes then they should only do films that weren't done right the first time" doesn't hold water for me. It's precicely the good films that I want to see re-done! That's how you learn the most!

So here's the leg lamp sequence from "Christmas Story," done well (below) and done badly (above). What lessons do you take away from this?





By the way, the better version of "Christmas Story" was done by Bob Clark, the same director who did "Porky's" 1 & 2, and "Black Christmas"! Clark died a year ago in a car accident on the Pacific Coast Highway.  He was a friend of Quentin Tarantino.

THE AMAZING iSIGHT CAMERA

I can't stop fooling around with the built-in iSight camera on my computer. Maybe it has to do with the quality of the lenses or the electronics.  Maybe it's the program. Anyway, you can do some serious photography with this thing.

The moody picture above was lit with a flashlight. Think about it, a flashlight!  I look like a guy who's at the end of his rope, out of work and wondering how he's going to feed his family. In reality it's just me, wondering if there's any potato chips in the house, and the camera benignly transforms that expression into high tragedy.  Of course, it also makes me look a hundred years old! 

 
Here's my favorite (above)!  I look like a demon from a Hell that burns black flame. I shot it for the Potemkin post but wasn't able to fit it in.  Once again, the lighting was done with a flashlight. 

 

 Here's (above) a bit of gritty, 50s realism.  Theater in that era was thick and serious. The words poured like molasses.  One play that comes to mind is "Krapp's last Tape." It's terrible and just about unwatchable in my opinion, but it has a following, and it has the virtue that you could film the whole thing in YouTube type close-ups. Imagine that! A serious play shot just for YouTube! 

I think I'll try a couple of really heavy, dramatic readings here. They'll suck but, what the heck, it's a blog and blogs are for fun, not for perfection.  Like Clampett used to say, "What's the worst that can happen? Is the sky going to fall down?"

 ISight does a good job on color, too. Sometimes the color looks purple and washed-out, and other times it feels like Technicolor.  In the picture above the lighting makes me look like someone in "The Conformist."

INTERVIEW WITH COWBOY BOB

ANNOUNCER:  "Today we're visiting the internationally famous star of stage and screen, the original singing cowboy.... Cowboy Bob! Hello, Cowboy Bob! Are we interrupting?"

COWBOY BOB:  "Why, no Bill! We got most of the cattle bedded down for the night, so a little jaw-jabberin' won't hurt!"

ANNOUNCER:  "Cowboy Bob, we have some letters from the fans. One fan writes in to ask, "Why does Cowboy Bob smoke? Doesn't that set a bad example for kids?"

COWBOY BOB: "Haw! That's a laugh! I don't smoke! Never have! It's a filthy habit! I carry the cigarettes for a friend, my horse!"

COWBOY BOB:  "Of course he gets the cigarettes all wet with slobber so they don't work so good anymore. If one gets really wet I'll let it dangle from my lip just to dry it out! 

Any more questions?"


ANNOUNCER:  "Yes, here's one.....this reader asks, "Cowboy Bob, Do you have your own ranch? Where do you bunk?"

COWBOY BOB: "Where do I bunk? No cowboy 'bunks' anymore. When I'm on a drive I stay at motels, just like everybody else."

 
COWBOY BOB (CONT):  "My favorite is 'Motel 6' because they leave a peppermint on the bed. Of course you never want to run an ultraviolet light over the bedspread but heck, even big hotels have that problem." 

COWBOY BOB:  "Well, there's the call to the chuck wagon! Gotta cut it short! It was real nice talkin' to you, Bill! Tell the kids out there to talk straight and stand tall like their friend Cowboy Bob! That, and always listen to their mothers!"



ANNOUNCER: "Will do, Cowboy Bob! It was nice talkin'...I mean 'talking'...to you!"

BTW: Thanks and a tip of the Cowboy Bob hat to Luke for the fine poster above!

AH, THE OLD WEST!!!

Here it is..."Uncle Eddie: Cowboy Commercial", Two minutes long, fresh from YouTube! I wish I could have added SFX. 'Hope you like it!

COWBOY BOB ON YOUTUBE!!!!!

I just transferred it to YouTube but I'm too sleepy to wait till they process it, so I can put it up here. If you just can't wait, go to YouTube and you'll find it under "Uncle Eddie: Cowboy Commercial." In the more likely event that you can wait, just hang loose and I'll post it here as soon as I'm able.

EXOTICA FOR HOUSEWIVES

Here's (above) something Mike turned me on to: Christopher Walkin's sketches on Saturday Night Live where he plays "The Continental." What a terrific idea! A woman we never see knocks on the Continental's door and he takes her in and tries to seduce her. Where's this been all my life? I want to see every episode!





Here's (above) a parody of the Walkin sketches which is even more overt than Walkin's. Hard-to-please YouTube fans gave this 2 1/2 stars, but I'd give it a 5. It's hilarious!





Housewives in the 50s were treated to some real exotica on TV! After being stimulated to distraction by the original (unfortunately short-lived) Continental show, they got to watch the king of the exotics, Korla Pandit (above) play the organ. I love the mystical narration at the start.

SOUP SLURPERS

Please, please, please forgive me for wiping out 13 perfectly fine comments in order to put a slightly improved version of the video up. I just couldn't bear to watch the video run silent for the last 45 seconds! If I'm able to re-cut this sometime in the future I'll run the music throughout instead of dimming it for the SFX. That and 50 other changes should fix it!

A LESSON FROM JUDY GARLAND

Here in one video are two terrific songs from Judy Garland's first feature, "Pigskin Parade." How old is she here? 14? 15? 16? Something like that.

She does a great job on the first song,"Texas Tornado," and when you hear it you think, "Well, that's it. She's not going to do better; nobody can,"...then she proceeds to top herself with the second song, which is nothing less than masterful.

This second song (which I've just forgotten the name of) must have been especially hard to sing. The lyrics and melody are awkward in the extreme. You get the feeling that she decided to make a big splash and if she couldn't do it with a good song, she'd hunker down and do it with a bad song. Listening to this is like watching soldiers fight door-to-door. She broke down the song into parts and somehow found a way to beat life into each separate segment.

I learned something important from this performance: if you can't find the perfect project to show the world what you can do, take the godawful project you're stuck with and force it to be great, one scene at a time.

AYN RAND, BARBARA STANWYCK, AND WALLY WOOD

What do Ayn Rand (above), Barbara Stanwyck and Wally Wood have in common? They all lived 20 minutes or less from my house! Of course that was the era before the land was sub-divided into housing developments. Come to think of it, Jimmy Cagney lived around here too, in Porter Ranch, but I don't know exactly where. In LA no part of the city is more than a stone's throw from some kind of historical film landmark.

Yesterday Milt Grey and I decided to get in a car and look up the sites where the homes of these people used to be. I wish I'd thought to bring along extra batteries for the camera. I only managed to get a few pictures but you might still be interested to see what we came up with.



Barbara Stanwyck (above) and Ayn Rand were next-door neighbors in what is now called Northridge. That's right, Northridge, where the Earthquake was.



Here's (above) a picture of Ayn Rand's house, address: 10000 Tampa Blvd., taken in the 1940s when half the valley was still covered with orange groves. It was originally designed by Neutra for film director Erik Von Sternberg.


Today the house is gone and in it's place is a public junior high, Noble Middle School. I had to get this picture off the net because my camera froze.



10000 Tampa is a few blocks up from the local mall, The Northridge Fashion Center. It's funny to think of people at the mall's book store perusing Rand books that were written only a few blocks away.


After Northridge we headed in the opposite direction to Wally Wood's (portrait above) last apartment at 15150 Parthenia in Van Nuys.



We discovered a somewhat run-down neighborhood but I imagine it was OK when Wally was there. My camera started working again so I got this picture of the side of the building where Wood had a street-level entrance. That's his apartment behind the grey car.


To get to Wood's apartment (above) you turn right after opening the brown gate.


And that's his place, number 71. I met the occupant and she was delighted to learn that a famous artist lived here. I didn't have the heart to tell her that Wood shot himself there. It was three days before the body was found.

According to Milt, Wood came to LA to find work in animation because it was getting harder and harder to make a living doing comics in New York. He was desperate for money because he had kidney problems which required expensive dialysis treatments. He tried to sell projects to Hanna Barbera and others but nobody was buying. I think his final work was comics for a local porn publisher, a real come-down for someone of Wood's stature.

I'm tempted to say that a gloom hung over the apartment, but really it was just the opposite. In bright mid-day it was positively cheery. Thank God life carries on.