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Another Fein Mess
AF Stone’s Monthly
January 2014

‘Round town



12-6 Went to the Paisley Underground fiesta at the Henry Fonda. The show drew a substantial crowd. I couldn’t stand it, literally - I got tired of standing - and left. Bangles headlined. Diane loved it. Pictured - The Rain Parade.

12-7 My entertainment this day was traffic school to expunge a ticket from my driving record. It ran from 9 am til 4pm at the Improv on Melrose, helmed by comedian Mike Uryga. It was plenty of fun, and informative. Several ambiguous traffic laws were clarified.



12-8 Jonny Whiteside’s hoedown at Viva. The Billy Bones, shown here, rocked hilariously.



12-9 “Do they know it’s Christmas?” was about LA, wasn’t it? This is the only clue we got during this year’s freak 70/ 80 degree temps.



12-15 The Skip Heller World filled the Redwood stage, both with single singers and his Large Band.



12-21 The streets of Hollywood were packed Saturday night and the Piano Bar was packed as always for the monthly show by Chuck E. Weiss.



12-23 Got my ‘new’ 2004 Honda detailed, i.e. the corrosion stripped from the paint to reveal more scratches and pits than previously visible. The little fix-it business is in the parking lot of Capitol Records, seen in reflection.



12- 24 Went to the Hollywood Library, and who should be there but shutterbug Gary Leonard, shooting bldgs for the city. He seems sane on the surface, but when he handed me his business card with braille on it ... I saw him again three days later outside the gym on El Centro, snapping the city.



12-25 Went with Diane to the Christmas open-house of Beth Falkenstein nee Fieger, Doug’s sister, and husband Jim and their kids. Eldest daughter, college student Freya, a real belter, will sing at the Elvis show this year.(Photo shows, none too well, paper snowflakes hung in trees in Valley Village.) That evening we dropped in at Gary Stewart’s annual jam-packed party full of friends.



12-26 Drove down to ... Torrance? (everything south of downtown is the same to me) to visit Rip Masters at his home. We had lunch at Alpine Village, which I’d passed on the highway for many years but never visited.



12-27 Lost my storage locker key. Storage Etc sawed off the lock for twenty five bucks. I’ll replace it with string, nobody wants my stuff.

Music

I can pinpoint my alienation from the music scene. When the Who created a musical stage play and called it an opera I turned in my membership and became only a visitor ... Indian chief on Freberg’s “History Of The United States”: “Tonight Flying Birdsong conducting at Carnegie Wigwam” ... Just got a CD of Aretha Franklin’s recordings for Columbia Records in the early 60s. Boy she could sing, and boy they handled her wrong. Still, she ripped through some of the standards good ... On Jeopardy - “The group that did “Hazy Shade of Winter.” That’s right, the Bangles ... 10-17 LAT, Randall Roberts, assaying new entry possibilities for the R&R Hall of Fame, pronounced that Yes, the popular prog-pop band, might be admissible because last year’s induction of prog-rockers Rush signaled that “progressive rock, long the realm of finicky geeks, had a way in.” A rock crit calling others geeks? Doctor, heal thyself. ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME MEMBERSHIP SHOULD BE DECIDED BY MUSICIANS. They rarely sneer, publicly, at other musicians ... That Darlene Love and others from the 20-Steps program were chosen to sing the national anthem before the Rose Bowl game was promising, but if I were in charge I would have demanded they stay on the notes and not wiggle around them like singers today. Their 4-part vocal athletics echoed the female soul-yodels that dog me at the gym ... Honda Christmas ads featuring Michael Bolton have unleashed a flood of snappy insults. I, too, never took to Bolton’s voice, but when a friend I visited put on a Bolton CD I had to accept that good people have different tastes. (Lordy lordy, now I’m worried - Were the Honda ads “ironic”?)

First

Surf Sound - “I’ve Had It” the Bell Notes

Wall of Sound - “Red River Rock” Johnny & Hurricanes

Metal/Hard Rock Guitar Intro - Kenny Paulson on Slay/Crewe/Freddy Cannon’s “Tallahassee Lassie”

Movies

“Wake Me When It’s Over” with Dick Shawn, Ernie Kovacs and a couple dozen character actors has been popping up on tv lately. It’s great, like a long tv show ... When I recently saw “Hot Fuzz” with subtitles I realized I’d missed half the picture when I saw it in 2008. Rapid Brit-talk confounds colonists.

Dia-logue jam

- In the french film “Diary of A Chambermaid,” the woman says, according to the subtitle, “I could care less about him”. Was she using a 1940’s (time of film) fractured French phrase that meant the opposite of what it says, like ‘Yeah, right’ for ‘Wrong’? Or an indication she is stupid? Or cunningly saying that she actually cared a lot? Or that the translator was born the day before today? 1

- In “American Hustle,” set approx. 1980, someone says money has “gone missing,” an invasive Britishism not heard in America til this century. Also, the mayor says he needs money to “grow our economy,” a vulgarism made common only just recently.

- “Saving Mr. Banks” had me literally (the new ‘figuratively’) jumping out of my seat when Walt Disney said “That isn’t ironic, it’s iconic!” Before I landed, his foil replied “Yes, but what about the gravitas.” Also heard: trickster, fraudster. Where was shortlist? proactive? artisinal? After all it’s 2013, which at Disney is the new 1961. 2

On the 12-19 Colbert, someone on a news clip says “And finally, the penultimate”. Colbert says Yes, the penultimate, but it isn’t clear if he’s mocking the fancy word or its misuse.

1 One of the many ways I get myself in hot water is saying ‘I could care less’ to mean I care a lot, as it says. (The removal of ‘As if’ from “As if I could care less,” the actual sarcasmism, changes it from snide to counterintentional.)

2 Almost a parody, or was it, the 12-29 LATimes think-piece debating whether Disney’s negative portrayal of the lady writer of ‘Mary Poppins’ in ‘Saving Mr. Banks’ was fair featured interviews only with people at Disney who worked on the movie. They all seemed to feel they did a good job. Yet some people still think the Times is in Disney’s pocket! (Thank you Diane.)

TV

Seeing old Hitchocks on Antenna TV, you can observe careers that grew and that didn’t. Robert Redford did a couple - he did OK later. Robert Horton was great in his pre-Wagon Train work, but then stalled. Ralph Meeker from the Mike Hammer movie was on several, but later he froze too. Watching Royal Dano on one episode, one sees resemblance to Gary Cooper, tall, thin, laconic and compelling, but like Lee Van Cleef he moved on mainly to roles as an unshaven bad guy in Westerns. Dick York as a psycho killer was a surprise. But it’s always great to see character actors like Percy Helton and Robert Emhardt ... Is the only late night tv talk show with a predominantly white band Arsenio’s? ... When someone on tv speaking from a desk turns to look, supposedly, at a visual placed next to them - they look immediately in that direction, like 90 degrees. Wrong. We see THEM in depth. Though they are on a flat screen, we accept that they are 5 or 10 feet away. When an image is plastered up, it is on on the screen between us. They should look slightly forward to the image we are sharing. My life is a vale of suffering ... Some of the local newscasts lead with ads. You go to the 8 am news and there’s two minutes of commercials before the program. And 10-second newscast teasers are another insult. If you’re half-eyeing commercials with the sound off, the sight of a news reader causes you to flip on the sound and he says “These stories coming up after these messages.” Like when SNL breaks the commercial chain to show a SNL set being prepared and returns with more ads.

CRITICS

In Mel Brooks “History of the World,” caveman Sid Caesar is identified as the first artist, painting an ox on a cave wall. Next an oxlike cavemen walks in, stares, and pisses on it. He is identified as the first critic.

LAT Aug 2, Joe Flint: A tv producer “took heat from critics about the politically incorrect humor“ of a new show. Took heat? Parentally, the producer told Flint to wait and watch the show develop. In a lather Flint wrote “The critics did not seem willing to oblige, however.” Hear them roar.

Oct 4, Charles McNulty, LAT theater crit: “The knock against Neil Simon in the early days was that he cared more about his punch lines than his characters.” THE knock? Where was this knock? Oh, typewriter-peckers. And “in the early days” means that in time they developed new knocks, which helped who how?

Sept 14, NYT, Manohla Dargis goes to a film festival for us, and bitches that “some attendees wrote themselves silly as they breathlessly praised” a film while missing a point that only Manohla, apparently, saw. She crows her superiority over other road-trip expense-account crits! Rude shoptalk.

Dec 3, Amy Kaufman told us ad nauseum about her girlhood crush on the late actor Paul Walker, opening “When I was in high school, my bedroom wall served mainly as a canvas for displaying 90s teen heartthrobs,” which differentiates her from other teen girls of that era how?

Well, maybe it’s in the female-only LAT style-book. The opening graph of Margaret Gray’s 9-28 review of a Leiber-Stoller musical said the songs “took me back to my teenaged years, when my brother strictly forbade me to sing any song he liked.” Forget Leiber or Stoller, more about you, ladies.

Wait. This just belatedly in. Mary McNamara, another person with the secret LAT privilege book, wrote 9-7 about actor Derek Jacobi “I have written only one fan letter in my life, and that was to Derek Jacobi.” New graph. ”I wrote it, and God forgive me sent it.” (Calm down, Mare.) Eight more lines, new graph. “So, yes, I was that girl. Fat and unhappy, with the glasses and the zits.” Next three graphs opened with “I” and I didn’t turn to page D6 to see more. Ay yi I.

NYTimes

I’m not familiar with high-society argot. The headline on a 10-31 Style section announcement that a gal is ready to be seen with other swells in NY society, “Another Chandler Presents,” sounds like a female dog in heat. (I wondered, for a second, if she was honored for being a member of LA’s newspaper family, hahahaha) ... 12-26, Patricia Cohen writes abashedly about an art dealer, normally a sainted personage, who fobbed phony ‘masterpieces’ on buyers. Shouldn’t this be tilted to address the underlying fact that art’s value, re the marketplace, is a price-based illusion? Or maybe the emperor’s new clothes are real.

Lite leads on the 12-2 NYT Business Day section’s front page:

- You know there is trouble when Tony Robbins, the tirelessly upbeat Mr. Motivation, is sulking.”

-: It was a cold, clear day in Leesburg, Va.., and a security guard at the outlet mall there said the mid morning crowd was similar to that of a typical busy Saturday.

- Michael L. Corba, head of one of the biggest banks in the world, recently strolled through Marea, the Central Park South restaurant where Manhattan’s elite go to be seen.

Yes but what should I invest in !!!!

LATimes

12-6 “according to people familiar with their discussions who spoke under the condition of anonymity because the deal hadn’t been yet announced.” Space wasting dribble. A reader must suspect Dylan Hernandez is uncertain to require that extraordinarily long dodge. The earthshaking issue at hand was that someone had signed a contract to play some sport. He could have just waited and signed a press release, like they do in the rest of the paper .... 10-20 A policewoman ‘performer’ outside a tourist spot “spoke on the condition that her full name not be published because, she said, her parents don’t know about her side work” supplementing her true calling as a screenwriter. Reporter Catherine Saillant is a humorist but doesn’t know it ... 11-16 hed, a black woman’s shooting “has been likened” to the Trayvon Martin case. This is supported by the same newspaper’s 11-13 story that the case “elicits comparisons” and “has raised comparisons,” as if agitative reporters aren’t the ones stirring those coals.

Words

A man on CSPAN said that someone was not “fixed” on an idea. The first time someone hasn’t said ‘fixated’ in a decade ... My mother took me to tap dance lessons. I liked the idea of huge metal cleats on shiny shoes, but not the lessons. The class was held in a studio above a bar. The bar sign said “On tap” so I thought that all bars had tap dance studios upstairs.

Four Eyes 3

I have begun using eyeglasses. When reading at night, they help. When seeing the tv 3 feet past my feet too.

When the lady was examining my eyes she said “Do you have floaters?” I was shocked at this precise term for the amoebas that cross my vision field. She said it was nothing, just my retina or something disconnecting and leaving traces. Like the solar system chatter from the Big Bang.

When I ordered the glasses, the salesman asked “Do you want to pay extra for scratch-resistant lenses?”

What is going on? Are the others scratch-attracting? It’s like asking “Want to pay extra for the nonpoisonous soup?”

3 A good Lovin’ Spoonful song in which John Sebastian vents about being teased as a child because he wore glasses.

Esquire, for the sophisticated male

Looking at a May issue at a doctors office.

- “Get to know your hostess.” Conversation with 21-year-old Danish model Nina Agdal, who hosts this month’s music coverage.

- Feature: “Funny joke from a beautiful woman.”

- Profile: Mafia contract killer who “hid his profession from his family.” Profession? Perhaps a potential career choice for young readers.

Cars

I recently bought another, so I garage it and leave the old car on the driveway. Since it’ll to be there a while, I put a cover on it, then when it rained I learned the damn thing is porous. I don’t want it clinging to the wet car so the solution is to remove the cover when it rains. Nuts ... I wanted an air freshener for inside the new car, which sat on the driveway for 6 months before its papers cleared, so threw some Breeze dryer sheets in it. Those laundry fresheners baked in a purdy smell in the summer heat, and now I put them in my drawers (dresser drawers) ... A few years ago when I wanted to play an iPod in the car, I bought a mini-broadcaster that plugs in the cigarette lighter and attaches to your iPod and sends a signal to the radio, which you’ve tuned to an unused FM station matching the device. The one I bought at the Apple store in 2007 cost $90. The one I recently bought at Ross’s cost $8, and will probably drop in price because I am the only person left who knows what it is ...

The news

If I read another ‘news’ item about a Tweet I’m gonna .. I don’t know what

Did you her that Nelson Mandela died? Surprise - he was only 95. A whole week of mourning for the great nation of ... how is that nation faring? Then another week contemplating life without him.

Some tv hick says he thinks gays are unnatural. So? It’s a free country. Homosexuality looks queer to some people but it’s always been here. Who cares what he says? 4 (I think flying is unnatural. We were not meant to hurl through the air in a metal tube. So fire me.)

Early December - Tapes released a year later of Newtown emergency calls. (Can’t wait to hear them!) A week later “Newtown still suffering.” That’s after the 6-month anniversary ‘celebrated’ in May. The story keeps on giving.

Some tv news highlights -

- We don’t know at this time if the shooter has been captured or whether or how many people were shot.

- (The latest kid-shooting) “is very unsettling sight for people who have lived in Colorado.” I lived in Colorado, but don’t think it gives me grieving rights. Everyone’s upset.

- It is apparently over, whatever has happened.

- The happiest place on earth has just got merrier. Disneyland has announced ...

(c) Arturo Dos Passos.

4 Breaking news for the new year. Jan 2, someone has found an old tape of him saying men should marry young girls! The news is all over it. This is a publicity fountain of plenty. What kind of fools run tv news?

Newspapers

The end of each baseball season is a problem for me.

I rush through the LATimes each morning, and leave the NYTimes for later. When the laters pile up high I take a few weeks worth into the kitchen and read them while standing in front of the tv watching baseball.

But only baseball. You look up only when something happens, which is rare. You can’t read and watch The Daily Show or CSPAN, they’re too contentic.

I guess I’ll have to substitute poker shows.
They have 15 minutes of play and 45 of gab.

Penneys from hell

I wear thin cotton ‘dress’ socks, or did. Got’em at JCPenneys for a-number-multiplied-by-ten years. They were 100%, and of a certain heft. Penneys quit making them when they went, disastrously, boutique. And now I’m lost.

Substitutes available online are of the same content but less heft. Hence, as one walks, the thin, wispy socks sink into your (my) shoes. Maybe ‘polished’ cotton, or worse waxed.

It’s a problem. My shoes don’t accommodate fat athletic socks. Shall I get all new shoes? A dozen years ago I engaged in correspondence with a sock manufacturer, for Penneys, in North Carolina where the cotton is high. I must rifle through my files and find that source.

Also, t-shirts with a pocket (widely being eliminated “for your convenience”) were sold at Penneys under the house brand name. Now they sell an odd brand, and they, too, are thin almost to the point of transparency and cost more.
Probably for my convenience.

Know anyone like this?

Pill, the blasting lead singer of a rock band, informed me that my love for Mel Torme’s singing was a mistake.

“That’s not singing, it’s trickery. He’s fooling you.”

You don’t think, perhaps, that it’s a matter of personal taste?

“No! It’s not singing! It’s just vocal athletics.”

But what if I like it?

“You’re being fooled.”

You know Pill, I went into your closet and I tried on your shoes. You’re wrong to wear them. They don’t fit! It’s not my opinion, it’s fact.

Get a grip!

Chicago’s high temp was minus-3 the first of January.
I remember weather like that.

A while ago I was in NY walking on snow in 15 degree weather with two NYers who were grimacing “Damn it’s COLD” and I said “What’s so bad about it?” I told this to a Syracuse friend now living in LA and he wrote :

I too have a snobbish short fuse for "Weather Wussies"-- being from Syracuse, NY, which has all the cold of Chi-town but with even MORE snow! I don't know why LA soccer moms kvetching about being "totally totally freezing"  when SoCal temps plummet to 55 degrees bugs me so much...I think it's because 'Cuse-type folks ( like my 83-year old mom!) just uncomplainingly go about the business of shoveling their driveways & scraping their windshields without a lot if bellyachin' .

Time

Skip Heller, on FB in December:

“It is the 33rd anniversary of my first paying music gig.

I made $3.

Today I make five times that much!”

- 57 -

Mark On The Move - by Mark Leviton
 
For the second year in a row, the Melvin Seals-lead JGB came to the Auburn Events Center on the Saturday before Christmas for a “Very Jerry Xmas” event, for which the sets – including the opening act, local favorites Achilles Wheel – leaned heavily on songs associated with Jerry Garcia. 

Keyboardist Seals played with Garcia from 1980 until Jerry’s death in 1995, and hies to the style of the Jerry Garcia Band, which had a repertoire separate from the Grateful Dead.  Achilles Wheel included several GD tunes in their set, including “Shakedown Street” and “West L.A. Fadeaway,” and did long jams on two songs from GD setlists, “Not Fade Away” and “Iko Iko,” before Seals came out for two sets, beginning with one of Jerry’s favorite Dylan tunes “Tough Mama.”  The Garcia-ized versions of “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together” lacked drive, but then I never liked them when Jerry used to perform them either.  The standout for me was the long medley/jam on “It’s No Use” (a song co-written by the underappreciated Swamp Dogg), Little Milton’s “That’s What Love Will Make You Do” and Hank Ballard’s “Tore Up.”  Dave Hebert’s guitar work and vocals were spot on, and Melvin’s soloing on organ was ferocious and funky.
 
I’d known about the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento ever since I moved to Northern California in 2005, but had never visited, figuring a backwater like Sacramento was unlikely to have a first-class collection.  Boy, was I wrong! 

I went to see the special exhibit from Stockton-born artist Kara Walker, whose show at the Hammer Museum in Westwood blew me away in 2008.  The Crocker show was much smaller but nonetheless contained some powerful new work, reflecting Walker’s continuing effort to forge a transgressive African-American visual art from traditional “home arts” like antebellum-era black silhouettes and puppetry. 

I especially liked a series of lithographs in which Walker reprints pages from an old book on the history of the Civil War (which conveniently omits most mentions of slavery), obscuring parts of each page with silhouettes of the missing black people and their sufferings.  She often uses traditional racist imagery (including “mammy” and “pickaninny” stereotypes) to force a dialog with the past.  Her work deals explicitly with difficult subjects of race, sexuality and violence, and this exhibit carried clear warnings at the entrance suggesting parents might want to consider if their children are old enough to deal with what Walker shows.
 
The biggest surprise of my visit to the Crocker was how outstanding the permanent exhibition of modern art is.  There are fantastic displays in beautifully designed, spacious, and light-filled rooms, and I was introduced to dozens of artists new to me, many of whom have taught at local universities in Sacramento, David and Folsom.  There are also great works by Georgia O’Keefe, Irving Norman, Romare Bearden and other better-known artists.  I was especially impressed by two modern works: the huge fiberglass sculpture by Luis Jimenez called “Progress II,” which appropriates the “frontier” art of Frederick Remington to critique the role of myth in America, and a large (114 x 170 inches) canvas titled “Portrait of My Father” by Stephen Kaltenbach, which uses a vine-and-leaf lattice pattern to illustrate the subject’s hair and beard, rendering a powerful, spiritual portrait of a man near the end of his life. 

Oh heck, writing about art isn’t really my thing.  Until you get to the Crocker in person you can get an idea of the Kaltenbach painting here: 
http://www.rsaf.us/artistdb/artist.php?artist_id=8&section_id=1&image_id=7
 
         
-- Mark Leviton
 
(Mark’s sixties-themed radio show Pet Sounds can be heard alternate Wednesdays 10pm-Midnight PST on KVMR-FM 89.5 in the Sacramento area and streaming at www.kvmr.org .  You can access his latest podcast and playlists at www.petsoundsmusic.com)