DID YOU MISS ME?

Yeah well, it was a weekend not so much lost as spent running behind the metaphoric bus, and not managing quite to get on it, mainly because of Mixmaster Eric and his using me and the CityBeat crew as guinea pigs for his glow in the dark cocktails, although the golden-orange ones were very nice – Carmen Miranda’s Tropical Pussy or something. I really have to compose the names of Eric’s drinks for him. I did create a moment of drama, though, when the TV in the bar was running by default, tuned to some History Channel-type show about famous executions, it being the anniversary of the hanging of alleged Lindburg baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann, and everyone was suddenly watching with such rapt and grisly attention that I felt I had to remonstrate with full Shakespearian projection that this was not appropriate bar-viewing on a Friday night – even the 13th – and then storm out for a smoke. When I came back, Jimi Hendrix was on the jukebox and the lights had been dimmed and all was much more as I felt it should be. So I guess I prevailed, but maybe I am turning into an irascible old geezer. Who knows?

DIALOGUE

The following exchange occurred on Sunday afternoon with Henry Cabot Beck, although you do need an extensive knowledge of old movies and Tennessee Williams to follow it.

Re “Richard Cohen describes far more vividly than GWB what it was like avoiding Vietnam combat in the US National Guard.”

Beck – We're going to find that like Orson Welles' Mr Arkadin AKA Confidential Report, guys who could actually come forward and talk about bending elbows, snorting blow, chasing West Texas hookers, tipping cattle, and evading the war with GWB will have disappeared, one at a time, in the vast indifference of the Texas outback. Other movie references: Cliff Robertson in Picnic, Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack) in Written On The Wind, Anthony Franciosa as Jody Varner sucking up to Will Varner (Orson Welles again) in The Long Hot Summer. All stories about bad sons with too much money, mean and miserable, trying to make daddy happy or stand in his shoes. If this were the film Giant, GWB would be seen as a child playing in the dirt with an toy oil derrick, a tin soldier and an empty whisky bottle. Chill Wills would play Dick Cheney.

Farren – But where is Jett Rink?

Beck – He's Phil Spector.

Farren – Oh, I though he might be Ted Turner. More important though, in the Giant analogue, where is Liz?

Beck – To my mind, the tragedy of GWB is that he never had a great, big-titted fag hag Liz Taylor dominatrix drama queen to pick him up by the scruff of the neck like Roy Horn and drag him away from Big Daddy like Maggie The Cat did for Brick. Of course GB had Barbara, but Laura Bush is neither Big Mama nor Maggie nor even Hillary. Come to think of it, Bill would have made a good Brick. And worst of all, Big Daddy Bush (Bradford Dillman?) never gave GW the much needed speech about mendacity. Of course the crux of the play is that nearly everybody in it is a lying liar. The world may be ready for Cat On A Hot Tin White House.

OBITUARY

Munz sends the following clip...

Feb. 13, 2004 – The Wisc.Post-Crescent

His daughter remembers him as a man with a pad of paper and pen, always writing articles or jotting down memos. For the man who first used the term "psychedelic," the end came in Appleton. Psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, 86, died at home Feb. 6. Osmond and his wife, Jane, had been living with their daughter in her Appleton home for the past four years. He moved to Appleton from Alabama. Euphemia Blackburn, 45, said her father had been an invalid for about 13 years. "He went quietly at home," Blackburn said Thursday. Osmond, born in England in 1917, is said to have coined "psychedelic" in a letter to British author Aldous Huxley to describe manifestations of the mind. Osmond, researcher of such mind-altering substances as LSD and mescaline, gave Huxley mescaline in the 1950s. Huxley related his experience in "The
Doors of Perception." Osmond was interested in researching the way LSD altered perceptions of
time and space and whether it could help could help alcoholics kick their addiction.

CRYPTQUE – I might as well live.