James Gandolfini was Bear, the semi-kindhearted semi-mobbed-up stuntman in Get Shorty. I never saw him in anything else, except that submarine movie with Gene Hackman.
Get Shorty
is the best movie about the movie business I ever saw. It’s the most “Los Angeles” movie ever made. It’s the only Elmore Leonard book I ever read. I read it because I liked the movie, and wondered if the book was any good. It was alright. Get Shorty has one of the best soundtracks of any movie I’ve ever heard. Get Shorty has one of the best soundtracks of any movie I’ve ever heard. It was the last fresh sale date for about 75 percent of the cast, too.
My brother Garrett told me yesterday that he has a friend that plays saxophone, and has played with everybody. He laughed and told me his friend can claim to have played with Garrett, and with Elvis. I said I knew who Garrett was, but which Elvis was he referring to? That’s how crabby my worldview is.
James Gandofini was Bear, and he was someone because I watched Get Shorty and liked it. You could run over the rest of the cast of The Sopranos with a bus and I’d never notice. RIP big fellow.
Santo and Johnny, two nice Italian boys from Brooklyn.
I’d be hard pressed to come up with a more unlikely word salad than: Italian kid in New York City playing steel guitar. But America’s always been like that. Everybody feels like they should be able to glom onto any tradition extant in the land and have a go at it. There are no permanent classes, but there are always pedal steel classes.The radio, TV, and the movies were the great uniters then. Everyone listened and saw all the same things, more or less. It’s more fractured now. You can blissfully hang out in one little, crabby corner of the intellectual world, and never hear of anything that might upset you. You can concentrate fully on only upsetting other people.
The Billboard Top 10 Singles list for 1959 is glorious, and pretty variegated. Catholic. It’s goes from Lloyd Price to Conway Twitty and back again. It spans the gap between Ray Charles and Alvin and the Chipmunks, with plenty of stops in between, too. There’s plenty of dreck on there, but it seems harmless. There’s a lot more really good singers on there than you’ll find Auto-tuning their way across the landscape now. When all you had was a plate reverb to tart up your singing, you were more likely to learn how to sing before you got a gold record, I guess. And I bet every single name on the list could sing the National Anthem better than I’ve heard it in 25 years, and knew the words by heart, too. Including Santo and Johnny, who didn’t sing.
The naugahyde was cool against your cheek. I remember that.
Driving back from Roxbury. Rambling along the Charles on Storrow. The car pitched and yawed on its butt-sprung suspension and the spidered pavement. You could reach down and lift the floor mat to see the asphalt roll by through the rusty pinholes in the floor, where the road salt had done its work, and worked overtime, too.
Pop was operatin’. He was like a sub commander. Steering through shoals with vision obscured. Our moist breath fuddled the windshield. The defroster exhaled on the glass like the dying animal it was. Pop wiped the fog away with his hanky, and pressed on.
Little brother was already asleep on the seat next to you. Mom packed blankets and pillows around him to hold him on the seat. I bivouacked on the rest, and tried to align my face on the part where the cushion wasn’t split from a thousand butts. The edge of the rip would cut your face and the foam would tickle you.
The scene was framed, imperfectly, through the lens of the side window. Left to right, the world ran past. The drops of condensation coalesced on the movie screen of the fogged window, ran down, and revealed the Cambridge shore through the mist. Low-watt Christmas everywhere. The enormous billboards were shrunk by distance and time and poverty to faraway smears of luminous color with winking neon and the stink of death on their topics. FULLER OLDS. NECCO. KASANOF’S. The window made them into a kaleidoscope.
The useless wipers went scrreee-BAP, scrreee-BAP over and over, and Pop would fiddle with everything to no effect and keep going. Mom would look out the window and over her shoulder and her thoughts were her own. The Christmas presents from doting Aunts who asked over and over, “Which one are you?” shifted and tumbled over in the trunk an inch behind my head when we got to the huge sign that said REVERSE CURVE — the one that caught Pop by surprise, every time, even though he was born a brisk walk from it.
There was sometimes a hand free to twist the huge, mostly useless dial on the radio. Snap, Crackle, Pop, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, came out of that thing. At night the big stations like BeeZee would bleed all over the place, and bizarre incursions of French from Canada would appear, unwonted, fight for primacy like radio chimeras, then disappear as Pop searched again for whatever you could catch and hold.
Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone…
My friend Gerard sent along this obviously mislabeled video he found on YouTube. It says it’s from Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide, but it’s obviously footage from last year’s Father’s Day celebration at Sippican Cottage. I’ve a good mind to call YouTube and straighten them out. Anybody got YouTube’s phone number?
Shakespeare can be tough sledding for the average person. It doesn’t scan like contemporary text or sound like contemporary speech. It’s acted badly, mostly, by Americans I have seen. This same speech delivered by Charlton Heston is a hash. But he really wasn’t much of an actor. Just popular.
But Brando can do it. The words, and the force behind them are instantly understood tripping out of his mouth. I think it’s a kind of respect for the audience. He wants to make himself understood, both words and subtext.
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest -
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men -
Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
They used to call it Grammar School. It’s the only school Shakespeare ever attended. It’s the only school the greatest writer who ever lived needed. I’m told they used to teach grammar there.
Month: June 2013
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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