Shilling for Hollywood

A new collector-oriented CD appeared recently, an Intrada re-release of two film soundtracks from 1978 and 1980 offering the music from An Unmarried Woman and The Stunt Man, respectively. Usually such collector-demand items reappear with extra music, alternate cues, remixed tracks, etc., but this one simply reissues the three-decades-old LPs on a single CD. There's a small but very vocal coterie of film soundtrack fans (maybe 3000 to 5000 worldwide) who watch for these specialized items and scoop them up; recent sold-out mini-"blockbusters" have been a two-CD set devoted to Jerry Goldsmith's music for Alien and an eight-CD box set reprising the music from all four original Superman movies (much of it appearing on CD for the first time), by John Williams, Ken Thorne, and others.

Thinking about that Stunt Man movie, starring Peter O'Toole, sexy Barbara Hershey, and a very paranoid Steve Railsback, reminded me of the two or three years I spent slightly involved in marketing a handful of films from Hollywood and elsewhere. For a couple of decades, Sixties to Eighties, about, the major Seattle-area personage in art-house cinemas and some specialized distribution was an exhibitor entrepreneur named Randy Finlay who at one time owned the Guild 45th, the Neptune, the Varsity, and the Seven Gables theaters plus what eventually became the Metro Cinemas. Back then, the Emerald City was known as a moviegoers' town, with a liberal-minded audience supportive of so-called art-house movies; this was, of course, before the multiplexes took over. Finlay and I met somewhere, and after a time he asked me to help him launch a few movies in Seattle and other Northwest markets.

My memories are a bit hazy on some titles, but I do remember three in particular. The first one was then-newcomer-director John Sayles' first feature, the small independent film titled Return of the Secaucus Seven, which had a fine group of basically unknown young actors and actresses portraying leftish/hippy friends enjoying a reunion picnic, revisiting some of their past political exploits (I think; haven't viewed it since the Seventies). Anyway, Finlay asked me to help create the local advertising/marketing for the unknown film.

I loved it, thought it was so much truer to the spirit of the Sixties than Hollywood's harebrained attempts at youth exploitation. I suggested some straighforward copy for print ads and persuaded Randy that the radio spots should just be a sound montage, snippets of film dialogue edited together, presented with a minimum of hype (like the movie itself). Working at one of the sound studios we used for Rainier's radio ads, I oversaw the editing and came up with 30- and 60-second versions. These met Finlay's approval, and were then used to entice film fans in Seattle and Portland areas into the theaters, with resulting positive word-of-mouth doing the rest.

Sayles' debut film was well-launched up in this corner of the U.S., then a success elsewhere, and so his own directing career was given a small boost. (Some people claim that Lawrence Kashdan stole much of The Big Chill's plot and characters from Sayles' movie. Let's be kind and just say it was "influenced.") Sayles' working mode at the time, and often since, was to script movies for other producers and then use his writer fees to finance his own independent productions like Brother from Another Planet, Matewan, City of Hope, Lone Star, Sunshine State, and many more. I actually got to meet Sayles at the Seattle premiere of Brother and told him about my efforts of behalf of Secaucus Seven, but his response was tepid and dismissive; I don't think he even said Thanks!

Meanwhile, the second film I got called in on was a French import titled The Little Sparrow, a bio-pic on the life of, yes, Edith Piaf, whose nickname was "the Little Sparrow." This was the late-Seventies I think, 30 years before the recent international succes d'estime of La Vie en Rose, starring Academy Award-winner Marion Cotillard as the living-on-the-edge chanteuse (France's own Billie Holiday/Judy Garland figure), with Piaf's voice performing the title tune, "Milord," "Non, je ne regrette rien," and other international hits. That recent film was brilliant, deserving of its surprise success, while the earlier Little Sparrow tried valiantly, but was merely sad and bleak, with lots of sex and drugs and pathos, and some fill-in singer's voice trying to recreate Piaf.

It was a downer, and I told Finlay so. He wanted the advertising to ignore that, trick the audience into expecting an uplifting, feel-good sort of film, a musical like Carousel maybe. I battled him, did my best to inject some realism and honesty, but the resulting compromise radio ads were no more successful than the film, from which Northwesterners stayed away in droves... You win some, you lose some.

Film number three was Richard Rush's long-time-in-the-making pet project The Stunt Man. He worked for a decade to get studio support and the necessary money, but by 1979 was struggling with studio bosses over their reluctance to issue his finished film. (He actually suffered a heart attack not many months later, I think, with stress no doubt a factor.) Rush picked Seattle as a test market to prove the film could succeed.

Eventually, Rush's film received Academy Award nominations and, still later, achieved major cult-film status. But anyone who saw it even at the beginning came away with strong impressions of O'Toole as a God-like director (Satanic, more like), swooping down on his camera boom, issuing edicts and tricky orders, manipulating the film-within-a-film and the people involved. Co-lead and director's-stuntman-patsy Railsback had just portrayed Charles Manson in another film (he would much later appear memorably in a couple of episodes of The X Files), and here was asked to play a Vietnam vet on the run from authorities; he acted suitably skittish and paranoid throughout.

And then there was Barbara Hershey... The woman was stunningly beautiful, at her youthful peak, with a pronounced earth-mother aura, better acting skills than one had previously known, and a startling ability to exude both charm and erotic promise; and she was obviously willing to appear naked on screen. (Railsback was naked too, but who noticed?) This was a bawdy film pushing the envelope back then, but the cut put out on video many years later was dark and poorly transferred and did not match my memory of full nudity; maybe the version I saw originally was recut for other markets, perhaps to protect an R rating?

Anyway, using the sound-edits solution again, I helped shape radio ads that spliced together pronouncements by O'Toole, music by composer Dominic Frontiere, tense moments among the actors, etc.--and came up with a couple of spots that teased and tantalized, promising suspense and intellectual trickery and, of course, the hint of sex. Finlay was pleased and told me that director Rush too was excited and hopeful.

Came opening night, the local premiere held at the Guild 45th. I shuffled around, chatted with a few folks, saw the stars from a distance (Hershey and Railsback, no O'Toole), then took a seat for the screening. As the lights dimmed, suddenly the leading lady herself sat down right next to me! She said Hi, and I mumbled something back.

I was immediately torn in two directions--I desperately wanted to gape at the gorgeous, subtly scented real woman beside me, engage her in witty conversation, but knew I should stay cool, keep my eyes on the screen 20 feet away, where the other Barbara was, er, giving her all.

Nerve-wracking? You bet. The nude scenes were many times more disconcerting with her clothed body sitting there too. But Ms. Hershey didn't shift or murmur or do anything else during the entire screening. (I was the one squirming.) And when it was over, she got up and left before the lights came up, so I had no chance to speak to her. And as the old gag goes, what do you say to a naked lady?

The Stunt Man played successfully at the Guild for an entire year and became a critical favorite, if not box office winner, elsewhere. ("Should have used my ads in the other markets too," he said modestly.)

But the one or two other minor films I consulted on after that one paled badly--in fact, I can't remember now what titles I got calls about. Dreaming up taglines for one-sheet posters just didn't have the magic and allure of sitting next to Barbara Hershey circa 1979...

Birds of a Feather?

The two most important poets writing in English during the last quarter of the 20th Century--distinctive, innovative, acclaimed, influential--were Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. I came to revere the careful wit and rigorous thought of Heaney, and the sheer pleasure of his language (not for nothing was one book of his prose titled The Government of the Tongue), but originally I was quite taken with Hughes' early poems, back when he was married to then-still-living Sylvia Plath, and long before he lost the thrust of his work and settled for Poet Laureate honors instead. The Hughes of those first books (Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal) seemed to have immersed himself completely in Nature and to have attained pure dumb animal thought--owls and crows, jaguars and foxes, pike and trout, creatures great and small indeed.

One of my forever-favorite poems is his "Hawk Roosting," which begins "I sit in the top of the woods, my eyes closed..." and ends thus: "I am going to keep things like this." That is one never-to-be-forgotten, egomaniacal bird (like Hughes himself!)--and I thought of him while travelling Down Under back in 1986. Oddly moved by the duck-billed platypus shown at the Sydney Zoo, I read what I could conveniently find on that unique creature of living pre-history, and then cobbled together this on-the-road portrait, a recognition of Nature's bizarre sense of humor (the poem also a distant homage to Hughes' surly hawk). By the way, it's hard to make out, but the color illustration above shows creation of platypus--mammal, then duck, and then down below, a couple of platypi emerging:

Platypus

I am mocked: leathery bill of a duck
I root with, my flat snout
nuzzling the stream bottoms, shoveling worms
out, gobbling yabbies up from stones and ooze.
Fifteen million years you laugh at—my otter’s fur,
wet, and webbed feet. I live a sleek, watery secret
you would do better not to discover,
with poison spurs on my hind legs, and claws
as needed, aft and fore. Oh, I am other
than you dream of, you with your nippled love
and blood-birthed womb. My young come
from egg, and then seek mother’s milk—
and a hard suckle they have of it with no teat
to grapple. Eons of amphibious battle,
and I am here; with elegant flair
species arrive, then go; I munch larvae
and close my ears to the cries of you brief intruders.
I am monotreme: of beast and bird the sum.
So the meal chews bitter, this life; is yours better--
eggless, dry? I outlive and am free.
Yes, call me Platypus; the name suits. But of us
which is the stranger? whose world more meagre?
I survive my each plunge. Why change?

Goodbye to All That (Burma 3)

((According to world news, a bad cyclone hit Myanmar several days ago--weather is one thing the generals can't control--with over a hundred thousand killed. Between destruction and suspicion, the West will have a hard time sending aid, and NPR's correspondent is staying anonymous and moving clandestinely, to keep getting the news out. The gentle Burmese people deserve a better fate... Meanwhile, visiting there in 1986, I was up country and ailing.))

June 28

Taking medicine, eating nothing, resting for long stretches. I roused myself sufficiently to tramp about for a few hours to visit eight or ten of the closer and more scenic jedis (pagodas). Some are massive, looming high over the dusty plains like Egyptian pyramids; others have baroquely ornate shapes and facades, like giant seashells; and many are compressed and crumbling away. The Buddhas sit unattended. Lizards and monkeys prowl the outer terraces and the stairs too worn to climb. But I did clamber up to the top of two huge platforms, to survey mile upon mile of scrub growth and hardpack fields, temples rising like tombstones in a giants' cemetery, distant smudges of mountain, and the flat, sluggish, meandering Irrawaddy River, so famous from the past, but looking just muddy and empty today.

Clearly my enthusiasm is minimal. Nothing--no design, no Buddha contemplating swarms of gnats, no breathtaking view of ancient structures stretching to the horizons--can rouse me from this drugged lethargy. Even the two metal statuettes I spent more illegal kyat on earlier, an antique opium-weight lion and a "good spirit" figure, seem just ridiculous this evening. So what? Now I must preserve the rest of my kyat to buy food (if I ever get back to eating), and my way out of Burma, come Monday.

June 29

Sitting at Pagan's dinky airport, awaiting a flight that stops here en route to Rangoon. Ordinary folk, including tourists, can be bumped off any flight if a government bigwig or other visiting fireman shows up wanting a seat; but things seem safely quiet here.

Still feeling punk. Out of illegal kyat, so I'm trying to decide if I should sell some dollars at the black market price for now ((which was about 30 kyat per dollar)), in order to get three times the amount back (in dollars!) at the time of legal reconversion. It's just crazy. Some people manage to slip around Burma spending as little as $10 legal by spending who knows how much il-legally, but I'll be out about $90 total since my sick, tired spirit demands an airplane return to Rangoon.

Well, between credit-card trouble ((I'd had Visa card removed from hotel "safe" in Thailand and a stack of forms run off, used for jewelry and other expensive stuff, that my watchful sister in the States noticed almost immediately, saving my ass)), kyat confusion, and crappy illness, I've about had it with Southeast Asia.

July 1

Stopover Delhi, about 4 a.m. My last days in Rangoon and then Bangkok seemed endless bus rides and waiting rooms and check-in lines, though I did have good conversations with an English cricketer, a Cypriot woman architect, a Scottish jewelry importer, an American farm-techniques Peace Corpsman, and a grand old dame (English) who sat next to me, Bangkok to Delhi, where she exited to head for the Taj Mahal.

Final thoughts on Asia: I guess I lack the requisite fatal attraction for the exotic East of Maugham and Conrad and company. I think one must be younger, less used to creature comforts, more flexible about dirt coating the skin, scabs dotting the legs, beggars in the streets, perennial humid heat and cold showers, smiling people eager to rip you off somehow. I'm tired of being stared at, laughed at, overcharged and under-rested. I'm ready to take on the different hassles of being an American in Europe in the summer of 1986 ((when Reagan had bombed Libya, outraging much of the world)). At least there I'll be less conspicuous, as long as I keep my mouth shut, anyway.

July 2

Yesterday's demented ravings before dawn convinced me I should concentrate first on sleep, but it eluded me for many hours more. Into Heathrow at 8 a.m., two hours getting through regulations and into the city via the Underground, then a half-hour walk lugging 90 pounds of pack and other bags to the hostel--but a good one, Holland House, an old Jacobean mansion at the edge of Holland Park, in the pricey area called High Street, Kensington. I checked in but couldn't get access to a dorm bed, had to try napping in a lounge chair.

No luck. At my nadir, 40 hours without sleep, my stomach aching steadily, feeling completely rotten, I decided to find the area hospital, for a check-up on leg and bowels.

But walking through the park got the blood pumping again, and I persuaded myself that exhaustion and lack of food might account for much, so I dragged myself to the nearby... yes, the High Street McDonalds, where I scarfed down two burgers, fries, and a cola (not a Coke, for some reason). Feeling full if not better, I strolled back to the park hoping to crash on the grass; but dogs and picnicking schoolkids had other ideas, so I returned to the hostel, where the warder studied my pallor and took pity--penciled me in as "sick" and let me go up to the bed area two hours early.

A nap worked wonders, as did the long-overdue clean-up and then a ramble around the park last evening. How civilized it is here! Soccer players and all-in-white cricketers, lovers lolligagging together on real grass, Arab-looking kids running, Caribbean men lilting and smiling, hunched old ladies mumbling to each other in their tired verbal shorthand, a popular and mobbed ice-cream seller, and--sounding forth, magnificently resonant over all--a live performance outdoors of Verdi's opera Un Ballo Maschera. I sprawled on the greensward for nearly an hour just drinking it all in. No ants, no mosquitoes, no filth evident; simply a warm summer's evening in a park in London.

I am a child of the West, however old now. There's no denying how much better I feel here than I did in Indonesia or even slickly Westernized Thailand. The hell with pretending any different.

((I guess I'm as biased and ethnocentric as the next ordinary schmuck.))

Mixed Up in Myanmar (2)

((Last post ended with me heading for the train to Northern Burma, speculating that the ride on wooden seats "should be interesting."))

June 26

That last remark qualifies as basic understatement of the week. Twelve hours of sleepless nightmare on slatted wooden seats too hard to relax on and too narrow to sprawl on, with four people packed in each facing pair. Since we tourists can't read Burmese numbers--my seat 29 looks something like "JC"--we need help right from the start. Then the train pulls out, racketing and rocking back and forth, the cloudy lights inside burning all night long, covered with insects right from the start. Metal louvers on the windows keep fresh air out, but admit bugs and rain. The toilets waft their aromas throughout the car whenever a door is opened. Yet nothing fazes the Burmese passengers, whole families travelling with every scrap of their belongings: bales, bundles, boxes and bags tied to the overhead racks and heaped everywhere else.

Gradually the bodies mount as well--determined nappers stretched across aisles, pretzeled into seats, hiding under seats, jammed among goods and feet. (I tried craning up straight, slanting across, curling down, and several other postures, to no avail.) But what a wonderful array of travellers! Dazed tourists staring blearily at nothing, mothers suckling two-year-olds, soldiers in Socialist Army olive-drab, venders scrambling over bodies and loudly hawking their wares, young girls checking their make-up, older men struggling to keep their longyis wrapped. (I was feeling like a character in Paul Theroux's famous book about Asian trains.)

Most affecting to me were a beautiful, sad-eyed woman tending her small boy, who handed me her copy of a Tourist Burma brochure, wanting me to keep it, wanting me to admire all the slick and pretty pictures of her (impoverished) country. (All this conveyed by gestures only.) And my seatmate, a handsome guy in his 30's, but with stubble on his face, violent tattoos on his arms and ankles, a blank despairing look, and bandages at both temples, as though he'd received some sort of electrodes treatment. Yet his pockets are full of rolls of kyat, and he offers friendly advice, in fair English, on Burmese numbers, expressions, even the right train station for my bus connection to Pagan.

But, before that, we watched dawn come to central Burma: dirt roads, woven-mat houses, women with baskets on their heads, boys squatting to watch the train pass, a man and his dog also squatting, but to shit. Scarecrows of flapping rags, horsedrawn carts hauling goods to market, clay pots (for water?) outside the doors of houses, stick fences around dust yards, patches of succulents and bushes and small trees, white Brahma cows pulling wooden plows, above-ground flat tombs filling the village cemeteries.

In Thazzi some of us transferred to a small mini-bus, six Westerners and 20-some Burmese all crammed in, on, and hanging off the van's slatted sides and roof. So we went, rocketing across the dusty plains for another four hours of severe discomfort--van ceiling bumping our heads, wind attacking our backs, hard seats cutting off circulation to legs, no room to stretch or avoid each other's sour breath... What can I say? I guess there's just no pleasing the ornery tourist.

June 27

And then, heaping insult on injury, after five safe months and with not many days left in Asia, last night I came down with a serious case of La Turista--cramps and diarrhea and no interest in food. Don't know whether I just got too cocky, or picked something up walking Rangoon's filthy side streets. Whatever the cause, I'm feeling listless and not real enthusiastic about tromping the ruins of ancient Pagan.

We arrived yesterday exhausted, and booked into various small guesthouses. Some tried to sleep, others to soldier on; I couldn't relax, so I walked out to explore, check prices, and wound up hiring a horsecart to take me to a lacquerware village where I swapped jeans, t-shirt, batteries, and spare cassettes for a nice plaque of Buddha, two shoulder bags, and some more kyat. So now I must go on a spending spree, once feeling better, to unload all the illegal money. What an odd system.

Last night in a stupor of pain, I had the possibly inspired revelation that the Burmese government really is slyer than given credit for. These Socialists have taken a reading on Western capitalist thinking and decided we are all greedy pirates of industry at heart; so the "pinko" bosses have devised the tourism system accordingly. Our visas are limited to seven days, which protects the Burmese citizenry from too much infectious contact with our decadent ways--and makes us think of a visit here as something special and desirable, yet kept so brief that we are easily channeled into the controlled routes to Pagan and Mandalay.

On top of that, the confusing kyat system: by turning a blind eye to our liquor/cigarette sales, goods trading, even most of the black-market dollar exchanges, the government accomplishes much more. The Burmese get enough (but not too many) Western goods, which the Socialists can disavow all responsibility for; and we tourists wind up with so much excess money that we must buy more food, drink, taxi rides, horsecarts, tour guides, and blessed souvenirs than we ordinarily ever would, thus providing economic support to both common people and cottage industries.

Diabolical, these Socialists! All the locals kept happy, all the travellers kept busy (and boring) with their scheming and dealing, working so hard to travel around for a week on, seemingly, next to nothing, laughing as they/we, uh, pull the wool over the government bureaucrats' eyes. In a pig's eye, says I! We're being led by the nose, all unknowing, every step of the way...

((Next time: seeing the sights of Pagan and bidding farewell to Asia.))

On the Road to Mandalay

((On the premise that not many people have ever managed to visit Myanmar/Burma, I'm returning to my 1986-87 journal to recount some adventures I had there--back before the military junta cracked down again, before Aung San Suu Kyi's seemingly permanent house arrest, back when Westerners could still visit, even if only for a very controlled single week.))

June 24

The Strand Hotel in Rangoon is another out-of-time survivor of the British Empire, preserved much as it was to please us romantic Westerners, but also slowly decaying beyond recovery. Patches on the carpet and cracked walls in the slightly seedy bathrooms bespeak the Socialist government's basic disinterest. But it continues to serve as a social center of Rangoon, ready for parties, weddings, and officials taking other officials to lunch.

Before heading up-country I'm sharing a double room at the Strand overnight, with Tomas, a professional photographer from Santa Cruz. He travelled here five years ago, says nothing has changed that he can see; but he hopes to rent a jeep and cruise the un-touristed countryside, something the government attempts to discourage/prevent. With my own more-limited time, looks like all I'll get to is Pagan's 40 square kilometers of temples and ruins (one of the wonders of the world, the books and visitors say), then back to Rangoon.

Turning the clock back (a suitable expression since Burma is the most placid and time-lost country left in Asia): it was pouring rain in Bangkok, with a two-hour wait at the airport till Burma Airways folk deigned to allow passenger check-in. There and on the flight, I spoke to more Americans at one time than I've seen in the previous five months of travel. (Everyone wants to see this mysterious country, I guess, envisioning Kipling and the Empire, WWII's Burma Road, Flying Tigers, etc.)

Then on arrival the customs/immigration/declarations/cash conversion process seemed interminable; my passport and one-week visa must have been stamped a dozen times. Anyway, I converted $100 in travellers checks, receiving 729 official kyat (pronounced "chaht"); these bills must be used for the government-sponsored travel and hotels. After that legal transaction, I ignored the inadequate offer from one of the customs officals and instead sold my duty-free fifth of Johnny Walker Red and carton of "555" cigarettes (total cost $14) to the taxi driver for 500 kyat, equal to about $70--which is how the traveller in Burma acquires "illegal" kyat to finance food, beverages, souvenir-buying, etc. The trick is to use up all the ill-gotten money, plus just enough of the official kyat to satisfy government watchdogs--a silly and time-consuming exercise in this land of double-think, where we have only seven days (six for me), much of which must be spent on planes, trains, or buses just getting around. Maddening, peculiar, confusing, and fun, and the long-standing Burmese tradition. Who am I to refuse?

(The other, more dangerous option is to sell U.S. dollars on the black market, at about 30 kyat each. My friend Patrick was here not long ago, was caught selling just $20, held for eight hours at the police station until the American Consulate effected his release.)

June 25

I stood in line at Tourist Burma to book an overnight train to Thazzi and bus from there to Pagan, then wandered the city. Rangoon seems almost blissfully quiet compared to Bangkok or Jakarta, but also unexpectedly dirty on the rain-splotched side streets.

Observations and encounters: Burmese women in sarong-like dresses, with streaks of a yellowish pasty substance dabbed on their faces, and the men in their wraparound longyis--a cascading human rainbow of colors and stripes and plaids, usually mixed together... The stares experienced by Westerners, neither friendly nor hostile, just watchfully blank until you make the first overture... The absence of garish advertising, with every movie poster subdued, save for the familiar James Bond scene of a woman's legs framing gun-ready 007; this one attracts a group of men who stare up, mesmerized...

Locals sidling up to tourists: "Anything to sell? Kyat for dollars?" One man's rapid-fire rap listed 20 different items he wanted to buy, but we couldn't agree on price. Another was dying to acquire two of my old shirts: "I'm a poor man. Many children. Not sell. For myself. How much you want?" He started at 20, went to 30, tracked me down a half hour later to offer 40. But, finally, I only sold him a Bic lighter for 10.

Block after block of grubby, three- and four-story, cracker-box-shaped buildings, all in need of a sandblasting facelift... Pouring rain driving me indoors to a cafe lunch of noodle soup (good) and lime pop (execrable). Suddenly a man sat down at my table, ordered his own meal, and began passing the dishes to me to share. We soon swapped names, addresses, and Burmese phrases as well. ("Thank you" sounds like "Je-zoo-te-mah-day," and "Hello" equals "Mingle-a-bah.") Then departing for his work just as quickly as he came in, Mr. Ko Kyaw Swe insisted on paying for both of our meals. "Welcome to my home," he said as he left.

On to Sule Pagoda, a tall gold-plated spire surrounded below by many Buddhas of terracotta, painted soapstone, and gold. From the many sellers clustered at each entrance, worshippers buy paper parasols, floral wreaths, braided ribbons, and incense sticks, all to offer up. Workers prowl the grounds pouring water over the Buddhas' heads. Young women stand pitching coins into buckets rotating on a lazy susan. A fascinating exhibition of photos and painting from all of the varied Buddhist countries of Near and Far East also includes three-dozen bright cartoon drawings like Disney animation cells, on the life and miracles of Gautama!

Finally, ambling back to claim my pack and head for the train, I stopped in a busy bookstore full of ancient dusty stacks of old Penguin and bantam paperbacks, most from the Fifties and Sixties, Classics and hot rods and Westerns, but also Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar and Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues! But all of these are ignored by the thronging Burmese who instead crowd the long front counter, shouting and waving their hands to obtain the latest International issues of Time and Newsweek.

The ride north on wooden seats should be interesting.

((As indeed it was, to be recounted next post.))

Things Are Looking Up

Humans are always looking up--to the Heavens, to constellations and particular stars, to mountains in the distance, to birds and leaves overhead, to the roof and even the ceiling, to sports figures and silly celebrities, to fast-talking politicos, and, of course, to a hoped-for future.

Here are two poems of mine about looking up from inside (and please note that the first, lacking a final dot-period, ends as intended; it's not a typo):

Rafters

I was thinking of rafters, of being
up in the rafters: a summer cabin,
crumbling wasps’ nests, cobwebs
misplaced with dust. A boy climbs
and becomes the inheritor of these.
Beams come together at certain angles,
and join, like the bones of the sky’s foot;
nerves and muscles ease, and he fulfills
flesh with his silence and his joy.

He is high. From his ribbed haven
he lords it over all gravity’s playthings,
exulting in his horde of small pleasures:
the planed feel of fir, knotholes
slipping through other worlds, the archeology
of dry husks, the reinvention of listening--
Stella Dallas’s torments diminished,
Green Hornet’s cousins mutable,
Jack Armstrong, All-American boy…

himself aloft. He waves his arms
and the NBC Symphony swells,
buoying the rafters, sounding
and resounding in the fiber
of sullen air. Broken wings
of wasps are made whole,
spider’s silk releases, the heel
of earth lifts. Transported
he flies, he cannot fall,

he is as he dreams in the music
of first memories where
dreaming is flying and falling
is flying and rafters are
flying and I am still



******

The Dormer

Rising from sleep’s undersea,
decompressing in gradations, I
see liquidly: the perfect shadows come,
hold for a moment,
then melt… or break and run.
Wrapped in the same flowing stillness but
attenuated by daily circumstance,
last night at the edge of sleep we
found each other’s heat in supine flesh,
stirring just long enough to meld
greater than we are apart.

Now from this nest of sheets and haunches
I see new wings, fleet limbs
flickering on the dormer ceiling,
spirits recreating us in light and shadow:
the cars that flutter past outside
bounce over pitted concrete, braking
for the downturn, scattering
their two-tone, heads-and-tails illumination
across the darkened pale of
walls that are not walls
to our slant, unceilinged selves.

Beyond this life,
splotches of evergreens sharpen and shift
in the brightness thrown by cars ascending;
then, bathed in red, they drift
and fall away, as we do
when we are not ourselves,
convected by each day’s disappointments.
I see the stress and hurry,
the spectres of cash and loss,
take up the trees and rush them away;

and I would become
some changing angel of the rooftops,
enveloped in loving possibilities--
who dances at his moment, then
vanishes in ambient light,
overwhelmed by morning.

I Get the Full Treatment

As a freelance writer with an interest in film, I spent a pretty fruitless decade (late Sixties to late Seventies) trying to sell to Hollywood and/or the networks, first the idea for a grand documentary series devoted to the amazingly varied "Music of the South," then my script on Robert Johnson, then a host of other ventures--the subject of this post.

One of the directors at King Screen (which specialized in educational films when I was writing for the company in the early Seventies) was named Paul Preuss, who later enjoyed some success as a science fiction novelist. Paul and I teamed up to develop a few feature ideas, for which I then wrote treatments. Our Western was called Deadwood City--yes, the very place immortalized (trivialized?) by a raw and powerful series on cable TV nearly three decades later. The treatment I wrote had Calamity Jane as our scruffy and rowdy, in-need-of-a-bath heroine, residing in the sea-of-mud town of Deadwood trying to track down the killer of her (unrequited) love Wild Bill Hickok.

We also plotted out a Ross Macdonald-styled hardboiled mystery titled The Chinese Puzzle, with a disenchanted Vietnam vet who had stayed on in Southeast Asia to become a martial arts master (some bizarre combo of kung fu and Thai foot boxing!) and then returned to Seattle as a private detective; our case involved dark secrets in the past of a wealthy family, the pieces of the "puzzle" open to differing interpretations and wrong conclusions.

About then, Paul decided to move to the Bay Area, and we opted to split "ownership" of the treatments--he got Deadwood and I got The Puzzle, which I then had no luck selling anywhere. I hope Paul got something from the version of our gritty Western that finally made it to television, but probably not, since no one has a copyright on history. He'd have had to prove direct theft of our treatment somehow.

Anyway, I kept plugging away. With consulting input from a Black friend named David Carr, I wrote the pilot for a sit-com series, called something like The Arletha Jones Show, which had a pop/soul star as lead (sort of Diane Ross, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin combined), supported by her Phil Silvers-like manager; her backing-combo led by arranger/pianist boyfriend; and her richly varied, ghetto-but-cheerful extended family. It seemed promising as a concept, but I never managed to get it read by anyone important.

I also spent a long time researching and writing a full-length script I titled Union Maid, involving labor organizing in the Northwest logging industry circa 1920, by the I.W.W., with a firebrand woman--a "Wobbly" organizer from the Eastern coal country--as lead, accompanied by a Guthrie/Dylan folksinger guy as her (unwanted) sidekick. The first half had some fairly comic, character-driven stuff, sort of "tough, good-looking woman trying to persuade crude loggers to think," while the second got tragically serious, culminating in the notorious Everett Massacre and subsequent trial.

But Union Maid got put away before it ever circulated. I couldn't quite make the two halves work together effectively, with the late trial dragging the whole film down... (But I still believe today that the largely forgotten Everett Massacre would make a powerful feature, a saleable combination of action film, tragicomedy, and historical look back, with many visual horrors revealed.)

The last script I wrote back then was also promising, and it actually got produced. But almost no one's ever heard of, much less seen, the film titled Doubles--and that's a suitable review right there.

Here's the story: another wannabe director I knew named Bruce Something asked me to write the screenplay for an idea he had. A bored Seattle dentist decides to create a second life for himself, setting up another residence and dental practice north in the Skagit Valley; not yet satisfied, he then hires a hitman to "kill" that second persona. That was pretty much all Bruce offered, but I was intrigued, pretty confident I could make something out of it.

And I did, adding the plot twists and turns (how to put the killer on the trail without him realizing that he's to kill a guy who knows he's coming; how to manipulate the hitman through a series of near successes; etc.) as well as the character details, indeed adding several other characters to flesh out the bare bones idea. My biggest contribution was to make the hitman one of a pair of twins--second brother the by-telephone contact man who serves as go-between--doubling our idea of "doubles." So when the lead guy finally manages to turn the tables, killing the killer first as it were, he thinks he's avoided any repercussions, legal or otherwise. But he then finds that he is being stalked by someone else he doesn't know about and can't control.

The twin brother is no killer, however, so he tricks the dentist into a final deadly confrontation that he (the brother) expects to lose. Then he cleverly arranges for the local sheriff and others to arrive at the murder scene before the guilty dentist can escape, with all evidence pointing to him as cold-blooded murderer.

I've spent some time detailing this plot mostly to make the next point. I finished the script, Bruce loved it, and he set out to raise money for a small-budget feature shoot. But he circulated the script with only his name on it. And when I learned this some weeks later, he persuaded me that I'd get full credit eventually, but that his apparent sole ownership would make a production deal easier.

I guess anyone reading this can pretty much guess a lot of the rest. The film did get made, but Bruce chickened out on trusting the rather hardboiled script I'd written. Oh, he didn't change the plot or dialogue or my script writing at all, but he added a framing device, a stupid dinner party setting where the whole "doubles" plot was told merely as a story, with no visual attempt to make it seem true or real; the inner story's actors even wore the same clothing in every scene! So all suspense was lost and the new ending just lame.

When I did get to see the butchered film, I also learned that my credit had gone from "Screenplay by" to the meaningless "Script Consultant." But the film was so wretched I decided I was better off not connected with it. Rather than file a grievance with the Writers Guild, I just left Bruce to make what he could out of the mess. Which was nothing.

I pretty much gave up on the notion of a screenwriting career after that. Hooray for Hollywood and its hucksters, wherever they reside...

Ban Microsoft!

A temporary message while I scramble...

Microsoft oh-so-generously sent me some sort of upgrade the other day, which I attempted to stall off because I was in a hurry to read emails before departing the house. But the damned intrusion failed to go away and, ever since, my computer sits in some sort of screwed-up mode unable to proceed. The upgrade won't install, the error code seems unfixable since I lack the tool it wants, and I can't get to any of my subprograms, frozen out by the error code. I can override to shut down, but when I boot up again, the whole scenario repeats again, just as in that movie Groundhog Day. Trapped in a time glitch, or a Microsoft niche maybe!

So I type (yeah, yeah, I'm supposed to say key or whatever) this from my wife's laptop, can't add pictures of course, and must wait till I can settle in for a long and irate session with some Microsoft tech helper answering from his/her distant corner of the world.

I'm too old to appreciate the qualities of computers. Bring back my Underwood!

*******
Two days later. I am back on my own computet, following a painful 90 minutes on the phone with a Microsoft techie, a nice guy named Amul (spelling may be wrong) speaking from somewhere in Ingleshtan. He kept suggesting ways to solve the impasse, the machine kept ignoring him and me, and after six such failures he/i resorted to some surprising trickery to erase my Groundhog's Day glitch. Commanding the computer as "Administrator" (which evidently means "God" to a chip entity), he took my recalcitrant machine back in time to a day previous to the beginnings of the problem--et voila! stubborn download gone!

I guess time travel may be possible too.

The O'Day Conspiracy

Writing recently about my brief foray into deejaying (radio, that is, not hip-hop) reminded me about the odd experiences I had with a disc jockey named Pat O'Day, probably the all-time best-known jock from this part of the country. (The photo is not of O'Day, but rather Sam Phillips, who was sort of Pat's role model.) O'Day was variously a deejay, a concert promoter, an m.c., a busy entrepreneur, a station manager, and god knows what else, most of those careers overlapping and continuing on for decades--in fact, at 75 or 80 he's still on television doing ads for Schick Shadel!

Here's how I came to know Pat... When I moved on from the University of Washington's Alumnus Magazine to the original Seattle Magazine (circa 1965-1973), I quickly became the local-color writer on staff, impressionistically covering archeological digs, Olympic Peninsula logging, the Black Power movement in Seattle, the then-new Seattle Repertory Theater, and so on. I tended to write multiple smaller descriptive scenes that, combined together, gave a bigger overview.

Anyway, Pat O'Day was THE major force in radio and rock music concerts at the time, and the editors decided to profile him. Pat's ego was healthy enough that he was quite willing to welcome me and a photographer into his life. I interviewed him a few times and visited his station--the regional powerhouse KJR--as well as a concert or two he was promoting (got to meet the guys in Buffalo Springfield at one); I hung out at his home in Bellevue, and so on. Then I wrote up the story.

Now, Seattle Magazine was known then as a wise-ass, full-of-attitude, gadfly-on-the-rump monthly journal, always willing to pry into things and take a sarcastic stand whenever possible. I locked horns with the editors often, as those carpetbagger East Coast snobs rearranged or rewrote my copy to give it an edge, sometimes rather mean-spirited. For example, I profiled an old-time police chief up in Darrington in the Cascade foothills who claimed to have been on the posse that hunted down Bonnie and Clyde; he had lots of other good stories too. And I added plenty of local color and scenic history; the town had been founded by loggers and others from North Carolina, and was still a hotbed of Tarheel culture in a strange and distant place--with tobacco-chewing workers, bluegrass music, Southern food and manners, etc.

Well, I told the chief's story sympathetically, but the editors turned it into a sarcastic piece mocking dumb rednecks. When it ran, we (meaning I) got nasty letters and angry phonecalls, and the old guy lost his job for innocently helping to make a mockery of Darrington. And when I turned in the O'Day story, the churls went to work again, playing up Pat's nouveau riche suburban lifestyle, his motel-like house furnishings, the big-hair look of his wife, his own obvious toupee, and so on. When the article appeared, well, he definitely wasn't happy with me. (In point of fact, I only lasted a little over a year on staff at the magazine; just couldn't stand the editorial policies and general rewrite interference.)

So we parted ways, both and all of us. Several years went by. I was busy with Rainier and other TV and radio ads, working often with a company called Kaye-Smith Productions (the owners being actor-comedian Danny Kaye and businessman Lester Smith). And in the course of things, KJR and other stations Pat was connected with were acquired by the Kaye-Smith parent organization.

Out of the blue one morning I got a call from O'Day, who wanted to talk to me about a writing project; I had continued to write scripts and such, freelancing apart from my regular job (the next blog chapter will discuss that), and someone at Kaye-Smith had recommended me. So I went to see Pat.

This was the post-Watergate era, when many strange figures connected with Nixon and his minions had made it into dubious history. (Which reminds me that I interviewed John Erlichman for an article before he ever went on to D.C. and disaster.) And O'Day wanted me to write what's called a "treatment," meaning a pared-down script with plot and scenes but without most dialogue and camera shots spelled out, expanding his conspiracy idea. Can't remember whether it was E. Howard Hunt or Gordon Liddy, but one of those creeps was married to a woman who died in a mysterious plane crash; and there was some speculation that she had been killed to keep her husband from telling all.

That was the extent of it. Pat wanted me to turn this broad suspicion into the script for a feature film. I wasn't too excited by the thing, to tell the truth, but he was willing to pay me $2500 for my time, so I went at it. Dreamed up minor characters, twists and turns in the behind-the-scenes action, showed how and why the wife died, etc. Typed it up clean, about 25 pages of stripped-down story, and turned it over to O'Day, who intended to use his Kaye-Smith and other show-biz connections to get a production going; I'd even get to write the shooting script maybe (wasn't holding my breath). He seemed pleased, told me to submit a bill, which I did.

A month went by; no check. I invoiced him again. Another month; still no money. I phoned a few times as a third month went by, couldn't even get him on the phone of course. Finally I asked a lawyer friend to send him a threatening letter... and was then paid within about a week!

I don't know if O'Day was making me sweat for the long-ago article, or merely being a typical, slow-to-pay producer hustler, but the $2500 check actually arrived at just the right time. I used it as the small down payment due on the house my first wife and I were trying to buy. Sold that house a decade later for big bucks, and I certainly owed some of our good fortune to my prickly dealings with one famous deejay!

The conspiracy movie was never made, of course.

The True Love

Sandie and I recently celebrated our twentieth anniversary (the years go by, don't they). She craves wooden boats and sailing, and I'm sure she wishes we had the money, and she the time, to own and enjoy a sailboat. Doesn't seem too likely these days. Instead, sort of compensating, we live on an island and she commutes to her job by ferry (while I cruise the computer).

I'd love to buy her a sailing sloop or yacht or whatever, but all I've managed to give her (with a bow to The Philadelphia Story and later great musical version High Society) is this poor substitute...

Yar

Her lines are graceful.
A full stern tapering for'ards
to a shapely bow,
roomy below, with a nicely
fitted galley, and her deck
all of teak, she's comfortable.

Where others pitch and yaw,
with her deep draw she
maintains an even keel;
and when we luff, she responds,
quick to my right rudder.

Any time she's had too much
of port, become sluggish
in her motion, we raise anchor
and take to the ocean ways.
She's in her element then,
breasting the open sea;

and when she sails past,
bold as her polished brass,
tacking into the wind
as is her wont, the other boats
might just as well heave to!

All dressed out in her
full rigging, mainsail rounding,
spinnaker bellying out, oh my
but she is yar... and lady enough
to melt the cold heart
of this old jack tar.

Broadcasting the Blues

I was listening to the radio the other evening, Western Washington's hugely popular Jazz station KPLU (broadcast to the world via the Internet), which has all-Blues programs every Saturday and Sunday, 6 p.m. till midnight, hosted by a genial and very knowledgeable guy named John Kessler. One of John's program features is the "Blues Time Machine," in which he presents some great early Blues number followed by remakes made over the decades since. That time listeners heard Sleepy John Estes' "Someday Baby" from 1935 and then versions by Muddy Waters (1955), The Allman Brothers (1975 or so), and the more recent North Mississippi All Stars, but all four performances with something distinctive to offer.

A terrific idea, I think, well executed that night. (Some attempts aren't quite so perfect, when the remakes are too much of a letdown.) And it brought to mind my own brief career as a nighttime deejay. Back in the Sixties--it may be hard to imagine this now--the airwaves were dominated by AM stations, mostly rock 'n roll and Pop, hosted by loud local jocks doing way too many ads interspersed with repetitive Top 40 music selections. FM stations tended to be for Classical or Easy Listening fans only. But then a few brave FM stations in the Bay Area and elsewhere began programming their own freeform versions of (just a-borning) Rock Music, political commentary, hippie goofing, and whatever else.

Seattle's fledgling was KOL-FM, which had a handful of deejays creating their own radio personae each day and night. One regular was Pat McDonald, these days still a familiar Rock critic on the local and national newspaper scene. Another was a slightly off-center Philosophy professor from the University of Washington named John Chambless, who came across sometimes as a hippie guru a bit like Timothy Leary.

Anyway, Chambless was due his sabbatical year's leave from teaching (this was about 1968-69) and was bound out into the world somewhere, and I believe it was Pat who suggested me as a temporary replacement. Chambless' station slot was Sunday night from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m., an eight-hour on-air shift. I had no idea what that meant really...

The manager approved, and the engineers showed me the mechanical ropes--and then I was launched, much like someone tossed into the water to learn to swim! I was free to play anything that seemed relevant to the burgeoning youth culture (I was still a part-time member then), to talk at will and do whatever it took to fill the eight hours of air time. Oh, it was a heady thing at first, as I got to select fine current music, album music, cut after cut, weaving the sounds into mini-suites, sort of, jarring the listeners with something loud after a quiet number, cleverly connecting disparate cuts that echoed each other textually, and so on.

I was having a great time... except that every time, my on-air energy started to flag after about four hours, and by 1 a.m. I was hopeless. I belatedly realized that eight hours is a hellish long time to be on the air trying to be interesting, even just trying to maintain one's voice. I soon resorted to tricks to get through--playing whole album sides of the Beatles or Steve Miller or whoever, turning those mini-suites into longer and longer stretches when I'd say nothing, letting the music do all the talking whether the tunes fit together or not.

And I played my one ace in the hole. Like John Kessler I was a Blues fan big-time, and I knew a lot from reading everything I could lay my hands on. This was the period when the whole Blues reissue-album phenomenon was just getting rolling, and I could practically buy, and did, every record that appeared. Son House and Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt were in the studios again after decades of no attention, and younger figures were getting their chance to record whole albums too, Junior Wells, Magic Sam, and other Chicago guys (including Buddy, of course), and the Southern cats on Nashville's Excello and elsewhere.

I began featuring a couple of hours of Blues music, maybe 10 p.m. till midnight every week, which the audience seemed to dig; at least, most of the phone calls that came in were positive. So I got creative (or cocky maybe). A white musicologist and writer from England named Paul Oliver had published two or three books on the Blues, the themes and history, that is, and I latched onto one of them, The Story of the Blues, and began reading whole sections and chapters on the air, interspersing his prose with the musical examples he quoted or cited, and related stuff that I could find. (Somehow reading aloud was less of a strain on my voice than doing aimless chatter.) And, also like Kessler, I played modern British Blues groups like the Cream and the Stones and Led Zeppelin who were doing their own versions of older tunes, usually without giving credit to the artists they were stealing from. I made sure those connections were properly acknowledged.

And what of KOL's audience? Well, I got almost no calls at first, aside from the odd whiner saying, "Hey, man, what's all this old shit. Play some Hendrix!" (It was clear some goofs didn't have a clue where Jimi's own deeper roots lay.) But then gradually I developed a small following, with people tuning in every week to hear the latest chapter from Oliver's book, and then phone me to comment on the music I'd added--Frank Stokes, Leroy Carr, Memphis Minnie, Big Bill, Blind Lemon, Blind Willie McTell, et wonderful al, working on towards the post-War Chicago Blues.

I was on a roll. I felt great--"Educator at Work" was the badge I wore mentally--entertaining the listeners and giving them some major Black/White racial history too. But then the real educator, Professor Chambless, decided to come back early from leave and reclaim his radio slot. After only seven or eight months I was out--kept on the KOL roster as a fill-in, but almost never called.

And so ended, ingloriously, my one brief close encounter with the world of radio. There were some who complained to KOL about the loss of the Blues I'd been featuring, but all the bosses did then was start programming more of it themselves, not to mention lots of Hendrix and Mayall and Cream.

About then too I decided I'd read and listened and learned so much about the Blues past that I could attempt a screenplay about Robert Johnson... But that's another story.

(Which can be read at my blog posts for June 12 and June 15 last year.)

Portuguese Spring

On this first day of Spring, 2008, a day early or not, I offer a brief note to acknowledge better times and dryer weather ahead...

On our big around-the-world adventure 20-plus years ago, Sandie and I (and various of our kids) spent the winter of 1986-87 holed up in the south of Portugal, in the region known as the Algarve--incredibly scenic pitted rocky cliffs, lovely beaches with working fishing villages nearby, Mediterranean-style white stucco buildings, too many Brit tourists, and so much more.

Last year, on May 28, but deriving from that most excellent Portuguese sojourn, I posted a lengthy, largely historical poem about Cabo de Sao Vicente (Cape St.Vincent), thought of as "The End of the World" back in seafaring times. Here's a much shorter lyric about the unheralded, early arrival of Spring, 1987...

Early February in the Algarve

The sea mints coins of silver light;
Blossoms salve each prickly branch;
Skittish clouds shy and collide:
Spring has taken Centianes.

Scent of almonds, fizz of bees.
Green bands stripe each clay-pot hill.
The sky regains its blue-tile glaze,
And every clover bed plumps full.

Donkeys haul bright produce bins.
Small boats trawl for cod and sole.
Tourists flee their white-snow dens,
Searching for some fado soul.

The heart in hiding stirs at last,
Sidles out in shadowed sun,
Darts back inside its leaden chest.
Six more weeks? ...but Winter's gone.

Feng Mac, Anyone?

It's a slow news day as I write this--if you don't count Spitzer resigning and the car bombs in Iraq--so why not talk fast food?

NPR yesterday morning told the odd and silly story of a Los Angeles-area McDonald's which has been laid out and constructed and interior designed according to the precepts of Feng Shui--directional positioning, curved surfaces everywhere, spaces for the wind gods to blow through maybe. (Sounds more like Oi Vey to me.) Okay, it's located in a predominantly Chinese-clientele part of the L.A. sprawl, but still... Big Macs? Cokes? Ronald McDonald?

It's one thing for Mickey D's and the Cola Kingdom to head greedily to Beijing, but quite another for an ancient culture to be shoehorned kicking and screaming into the Home of the Golden Arches. Why not a golden-domed McAchmed mosque? (Because the Moslem population would be insulted?) Or free handouts from the Torah with every burger purchased? (Jewish good-humor goes only so far?) I guess Buddhists and Confucianists, being generally peaceful and inscrutable and such, are considered less likely to object, more willing to... what, adapt? ignore?

The bigger mystery is: why not go the whole distance and alter your McDonald's menu to match? Evidently the franchise owner has no intention to offer bowls of rice or Chinese provincial delicacies beyond the "meals" and salads already on display. Heck, the guy's clearly missing a bet. We have a fast food local here on Vashon Island that offers Thai specialty dishes right next to burgers named for the high school team and certain island characters!

Us young-oldtimers have already lived through the transformation of McDonald's, Taco Time, and such from grab-a-meal joints to family-friendly sitdown eateries offering a lower-priced alternative to "real" restaurants. (Of course, many of them now purvey Starbuck's or some rival designer coffee brand... oops.) I'm actually old enough to have frequented one of the first McDonald's that Ray Kroc built outside of California, back around 1961 in Evanston, Illinois, where every weekend us college boys would trek the mile or so to that golden-arched stand-up (lean-on counters outdoors, as I recall), where we could get two cheeseburgers, fries, and a milk for just under a dollar. And the sign back then read: "Over 10,000 Sold."

The pretentions of food sellers and food eaters know no bounds. Buy local, eat organic only, consume nothing you have't raised yourself, monitor your carbon footprint during both the growing and the transporting, maybe eat nothing that bears offspring (not much left to chew on then)--I reckon those are all admirable attitudes. It's just the matter of belief vs. money available. And you will certainly find sellers willing to cater (yes) to your demands; it's all about niche marketing these days, right? The "Slow Food" movement, and obscure fruits, and vegetables grown according to Feng Shui maybe, as the answer to mega-farms and dangerous Chinese imports and fast food by any other name.

And now NPR today states that some consortium in Brazil is buying up all of America's slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants and cattle ranches. Should we carnivores be concerned? Just because we import Argentinian beef doesn't mean we welcome "carcassbaggers"! Is Congress going to save the American hamburger from its global-economy fate? (The anti-Latin-immigrants faction is already gearing up, I bet.)

Wealthy "foodies" want bottles of wine costing thousands of dollars to brag about? Well, that means there'll be some crooks willing to sell them leftover dregs or cheaper vintages at sky-high prices--does the concept "new wine in old bottles" sound familiar?

And my wife tells me some bigname local chefs are touting fruit-flavored carbonated drinks (kumquat, rhubarb, pomegranate, and lavender are a few of the flavors) as alternatives to wine. Oh really? A vintage 2008 persimmon punch swirling around in your goblet? I wonder what sort of "legs" it has. Carbonation goes so well with the chef's latest recipes, no doubt.

Certain well-known sayings spring to mind: "There's a sucker born every minute..." "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American populace..." (make that consumer). Or my own favorite, the sign in P.T. Barnum's freakshow tent herding the gawkers onward (and perfectly apropos at this penultimate moment), "This Way to the Egress..."

So Few Books, So Much Time

I've never written or published a book, though I've been featured briefly or mentioned casually in several--which relates slightly to the "witness" title this blog bears.

I think basically I'm too stubborn or willful to submit to the necessary work regimen, or just unable to stay focussed long enough, to write a novel or memoir or even a book of related essays; lengths ranging from brief lyric poem on up to feature screenplay seem to be my attention-span limits. Still, other people have deemed bits of my work worthy of preserving--poems appearing first in so-called little magazines, for example, and then a couple of them picked up for obscure anthologies later.

A different example: back in the late Sixties-early Seventies I wrote maybe two dozen short pieces for Rolling Stone; and three of my record reviews were then reprinted in the first book collection devoted to such--brief but deathless paragraphs praising releases by Clifton Chenier (I was proud to introduce his Zydeco accordion music to the world of rock), the Everly Brothers, and... who? Can't remember the subject of the third. (All of the pieces I wrote do also appear in the early bound volumes of Rolling Stone, but that doesn't count since there was no selection process involved.)

Another article I wrote back then, this time for Ramparts Magazine, critiqued what I saw as the phoney revolutionary attitude of Jefferson Airplane, examining the band's Volunteers album in particular, issued while the group was also doing jeans commercials! Many years later this piece was picked up for offprint use in the syllabus of a counter-culture course taught at a college in Germany, and then quoted too in a recent biography of the band, Jeff Tamarkin's Got a Revolution. I guess Internet access served as the key.

On the other hand, my long interview with Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman (offered complete, for the first time, in five early chapters of I Witness) has been quoted in a couple of Parsons biographies (one book also used a photo I own of Gram and me, seen below-right on this home page), but because both The Helix and L.A. Free Press underground newspapers long ago neglected to credit me as author, any quotations appeared anonymously (as it were).

Also basically anonymous were my writing and editing efforts for three other books: the notorious mid-Sixties Course Critique of professors and classes at the University of Washington (loads of fun to compile and write, laced with ridiculous puns throughout); the 30th anniversary history of Seattle Center and the renowned 1962 Seattle World's Fair that launched it (Meet Me at the Center by Don Duncan); and a thick Seattle Art Museum catalog for a major exhibition of (pre-Green Movement) giant "Earth Works." The author, some hopeless academic, hated my attempt to enable reader comprehension!

No thanks there, of course, but I did receive brief mentions, merited or otherwise, in two books focussed on Elvis Presley: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train (a later reprint offers after-the-fact acknowledgment for a story he used that I'd told him years earlier) and Peter Guralnick's great two-volume definitive biography of Elvis, for which I had helped line up a couple of interviews with Northwest promoters or reporters. (But you'd have to look deep in the lengthy Who's Who of people thanked to find my name.)

The experiences I had at the Stones' Altamont Festival turned up later in another guy's book too. Record producer and folksinger Sandy Paton, best known for his excellent Folk-Legacy label, published a collection of short prose pieces back in the mid-Seventies (I've forgotten the title and don't find it referenced anywhere) and in the one on Altamont he namechecks me and the battles, Hell's Angels vs. stoned fans, I witnessed with horror that day; Marty Balin of the Airplane, for one, was knocked out by them.

More personal: over the years I've fantasized that someone somewhere would discover my circulating screenplay on Mississippi Bluesman Robert Johnson, titled Hellhound on My Trail (written back around 1968-70; see blog chapters of June 12 and June 15, 2007), and offer to publish it, but only the last 20 or 30 pages have ever seen print. I've come to accept the unlikeliness of that ever happening now and have learned instead to look with special fondness on the final two books I want to mention.

Among the best English Lit courses I took in grad school, at the University of Washington in 1965, was one titled something like "The English Popular Ballad" (meaning the post-medieval Child Ballads, more or less), taught by Dr. David C. Fowler. The major assignment in his course was to select a folk song well-known in England or America that the ballad hunters had missed--to research it through history, try to find the ultimate source for it, analyze its structure and content, and finally make the case for its inclusion in the somewhat ex-clusive ballad books. I chose the Scots folk song usually titled something like "Lang a-Growin'," or "The Trees They Do Grow High," made famous by Ewan MacColl, Joan Baez and others; did all the research, sending for manuscript copies from overseas libraries, reading microfiche and old songbooks, listening to all the recordings available, etc., with no Internet back then to make things easier; then wrote my paper--which convinced Fowler so completely that his own subsequent book, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, cited my research and thanked me for establishing the song as worthy of serious academic study.

That remains the highwater mark of grad school for me (even though I only learned of my inclusion in Fowler's book several years later). I may only be a footnote, but by God, I'm proud of it!

From a Scots ballad to the Nottingham cityscape... as we finally head south to England and the novel titled Living Proof, from the great "Charlie Resnick" series of police procedurals by prizewinning mystery writer John Harvey. Back when I still had a real-location bookstore, the annual BoucherCon gathering of mystery writers and fans came to Seattle, in 1994 or so; as a mystery bookseller I naturally had to "buy" a dealer-room table at the convention.

One evening there was an auction staged to raise funds for the widow of author Robert Bloch (best known for Psycho), whose medical bills and recent death had left his family in financial straits. Towards the end of this worthy event, Harvey as one of the guest authors offered to auction the rights for some fan to appear as a character in his next book. This novel idea (excuse the pun) seemed to leave the room confused, convention-goers looking around at each other wondering whether it would be "cool" to spend one's money so (let's call it) egotistically.

Let me just say that Harvey's generous offer soon became a regular fundraising occurrence at such conventions, and other authors immediately afterwards that same night made similar offers successfully. But this first time out was met with silence. Finally, just to get the bidding started, I raised my hand for the seventy-five dollars or whatever it was... and no one else bid! So suddenly there I was, about to assume some unlikely role in an upcoming mystery. Harvey and I talked a bit; I assured him I didn't care what he wrote, and that he really didn't have to use my name at all. But we corresponded more over the next few months, and finally he sent me a proof of the page and role I'd come to fill...

I'm quite happy to state that on page 137 of the hardback of Living Proof, any curious reader can find one "Ed Leimbacher" and his Seattle store MisterE Books given a comical, slightly venal, but recognizably booksellerish walk-on part (several paragraphs actually) at a fictional book fair in Nottingham. And further deponent sayeth not.

Gee, ain't it grand to be famous for, maybe, 15 seconds?

Chiang Mai (2)

((More journal entries from Thailand 1986.))

June 9

Yesterday I walked to a wat open to visitors on Sunday only, to view its 4th Century crystal Buddha and 6th Century B.C. golden Buddha from India (closer in its appearance to Hindu statuary than to Thai Buddhism). I also said goodbye to acquaintance Patrick, heading home to Seattle and kindly transporting my package of gifts and goods accumulated over the months.

Meanwhile, today's bus to the ancient ruined city of Sukhothai took too many dusty, sweaty hours over partially paved roads. New Sukhothai, several kilometers farther on, is like Nothingsville: a dozen grubby streets, a few hotels and restaurants. I'm hoveled in with the usual array of paperless toilet, cold shower, and swarming insects of some unknown sort. Just overnight, however--tomorrow I explore the ruins of old Sukhothai, which are magnificent and haunting, giant monuments in stone. Then a night bus back to Bangkok.

Speaking of BKK (as it's known in airport-acronym lingo) reminds me of some observations regarding Thai place names. The Thai alphabet has no connection with Latin/Western lettering, and looks something like this: SZSZSFSXSZ ((originally I hand-drew a row of varied squiggles mimicking the Thai letters; imagine individual strands of spaghetti dropped in twists and curls)), which is "Sukhothai." Unless a white farang learns to read Thai, or is lucky enough the find the approximate one-in-every-seven, street- or restaurant-sign that transcribes its information to Latin script too, s/he will wander around in a daze. But even then the Western version may be confusing; for example, the word for "welcome" or "hello" is variously spelled Sawasdee, Sawatdi, Sawadee, and so on, and I have seen "district" on signs as amphoe, amphur, and umper!

Also, seeing the Western form won't necessarily prepare one for the Thai sounds. Kamphaeng Phaet and Chao Phra are pronounced something like "Camping Pet" and "Ciao, Bra." Picture the Thai spelling for some sounds I swear I've heard spoken: "Bankrupt," "Podunk," "Punch 'n' Judy," even "What's up, Doc"! And the words Bangkok and Phuket have nothing to do with what an oversexed tourist might fantasize; the latter is a beach resort pronounced "Poo-ket" and the former merely a one-word summary of the city's 40-word, royal-language official name--something on the order of "Eternal Heavenly Abode of Bliss Where the Royal Personage Dwells in Halls of...," etc. (Actually, come to think of it, Bangkok is a place where soldiers and travelers in search of earthly bliss and cheap thrills do still congregate, in the infamous rowdy sex-trade area called "Soy Cowboy.")

I have also neglected the hilltribes of Northern Thailand--Meo, Liso, Karen, Akha, Yao, and others who live in the rugged, mountainous strip stretching from Burma into Laos, the dangerous "Golden Triangle" of drug-trafficking renown. Sanguine, some would say foolish, travelers to the north often head out on three- and four-day treks, riding elephants, fording rivers, smoking opium with village headmen, battling vermin. These isolated, not-always-friendly areas offer other thrills too; just last week, two Aussies were set upon by bandits shooting guns, with one tourist wounded slightly. (I chose to save the $150-$300 cost, and my own skin.) The government attempts to control the bandits, stop the flow of drugs, relocate certain tribes, boost tourism in the region, and encourage the sale of tribal crafts and clothing.

So Chiang Mai is full of these fascinating people and their colorful goods, as well as large string-puppets, opium weights ((see photo above)), and bright lacquerware smuggled in from Burma. I browsed the night market a few evenings, finally bought an old Meo shirt and a new bag from another tribe (I forget to ask which). The village folk come wearing their hand-embroidered, multi-layered, many-trinketed costumes, and last night I saw the most striking yet: a very tall young Karen woman, quite attractive in looks and tribal garb, but also wearing a floral headband/tiara thing, silk stockings, and high heels! She caused heads to turn everywhere she went.

Prices, by the way, can be ridiculously cheap. Some tourists go to Chiang Mai just to ship home hundreds of dollars worth of quilts, coats, leggings, hats, silver jewelry, and so on. And then turn a handsome profit back home...

June 10

The bugs and I had a restless night. Up before dawn as usual, I set out on the community bus at 7:30 for the bumpy, 20-minute ride back to old Sukhothai; and there I rented a bicycle to tour its three-kilometer-square grid, filled with broken wats and ruined royal or religious buildings, many of them not yet excavated--a sort of low-lying Machu Picchu. Some random impressions, then, jotted down under a raging sun:

From this capital city, early kings ruled until the 15th Century when Northern Thailand was partially sacked by Burmese invaders. Since then, earthquakes and weather and age have destroyed much of the rest. Yet here today a Buddhist monk, orange robe lowered to his waist, wrestles a power mower around in foot-high grass...

One large complex, Wat Phra Phai Luang, is almost totally razed: shattered Buddhas, tumbled stupas and chedis, broken columns, crumbling walls of brick and sandstone. And in the midst of this destruction, ponds and moats full of floating lotus plants, white or purple blossoms stretching up from their green pads toward the sun; and one perfectly preserved dark Buddha, tranquil and unflappable--like the lizard poised atop a nearby chedi...

In contrast, the beautiful, well-restored Wat Mahathat, with nearly 200 chedis of varied shapes and sizes, two magnificent Standing Buddhas several meters tall, a half-dozen others seated in the lotus position, and all of them lovingly sculpted. Peace in the midst of strife, in a splendid moat setting with the everpresent lotus blossoms...

Smells of stagnant water, fresh-mown grass, new-dropped cowdung. And nearby, the "Palace of the Gods in the Field," completely obliterated, covered by grass and bushes, inhabited only by the cows...

Finally, Sukhothai's heart, Wat Sri Chum--four high walls, open above, enclosing a single giant, lotus-position Buddha, 11.5 meters across the lap, maybe 18 meters high. Once carved from some light-colored stone, portions of it have now gone green from moss, or gold from the thin sheets of gilt leaf attached by worshippers. Oddly, this particular blessed image, a favorite of photographers, has his eyes open and a quite mischievous grin on his face...

After a visit to Sukhothai, it's impossible not to think of Ozymandias: "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

((And now here's the poem that tried to capture my stay in Chiang Mai and the North.))

Freeing the Birds

After the dizzying bus-ride
15 kilometers up and up
both sides of the corkscrew road
to the top of Mt. Doi Suthep,
we emerge through swirling clouds
as giddy as spring birds:

the view falls away for miles,
down tipsy forests and rows
of fields, to Chiang Mai’s walls
and the fleet cloud shadows
scudding toward us. Even the trees
give back glory! So we seize

the day, this day of praise
for the faithful here gathered
in scores, climbing the stairs—
all of us—herded skyward
by tile-encrusted dragons
300 steps to the heavens…

or at least another station
on the Middle Way, this one
most holy, attended with passion,
because it houses a tiny bone,
sacred relic of Gautama.
Ascending takes more stamina

than I have; heart thudding,
I’m out of breath and belief,
grabbing at straws: a sweating
fence-straddler quick to quaff
one Coke in earthly recompense.
The loudspeaker amplifies chants.

Busy monks pour concrete.
Worshippers place lit candles
at the myriad Buddhas’ feet.
Women with flower bundles
kneel by men burning incense;
bowing, both groups advance

to an elderly monk, face scarred,
who sprinkles them with water,
then re-lights his stub cigar.
This benevolent holy father
puffs contentedly, eyeing us,
his jostling ranks of the pious.

Temple bells marked “Don’t Shake”
persuade some Thai believers
to strike with fist and stick
till the wat echoes their labors,
a great clangor of rejoicing.
I slip my shoes off, placing

them in amongst the multitudes
already converted, to step inside
where a hundred glittering Buddhas
smile... so many they hide
the alter, draped with gold-leaf,
rippling in a scented breeze.

One sheet fallen to the ground
I try to place back whole;
it crumbles, sticking to my hand,
gilt clinging to me piecemeal...
A father and son at cliff’s edge
hold a cage full of finches,

sold below on the mountainside.
Coaxed, the boy shakes them free
with his arms spread out wide,
a tiny Francis of Assisi
crowing with delight as each bird
leaps into the diamond void,

the clouded ladder to heaven,
vanishing into that blue eye,
all pecking and filching forgiven.
I pay five baht to buy
a new tile for the temple roof,
touch the hand-worn bas-relief

of Erawan, the three-headed
sacred elephant, for luck,
then reclaim my shoes for good.
I pocket a soapstone relic
for no clear reason, and depart,
unenlightened but lighter of heart.

Rose of the North (1)

((Chiang Mai area in the North of Thailand, 1986.))

June 2

I whiled away the rest of yesterday avoiding the extreme heat, reading in the shade, planning excursions, finally venturing out as cooler evening came on. Had a glass of wine in a bar run by a Thai woman just back from two years of social work in Nicaragua. She dislikes the Sandanistas now, says the revolution has gone sour. (Some of her comments remind me of Jean Genet's play The Balcony, where the whorehouse revolutionaries become beasts and dictators themselves, once in power.)

A fruit smoothie slurped in a Euro-tourist cafe later let me observe other Thai women putting the make on Western travellers. No one approached me--not that I was looking for company, but one does feel somehow slighted... Actually the women of Chiang Mai are renowned throughout Thailand (and pictured in books and airline adverts all over the world) as the most beautiful in this graceful kingdom and any husband's most-prized "possession." And they are striking in appearance: paler skinned than the southern Thai, and presenting a more knowing, even arrogant, look on their lovely features. Yet not offensive; just confident of their special privilege.

Today I walked a few miles visiting various local wats. Given that each of them must have support buildings, stupas, chedi pagodas housing holy ashes, glass/porcelain/gold decorations, Thai serpents, and sometimes Chinese lion-like watch-dogs, somehow each still manages to look distinct. Ditto the Buddha images. While there are a dozen favored poses, each face has its own breadth and taper, or glint in the eyes, or set of the mouth--even when you examine a dozen Buddhas of the same pose side by side. All are serene, but some seem to smirk, others to leer; some have eyes open, others downcast or closed. But nearly all of the statues have a rather demure, sensuous, almost hermaphroditic shape. Except for the Starving Buddha/bones image, all are soft and fleshy, exhibiting graceful, rather feminine gestures. What does this signify?

I took most pleasure, however, in talking for an hour with a cheerful young monk anxious to practice his halting English. Pranong (pronounced Ba-non) comes from the northeast, near the Laotian border--where the armed clashes and shelling of refugee camps go on regularly. When Pranong learned that I'm a "writer," he scurried off to get the journal he's been keeping, in English, of his stay at this Chiang Mai wat. (I noticed several references to the city's good-looking women, the young sly boots!)

June 3

The weather brought hot sun in and out of clouds until 5 p.m. Now it's thundering and threatening to storm again. But I did get out on a rental bicycle this morning, pedalling 'roundabout some 25 kilometers of countryside. The core of Chiang Mai is a square-walled city, though without the towers and crenellations of European or Moorish castles. There are gates through each wall and a broad, quite beautiful moat/park around it (on three sides only, I think); and the confident, friendly air of the people confirms the area's reputation as a haven of education and cultured wealth. Many successful Thais maintain "summer" homes up in this region (the city's name or nickname in Thai meaning "Rose of the North"), where they come to escape the heat and oppressive urban confusion of Bangkok.

Once out the North Gate, however, and past the surrounding commercial-residential strip, I found farms galore, a couple of golf courses, little food-and-drink stalls along the roads, even a major Thai Army installation. Asked a few soldiers, in fact, where to find what I had actually ridden out to see: two stoneware factories making what's called "Thai Celadon," a pottery style and process imported from China about 1100 years ago, and used to produce lovely cracked-glaze pots and plates ever since. Had a tour, some cold water, and bought a small plate for $2, then rumbled back toward the city, sweating like a hog in the sweltering heat. The monsoon season is clearly upon us.

More wats en route, a fiery-hot lunch at a vegetarian restaurant, then home to collapse.

June 5

I purposely set yesterday and today aside for writing postcards, letters, and recalcitrant poems. But in take-a-break strolls I managed to find a small antique "Sukhothai" bowl (the Thai Celadon style of a hundred years ago), a collection of Hemingway stories, and a superior Indian restaurant in a spacious, sculptured garden setting. Otherwise I sat under the swirling fans of the Galare's ((guest-house I was staying in)) breezeway-styled dining area, conversing with the Thai help, some Canadian women, and Patrick, a microbiologist from Seattle ((further proof of the world's shrinking)). The two of us will stroll to the city's night market this evening, where I intend to learn by observing Patrick; here for a year, he's become an old hand at shopping and bartering...

June 7

The monsoons have arrived in full force with drenching storms these last two days. I ventured out early yesterday, however, on a bustling tour to outlying areas, me the only taker and my substitute guide speaking no English! But we got on--up many kilometers of climbing mountain road, to one of the King's alternate palaces, a seasonal retreat no doubt, where I saw shady gardens, long sweeping views of the surrounding plains, and posh marble buildings visitors are not admitted into. Then higher up, to the venerable monastery of Wat Doi Suthep, where a 300-step ascent leads to the mountainside-perched platform, which houses one of the Buddha's holy bones. Many worshippers, a few Western gawkers, but only one man and his son doing the traditional freeing of caged birds for good fortune, blessings on the person, and so on. ((This visit I expanded on in a poem which will appear next time.))

Back down the mountain and around Chiang Mai's perimeter to opposite-side craft villages: Baw Sang, where I saw the making of famed regional painted parasols (shipped a pair of them home), and Sam Kamphaeng, where I admired silkworms in various stages of larvae and labors, along with raw silk, weavers and sewers at work, and numerous bolts of colorful silk--even broke down and spent $60 on enough from one bolt to have a suit made someday... ((and I did too, the suit I got married in nearly two years later.))

A fixed price, unlike night-market shopping. There, you mingle with hundreds, locals and hilltribesmen, hunger-inducing food stalls and aggressive vendors (want a phoney "LaCoste" shirt for a buck?), shops upstairs, downstairs, and sprawling along several blocks and side-streets, teeming and raucous but, in Chiang Mai anyway, impeccably clean. And, as in other markets elsewhere, except for those like Patrick who speak the local lingo, the bartering proceeds by headshakes and hand signals, raised eyebrows and expressive shrugs, pigeon English mixed with scrambled Thai. Only a foolish farang tourist pays the asked-for price; the mutually enjoyed game is to "talk" the amount down by a third or more--a lot of work, of course, for something that already costs only a few dollars, but the proper course nonetheless.

Had trouble sleeping last night, woke today with the blind spots in vision that presage one of my rare migraine headaches, and soon got a doozy that left me sick and groaning near the guest-house telephone, awaiting a callback from Sandie... Then spent the rest of the day flat on my back, listening to the rain and feeling sorry for myself, racking my pain-wracked brain-pan for some solution to the anguish my travels are causing among my various loved ones. None of them really understands why I persist in this, my stubborn solitary sojourn in the world. Hell, I don't really know why myself; only that I must go on...

This Gift Reversed

Now that I'm a wise old...er man of 65, all this looking back almost begins to make sense. One does need to take stock now and then, and writing an autobiography slightly disguised as a pop culture blog seems a more palatable (and possible) solution for my somewhat short attention span.

I do much prefer making new discoveries, hearing new music, reading new books, visiting new (as well as much-missed) places foreign and domestic. I've just returned from a whirlwind visit to Vancouver, Canada, occasioned by the amazing invitation of my pal, animator Marv Newland (introduced in blog chapter Newland of Animation, dated 8/20/07), to come use his spare ticket to experience sax giant Ornette Coleman--who in the event did so much more than simply blow Free Jazz. His three-bass band was crisp and tight, and funky when necessary, leaving the quintet's frail but phenomenal frontman to blow his heart out, from a Bach visitation to wild new stuff to the beautiful encore of Lonely Woman!

Anyway, the past is always with us, late and soon, getting and spending, sometimes allowing us to lay waste to our very future, whether personal or species wide. And here's one view of what's past...

In His Dream


He is me, yet he can watch me act.

Things move backward, but matter-of-fact:
Older, then younger, he un-ages;

His marriage removes its bandages,
Revealing faces lovelier once.

He gives away accumulations;
The less he has, the more he is him-

Self, the man he dreams I was in time.
He turns the book’s pages left to right,

But this gift, reversed, of second sight
Leads him briefly into misery,

Discovering his story, when re-
Viewed, as choices made in ignorance,

Lived on the pulses, lacking science.
Yet he is happier, freed of “I,”

All that case-hardened identity—
Circumscribed possibilities reeled

Back up the line, present loss re-called.
Younger than this now, he lives his days

Forgetting who he finally is.