OWLS AND WHISPERS

Last night, or, to be more precise, yesterday in the predawn, when the black turns to a submarine grey-blue half-light of urban gris-gris, a huge full moon loomed bright and dangerously white behind the jacaranda trees, and a weird sound started that was clearly a bird-call. Woo-woot, woo-woot, woo-woot, woo-woot. Loud, fast and rhythmic; perhaps a warning, quite as insistent as any raven on any bust of Pallas. And the local crows (cousins of the raven), who normally own the predawn – picking in the gutter for edibles and shiny objects, while wishing they had hands so they could start a civilization – looked nervous and uneasy. Meanwhile Newton the cat was at the balcony door, furry and staring with wide blue eyes, at full DEFCON-2, because he didn’t like the noise any more than the crows did.

I went to look, but saw nothing. An owl, my inner country-boy suggested? It sounded like an owl, but can owls survive in the bladerunner eco-disaster that is LA? Aren’t the rodents all toxic? Have the owls adapted? I later emailed a friend of copious knowledge, to see if an owl was possible. She responded that they had been reported, both heard and seen, although she herself never had.

I felt perversely pleased. An owl, a bad moon setting, antsy crows, and a watch-cat on alert, they all seemed like a timely message that, before I got too involved in all tomorrow’s structural conspiracies, I must never forget that the wild places of Poe and Lovecraft lurk very close to surface, and are maybe at par with any other given reality at the point of transition from day to night. And that may really be where my strength should be drawn.

FROM THE EMAIL
fidicen rants and leaves a handy link as to how Bush may hope that the capture of Bin Laden will win the election for him.

Fuckin' A Mick, how sad it has been for me to watch this massive crime family response the last two weeks to the events of January and early February and the lack of even astute observers in putting two and two together. I think fluoridated water really does block the questioning faculty. Something keeps the populace impeccably docile and its not just teevee and junk food and the old Marxist standardbearers. You didn't even mention the Haiti and Venezuela "products." An unstable world even beyond the towelhead realm along with an immoral left is the campaign recipe. Hence Iraq may be allowed to descend into civil war, or even encouraged to do so (and perhaps indeed that is what has been happening there lately) because the cost vs. benefits of that scenario are more favorable than what has been happening or certainly allowing them to have elections and actually, god forbid, pulling the troops out. Iraq on Iraq violence to replace Iraq on Yank violence while the news shrieks of homos copulating with each other via multiple inputs six ways to Sunday legally on American flag bedsheets while western hemisphere nations fragment violently in 'military' coup d'etats. "Stand firm Amerikka! Only the Smirking Chimp can save us now!!" Be right up the old Grand Oil Plan alley.

Achtung: http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/000037.php

There will be no self-pity in the ranks – William S. Burroughs

MORE JACK ELAM

The second part of Henry’s lost Jack Elam interviewette. See yesterday for a full explanation.

YOU WERE IN AN AMERICAN GUERILLA IN THE PHILIPPINES THAT FRITZ LANG DIRECTED
Are you sure that he directed American Guerrilla? Holy shit I had no idea…that was a long time ago. We shot that motherfucker in the Philippines. I had just finished Rawhide. And I was under contract with the studio-that was it! And I hated 'em. I hated that picture because I had nothing to do in it and they made me, because I was under contract, they made me stay with the picture over in the Philippines for months! And I don't think I worked three days! If you ever look at the picture, maybe three days. Was that Fritz?

AND MOONFLEET, TOO
Moonfleet I do remember because we shot that at MGM, everything on the stage, and I was doin another picture at MGM, a Tarzan picture, one with Vera Miles. Gordon Scott was Tarzan, I remember. And I was doin that picture and Fritz was doin Moonfleet at the same time at the studio and he insisted that I work in Moonfleet, so I wasn't in much, whatever it was, he said, it doesn't matter. You can go do the other picture, they won't miss you-there was a bunch of us, a whole bunch of pirates, you know, and he said I can shoot the shot around you, don't worry, and I did the two pictures at the same time. I'd stay on the Tarzan picture cause I was the main heavy, and I always had something to do, he's say any time you're not on there, I want you on the set over here at Moonfleet. That was strictly a gift courtesy of the friendship of Fritz Lang. I had a wonderful relationship with Fritz Lang. Absolutely. Without any question. Of course I didn't work with him that much-we're talking three pictures. There's some directors I did 15, 20 pictures with. But I was with him enough to know that I liked him. I worked from one end to the other, from the really heavy to the sidekick, the bearded old sidekick. I had a lot of fun in the Willie Nelson picture Where the Hell's That Gold? We got along like twins. We did two pictures together, the last one was basically just him and me, and we agreed on one thing, in the picture we sang together, in that one, we did a duet when we were in jail, and we agreed when that was over, he said, "I think Jack, you better let me do the singing," and I said, "Well, you fuckin well better let me do the acting."
Don't know if you've heard this anecdote, but when they were shooting Once Upon A Time In The West, they were having a hell of a time trying to get flies on Elam, so they gave up and broke for lunch. They discovered that all the flies were hanging around the watermelon at the lunch table, so they went and smeared watermelon juice on Elam's face, and got the shot.

CRYPTIQUE – Black is the color and nine is the number.

WEEK END

After a week of weirdness, I ask myself, should I laugh when I hear Attorney General John Ashcroft has gallstone pancreatitis, “a serious and painful abdominal illness"? Or is that mean?

Mick Farren;s stuff in this week’s LA CityBeat. First up a preview of The Sopranos.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=721&IssueNum=39
And then Andy Klein and I double team the dreary Oscar Show.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=726&IssueNum=39

FRESH FRIDAY LINKS

Our pal hipspinster blogs on Elvis Costello
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/
And Belle de Jour, our favorite call girl, weighs in with more of her chic and unique weberotica
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

JACK ELAM

At the beginning of the week I mentioned being sad at seeing the great character actor Jack Elam on the Academy Awards tribute to those motion picture stars who had died this year. This prompted some correspondence, and now Henry Cabot Beck unearths bits of an old, unpublished interview conducted just before Elam’s death....

ON SAM PECKINPAH
Peckinpah tried-just died--to get me to do-what was the name of the western in Mexico?-(Jenny, his wife, tells him) The Wild Bunch, and I turned him down, wouldn't do it. For a very simple reason. Cause if I did Sam's pictures, we're personal friends, and that means I had to live with him on location. And if I live with him at night it'd mean dinner, poker-he loved to play poker too, and I knew I'd be seeing a lot of him and drinking together, right? I knew I couldn't live through it. I can't drink that much, I can't run, it was just a rowdy life for three or four months, which it's gonna be, so I turned the picture down. It almost broke our friendship up, but it didn't, because later on he came along and made me an awful lot of money on another picture that he did, Billy The Kid-(wife chimes in: "Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid"), in which I had a very small part and made a fortune. I did a cameo in it, worked three days, and he made the studio carry me at full salary for three months. Bought me two Lincolns out of the small change left over.

ON FRITZ LANG:
The only one I was really in, was the one with Marlene Dietrich, Rancho Notorious.He was a character, but he was a gentle-I loved him. We had a great personal friendship which developed. We had an instinctive liking of each other. And a lot of directors I don't like for sour shit, because to be a director, it helps a lot to be a prick, and in this case he wasn't. He was mean, people thought, but he wasn't mean at all. He was brusque, but he was certainly a gentle (?), but he was very very brusque, though, in his handling of people. But he was very kind if he liked you. There was a fellow named Dan Seymour, he was in all of Fritz' pictures-they had a personal relationship, and that's where I met Dan Seymour was on one of Fritz' pictures, course I worked with Dan on other things, anyway I was very honored, I felt honored, because of being invited to a very special dinner at his home one night. He had a home high in the hills over Hollywood with a view for a million miles, you know, looking over Beverly Hills and everything, it was a strange house to me, it didn't go with his character because it was a modern house and it was a catered affair, a very very lovely party-twelve or sixteen good friends of his, and I felt very flattered to be invited because…

I enjoyed the man's company a great deal. He was very very considerate to me personally.

(Rancho Notorious)

We had a lot of fun. We got to match coins to see who got to walk by Marlene Dietrich's dressing room when she was changing cause she never closed the door. I won a couple of times.
I remember Fritz had a couple of problems, seems to me he had a couple of serious problems with the cameraman (Hal Mohr, who also shot Destry Rides Again with Dietrich), because the cameraman's very important in a Dietrich picture and three or four times-cameraman's very important on a Fritz Lang picture because Fritz Lang pictures were big pictures-but I remember that Fritz would line up a shot, he'd walk it through, then you walk away, go to your dressing room, wherever you want to go, and the cameraman and his crew light the set, which takes maybe an hour, or in some cases two hours, then you bring everybody in, you run the scene, then you shoot it. And I know that more than once on a Dietrich situation we'd come back and the scene had been changed, the positions had been changed cause the cameraman had changed the positions. And Fritz would say, "That hurts my shot!" and he would argue. But he had a brusque manner and its definitely a very very strong accent, as I'm sure you know. But Fritz was a very kind man; I liked him very much. And as far as I'm concerned he was a very good director.

(More tomorrow)

CRYPTIQUE – It’s a shotgun romance.

THE DRUMS JUST GOT LOUDER

I'VE ALWAYS CONSIDERED WRITING IN CAPS TO BE A SYMPTOM OF INSANITY. LAST NIGHT I WENT OUT FOR A FEW DRINKS, TOOK A NAP, AND THEN WOKE UP TO HEAR HOWARD STERN PREPARING TO BE TAKEN OF THE AIR BY THE BUSH FCC. CHARGES ARE EXPECTED TO BE FILLED LATER TODAY WITH FINES RUNNING INTO THE TENS OF MILLIONS. I REALY DON'T CARE IF YOU LIKE STERN OR NOT. FREE SPEECH IS BEING PISSED ON FROM A GREAT HEIGHT. HE HAS 18 MILLION LISTENERS AND WANTS GWB BOOTED OUT OF OFFICE. THUS STERN MUST BE TAKEN OUT. THAT IS CURRENT GOVERNMENT THINKING.

AMONG THE POINTS IN THE SCARY MADNESS...

SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK (R KANSAS) HAS BEEN PERSONALLY CONTACTING VIACOM BOARD MEMBERS AND THREATENING THEM, REMOVE STERN OR ELSE.

IF YOU WANT TO CONTACT BROWNBACK HE'S AT...

http://brownback.senate.gov/CMEmailMe.htm

BROWNBACK ALSO LIVES IN A FUNDALMENTALIST CHRISTIAN COMMUNE IN WASHINGTON WITH A NUMBER OF OTHER CONGRESSMEN THAT IS FUNDED BY A RELIGIOUS SECT CALLED "THE FELLOWSHIP".

A REPUBLICAN WHISPERING CAMPAIGN HAS THE SLOGAN "A VOTE FOR KERRY IS A VOTE FOR BIN LADEN.

STERN ALSO RECOMMENDS YOU DO A GOOGLE SEARCH FOR THE BANNED KORN VIDEO

(I'll post more stuff later. Right now I'm listening to the world turn weird.)

I HEAR THE SOUND OF DISTANT DRUMS

And they ain’t Ric Parnell. These are the marching drums of something very unpleasant. Trust me. I’ve heard it before.

I find it easier to believe in evil than coincidence. And I’m really coming to the conclusion that since a rather stupid, but infinitely unscrupulous man suddenly realized that he might not be president this time last year, he is prepared unleash any evil, like a nasty idiot child uncorking ancient bottles without a clue to what corrosive potions they really contain. And this is why we suddenly seem awash in an undertow of fundamental evil? The talk is of anti-Semitism and how the Nazis used Passion Plays to their genocidal ends. Homophobia and godforsaken religion go up like the smokescreens to hide what is really burning. Up on the message board, Blanche wants to know why she (?) should give a rat’s ass about Howard Stern?

(The full Stern/Clear Channel story is told much better by Maureen Farrell on BuzzFlash)...
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/04/03/far04006.html

Am I paraphrasing Dietrich Bonhoffer?

First they came for Tommy Chong.
Then they came for Howard Stern.
Then they came for the gay weddings.
(The mistreated mateless mother? The mistitled prostitute? Please fill in the rest. There’s going to be eight fucking months of this shit.)
In each case I did nothing
And when they came for me, I found there was no one left to do anything.

Or, in other words, when you’re fighting the good fight, you might find yourself on the line with some real assholes, but protect them and pass the joint or the bottle, because they’re your assholes.

But laugh, if only to keep from crying.
And don’t cry because when it comes to it we have love, laughter, and some mean motherfucker mean-ass magic of our own. If we can remember where we put it.

And talking of laughing

BILL CLINTON FOR VICE PRESIDENT

Writing in yesterday’s NY Times, Stephen Gillers, an NYU law prof got about as funny as a law prof gets. Making the case for Ol’ Boy Bill as VP...

Amid this conjecture, however, one name is conspicuously absent: Bill Clinton.
Mr. Clinton's strengths would compensate for Mr. Kerry's weaknesses almost perfectly. Not only is Mr. Clinton the most talented campaigner of his generation, but he is also a Southerner —and since 1948, when Harry S. Truman chose Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky as his running mate, every successful Democratic ticket has included a Southern politician. Besides, people might even pay to watch Bill Clinton debate Dick Cheney. So why not? The first objection, the constitutional one, can be disposed of easily. The Constitution does not prevent Mr. Clinton from running for vice president. The 22nd Amendment, which became effective in 1951, begins: "No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."
No problem. Bill Clinton would be running for vice president, not president. Scholars and judges can debate how loosely constitutional language should be interpreted, but one need not be a strict constructionist to find this language clear beyond dispute. Bill Clinton cannot be elected president, but nothing stops him from being elected vice president.
True, if Mr. Clinton were vice president he would be in line for the presidency. But Mr. Clinton would succeed Mr. Kerry not by election, which the amendment forbids, but through Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, which provides that if a president dies, resigns or is removed from office, his powers "shall devolve on the vice president." The 22nd Amendment would not prevent this succession.

FROM THE EMAIL – WUSA

Doc40 regulars will remember how Clear Channel’s media manipulation raised recall of the old Paul Newman movie WUSA about a radio chain with Nazi ambitions. 00SOUL firms up the background, and also makes some powerful recommendations of culture worth consuming in these trying times...

Not to get pedantic or literary on y'all, but "WUSA" was the film version of Robert Stone's "Hall Of Mirrors," which is -- along with Nelson Algren's "Walk On The Wild Side," Walker Percy's "The Moviegoer," and John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy Of Dunces" -- one of the four best novels about New Orleans extant. Aside from the right-wing politcal machinations that you already noted, Stone's book is notable for its opening sequence sporting possibly the finest first-person point-of-view from inside the drowning mind of a drunk that's been put to paper.
Stone is also notable for writing "Dog Soldiers," which became "Who'll Stop The Rain" when it was made into a similarly excellent film. Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld, and Michael Moriarity starred in this amazing-it-got made tale of the Stateside moral corruption spawned by Vietnam.
He followed this with "A Flag For Sunrise," a bone-crushing indictment of America's '80s policies in what is obviously El Salvador. Still waiting for the film version of that one ...
After that came a good, but not great Hollywood novel and a couple of others that we still haven't read. But for the opening trio alone, we nominate him to the status of "hipster saint."

CRYPTIQUE – Are you ready, boots?

THE DEATHSTAR

The matter of the November contenders is now settled, and short of a lone gunman or some other external intervention, it will be Kerry v Bush when the time comes. And that may well be the next problem. With 245 days to go, the Bush machine and the Bush money have months to throw anything they like at John Kerry, and almost unlimited resources with which to manufacture the ammunition. I would be foolish to pretend that the Bush campaign will be anything but a political Deathstar, a massive, obscenely funded juggernaut, that is formidable, although not by any means invincible, because, as we all know, to blow up a Deathstar, all one has to do is fly along the correct trench under heavy fire and drop the bomb in the right vent or conduit. Maybe not easy, but not impossible, given courage, fortitude, and a suitable supporting cast of reliable and friendly androids

It’s late at night, am I’m aware that I risk going down in an welter of mixed metaphors, but if the last ten days have proved anything, it’s that we not only have to tackle the Deathstar itself, but also all of its related rabid dogpacks who cannot be defined as part of the Bush machine, but are all working to the same concerted, corporate, and essentially fascist agenda. We have just seen a combined counter-attack by these allied interests, a laying of smoke to allow the Chimp Boy to cover himself after the massive floundering that set in following his disintegration on Meet The Press. Clear Channel, the religious right, and Mel Gibson have spun the focus to redundant debate over gay marriage and all the incipient homophobia contained therein, the nonsense over Janet Jackson, Jesus, and the negation of Howard Stern, when all attention should really have been centered on the electorate's coronation of John Kerry, and the primary Deathstar soft areas, like the scary economy, and the quagmire in Iraq. Tomorrow Bush will launch a full Deathstar cash attack with TV ads in seventeen states designed to take the gloss off the Dem primaries. The long haul to the presidential election is not going to be easy, and definitely not pleasant, but it's so crucial fucking crucial we have to hang in for the long summer haul. No ruptures in the Force, okay?

BUT CHEER UP

Seems like there might just have been Martians a billion years ago.

FROM THE EMAIL

Fidicen pays tribute to Jack Elam (and we run his letter in full, even though Doc kinda likes Clint Eastwood.)

Good on ye for saluting Jack Elam. I thought I was the only one who knew who he was. His death saddened me much this year and I will give the pretentious silly twits at the 'Academy' (ha) a pass from further bombast for acknowledging him in death in a way I assume they never did in life. What a putrid thing, the Academy Awards. Whoops, more bombast. When I am King, all awards will be banned, from the Nobel on down, except for those in sports, which is in fact about winning in the first place. For "artists" to participate in awards programs is to betray everything that is art but then again Hollywood is not art at all. So why not just give the awards to the highest grossing productions in each category? That would be honest. I might even watch that, even though I hate almost every movie I see now. I thought Mystic River a piece of shit, one of the most overwrought and manipulative, hate filled and cynical bids for box office gross I ever endured. I grew up in that area and know people not unlike those characters, but the film was absurd, an insult to anyone who ever tried to write or tell an honest story. Fuck Eastwood. You want treachery? Intensity? Woozy, booze soaked hard assed men trying to get ahead in a wicked, corrupt world? Watch Jack Elam in Pat Garret & Billy The Kid. Now there's a film that's honest even when it lies.

CRYPTIQUE – Beans, beans, spinach, beans...

WIN ONE FOR THE BEAST

This is surely too good to pass up. I can only hope it presages the Rapture and all these bloody (and I use the word advisedly) fundamentalists will vanish straight up their own apocalypse. From AOL...

ROME, Ga. - Tickets at one movie theater screening Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ are being deemed decidedly unholy. The number 666, which many Christians recognize as the ''mark of the beast,'' is appearing on movie tickets for Gibson's film at a Georgia theater, drawing complaints from some moviegoers. The machine that prints tickets assigned the number 666 as a prefix on all the tickets for the film, said Gary Smith, owner of the Movies at Berry Square in northwest Georgia. The 666 begins a series of numbers that are listed below the name of the movie, the date, time and price. “'It's from our computer and it's absolutely a coincidence” Smith said. '”It has nothing to do with the film company or any vendor. It's completely in our computer.”

To paraphrase the old radio serial, The Shadow, “Where evil lurks in the hearts of men, the computer knows.”

JACK ELAM RIP

One of the few redeeming moments in the otherwise mind-numbing 2004 Oscar show was when poor dear departed Jack Elam appeared in the role-call of the dead, in a tiny clip from his epic cameo in Once Upon A Time In The West, in which he traps the fly in his gun barrel. With his one glass eye, he was my all time favorite western character actor, and teenage skanky role model, and if you don’t know who he is shame on you.

FROM THE EMAIL

Lordmarm writes from Texas

There's no explanation for Houston. It just is. Elron, Bush, the listis endless. See the latest Harpers for a fun piece on Repuglican fund raising in that fair city. But it's not all corruption and oil. Get your ears around Jandek (http://tisue.net/jandek/) if you want a truly alternative vision of that eldritch city. You've never heard the blues so desolate and scary and horrible. But the execution capital of the free world is Huntsville, about an hour's drive north nof Houston. According to the city's website (http://www.huntsvilletexas.com/) "there's something for everyone in Huntsville!" And don't miss this:http://www.txprisonmuseum.org/ for sheer ghoulish weirdness. There are plenty of anti-execution protest sites online. There are usually people with banners outside the gov's mansion here in Austin. But we're not really Texas -- but I guess that'll change now that Tom Delay's redistricted us and turned us into a suburb of effin' Houston...

CRYPTIQUE – Did the lights flicker?

MORE PORNO SPAM POETRY

Last Sunday, (February 22nd) Doc40 ran the first piece of poetry created by online porno sites masking their content from the latest generation of spam blockers, parental controls, government surveillance, and god knows what other manifestations of online moral enforcement, by using unintelligible scrambled and cutup text around the crucial hotlink to the site being promoted. I was intrigued by the way in which it resembled the cut-up works created by William Burroughs and Brian Gyson.

Here’s some more.

There is, however, another less noble reason for running more of this stuff today. As I warned yesterday, when I turned command over to Henry CB, I spent Sunday working with Andy Klein on a blow by blow account of this year’s Oscars (which turned out to be a tedious, time consuming, waste of electrons), and the full account hilarious will appear in next weeks LA Citybeat. But, in the meantime, I’m beat. It’s been a long weekend of work.

This more another found verse...

THEIR MUSHY LIFE

She , The i l there
half n t also squeezing
The run a sports also scrawny.
On , smooth n m the in
I flashlight it king-sized the mom s
a the her, there wet special
I need I chasing m t are want.
Are which, Or apple t t is left The nice.
On sickening, It super human
v b he motherboard The rubbing the dropping.
427 wheel,
Their mushy is life on phone
Their mushy life
d g ghetto v c country
he anyone earth it molecule
The present.
The present.
The present.
firebreak minsk audobon
discriminatory freemen mit limb arsenic
discriminatory freemen mit limb arsenic

And if you think all this is stone crazy, there another site who takes a slightly different approach to the same concept
http://www.sperare.com/spam_poetry/blogger.html



MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE

Two of our very best cyberfriends have new blogs posted...

Hipspinster reflects on eerie coyote kill and human rage
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/

And belle de jour also writes poetry and goes shopping with her mum who’s going to a lesbian wedding
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Burn the envelope, please.