The Dean Martin Show…exploited his public image as a lazy, carefree boozer. It was there that he perfected his famous laid-back persona of the half-drunk crooner … making snappy if slurred remarks about fellow celebrities…. Over time Martin [had earned] a reputation as a heavy drinker — a reputation perpetuated via his vanity license plates reading ‘DRUNKY.”– Wikipedia
This is giving me great ideas for my own television program– a shakily-framed public-access fantasia. My trademark ‘5T0NR’ vanity plates will be on display, and there will be a great opening montage (me, drinking out of a giant Svedka bottle, in all the different seasons). Instead of charm, I guess an uncanny narcotic haze will make the audience fall in love with me every week. It will be like the Judy Garland show for suspect glassy-eyedness, the Muppet Show for incredible length of limbs, and the Laurence Welk show for relentless use of the bandoneon.
Yooooou-oughta see his wife, she was a covergirl in paris. Yeah, she used to put the tops on the sewers.
This was Junior Year of college (aka ‘the Time of the Troubles: the Revenge’). We were paying about 8 dollars an hour for the life lessons learned — 24 hours a day, 9 months a year. Money well spent!!
Here, I was showing Say some important disguise techniques (gleaned, from this book, during my childhood). I had given myself a charming mustache, and was well on my way to a pair of “angry” eyebrows (the book suggested that you cover over your normal eyebrows with soap first, to hide them, but we didn’t have time for that).
It was also an era of Good Hair… just kidding! It was an era of… interesting… hair, and pasty, pasty skin from avoiding the rueful sun. This, to be clear, is not an eyebrow pencil. It is a regular COLORED pencil that I had licked, according to Say, to make it “work better.” Another childhood trick!
To my credit, I had some competent supervision.
________
My little brother, Russell, pointed out these important points, also contained within the above mentioned Spy Guide:
“And when are you getting your license? The thirtieth of Nebuary?” – my brother, Matthias.
Everybody offers to teach me to drive, thinking it will be easy and fun and I will thank them forever. “Colin,” they say, “there’s no need to be scared. Its easy!”
Which is not at all embarrassing, since when I do finally get behind the wheel, Yakety Sax starts playing out of nowhere, and I drive over a paper bag (probably containing an abandoned infant), and collide with a picnic table / public memorial, and am not allowed to drive any more. When I am 40 and driving a segway to work, please just try to be nice about it.
WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967) was kind of awesome. Three criminals terrorize the f**k out of Audrey Hepburn (who plays a blind woman) for what amounts to an hour and forever. Then — with ten minutes left! — she metamorphoses into Anti-Ingenue/ Deathstalker- 3000, and is throwing gasoline and matches and brandishing a switchblade. She starts giving her captors (including a kinda hot Alan Arkin) the total business.
Its not perfect (its one of those “we-basically-just-filmed-a-play” movies). But in the end this doesn’t matter; Audrey Hepburn could convince me to like Vegemite if she needed to. And Alan Arkin JUMPS out of nowhere at one point, and it is fantastically scary. There is some great camp value, too. As the movie ends, Audrey’s husband is like, “See! [Even though you're blind] You’re doing A-OK [because you totally killed Alan Arkin before HE could kill you]!” And that makes everything better, and things are cool again. Not like she would need years of therapy or anything!
My friend Catherine and I like to dance. If we were real New York Artists, we would say we’re actually “Making Work” and then look mistily off into the distance, and pretend to be all far away from you. But we’re not! On Friday, she snuck me into the Harvard club because we learned there is a awesome dance studio there.
Unfortunately, we got KICKED OUT by these super-old people who claimed to have “ballroom dance” in there. So we found this squash court, and just tried to dance in there. I took pictures but didn’t get all the scariest, best places on film.
Instead of water fountains, they had these RIDICULOUS dispensers, with grapefruits cut up inside. I sampled the water and it tasted… pleasant.
I am totally thinking about replacing my present non-existent massage therapist with this one endorsed by the Harvard club.
The only person of color I saw was in a photograph.
My Holg-tastic renaissance hit a snag today because I lost the take-up spool (i blame it the cats). Until I find it (or go out and find another 10 cent piece of plastic) this beauty is out of commission.
Some people have said that that, clearly, God wants me to stop taking pictures of people without their consent and then running away. But I think that, probably, God just wants me to think long and hard right now about where I can find more of these people, and where the best escape route from that place is.
He had a passionate intrigue with Joan’s washing machine. Although forbidden to come near it, he would be caught trespassing again and again. Casting aside all decorum and caution, he would feed it anything that happened to be at hand, his handkerchief, kitchen towels, a heap of shorts and shirts smuggled down from his room, just for the joy of watching through the porthole what looked like an endless tumble of dolphins with the staggers. One Sunday, after checking the solitude, he could not resist, out of sheer scientific curiosity, giving the mighty machine a pair of rubber-soled canvas shoes stained with clay and chlorophyll to play with; the shoes tramped away with a dreadful arhythmic sound, like an army over a bridge, and came back without their soles, and Joan appeared from her little sitting room behind the pantry and said in sadness, “again, Timofey?” [--PNIN, Vladimir Nabokov]
I love how he gives it “a pair of shoes to play with,” because there are so many layers of hilariousness… like, the description itself is funny ( “he would feed it anything that happened to be at hand” ). And the fact he’s the real culprit (stealing around the house, making sure everyone’s gone) is funny. And most of all, there’s how his brain is working — how he displaces his obsessions (turning the washer into a pet, an animal that will thankfully but destructively play with whatever you give it). All of these layers pile up, and Pnin becomes soooo endearing!
You know those days when your hair looks good, you’re not sitting in traffic, your man’s not acting like an idiot. You’re just fine. So it’s OK to have those days. So instead of coming with something ungrateful to the universe, how about I come with something first that says, ‘You know what? It’s OK. Enjoy this day if you’re having a great day.” [--Mary J Blige]
Ok, so none of that made ANY sense, but that’s not what I pay Mary for. I could dance to this for the rest of the year… you know I love music!
I love Jorie Graham’s “San Sepolcro.” I am always amazed to get to the end. You suddenly ‘get’ what you’re seeing in the painting, and find out why the poet needed say it in this roundabout way, and then you see that a whole ‘revelation’ has been enacted for you. And you’re trying suddenly, helplessly, to catch your breath!
SAN SEPOLCRO (by Jorie Graham)
In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to. This
is my house,
my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor’s
lemontrees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory.
A rooster
crows all day from mist
outside the walls.
There’s milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean
the mind is,
holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into
labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the birth of god. No one
has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line–bodies
and wings–to the open air
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity
to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button
coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.
WAIT UNTIL DARK
I love Jorie Graham’s “San Sepolcro.” I am always amazed to get to the end. You suddenly ‘get’ what you’re seeing in the painting, and find out why the poet needed say it in this roundabout way, and then you see that a whole ‘revelation’ has been enacted for you. And you’re trying suddenly, helplessly, to catch your breath!
