Roll Muddy River

"Roll Muddy River" was on another one of those country anthology LP's of Pop's, maybe the same one that "What Are Those Things" was on, I can't recall. I always liked the folksy ramble of this song. It looks like there are many different versions of this song done by many artists, ranging from real bluegrassy to rockin' country. I am not 100% certain that this particular version, by the Wilburn Brothers, is the exact version we had, but if it is not, it is very close to it.Again, I know nothing about the Wilburn Brothers. I can't help but recall an alternate lyric coined by my oldest brother, "I've got a notion Kung Fu's in slow motion", every time I hear this.

They Ain't Robins, Brother

I hope it doesn't get too tiresome, but I am having fun finding these old songs we used to listen to. This one has been a challenge, too. It was on an anthology album of various country hits that Pop had from the 60's, and was a particular favorite. Charlie Louvin is the artist here, and I am sorry to say I am not familiar with his work. Looking over the albums and titles that are available on iTunes (this song is not BTW), he seems like an old school Johnny Cash type, just my kind o' guy. (He even duets with EmmyLou Harris!) So he is worth further investigation. The only version of this song that is available on iTunes is by Roger Miller, who I normally like all right, but his version is full of weird vocal mannerisms popular at the time that really grate on me when I have this great version to measure it by. I know the accompanying video is kind of weied, right? But it is evocative of the times in its own bizarre way, too...

The World Ain't Big Enough For Me

We had an old 79 of this that I believe was my Grandmothers' originally, and boy did we listen to the fire out of it. It was a thick, heavy disc with a red Columbia label and it had a lot of pops and crackles, but the voyaging spirit the music conveyed was infectious. The anarchronisms always cracked me up, too. I never paid any attention to the artist, Guy Mitchell, when listening to it then, which made it a little hard to find, but then the music was the thing to me then, not the artist. I see that it is available for 99 cents from iTunes, but I am a little hesistant to hear this song too cleanly...The "canned" effect of the LP really takes me back...

The Powers That Be

The Tarot cards have always fascinated me.

It is the way the symbols work on the viewer that has always been the draw for me, not so much the idea of their use as an oracle. While having a discussion with my brother concerning the Tarot, I also expressed the fact that I was in a weird book limbo, where I didn't have anything that was particularly calling out to me to be read. Never at a loss for a book recommendation, my brother promptly put a lending copy of Tim Powers' Last Call in my hand.

Now, I suffer from a strange malady that I am sure probably has a medical term. That is, whenever someone lends me a book or movie with much enthusiasm, there is a demonic force in me that resists delving into the material; I don't know why. I have nothing but the greatest respect for my brother's taste in literature, and when I do finally get around to reading his recommendations, I am rarely disappointed. So this time I thought, "Dang it, don't be an asshole. READ THE BOOK!

And I am glad I did.

Last Call is one weird book. It is also fascinating, engrossing, funny, horrifying and epic. It was one of the rare books that just completely kept me guessing all the way to the end. It concerns one Scott Crane, a One-eyed Jack; that is, the son of a very twisted man who happens to be the King of our twisted world by way of a mythic cosmology that dates back to the Fisher King. If the Fisher King remains wounded, the land is wounded, and this particular King's wound is greed for immortality. He has devised a method of bedevilling certain "fish", (that is poker players drawn to an exclusive game), out of their bodies through a magical poker game called "Assumption." Every twenty years he holds a game in which he snares new victims, and as he wears out one body he spiritually assumes another. Scott, as his son, is in line to be a King himself, but Daddy has other plans-he wants to "assume" his own son.

If it all sounds a little mystical, it is. But by blending poker, Tarot, magic, history, Vegas lore, and a host of colorful characters , Powers weaves a completely original and spellbinding story with plenty of action and lots to think about to boot. I understand that this is the first of a trilogy, and I am sure that my trusted brother will have a lending copy of the next two volumes for me when next we meet. Maybe there is hope for me overcoming my malady after all...

Little Close Encounters of a 2010 KInd

More movies recently watched: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2010, Little Caesar.

I saw both Close Encounters and 2010 back when they originally aired in 1977 and 1984 respectively, and this was my first time to see the great Edward G. in Caesar.

Well. Close Encounters. What can I say? I remember being greatly interested in it when I was a boy because there was a real paucity of any big time mainstream examinations of UFO phenomenenonnonanonns, er, stuff, even though the 70s was the golden age of UFO mania. This seemed like a Serious examination by Somebody with some clout: that is Little Stevie Spielboig with his follow-up to the already much-worshipped Jaws. I remember having the novel, written by Spielberg, (yeah, right, and George Lucas wrote the novel of Star Wars -Alan Dean Foster-is that you?) I also nabbed the Fotonovel of the movie and a cool baby -pink bendy of the cool alien that "communicates" with Francois Truffaut at the end of the movie. The only problem was...The movie itself is kind of a bore...Oh, it has some great sequences, and some interesting ideas, but ultimately it just kind of is. None of the characters, although all very earnestly played, really touch you in any way, and I think that is the main deficit. It was interesting, too, from a cultural perspective, to see that the work begun in Close and then solidified in E.T. turned the mass perception , via the movies of course, from the aliens being hostile invaders from without, and the government being our saviour-as portrayed in 50s and 60s era sci-fi, to the aliens being friendly and wise ambassadors from beyond being squelched by a fascistic secretive government. Independence Day almost 20 years later reversed the trend again. The special effects are still quite fun to watch. I always found the portrayal of the ships to be quite unique.

2010. The sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Not made by Kubrick, but with his blessing. This movie more or less ditched the trippy mysticism of 2001 and portrayed a joint Soviet-US mission to investigate the derelict vessel and the monolith that shared its orbit around Jupiter. Roy Scheider does great work as Dr. Heywood Floyd, intent on finding out how his first project went kerfluey, and Bob Balaban plays the fussy computer programmer whose prodigy,the HAL 3000, or whatever number of HAL it was , also wants to discover why his golden boy went homicidal. The acting is actually excellent throughout, with Helen Mirren portraying a very convincing Soviet pilot, and John Lithgow as an engineer in over his head. This movie suffers from being a victim of its time. For starters, of course, the US and the Soviet Union were still in a global pissing match. There was also a hot-headed Reaganesque President whose excursions into Honduras touch off a military showdown with the Russkies. The political backdrop of the entire story is familiar sturm and drang Cold War anxieties of the early eighties, back when everyone was more worried about THE bomb and not just bombs. So the pay-off that the movie presents, a hope for a larger family of lifeforms, breaking us free from our death spiral of petty tribal warfare, has lost some of its punch. I remember being impressed by the sympathetic portrayal of the crews trying to muddle through the political cloud hanging over their mission and seeing each other as real people, and that still is impressive. But after having exonerated HAL and taking the gas out of the enigmatic monoliths, I found myself kind of missing the elegant mysteries of the original.

Little Ceasar- just a straight-up gangster tale from the 30s with another great nasty performance by Edward G. Robinson in all of his "Yah, see, yah!" glory. It is a familiar tale of a little man with big cojones who climbs to the top of the gang world by out-gunning and out-doing all of the other evil-doers. He is a vain man, not unlike Tony Montana in Scarface, more into the prestige and bling of his position than anything else, who is only brought low by the determined opposition of some equally ambitious lawmen. I hope to snare the original Scarface in my DVR net soon, so I can see the master at work again. "Mother of Mercy-is this the end of Rico?"

Mad as Hell about Network

Okay, tonight's TCM scoop was 1976's Network, starring William Holden, Peter Finch, Faye Dunaway, and Robert Duvall.

What a great movie. Oh, I could go through the predictable rigmarole about how what was far-out satire in the 1970s was actually a prescient foreshadowing of the three ring circus that is our modern News Infotainment industry, but it was more than that. It was a remarkably mature examination of the weird soul melding that has transpired between the individual and the zeitgeist, as transmitted by television. Watching this movie made me ache for a return to the times when not every film had to be produced to be a date movie or a stylistic masturbatory fantasy of a fifth generation film geek. The storytelling was on par with a fine novel; the characters well defined and archetypal rather than stereotypical; the language intelligent and flirting with true profundity. (The characters actually used some of them there big words now and then to express their ideas!) It was a tale about the very bright people behind the dumbing down of our collective character.

Fincher's "I'm mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!" routine as the raving madman-cum-media star Howard Beale is of course an Academy Award winning legendary performance, and I don't need to throw any additional garlands on it. I will say Dunaway's character, a beautiful but soulless TV exec , was not just wonderfully executed but brilliantly written. As Holden's world weary ex-news executive pointed out, Dunaway's character was television: a seductive , dynamic, irresistible love who turns out to be all surface; a soulless unfeeling ratings machine, and ultimately a lousy lay to boot. Few women in movies have really done it for me quite like Dunaway in her prime. She is absolutely riveting.

Duvall is very believable as the Corporate slime ball, but for my money, Ned Beatty in a very small role as the biggest of the Corporate Big-wigs steals the show. He lays out the way the world really is to a dumbstruck Beale, breaking it all down to not a world of nations and laws, but a world of global titans above all world affairs , whose very life-blood is the ebb and flow of world currency. "I have seen the face of God," Beale murmurs in the wake of Beatty's holy tirade.

I guess the closest we have these days to this high level of film making is the occasional Coen brothers movie, when they are not trying to be too cute. If I think about this too much I have a Beale moment myself, "I am mad as hell, and I am not going to watch Seth Rogan anymore!"

Okay...I need to break the ice on 2010 as regards this blog..I've not had much cooking other than usual survival stuff; but I have been watching quite a few old movies I have been catching with my DVR off of TCM lately...

I watched Hammer's The Hound of The Baskervilles with Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskervilles earlier this evening and found it an entertaining, if not terribly engrossing movie. I remember watching and enjoying it back in the day as well. I am by no means a huge Holmes fan, in fact I think the only story I ever read was The Red Headed League. I watched a few of those BBC productions with the actor Jeremy Britt and thought his was pretty much the best portrayal of the famous sleuth that I had seen. When I heard about the latest actor to don the deerstalker(although I am sure he didn't-that is far too old school) being Robert Downey Jr., I had to groan. I have nothing against him per se, but the match just doesn't sound that great to me. Several people whose judgement I trust have given the movie a thumbs up, and I will probably watch it when it comes out on DVD. My wife asked me who I would have cast instead, and after some thought I came up with Hugh Laurie. I think he has that intensity and cleverness about him along with the sly wit.

Last night I watched The Uninvited with Ray Milland, concerning a lonely windswept mansion on the English seacoast, and the mystery behind a pair of female ghosts who haunt the place and are battling over the life of a beautiful young woman. A good story that kept my interest to the end.

Other TCM viewings of late: In a Lonely Place with Humphrey Bogart; Public Enemy, Angels With Dirty Faces, and White Heat all starring James Cagney (White Heat being the stand-out though all are excellent).

Blood on Satan's Claw is a great British production concerning a coven of witches attempting to flesh out their returning Dark Lord by growing patches of his skin on different people and then reaping it by way of sacrificing the afflicted victims. Quite creepy with a great old Judge who mercilessly snuffs out the evildoers-a character who would probably be a corrupt villain if the movie were made today. Also a small but great role of the Squire, played by the delightful old actor who portrayed Mr. Tibbs on Are You Being Served. Full of creaking rooks, fog and mossy stones, the atmosphere is perfect. It also boasts a brief but creepy glimpse of the gibbering devil, not yet fully made whole, that was quite effective.

That's all for now-the ice has been broken-stay tuned for more news of absurd goodness!