2012 came in like a tired wave lapping against my hungry shore. Drink, drink, drink, it seemed to say.
With the New Year I unearthed all the books I've amassed from book sales, lying in piles here and there and began to organize.
But I started paging thru the first one I picked up and never got back to it. Maybe next year.
I swear, the voice on my new navigational system said, "I told you to turn right, asshole!".
Whoops, wrong satellite.
While organizing, I fantasized about putting all the books in respective genres; fiction, non-fiction, etc.
Oh, what a library it would be.
I read "The Book of Old Silver - English, American, Foreign", by Seymour B. Wyler - all 400 pages and I don't know why.
Saul Bellow. Now there's a name. I read his "Henderson The Rain King" years ago and I'll never forget the roller coaster ride with the circus bear. Bear with me.
So I read one of his very few plays from my book burning pile - the failed, much maligned "The Last Analysis". Broadway bomb of 1964 after much revision.
Revised again for publication, - it's hysterical. My interpretation - once beloved comedian has nervous breakdown while attempting to build a Freudian School of Comedy in New York City. Picture Milton Berle in a clown suit as a student of Socrates. I loved it.
Speaking of Broadway, I found a rare record in the bins - "Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein" (Caemdon TRS 367), a solo show from the late 1970s with Carroll as Stein musing about her beloved Parisian life while Alice B. Toklas naps in the other room.
Brownies.
I rung in the New Year with it. Felt like I was tipping glasses at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Felt the same way about Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast", which I read on a bus trip to NYC years ago, also about the American expatriate artists who graced Paris in the 1920s. Poor Ernie.
But I wasn't enamored by Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris", or is it "Paris at Midnight"? - with Owen
Wilson magically being whisked away to the art colony of '20's Paris. I certainly didn't dislike it (loved the surrealists), and I was just glad he had a hit movie. It seemed a bit dumb. Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin That I Live In', also let me down a bit. A modern day Frankenstein story about a scientist who creates a synthetic human skin. I thought it was a bit ridiculous. Good chill at film's end, though.
In the same record bin that revealed Gertrude Stein, I found The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Philips PCC 616), Ernest Hemingway Reading, (Caedmon TC 1185) and Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, Directed by Charles Laughton (Coloumbia Masterworks SL-166).
Inside one of those albums was a nice copy of Theatre Arts magazine from April 1952. It extensively covers Broadway and global theatre and it's proving to be as entertaining as any copy in media today. Great vintage advertising; the complete text of "Don Juan in Hell"; a heavy emphasis on the troubling new medium - television (One foreseeing article predicted a near future where people would pay for better television!); and a very funny article, "Second-Nighters" about theatre attendees the night after a Broadway premier: "Second nighters come to see the show, not each other. They are in their seats at curtain time. There is no irritating rustle for place during the entire first act, no dropped programs, crushed insteps, frenzied whispers. There is no rivalry between the center aisle striders and the actors onstage. Coughers are at a minimum, drunks sparse.".
A little while ago I was suddenly dropped by a bunch of unassociated "friends" on Facebook. I was "unfriended" and didn't know why. So I hired a private detective and learned that I was unfriended because of a crack I made about Jesus Christ on this blog. All I could think was, "Jesus, SOMEBODY is READING my blog!!!".
so the heck with you.
I had an incident at 7-11. I was going in the store and some kid standing outside asked me if I would buy him some beer. I said, "sure", took his money, went in the store, pulled out my cell phone, and called the cops. The cops came and hauled him away. I bought a 5th of Vodka with his 20 bucks. He's being executed next week.
Just sayin' - proud to be an American and do my bit to curb teenage drinking.
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