#the only GOOD movie out of this is vinny everybody go watch that one

[andyridgeley]

my top 4 movies that are not necessarily my favorite nor do i need to watch them all the way through, but i will ALWAYS get excited and turn them on as background if i see they're on

tagging @newlacesleeves @amazingpetey @andrew3garfield @lucy-sky @bruceewayne @splendiferous-bitch if ya want or if anyone else wants to go for it!

[ladyshandioftheendless]

~KISS AU writings 8~

THIS ONE HAS BEEN A LONG TIME COMING!! There’s apparently been a lot of anticipation for it too so here we go!! 

~Shandi

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~EXOTIC DANCER AU~

Featured Pairing: Bruce Kulick/Paul Stanley

Special Guests: Gene Simmons, Eric Carr, Ace Frehley, Peter Criss, Vinnie Vincent

Summary: Bruce’s friends take him to a gentleman’s club for his birthday. He falls hard for one of the dancers..and things go off the rails~ (told from Bruce’s POV)

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SURPRISE!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRUCE!!

I laugh as I’m showered with confetti as soon as I come through my door. Eric comes up and straps a party hat to my head. This was totally unexpected! I bet they’d been planning this for weeks! They guide me to my kitchen where there’s a huge pizza and a beautiful birthday cake waiting on the table. The living room is decorated with balloons, streamers, colorful plates and napkins. I can’t believe they did all of this for me! I’m not going to cry! 

Ace goes into my fridge and pulls out a big case of beer. “Can’t have a party without the party favors!” he said with his usual maniacal cackle. Gene shakes his head. “Just go easy on those cause we’ve got plans later. And if you get drunk I’m not taking you.” Plans? What’s he got in mind? Ace whines but eventually he agrees. These plans must be pretty damn great if it gets Ace to not drown himself in booze. I worry about him sometimes.. Eric distracts me by patting my back. “Cmon, birthday boy let’s get this party started!��� 

We carry everything into the living room and set it all on the coffee table. Peter goes over to my tv to put in a movie. “I brought ‘the Godfather.’ It’s a great movie, you’re gonna love it!” Ohhhh, Peter and his love for gangster movies~ It’s a nice sentiment but I’m pretty sure nobody will pay attention except for me and him..and Eric. Cause he’s a nice guy like that~ Fortunately I was wrong. We all sat with our beers (Gene with his soda), and pizza with our eyes glued to the screen. I’d heard of this movie but I’d never actually seen it before. It was really good! Nothing gave Peter more joy than watching someone else enjoy the movies he enjoyed~ After the movie was over Eric went into the kitchen to grab a knife and candles. “It’s cake time!” After the candles were placed Ace took out his lighter to light them. They sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me loudly and obnoxiously..just like I expected. Bunch of idiots. But they’re my idiots~ I blow out all the candles in one breath and they applaud. Eric hands me the knife. “Birthday boy gets the first piece!” I can’t wait to dig into it. It’s all chocolate. I can smell it..and it’s wonderful~ I cut out five pieces and put them on our plates. We spend the next couple of hours enjoying our cake and joking with each other. This has been the best birthday I’ve had in years~

Gene looks at his watch and grins. “Alright, gentlemen it’s time to go~ We gotta get there before all the good seats are gone.” Ace is already up on his feet and ready to go which startles the hell out of me. “About damn time! Lead the way, Genie!” Gene sighed. “Change first. We brought extra clothes for a reason.” I blink. When he sees my confusion Gene pats my shoulder. “It’s a very nice place..so we have to dress nice. I suggest a suit jacket and slacks.” Sounds fancy. And expensive. Also the fact that Gene is perfectly fine with spending that much money on me is not helping my case for not trying to cry. “O-okay. I’ll find something to change into.” I go to my room while the others take turns changing in the bathroom. Going through my closet I find the gray suit I wore to my brother’s wedding. This is perfect! Hoping it still fits I try it on. To my absolute relief it does. Taking off the jacket I take out a nice white button up shirt. I thought about wearing a tie but I decide against it. I don’t think we need to go that formal. Once we’re all done dressing we gather in the front hall. Gene picks up his keys. “We can all go in my car. I’ve got room for everyone. Birthday boy has shotgun~” I feel so special~ With a smile I let everyone out the door and lock up. Looks like it’s going to be a pretty interesting night~

When we reach our destination I see a long line of people waiting to get into some kind of club. “Is that where we were going? There’s no way we’re getting in there!” Gene parked the car and turned off the engine. “Relax, Bruce. I told you I’ve got it covered. Trust me~” When he says things like that I can’t bring myself to question him. We all get out and head straight for the entrance. Once the bouncers spot us I start getting nervous. They look like they’re ready to beat the hell out of all of us. Calm as ever Gene just takes out his wallet, opens it up and shows it to them. “Good evening. We have a reservation.” One of the bouncers narrows his eyes and looks closer, makes an expression of recognition and pulls the door open. “Good evening, Mr. Simmons.” he says. “Gentlemen, welcome to the Firehouse.” Ace was cracking up and smacking Gene on the back. “They know you by name, Genie? How many times have ya been here~?” Gene just reached back to put his wallet away. “If you really must know I just happen to have a VIP membership to this place. With it I can pretty much get anyone I bring with me in here for free so I figured why not~?” I’m just at a loss for words. Not to mention relieved that he actually didn’t have to spend ridiculous amounts of money to get us in. A high class place like this cannot be cheap. “I..I dunno what to say, Gene..except thank you~” I can tell Peter’s already taking a liking to his surroundings. I’m guessing this is his kind of place~ Eric looked a bit nervous but tried to play it off. I think as long as we stay with him he won’t get too overwhelmed. 

Gene guides us to the main lounge. The stage was lined with neon lights shaped to look like fire. The dance pole was of course made to look like one you’d see at a firehouse. Clever~ When we take our seats a very good-looking man comes over dressed in a skimpy gold fireman’s costume. “Good evening, gentlemen~ I’m Vinnie and I’ll be your server tonight~ Can I get you anything~?”

“How about a tall glass of you, baby~?” Ace said, leaning back in his chair and cackling with Peter joining him. Those two, I swear~ Whenever they get together craziness follows. Vinnie just took it all in stride. I’m sure he’s heard those kinds of comments before. Many times. “I’ve got the time if you’ve got the money, handsome~” Ace’s eyes went wide. He definitely wasn’t expecting that response~ “Why don’t you tell me what you’re worth~?” We all turn to stare at him, except Peter who’s still laughing his ass off. “What? Heeey..Brucie shouldn’t be the only one gettin’ the special treatment~” Vinnie was clearly amused at Ace’s eagerness. “Well..let me at least take your drink orders first before we get down to business~” We all order drinks, except Gene who asks for water. “Be right back~” Vinnie turned on his gold stiletto heels and walked off towards the bar. “Do you actually have the money, Ace?” Gene asked, leaning forward. “The ‘company’ here isn’t cheap you know. Some of these beauties cost up to $10,000 for a night.” My jaw drops. “Seriously?! I wouldn’t mind having some fun either but not if it’s going to bankrupt me!” Ace just waved us off. “Will you relax, Genie? I got it covered! That Vinnie’s lookin’ mighty fine and I want a piece of that tonight~”

A few minutes later Vinnie comes back with our drinks and sets them on our table before going over to Ace. “So what would you like~? It’s $1,000 if you want a private dance and $5,000 if you want my company for the night~” Ace is grinning from ear to ear as he gets up and wraps his arm around Vinnie’s shoulders. “Think I’m gonna go with option B, sweet thing~ Let’s go have some fun, hah~?” I can’t believe he’s doing this! Neither can Eric. We both just gawk at them as they leave. Peter on the other hand is beside himself. “Knock ‘im dead!” he shouts, waving until they’re out of sight. Gene picks up his glass and takes a sip. “I guess he’s finding his own way home tonight.” Before I can even fathom what the hell just happened the lights went out. The flames around the stage glowed brighter and a spotlight shined down on the dance pole. Looked like the show was finally starting! As soon as the music began everybody was clapping and scrambling to get closer to the stage. Apparently this dancer was very popular. I recognize the song right away and I have myself a little laugh. At least now I’m familiar with one other person who actually liked Queen’s Hot Space album~ The dancer sashayed down the dimly lit part of the stage to the song’s intro. Guys were attempting to lean over to get a closer look but the ‘flames’ were a pretty damn sufficient deterrent. 

Body Language

Body Language

Grabbing the pole the dancer pulled himself into the spotlight and hooked his leg around the pole, swaying his hips back and forth to the rhythm. The crowd was going wild and now I could see why. Holy shit, that dancer was sexy! He sparkled from head to toe in a rhinestone studded black bodysuit (with a large majority of those rhinestones covering his crotch) cut incredibly low in the front to reveal his entire torso, complete with a black leather collar and belt, studded with rhinestones that shaped stars. He had thick, curly hair the went down his back and bangs that framed his face just perfectly. A face that was covered in white makeup with a black star over his right eye and bright red lips. Wow..I don’t think I’ve ever seen an exotic dancer go that far with their makeup. But it was fascinating and impossible for me to take my eyes away.

Give me your body

Just give me your body

He slowly spun around the pole a few times, I think just to get a better look at his audience, who were already clamoring for his attention and holding out money in hopes that he’d take it from them. It was quite a spectacle. He ignored them of course, just to tease them further. I could see the smirk on his face as he pulled himself to the pole again and started grinding his pelvis against it. 

Give me your body

Don’t talk

Body Language

He moved up and down the pole with his legs spread apart, gyrating his hips while his hair flew about with every movement of his head. Damn, it was hot. Glancing around at the others I could see that they were just as mesmerized. I never thought anyone could command that much attention on a pole without even removing a single piece of clothing. 

Body Language

Body Language

He threw his head back, and he looked so damn good with his lips parted like that. Like he was giving himself the ultimate pleasure. 

You got red lips

Damn right he did~ He turned his head to look out at the crowd, tracing his upper lip with his tongue.

Snakes in your eyes

He leaned his head forward and threw it back again, making his curls fly everywhere.

Long legs 

Great thighs

He grabbed the pole with both hands and raised his leg high in the air. Only then did I notice he was wearing rhinestone studded platform heeled boots. How is he even doing that while wearing those?! They must weigh a ton!

You’ve got the cutest ass I’ve ever seen

Knock me down for a six any time

He turned his back to the crowd and swayed his hips again, showing off his beautiful ass to that hungry crowd. Oh, they were riled up now. Too bad they could look but they couldn’t touch. 

Look at me, I got a case of Body Language

Look at me, I got a case of Body Language..

The song was nowhere near over, but it began to fade out. What a cruel punishment. Give them a taste of what they want then cut them off and leave them begging for more. An excellent strategy to get them to pay more money. The dancer took the time to collect the money they desperately wanted to give him. They placed bills in his belt, in his boots, and if they were really lucky he’d lean down and they’d place bills inside of his suit. God, I wish I could give him money right now..cause he sure as hell earned it. As he moved off the stage the same way he came in, the entire place erupted in applause, us included. A voice suddenly blasted from the speakers. 

Alright, Firehouse!! Show your love for StarChild!!

So that’s what he’s called. Perfect name~ Since the show was over I figured we would all be leaving so I get up from my chair. Gene grabs my hand to stop me. “Hang on, Bruce..you’re not going anywhere just yet. You have a date with that dancer~” Wait. WHAT? I must’ve been hearing things! “I’m..what..?” Gene smiles and I can hear Peter and Eric snickering behind me. “That’s right~ A special little birthday gift from us to you~” I’m frozen. I can’t think. I can barely breathe. My brain is still trying to process what Gene has just told me. 

I am going to be spending the night with StarChild.

To be Continued!!

[spookysnicket]

ANON: Hey there, love your work!! May I have a matchup if you’re not too busy? I don’t have a gender preference, I like everybody 💦 I’m agender/asexual, I’m an animator and besides horror I love insects/arachnids. I’ve got a pet leech named Renfield 💖 I have kind of a bad temper and it’s not hard to make me fly off the handle. My other job besides animation is I’m a live-in airbnb maid, I stock up on supplies and hide from the guests. Thank you so much for reading!!

---

(Here you go love! As always, matchup under the cut)

I match you with Vincent Sinclair

🖌  Vincent doesn’t speak, but in his head, he always thinks about you with your proper pronouns

🖌 I HC that Vincent’s either demisexual or asexual as well. Besides- bodies, to him, are more associated with art and anatomy than anything else

🖌 Seeing as you’re an animator and Vincent’s a wax sculptor- I propose to you both: stop motion! Just imagine it- you planning out storyboards and characters, while Vinny creates all the little parts and pieces out of wax! You two could spend hours making little movies or skits

🖌 Vinny isn’t particularly partial to any one specific genre when it comes to movie night, so he’ll be down to sit with you and relax with any good horror or classic slasher flicks of your choice!

🖌 A lot of his works (aside from, well, the “life-like” human pieces) on display in the museum are notably influenced by different creatures, bugs and insects included. I highly suggest, if it’s your thing, to watch the human centipede trilogy with him- it’ll give him a bout of inspiration, if you can see where I’m going

🖌 Renfield is pretty nifty to Vinny! He’s intrigued by anything unusual, and quickly finds himself quite attached to your little leechy friend! However, sometimes, he means that literally- be sure to enforce the ‘no literal finger food’ rule, or else you’ll catch Vinny with his hand stuck in Renfield’s tank making wiggly fingers at the little guy

🖌 Vincent worries quite a bit when you and Bo get into heated arguments- he’s really the only thing that could set you off, and when you get into a rage, it’s scary to Vinny

🖌 He’ll do his best to calm you down when you get angry, and as much as he wants to see you be happy again- if you need to be left alone, he’ll give you as much space as you need

🖌 There’s no way to say it other than how it is, Vincent absolutely understands the stocking up and hiding away thing. He just makes art all day, puts it up in the museum, and lurks in the shadows away from any unfortunate travelers until Bo lures them in enough to get to work. So, there’s a few differences- but it’s the thought that counts! You’re hermits together!

[ontherockswithsalt]

A Made Man

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A/N: Here’s a quick little Joble chapter for a weekend smile. Before Jamie drops his bomb in the next.

Chapter 25.

“Bahamas?” I question, a jealous uptick in my voice, but I smile at the notion. Propping the phone against my shoulder, I pry off the cap to a beer and drop the bottle opener back in the drawer. “Damn. Poor you.”

“I know,” Noble muses on the other end of the line. “Bianca too. We leave the 23rd and we're staying five days.”

“Nice.”

“You’ve gotta see this resort,” he tells me. “And I wish you could come. A week there at the beach with you? I'd wear your ass out.”

Exhaling hard, I nearly fail to swallow my beer as I make my way to the couch. “Now that’s the Christmas spirit.”

“It could be,” he laughs. “A Tropical Christmas Getaway like one of those Hallmark movies I swore I'd never watch but maybe watched last Sunday. We'd have to like, hate each other but we booked a room at the same resort. But they confused the reservation and now we have to share a room.”

“Oh, is that how those movies go?”

“I don't know. I've never watched one,” he replies innocently.

I hum, amused.

“I'm just guessing.”

Sighing deeply, I lean back on my couch and tip my beer to my lips. “Well. Most likely I'll be working over Christmas. And then hanging out with my dad and my grandpa. And some ham.”

“Hey, other than the work thing, that'll be relaxing,” Noble reasons.

“And thinking about you in those shorts,”  I have to add. “Now that I know what you’ll be up to.”

“The flamingo ones?”

“Preferably.”

“I'll be sure to let you know when I'm wearing them.”

“They hold a lot of good memories for me.”

He laughs. “Yeah, me too.”

“So what are you up to this weekend?”

“I am--” He sighs. “Installing a storm door on my side entry.”

“Really? No tequila and strippers?”

“It's just my bad influence boyfriend who gets me into that kind of trouble.”

“Oh yeah?” I smirk. “He sounds like bad news. You should break up with him.”

“No way. You should see him naked,” he teases. “It makes up for everything. And he's a good kisser and I love him a lot.”

Pressing my lips together, I suppress a smile and murmur, “What am I gonna do with you?”

“Anything you want.”

Exhaling a soft laugh, I shake my head. I miss him so much. But thankfully, after a week apart, it's not an ache that stirs in my chest -- only every now and then -- but a content sort of longing fulfilled by the promise of him. “Well you and I both might be working on some home projects this weekend. Only mine is somebody else's.”

“What's that?”

“You know how I told you I lied in a panic to my brother and said I was helping Vinny tear out kitchen floors last weekend?” I remind him, leaning in to slide my beer bottle on the coffee table. “Well I can't live with the guilt of using him as an excuse so now I've volunteered myself to go over there and let him put me to work.”

He chuckles. “I saw that coming.”

“So that, plus nephew’s basketball game, and helping my niece with a driving lesson and I’m pretty booked.”

“Look at you. Uncle of the year, man.”

“What can I say?”

“Hey, you face danger on a daily basis, but spending the day with a sixteen year old behind the wheel in New York might be the bravest fucking thing you ever do.”

“If I don’t come back alive--” I begin with a somber dramatic pause. “I want you to have my pan.”

His loud laugh rumbles through the phone and makes me smile. “I will throw that damn pan in the river,” he threatens. “I will go to your funeral with that pan. And sob through my eulogy. And then I’ll launch that pan into the East River while they play those bagpipes and someone has to haul me away.”

Resting my head back on the couch, I crack up, rubbing my eyes in amusement.

“I don’t care that nobody even knows who I am,” he carries on. “I’ll just show up. With this rant like, he never lived up to his domestic potential! Sure he may have saved my life. But at night… he went home to his one pan that he got at Target when he was nineteen--”

“I got that pan at a yard sale.”

“I’m hanging up,” he huffs in aggravation. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“It's a perfectly functional pan,” I insist.

“We really are breaking up,” he grumbles. “You let me eat eggs out of that yard sale pan.”

“And you lived to tell about it.”

“You say you love me, but look at you.”

My cheeks hurt, I'm laughing so hard. I push my hand up my face, rubbing the ache and let out a heavy exhale. “I'll win you back.”

“God,” he whispers despite his chuckles. “You're a disaster.”

“But a good kisser, though,” I remind him.

A little gravelly him rumbles from his throat. “Yeah I guess I'll hang onto you.”

“Okay good, because--” I pause to clear my throat, adjusting on the couch. “I have something I want to run by you.”

“Alright.”

“How would you feel if I told my sister about us?”

“Really?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“I uh--” Then he breathes out this nervous laugh. “I mean, that's up to you.”

“Well I know. But how you feel about it matters.”

“In a perfect world,” he begins. “Everyone would know and we'd just... go on with our lives like normal people. In a relationship.”

“Right.”

He's apprehensive when he asks, “What do you think she'll say?”

I consider it over a deep breath. “She'll have her concerns. And doubts. But I think ultimately she'll understand and maybe help me get some perspective about how the rest of my family is going to take it.”

A quiet pause hangs there for a moment. “I guess I just worry… that, I don't know, she'll convince you that this is one big mistake, or to end it before anyone else finds out.”

“She might try,” I reason. “But she's not going to say anything I haven't already thought about.”

Noble simply hums in thoughtful agreement.

“I have no intentions of ending it,” I assure him. “Okay? But once I tell Erin, I have to be ready to tell everybody. Because I can't really ask her to keep it quiet for too long.”

“I don't know your sister so I can't predict anything,” he says. “But I trust you. And you're all I want.”

A soft smile curves along my lips. “You got me,” I tell him. “I come with a lot though. And I want you to be a part of all of it.”

[mst3kproject]

Dance Hall Racket

Remember Timothy Farrell as gangster Umberto Scalli from Racket Girls? He's back with a new scheme in Dance Hall Racket!

What's that?  You want to know how he could be back in 1954's Dance Hall Racket when he was shot and killed in 1951's Racket Girls?  So do I.  My first theory was that Dance Hall Racket was actually a prequel to Racket Girls rather than a sequel, but he dies at the end of this one, too.  Farrell also played Scalli in a third movie, 1949's The Devil's Sleep (which I guess is actually the first Scalli movie, being as it was made before the other two).  I haven't seen that one, but I'll look for it, and if he doesn't die at the end I will be extremely disappointed.

Scalli's scheme this time is using a nightclub as a front to launder the money he makes by smuggling diamonds inside dogs' ears (this actually happens), but if he wants his longtime girlfriend Fortuna to marry him, he's gonna need more than that. An old friend of Scalli's, Victor Pappas, is about to be released from prison – if Scalli can make Pappas tell where he hid the loot from their last heist, he'll be rich enough to win her over, but little does he know, his criminal empire is about to topple (again). Undercover cop Charlie Edson is investigating him, looking for the murderer of a sailor.  You'd think being killed once would be enough to teach Scalli that crime doesn't pay.

The cops use the phrase 'sea men' to refer to sailors.  I'm imagining Tom and Crow snickering over that while Joel tries his best to keep them from making jokes too overt for television.

“But Joel, he said...”

“I know he did, Crow, but there are kids in the audience!”

I went into this movie trying not to remember the pain of watching Racket Girls, but I really expected more of the same.  Because of this, the first quarter hour or so of Dance Hall Racket was actually a pleasant surprise.  Racket Girls began with a scene of wrestling that really contributed nothing at all – Dance Hall Racket, however, got right on with actually telling its story!  The exposition about Scalli, Pappas, and Fortuna wasn’t too annoying, we got to see the sailor killed and Edson sent in undercover, and I began to hope that this might be an actual movie. Sadly, having set up all of that, the story came to a dead screeching halt and began puttering around killing time.

It does this in two main ways: one is watching women change.  These scenes are filled with weird cuts in which the characters’ clothes appear and vanish again, while the actresses remain standing in the same spot.  They’re often not wearing any less clothing, and the dialogue continues, so we’re not supposed to think that any time has passed.  I think the cuts may have less to do with modesty than with a camera that could only film a certain number of seconds in one take.  There’s also a scene in which two drunk women have some kind of limp-wristed parody of a catfight which is so bad it’s actually laugh-out-loud funny.

The other way the movie fills time is with Punchy, a supposed ‘comic relief’ character who is so devoid of humour I think I’ve forgotten how to tell a joke.

So yeah, all this goes on for another half an hour, during which time very little happens that’s actually relevant to the plot.  Occasionally hints of it peek out of the foliage, but mostly we’re listening to Punchy fail to be funny, or watching Scalli’s goons threaten women with knives when he thinks they’re stealing from him (like Jackie and her Swanky Apartment in Racket Girls, I guess).  Then when we’ve almost forgotten about him, Pappas finally shows up and the movie actually takes a surprising turn, when jealous and trigger-happy thug Vinnie takes exception to Scalli appointing his girlfriend Rose as Pappas’ date for the evening.

This is a surprisingly good piece of storytelling for this movie – Vinnie’s possessiveness of Rose was set up earlier, although by this point we’ve pretty much forgotten about that, too.  So much time was spent on other details of the characters’ lives and relationships that turned out to be irrelevant, we can’t be blamed for assuming Vinnie and Rose are more of the same.  Seeing it paid off like that was actually kind of satisfying.  Unfortunately, it also serves to emphasize just how many other things were set up in the movie that didn’t pay off, many of which seemed like they ought to be important.

What, for example, happened to Fortuna?  We only saw her in one scene and then she vanished utterly.  She was the one Scalli was trying to please, so you’d think we’d see her hanging around and pestering him.  What happened to Icepick, the guy who wanted to leave the racket and get married?  His story was set up in a way that makes us sure something terrible is going to happen to him, but the movie never gets around to it.  What’s up with Pappas being unable to speak?  We’re told twice that he had his tongue cut out and that really sounds like it ought to be a plot point but it never is. When he made sure Vinnie got shot I thought for a moment it would turn out that he’d agreed to work for the cops in order to get out of jail, but the movie ends without going into it.

It’s also another movie that can’t really be said to have a hero.  We don’t know Edson at all – we don’t even learn his name until well after he’s introduced and nothing he does ever gives him a personality.  He’s just A Cop.  The movie is much more interested in the various double-crossings among the nasty types who work for Scalli.  None of these people can really be considered a protagonist, since they’re all horrible and never sympathetic in the least, but they at least have relationships and motivations.

For all that, though, this is still a better movie than Racket Girls!  The irrelevant dancing is somehow much more bearable than irrelevant wrestling was, maybe because the dancing isn’t a contest and we don’t feel we’re supposed to have something invested in it when we can’t. More importantly, we don’t have a Peaches Page in this movie.  There are plenty of half-clothed women in it, and the movie leers at them unapologetically, but there’s no single one who is set up as a potential hero only to be exploited and forgotten about.  In this sense, Dance Hall Racket feels a little more honest and a little less disappointing.  It’s a terrible, terrible movie, but it’s not quite as bad as I know it could have been.

Between this and Racket Girls, I also think I’m starting to get an inkling of what, if indeed anything, the ‘Scalli Trilogy’ is trying to say.  The films are obviously about how crime doesn’t pay, but the comeuppances in them are not brought about by the police but by Scalli’s fellow criminals. Crime doesn’t pay, but organized crime in particular cannot possibly pay because everybody in the organization is a criminal, and criminals are by nature untrustworthy and therefore unable to work together.  Maybe this is what’s being emphasized by Lois the thief in this movie, or Jackie and her Swanky Apartment in Racket Girls – there can be no cooperation when everybody is out for themselves.

I also have to wonder what’s going on with the thing where Scalli dies in Movie One only to reappear in Movie Two a few years later and die again.  The two can’t possibly be in continuity with each other unless Scalli respawns like a video game character every time he’s killed, so what gives?  Is Dance Hall Racket supposed to be a remake?  That kind of makes sense when you consider how it does try to start correcting some of its predecessor’s mistakes. Is this an alternate universe, demonstrating that crime doesn’t pay in any possible world?  Has Scalli been reincarnated, only to learn nothing from the mistakes of his previous lifetime?  This fascinates me far more than it should.

You may wonder why I bother to think about it when the real answer is obviously just that the film-makers and actor Timothy Farrell were just too damned lazy to come up with a new character.  It’s true that there’s probably no more to it than that, and yet I’m not totally sure, because the movie does make a point of ending where it began.  With Scalli and Vinnie both dead and Icepick out of the racket, management of the club falls to the next guy down on the totem pole, bouncer Bert.  We’ve heard the girls who work there talk about him and how he keeps everybody in line – both the customers and the girls themselves. The policeman who has supposedly been narrating the whole story says they figure Bert is continuing to launder money and sooner or later he’ll be next on their list, and thus the whole cycle starts again.

I gotta see that third (first) Scalli movie.  Maybe that one will tell me whether there’s really anything going on there.  Or maybe, considering how much of an improvement this one was over Racket Girls, it’ll just be totally unwatchable.  The only thing I can be absolutely certain of is that Dance Hall Racket would have made for some awesome MST3K.

[thorntonkrell-blog-blog]

OH SHIT PART TWO

TERRI AND BILL AND KEN

My wife was telling me about the intoxicating smell that came from the packaging of Barbie dolls and Barbie accessories back in the day. I related that smell to the smell of a pack of baseball cards back in my day.

My father was a smoke eater. Neither the Barbie smell nor the card smell opened his olfactory doors to any extent.

He knew as much about dolls and cards as we knew about hooks and ladders.

Fifty years ago, I was losing the urge for cards. My sister, however, was in the ‘She Loves You’ stage of her Barbie mania.

She wanted/needed a companion for her Barbie. She needed a Ken and Christmas was approaching.

My father was all over it.

Pretty sure he told my Mom “I got this”.

Christmas arrived.

The gifts were under the tree.

One of the packages was a man wrapped rectangle.

Everybody knew what that rectangle contained under the ribbons and bows.

My parents distributed the gifts. Sweaters and shirts and socks came first while anticipation for the ‘good stuff’ built to a crescendo as the packages dwindled.

The good stuff was always at the end and the best thing was the last thing.

Finally, the only package left was the rectangle.

My sister was getting warmed up for that fake cry of surprise that we gave when we got what we wanted although we knew that it was coming.

My Dad, full of confidence and good cheer handed her the rectangle.

Terri opened the package slowly, savoring the moment. All eyes were upon her.

“ oh my God…thank you Sooo much…it’s a …..”

She hesitated to make sure…..the plastic didn’t smell right.

“ a Bill!?”

“You got her a Bill, Vinnie” asked my mother in subdued shock.

“yeah”, answered my Dad. The guy at the store told me Bill was better than Ken”.

He knew he was in hot water. Even though he was used to heat, This heat grew to stifling in a matter of seconds. There were no hoses available.

My sister, to her credit, refrained from dousing the fire with tears.

I’ll never forget the way she said “it’s a Bill.”

The celebration continued although smoke was filling the room.

As I recall the moment today, I can imagine what was going through my father’s mind when he bought the Bill.

To him, a doll was a doll and the fact that one doll looked exactly like the other doll and yet cost half as much made the Bill a much better doll than the Ken.

Hands down.

No doubt.

My sister guessed the inevitable solution so she wisely underplayed her reaction.

She took the Bill upstairs to meet Barbie.

The meeting was awkward, I found out later.

Neither Bill nor Barbie knew quite what to say.

Of course, my mother knew what to do.

The next day, Bill disappeared and Ken had a great first date with Barbie.

Everybody was happy. Including my Dad.

Over the next year. he would ask Terri about Bill.

One day, he walked into her room to watch his beautiful daughter play with her Barbie and her Bill.

My father looking at Ken and mistaking him for Bill said “Bill and Barbie look happy.”

My sister agreed.

So did Ken and Barbie.

FICTION IS THE NEW TRUTH

I'm pretending to be a writer. I'm also pretending to be the narrator in an ongoing story in which I am pretending to be one of the main characters created by the writer that I am pretending to be.

And most of it is true except, of course, for the lies which I tell to the characters that I pretend to create as a fictional writer and whom I pretend are my confidantes.

In return, I realize that the characters that pretend to confide in the character that I pretend to be are also telling the truth most of the time except when they lie to me which sort of defeats the purpose of them pretending to confide in me which is quite an amusing technique for the writer who is pretending to be me and as such is pretending to write about pretending to be amused by a technique that reeks of despair and mistrust.

It all goes back a few years ago to that moment when Jeff Bridges came to town and I pretended to be sitting next to a character who was pretending to be Stingray. Stingray was pretending to agonize over the integrity of taking a picture of Jeff Bridges after he had learned from a character pretending to be a blue haired old bitch that photography of any kind was prohibited.

Very near to that moment, Stingray realized that he was in fact The Dude that Bridges had tried to portray in The Big Lebowski and therefore he was a fictional character looking at the actor who had pretended to play him.

Of course, even that fictional character was me pretending to be him.

When it all became too much for Stingray, he spotted me pretending to be Thornton Krell sitting next to him. I pretended that Sting was perceptive enough to realize that the guy who was pretending to sit next to him was also the guy who was pretending to be the writer that had got Sting into this situation in the first place and who therefore probably knew how to get him the hell out of there.

And that's where fiction started to become the new truth. Remember?

It's all there in black and white if you go back to the beginning.

Or even better

Pretend to go back to the beginning and I'll pretend to believe your lies. I'll believe you understand the back story to all of this illusionary pretension and we'll start all over again.

And that's the truth

CALL ME STINGRAY

Clearly, I’m not as stupid as I appear to be or pretend to be, that wouldn’t be possible although it might be preferable to the marginal state of bliss that I occupy now as I try life with double elephant ears for pockets,while I wander from the concrete concession stand that I call home.

No, I’m not stupid. Ya see it’s a combination of the oversight committees of my internal legislation combined with poor intelligence gathering that is responsible for the current comedy of errors that I laughingly call my so called existence. It’s not Trump’s fault nor Pelosi’s fault that keeps me from dreaming the American dream.

I'm all about the Dream.

Dude is the American dream for me.

Dude is Jeff Bridges.

Big Lebowski.

Dude is my idol.

I love the Dude, man. When I found out the Dude was coming to town, I rubbed a couple of nickels together and headed to the Dryden Theater at the George Eastman house where Mr. Kodak himself screened movies for his guests until he decided that his work was done and he shot himself in the heart at this very house. Somehow, I had another double sawbuck so I took the tour of the house, checked out the elephant head in the lobby overlooking a giant organ and an array of flowers and gingerbread houses. I strolled into the exhibition hall and looked at the photos on display taken by Jeff Bridges.  Next, I bought my ticket for the flick that Dude was going to introduce in the theater.

I’m an hour early. I walk down to the front. Figure for the money I’m paying, I might as well get as much indoor times as I can. Rochester is one cold, dark, dangerous town. So, there I am sitting safely, minding my own business when out of nowhere, a gray hair walks up to me and spying my unhidden camera says in a real snotty voice..“You can’t take pictures in here.”

Wait a minute, I think to myself. I’m in the home of the guy who popularized photograpy, the guy who made the art available to the masses as well as the messes and here’s some drainer telling me I can’t take pictures even though I’m using a Kodak camera loaded with Kodak film and I’m wanting to take a picture of a guy because HIS photographs are on display in the exhibition section of the museum. In other words, I’m a photographer in the birthplace of photography trying to take a picture of a photographer and somebody tells me “no”.

I should be more specific about the drainer. She looked a lot like Barbara Bush in Bar Bar’s days as first lady with the shocking white hair. The imitation was breathtaking. Part of the breathtaking aspect was the “perfume” she was wearing. Imagine the smell of lilacs inside a trash bin, well that was the stench that was taking my breath away. I whiffed her before I saw her and by the time I saw her, she was in my face telling me what not to do.

God I hate that.

I had paid six bucks to get in and six bucks is a whole different ballgame to me than it is to the fake Barbara Bush. Six bucks has bought me four days and four nights of winter warmth at Movies10 which costs a buck to get into the show and once you’re in, if you play your cards right, you can hide out for twelve hours. Six bucks is what I paid to get a picture of Jeff Bridges. Six bucks should entitle me to that.

BarBar stalked away leaving a trail of fetid flower stank residue. The guy sitting next to me, another  early arrival, looked astonished or alarmed or whatever you call an expression that is a combination of thunderstuck bemusement and outrage. I'm no stranger to that expression.  I get and give that kinda look quite often

I had been talking to this guy a few minutes earlier and I can tell you what kind of guy he was. He was the kind of fiftyish guy who looks like he's pretending to be someone else and the person he's pretending to be is a shorter version of a fake Donald Sutherland.

He told me his name was Ice.

I don't need notes to remember stuff like this so I never take 'em.

I would hesitate to call Ice a dude although he was too old to be a nerd, to tall to be a dweeb, too small to be a doofus, too friendly to be a dork and too well informed to be a nimrod. I guess he was just a normal guy . Still, even he didn’t know what to make of the fake BarBar.

I said to Ice, “There ain’t no signs around here that say you can’t take a picture.”

Ice reached into his pocket and pulled out one of those fancy phones.

“I didn’t see any signs either,”  he said with a ‘we’re all in this together but you’re the one who got busted by a fake Barbara Bush as if you were Al Franken on a plane’ kind of wink.

I wondered if the photographic prohibition was posted on my ticket. I looked at the ticket which didn’t look much like a ticket,just a crumpled piece of  green paper featuring a large ADMIT ONE.

Nowhere on this ticket did I see anything about not taking pictures.

I showed Ice my ticket and he pulled out HIS ticket and goes right to the fine print.His ticket cost thirty five bucks and since we were sitting right next to one another the main thing his fancy ass ticket bought him was more writing because his ticket said that photography was prohibited at the request of the artist.

Let’s see…no prohibition on my later cheaper ticket …clear prohibition on Ice’s reserved more expensive ticket.  This pretty much sums up my life. Forget about being reserved. Show up early and the cheaper you live, the more freedom you have.

So me and Ice sat there like twin particles ready to collide at the edge of a black hole. Something was about about to happen but nobody knew exactly what. I wondered if perhaps Ice's last name was Jones.

We both got out our cameras and our contradictory tickets. I’m trying to feature the Dude prohibiting photos in a situation like this and I can’t see it.

One thing we know about the Dude…he abides.

I’m tawkin’ bout the Dude who always adhered to a pretty strict drug regimen to keep his mind, ya know, limber. What kind of limberminded photographer like Jeff Bridges would bar other photographers from taking pictures of El Duderino himself.

Also, I hoped to ask Jeff a few questions. Did he do his own bowling scenes and because of the whole brevity thing did the Dude prefer being called El Duderino, Duder, His Dudeness or simply the Dude or Dude?

Decisions were soon to be made.

Making decisions without accurate intelligence is like applying mathematical theories to non-mathematical facts. It’s like grabbing a pool rack and putting the rack into sink full of swamp water in the hopes of creating a liquid triangle or a fertle delta. It don’t work. I’ve tried versions of that experiment many times if not most of my life.

And once again, at the Dryden, I found myself trying to rack up innocent water although this time I was closer to Ice than to actual water. I’ve also learned that when you subtract mathematical theory from contradiction, you eventually wind up with paradox. Ice, although heavier than water floats upon it. Paradox means you face a crossroads of two clear ,equally balanced, oppositional ideas options that are uncompromisingly win/win or lose/lose in their execution.

Sink or swim

Contradiction also abides

Then, the curtain rustled and out comes the Dude himself in the person of Jeff Bridges. Dude looks exactly like he does on screen except a whole helluvalot smaller. As I decided whether or not to take his picure, at least ten guys ran down the aisle like stealth bombers in hoodies and beards, snapped off several rounds of flashes and then ran back down the aisle, out the door, into the parking lot, into their POS cars and down East Avenue towards Wegman’s before BarBar could even get her panty hose unwadded.

Dude didn’t look like he minded the snapping. I suppose it helped that the stealth crew snapped him before he even had a chance to give two shits.

Dude, as Jeff ,started to speak about how misunderstood his father Lloyd’s career had been as Sea Hunt became a mixed blessing for the Bridges family. The money was the good part. The bad part was that the viewing audience thought that Dude Dad Lloyd actually was a skin diver, actually was Mike Nelson the role his Dad had played on the teevee show. Dude said most of his life somebody has been coming up to him all teary eyed and saying “Thanks to your father, Mike Nelson, I’ve become a skin diver and all my children want to become marine bilogists or harbor masters.”

Imagine, confusing an actor with a role that he played

One of my childhood friends had the same confusion, sort of. I guess that’s why he started calling himself ��Mike” and strapping a waste basket on his back, sticking a garden hose in his mouth, putting a pair of underpants over his face and a huge pair of rubber galoshes on his feet, he would “skin dive” by crawling around on his belly in his backyard in the rain until he reached the end of his hose and crawled back before his air ran out remembering all the while to keep the crawl slow as to avoid the bends.

Good thing my friend didn’t see High Noon when he was a kid, otherwise he might have grown up either a craven coward or a “boy not a man” as Katy Jurado had called Dude’s Dad when Dude Dad bailed out upon the return of Frank Miller as the clock ticked real time towards noon.

In real time at the Dryden, Dude was five feet away and looking straight at me, I was coming to a conclusion of my own. It was the flash in his face not the photo itself that the Dude objected to and wanted to minimize with the small print on the fancy ticket. Since my disposable didn’t have a flash, all I had to do was wait until Dude looked away for a second and I could snap his picture as I felt that I had the right to do. In all likelihood, the flashless picture wouldn’t come out anyway. Dude wouldn’t know that I had taken a picture that didn’t come out and everybody would have a win. Paradox confronted and overcome. Slick as snot on a doorknob.

While I waited Dude kept rappin’ and looking right at me while he spoke.

The way he was looking at me, reminded me of the phenomena of paired neurons. You see, when we watch somebody do something that we’ve done, paired neurons fire off in our brain similar to the neurons firing off in the brain of the person who is doing something that we’ve already done. If you play the guitar and then go and watch somebody else play the guitar, you are having a whole different neurological experience than a person who doesn’t play the guitar. And the guy playing the guitar can usually recognize you in the audience because he can feel your neurons firing in synch with his which makes him play the guitar better which makes you get more into his performance and fire more neurons which makes his guitar play even better and refire etc ad infinitum.

Anyways, this is the way that Dude was looking at me.

Certainly, I was firing ‘you are the Dude" neuronic vibes to the Dude but to my amazement he was firing back 'no YOU are the Dude’ neuros back at me.

I wondered if anybody else noticed.

I took a quick look over at Ice who was trying to pair up with the vibe and cop off it but he was unable to but he was taking notes, just as I suspected.

I turned my attention from Ice back to the Dude who took my glance at Ice as a vibe breaker rather than an icebreaker. Dude looked away.

My opportunity arrived.

I snapped my camera.

The camera didn’t flash.

Dude never noticed.

The whole transaction didn’t count.

Like an at bat that takes six pitches; two fouls and four balls.

And just like that, except for reflection and analysis minus thought and regret, it was pretty much over. Dude never looked back. He finished his spiel and took a seat in the middle of the theatre to watch the screening of his Dad's old flick. He didn't take any questions from the audience. Pretty sure he snuck out early.

My job was done as well. I didn't sere any sense in keeping my seat way over to the right of the screen in front of the vacated rostrum.

I went up to the balcony and found some degree of calm along with an opportunity to reflect using my feelings rather than my thoughts to process what my intuition had gathered.

Certainly, paired neurons were firing between the Dude and me. What was he doing that I do? What was he doing that I was going to do in the future? What had I done that he had done? What did he know that  I knew that only we two knew? What did I know that he NEEDED to know and was surprised to find out that I knew it and knew that he knew that he needed to know.

Or vice versa.

First, I  felt that it was the Big Lebowski film that had brought us together but my intuition told me that the neuron firing was too intense for that shallow of a conclusion. There is a big difference between a guy in a movie and a guy who's a fan of that movie, not that Jeff wasn't a fan of the Dude. Even I know that. I recognize the difference between illusion and delusion. Movies themselves are an illusion created by light and dark. Believing that movies are real and not reel is a delusion.

Dude had been in movies, I considered my whole life to be a movie or if not a movie, at least a book and if not a book at least a story and if not my WHOLE life than at least the last three hours of it or maybe my short term life was three hours within which a story could be noted, imagined, located, decided and written by somebody else and that was the purpose of my life and after that I would disappear and exist only in words that stay or in the memories of everyone who read those words.

If this was true, then I was a fictional character.

Now, one thing a movie star knows a lot about is fictional characterization. Stars earn their money playing them. When Jeff looked at me, his realization neurons fired off this message. "the guy in front of me with the crappy camera is LIVING what I do for a living. He's a fictional character in a story and he doesn't understand that a) he's fictional b) he's in a story c) as a fictional character he's got a lot more in common with the Dude than I do and d) this whole realization/connection/ neuron firing thing (myself included) is part of the story that this guy is the only fictional character within but also the unreliable narrator of.

That's exactly the moment that Jeff ricocheted my "you are the Dude" vibes to him with an even more powerful "no dude, you Are the Dude, dude vibe back at me just before I turned away and looked at Ice and snapped my flashless photo.

With that, I realized the truth of my situation. I was fthe fictional part of a factual story.

I was part of a faction.

I was and am a factoid like Thornton Krell.

That's my story folks although I didn't write it.

Ice Rivers wrote it.

He gets the credit or the blame.

GOLF

Golf took a gigantic leap forward with the invention of the hole.

Up to that point, golf was simply a lot of people with sticks and balls walking around some very lovely terrain doing all sorts of things with their sticks and balls.

Most of the people with balls were men who were trying to get the hell outta the house because the "woman's driving me bonkers etc." I'm sure it was all very spontaneous, creative, individualistic, time consuming, non-judgemental; usually comic in its pointlessness but occasionally tragic in its masculine temperamentalism.

Then somebody dug a hole in the middle of the environmental splendor. The idea was to try and use a stick to put the ball into the hole. Since putting the ball in the hole was the final act of each hole, the stick used to put the ball in the hole came to be known as the putter which originally rhymed with footer because sometimes a golfer in frustration would just kick the ball into the hole. Eventually the stick for putting the ball in the hole took on a new rhyme. Putter began to rhyme wiith both nutter and mutter. A lot of nutters muttered about their putters until they just kicked the ball in with the foot which was counted as a put not a putt.

In another example of the beauty and simplicity of our language amidst the wonder of rhyme, the word hole rhymes with the word goal. At first there was only one hole in the whole three mile walk and players counted the number of swings it took to finally put the ball into the hole. Putting was not as essential a skill ren as it is now.

The goal of the hole, although it increased judgmentalism and decreased individuality, proved to be a such a great idea that another goal was eventually dug into the ground and then another and another and another until somebody said "Damn, how many holes we need for this game?"

With our human tendency toward excess, 175 holes were dug before the guy who was digging the holes realized that he had enough of this and decided he would just as soon go home and listen to the troubles of the wife than dig any more of these goddamned holes which were a lot bigger than the  tidy holes that we have today.

The first holes were big enough to bury an eagle in case one of them got killed during the invasion of their air space by the men with sticks. It became a short-lived superfluous tradition because no one ever killed an eagle although many smaller birds were dispatched. Dispatching a small bird was considered a good thing and came to be known as a birdie.

 Eventually the size of the hole was reduced to the height and width of three golf balls which because they were made of wood and were almost impossible to hit into the air was a lot bigger than the golf balls of today.

After playing a couple rounds of 175 hole golf, it was determined that too many goals produced a "game" strikingly similar to no goals at all because everybody quit at different time and in various degrees of rage having long lost the number of swings needewd to reach the breaking point.

It was at this juncture that Lord Ferguson Calloway, came up with his revolutionary idea. " A half dozen isn't enough," thought the good Lord "and neither is a dozen. I got it. Of course, a dozen and a half is ideal."

And thus we arrived at the first course of eighteen holes.

Par is the standard for each hole.

Par is an exemplar representing skillfull reaction to the specific problems presented by each well defined goal/hole.

As each hole developed a standard level of difficulty measured by the number of swings required to put the ball into the hole, someone else came up with the idea of adding all the standards together and coming up with a standard for the entire course.

Shortly after coming up with the standards for each hole and then the entire course, some other wizard...perhaps Lord Bellamy Foxtrot decided to record all of those standards so that each golfer at the beginning of his walk had a clear idea not only of the goals of the "game" but also of the standards of each individual goal and each individual course. Individual holes from different courses could be compared as well as courses themselves.

The longest most difficult holes required five swings of the stick to put the ball into the hole.

Shorter holes required four swings.

The shortest holes required three swings.

Since most courses contain four holes that allow five swings to meet the standard, four holes that allow three swings to meet the standard and 10 holes that require a standard number of swings to be four. Add that all up and most courses have a par of 72 swings to put the ball into eighteen holes.

A score of less than 72 on most courses is considered under par.

Under par is good because it means it took less swings to complete the course than the standard requires.

A score of 72 means, a round of golf played exactly to the standards of the course.

A score of 73 or above means over par which indicates a playing of the eighteen holes with a number of swings more than needed by better players to complete the course.

Each hole is its own measure of standards.

If the goal is achieved on each hole by taking one less swing than the standard, that effort is called a "birdie".

If it takes 4 swing to put the ball into the hole of goal that has been established as needing 4 swings to complete. that effort is known as a "par".

If it takes a swing more than the standard for putting the ball into an individual hole, that effort is known as a "bogey".

Two strokes over is a "double bogey"

Three strokes over is a "triple bogey"

Four strokes over par on a par four is known as a "snowman"

Five strokes above par has no general name but there is a name for anyone who regularly needs more than five extra shots  and there is a term. That name is "duffer" and that term is “pick up the goddamned ball and either get off the course or go on to the next hole.”

Most of us are duffers in this world.

It takes us a lot more time to finish a task than it takes other folks to finish that same task.

We keep reinventing the square wheel.

Not only does it take us more time but the task we completed is a shittier version of the task completed by people who possess what I have come to know as "talent".

This lack of talent however usually doesn't stop us from trying to achieve the impossible while ignoring the possible.

Not too long after the invention of "the hole", another great moment in golf arrived; the invention of the green. The green is the closely mowed area immediately surrounding the hole. If the hole stands for the essential goal then the green stands for the important goal, a more general place to aim. To reach the green predicts looming realization of essential pursuit.

A century or two after the invention of the green, another great moment occurred; the invention of miniature golf. Let's skip the whole driving and fairway thing. We're not as interested in the journey as we are in the destination. We read the last chapter of a mystery novel first so we know who did it all along and who cares about anything else?

Miniature golf is a concentration of essential goal with a diminishing interest in  important goals. As it turned out, many people became activated by the single minded pursuit of the essential and thus the world dicovered a new use for  miniature windmills, aquarioums filled with enamel fish and plaster dinosaurs holding fake candy canes.

Shotrly after the concept of truncated activation peaked with miniature golf, some true star invented yet another form of abbreviation namely the "driving range". This one deals with the other end of the spectrum and once again gets rid of the "hole" as history once again rhymes with itself in a colossal retreat. Here the golfer can exercise a specific strategy, while sacrificing other important activities including the essential goal.

Both of those innovations diminished the concept of "walking" which at one time (before the invention of the hole) was in fact the primary goal of the game. Unless you count the husband's goal of getting the hell out of the house and the wife's goal of getting him the hell out of the house yet keeping him away from the harlots. Everybody used to win.

Miniature golf requires some walking while the driving range requires only getting out of the car and waking to the tee, usually grabbing a beer on the way. This means that the guy gets home before either he or his wife wanted him too or he stretches it out by stopping off somewhere and sometimes with a "golf instructor"

Shortly after the appearance of driving ranges and miniature golf courses, another synthesis reared its head. This manifestation included some walking, some iron driving, an important goal  (The green) and an essential goal (the hole). This innovation became known as par three golf as the fairways were shorter and narrower and the expectation is to be able to reach the essential goal with two swings and a putt..

Even with this myriad of manifestations, golf has remained a non-essential activity. Therefore, people discover or ignore the game based on their own interest and time table. Some folks activate through miniature golf. Others activate through the driving range. Still others activate because of the par threes. It's imposible to choose betweeen the game of golf and these three activators other than for purely personal reasons including the need to go "shopping" by the wife and the need to get the hell out of here by the husband who fully realizes how much his wife cherishes her private time.

I'm going to step away from the history of golf, like a pro who hears a fart in the gallery.

I'll tell you about MY game. Since it's my game, it's my rules. This is why I prefer to play alone.

When I do play with someone else, the game is best ball. My partner and I are playing against the course by co-operating with one another.

Here's how it goes; my partner drives.

His drive is straight and true and right down the middle.

I hit my drive straight into the woods.

Together we go look for my ball.

We find it and we head to HIS ball, the Best ball...hence the name of the game.

We take our second shots.

His shot lands in the trap.

My shot lands on the green.

We retrieve his ball from the sand.

We putt from my ball on the green.

My approach putt is short. He knocks his putt in.

We have a birdie...The hole was a par four and we took three strokes to get it in.

We're pulling for each other on every shot.

Best ball.

When I play alone, I start out with a mulligan.

That means sometime during the round, I won't count a shot that I hit. That non-shot is called a mulligan.

I only allow two putts of the first green.

I'm not warmed up yet so...two's the limit.

When I hit the ball into a trap, I just pick the ball up and underhand it out of the trap.

If I hit the ball into the water, I go to the place where my ball hit BEFORE it went into the water and I hit it from there.

Every horrible shot I hit, I find solace in the reality that no matter how bizarre the shot...I've definitely hit worse.

If  the ball gets lost in the woods, I play as if it went into the water.

I never forget that I'm here to relax and now here to recover.

I usually have my camera with me and I take pictures.

I keep score in my head. If I score five on each hole that's 45 as I only play nine holes at a time.

45 is pretty good.

That night as I go to sleep, I replay all of the forty five shots in my head which usually puts me to sleep.

Sometimes, I'm out on the course all by myself with no one else in sight.

At those moments, baby I'm a rich man.

Today, I'm a richer man. I won't be alone. I'm playing a best ball threesome. Because we have three guys hitting every shot, we'll have a lower score than any of us would have had if we had played alone.

My partners are Deke and Crown.

Deke, Crown and I have done a lot together.

We did the great American road trip in my truck from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We camped out almost every night under the stars down by the river.

We visited the Ponderosa Ranch in Nevada and got drunk in  the saloon where the Cartwrights drank.

We played blackjack every day and learned to count cards only to lose everything one endless night in Lake Tahoe.

We got kicked out of Candlestick Park.

We've been to the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont.

We've chilled with Muhammad Ali.

We've been through births, deaths, wedding, divorces, sickness, health and every stop in between.

We've climbed mountains and worked on Horse farms.

When Crown was an MP, he arrested Jane Fonda.

Deke got married at Graceland

Deke and Crown were there the night that Pete Rose broke the record for all time hits.

Crown and I saw Secretariat win at Belmont.

Deke helped my dying father into the ambulance in which he died.

Crown had a heart attack at the Kentucky Derby and since then has had colon cancer and open heart surgery.

Nobody can plank like Deke.

One thing we had never done before is play golf.

Two years ago, it looked like Crown wasn't going to survive his illnesses.

Last year, I had my moments of doubt.

Deke is the youngest of us and still is in great shape.

He doesn't owe anybody anything. Everything is paid up. His house. His car. His college loans. His credit cards. Everything.

So we've lived this great life together but until yesterday we had never played golf together.

Deke hadn't lifted a club in 10 years.

Crown, like me, played only 27 holes last year.

I can't lift the ball out of the hole anymore which explains why I NEVER miss a five foot putt.

Crown can't get the ball out of the  hole either. At least he thought he couldn't. Yesterday on the third hole, he reached down and plucked it out.

Way to go, Johnny

Now, because Deke is still flexible enough to pick the ball up out of the hole, we had no excuse to take gimmes on any putt. That killed us as we missed one five footer after another over and over and over and over ad museum.

We played amazingly from tee to green and from a distance might have passed as younger men but when we got on the green......fuggedaboudid.

Of course we used carts as this is the reason that God invented them.

And brothers

And friends

The sky was blue, the clouds beautiful. We talked about life. We laughed. We rejoiced. We remembered. We were present with our eyes on the ball.

It was worth the wait.

Golf they say is a sample of sorrow

A walk in the park scarred by frustration

Then we hit THAT shot...come back tomorrow

For more sorrow amidst celebration.

We retain our most ironclad of grips

We visualize keeping elbow tight

We take dead aim and we let er' rip

When we lift our eyes we see ball in flight.

When we lift our head a little too soon

Too anxious to see the ball in the air,

We won't see the sky, the sun or the moon

We'll see our ball on the tee sitting there.

We promise to always keep our head low

Then we strike a beauty and on we go.

SALAMANCA FUNDAMENTALS

My former brother-in-law Tim and I were great friends before both our marriages crashed. Tim was a lumberjack, a master with ax and chain saw.

One afternoon, Tim and I were working on a case behind the cabin that he had literally carved out of the forest for himself and my first wife's sister deep in the hills of Salamanca. Somehow or other after about ten beers apiece, the subject stumbled towards golf, specifically the origin of the game, more specifically the origin of golf clubs and finally the origin of the clubs called woods/ woods called clubs.

I speculated that in its most primitive incarnation, cavemen just used the all purpose clubs they had for survival, courtship and domestic tranquility. These clubs were made of wood.

Tim liked that idea. Next thing I knew Tim had his chain saw fired up and was cutting into a log. Wood chips flew everywhere as  Tim transformed the log into an L shaped object, handed it to me and said "here's a wood."

I held the club in my hand. The "wood" weighed about seven pounds. I told Tim the club was a little too heavy. Tim fired up the chainsaw again and trimmed about two pounds off the club while shaping a bit of a handle on top and leaving most of the weight on the bottom.

He handed me the reshafted club and I took a few swings beteeen a few swigs. The club felt great but what I wondered  was what did the first golfers hit with the first club. As we worked a little deeper into the case, we began to speculate on that problem.

Once again, Tim fired up his chain saw this time transforming another piece of wood into a solid kinda round object about tthe size of a baseball. Tim handed me the object and said "here's your ball."

As I looked at the "ball" I was amazed to observe that an object with so many flat sides could resembles something round. The invention of the ball caused more casework and label laughter.

Here's where I made my only contribution. I went over to the nearby woodpile, found a sturdy splinter, handed it to Tim and said "here's our tee". Tim took out his jack knife and whittled a roundish, flattish hollow at the top of the splinter. We put the "ball" on the 'tee" and returned to the case.

At this point our wives, annoyed by prolonged absence from the cabin , burst upon the scene and were immediately aggravated by what they saw. In the midst of her rage, Tim's wife grabbed the "club" that was leaning against a tree, walked over to the "teed" up "ball" and furiously and unknowingly hit the greatest golf shot I had ever seen with the first and only swing of her life. "The "ball" flew twenty yards, bounced off a couple of rocks, rolled a few feet and disappeared from sight.

Fueled by the combination of apology, concern and amusementthat most men use to confront aggravated spouses, Tim and I went to look for the "ball" as the sisters stormed back into the cabin muttering something about "five more minuted" and "wastes of time".

The ball had somehow found its way into a “hole” dug at some time long ago by some person or something. The "hole" was almost the exact size of the "ball". Up till that point, this was the first hole in one that I had ever seen.

FACTION IS THE NEW FICTION

As our president demonstrates each and every day, alternate truths are just a click away. Trump has already presented more than a thousand versions of the truth and since our country is based and was founded on the concept of a fantasy land, we get to choose how many of these alternatives we will swallow to determine whether or not we are red or blue with white still being a wild card.

Currently, we are trying to interpret the alternate truths that have led to the "invasion" of immigrants. Red is more convinced of invasion than blue. Red folks are even more convinced of invasion by whites and they have the history to prove it which everybody kinda ignores and for which ignorance many a casino has been built and many tobacco products sold.

We don't really know who shot either Kennedy. Even Helter Skelter begins to wobble as yet another alternate reality by Vincent Bugliosi to avert attention from Hollywood. Oh and OJ was not guilty until he was.

As usual, Tarantino got ahead of the game with his altered visions of the past including the death of Hitler (Inglorious Basterds) and the once upon a time cancellation of Helter Skelter by Leo and Brad.

All of this alteration of history can be summed up in the word "faction", Faction is both more and less than fiction and non-fiction. Faction is the intentional fictionalization of non-fiction in order to tell a better story. One of the ways to achieve faction is to have the story itself written by a fictional character If the author isn't real neither is the story no matter how closely it sticks to the facts. If the author is "real" person, she/he can grab the faction mantle by the utilization of an unreliable narrator.

Holden Caulfield admits to being a liar, right off the bat.

The Girl On The Train was drunk.

So faction is reality filled with interesting, conspiratorial lies.

Faction is the new fiction as well as the new non-fiction.

All it takes is a fraction of fiction to turn non-fiction into faction

And a fraction of non-fiction to turn fiction into faction.

Then all you need is some characters and action

And ya know what else helps a lot

Some rudimentary semblance of plot.

And for a dash of innovation

Add some internal motivation.

Who cares about "truth". Truth is 'soo' two years ago and it was shakey  then.

We don't need it.

Fuggedaboudid. We got faction and I know you love it so I'm gonna give you some more.

Because I'm neither real nor reliable although, unfortunately, I'm sober.

MAGIC POISON

Meanwhile, I've been poisoning a patch of innocent pea pods just to see what would happen to the peas.

Other pods, I've left alone just to give those routine peas a chance.

Naturally I've been raising almost as many caterpillars as I've been poisoning pods.

Just to see what might happen to the moths.

Most of the caterpillars that I've raised are immune to the poison that I've been putting in the pods.

They can eat all the poison they want and live to eat more on another day.

God knows that there's enough poison to go around.

The main reason I've been poisoning the pods, besides seeing what might happen to the peas, is to see what might happen to the spiders.

Ya see eventually the caterpillars that eat the poison peas will turn into moths.

These moths will look exactly like the moths that emerge from the caterpillars who ate the unpoisoned peas.

They will look the same and maybe even taste the same but the immune caterpillars who ate the poison peas will have a different truth when they become moths then will the other batch of moths whose pea digestion was restricted to the non-poisonous peas back in their respective caterpillar days.

"Different truth, different consequence" as Aristotle might have whispered to Krell if they had ever met. Of course, the likelihood of fictional meeting non-fictional is always very poor no matter what happens to the spiders, if ya smell what I'm cooking.

And there's a lot cooking in California.

Too bad we couldn't have doused the fires of California with the floods of Katrina and called the whole thing a wash.  

But so much for wishful thinking, even thought it is my favorite defense mechanism ( especially when the perceived threat is emotional rather than physical)

Let's return to the practical and the poisoning of peas.

What will happen to the spider?

Since all the caterpillars looked exactly alike whether or not they had eaten the peas from the poisoned pods, they would eventually grow into identical moths that I could throw into spider webs just to see what the spiders would do.

Moths fly into spider webs all of the time whereas the odds of a caterpillar showing up in a spider web are roughly those of a turtle sitting on a fence post.

I had to make sure that the caterpillars weren’t gonna turn into butterflies. Butterflies are too strong for most webs. I made sure to use the fuzziest of caterpillars. Fuzzy happens to be my nickname because my last name is Fuzzier

Both the turtle and the caterpillar would need help to get to the top of the fencepost or the silk of the web and spiders are a lot smarter than fenceposts.

A fencepost ain't gonna worry about how a turtle got upon it wheras a spider might have some concern about how a caterpillar got into the web. The spider might be a little suspicious.

Since spiders are smarter than fenceposts, suspicion is a form of intelligence.

Nothing breeds suspicion like jealousy.

Nothing breeds jealousy like love.

Love always begins with attraction.

Attraction begins with notice.

On their way to delectable mothhood, two fuzzy little caterpillars noticed one another. The male caterpillar was named Yar. The female was named Asil.

Asil was the more mature of the two which meant she thought more about reproduction than did Yar who was concentrating on chewing and crawling.

How much did Asil think of reproduction?

Let's put it this way, she was jealous of fireflies.

Asil had no idea that the peas she was eating were from the poison pod patch, unlike the peas that Yar was digesting.

Yar's peas came from a totally different patch.

I know this for a fact because I'm the guy who personally poisoned the pods and I'm the guy who determined which caterpillars got the poison peas and which ones didn't.

And I kept em separated.

I'm also the guy who fed the caterpillars.

I'm the guy who bred the caterpillars.

Like most breeders, I'm a feeder.

I knew lots of things that the caterpillars didn't know.

I'm a man for God sake. Let's hope I got more brains than a caterpillar.

Here's what I knew that the caterpillars didn't know.

I knew that they were immune to the poison peas that they didn't know they were eating.

I also knew the purpose of their lives and why they were bred and fed in the first place.......

Just to see what would happen to the spider.

Although Asil was jealous of fireflies, she didn't love fire flies.

A caterpillar loving a firefly would be sick.

Asil wasn't jealous of fireflies because they could fly.  Asil knew that someday, somehow she too would be able to fly.

Asil wasn't jealous of fireflies because of their fire because Asil sensed something that almost everybody senses unless they're sitting around a campfire.

The sparks coming from a campfire are very different than the fireflies flying near the campfire.

What appears to be fire in fireflies is really a mixture of luciferin and luciferase.

The resulting mixture is not a fire.

Fires, like truth, emanate light and heat.

Firefly fire contains no heat, only light.

Sort of like compassion.

Asil wasn't interested in truth or compassion.

Asil was interested in breeding and feeding.

Asil was more developed than Yar who was interested only in feeding.

No, Asil wasn't jealous because she loved fireflies.

Asil was jealous of the way that fireflies loved fireflies.

Fireflies flash when they're hungry or when they want sex. Every flash is a semaphor of desire either to feed or breed.

In this scenario, the female waits in the weeds untl she is luciferinated for a half second by the flash of the male flying above her.

Asil had seen this seductive behavior frequently from fireflies.

She thought it was cool.

Cool as a fire without heat yet hot as a fire without light.

FUZZY’S BLUES

I've watched the caterpillars grow into moths. I've picked out the two moths that look the best. I'm gonna throw them one at a time into a spider web that I've found. In the meantime, I want to sing you folks some blues before we all find out what the spider's gonna do. Maybe I don’t have the voice or the strum of Genesee Johnny but here we go.....

Well, it looks like it's come down to the final two

Yes, it looks like it's come down to the final two

One looks at the other and says "up to me and you".

I don't know if caterpillars have names.

I don't know if caterpillars have names.

If they don't they oughta cause they both look just the same.

I've chosen the spider, I've approved her spinning.

I've chosen that spider, I'm down with her spinning

The game is sudden death, I can't see two moths winning.

Both of the pillars have grown up to be moths.

Both caterpillars have grown up to be moths.

They're gonna get all caught up in a game of webtoss.

The lady caterpillar's chock full of poison peas.

Yeah, the female pillar all fulla poisoned peas

Yet the moth she became ain't suffereing no disease.

The male caterpillar of poison peas is free

The caterpillar man of poison peas is free.

There's a load of silk underneath the apple tree.

I'll conclude my experiment when I'm done with strummin.

I'll end my experiment when I finish this strummin'

Spin on Mona, Your poison trick or treats a comin'.

I'm gonna have some rum and apple cider too

Gonna drink some rum and suck some cider too

Then we'll find out what the spider's gonna do.

EVENTUALLY

Of course, the caterpillars eventually became moths. When they took wing, Asil became Lisa and Yar became Ray.

By the time they became reacquainted, Ray's scent brushes were loaded with alkaloid. Lisa could smell that from ten feet away. Lisa was sitting on a wire perch chemically treated with poison peas. The chemical treatment lured Lisa to the wire and Lisa lured Ray.

Lisa had already lured a dozen others to her in her four days of fertility but there was something about Ray that suggested that his alkaloid package would be the package selected for warrior offspring.

Maybe it was his size. The bigger the moth, the more the alkaloid. The more the alkaloid, the more the male moth advertises his reproductive eligibility.

This is the message Ray was sending to Lisa. 'Look at all the alkaloid I'm carrying. I get this from the flowers. If you want your kids to be able to gather a lot of alkaloid from the flowers make sure that their old man brings a load of alkaloid to the bargain'.

Ray looked big and he smelled big.

Ray was a regular Mothra.

Ray hovered over the wire.

Lisa called to Ray.

Lisa called with her scent.

Although Ray was not a butterfly, he did know how to flutter by. He did just that.

His scent brushes came out when he got in range.

Once, twice, thrice, in less than a second.

Lisa was impressed.

She accepted Ray.

The rest is moth love, too private and exquisite to describe.

Even on a weekend when practically no one is looking.

Except just a few who wonder what the spider's gonna do.

Mona the spider is fastidious. She knows how to use her silk. Her silk will be far less useful if it becomes cluttered so Mona spends most of her visible time cleaning the debris from her web.

The more debris in the web, the less clear the signal becomes when something of value is caught up in the silk.

Mona can not see all of her web so she waits between spinnings and cleanings. She stays out of sight and waits for a signal.

Her web is filled with silk spun of different levels of water content. The more water in the silk, the more elastic. The most elastic silk is in the middle of her web. These are the waterworks. When prey falls into the web, they are confronted with mysterious elasticity far beyond rubber.

Caught in the center of the silk, the prey in its struggles puts very little tension on the web. Every attempt at escape only results in tighter wrapping.

Mona reads the level of tension. She has her escape routes well designed when the tension gets too high. Mona only feeds upon appropriate tension.

All the prey can do is pray.

Mona isn't looking for a fight.

Mona is looking for food.

Even on weekends, when things are so quiet elsewhere.

I know all about Mona but not yet enough.

I'm gonna use Lisa and Ray to find out what the spider is gonna do.

And Lisa will be a momma soon, if she survives the tension.

Moth tossing is a skill. I've had a lot of practice. I'm a professional. I wouldn't try this at home if I were you.

I kept the two moths that I had raised from caterpiilars and poisoned or not poisoned in two separate vials. I took the bigger of the two out first. I knew he was the male. I figured that with his strength, I would have to get him closer to the center of the web. I grabbed him by his wings and tossed him.

My hours of practice paid off. He landed right smack dab in the middle of the web.

I opened the second vial and removed the female. I wanted to get her off to the side of the web, closer to the spider. I grabbed her wings and tossed.

Perfecto.

The female landed off to the right, very close to where I knew the spider was hiding. The male flailed more then the female but the elasticity at the center was greater. He got all wrapped up in the web. His strength and struggle didn't cause much tension on the web. The elastic web was more water than fire.

The female landed on a portion of the web that was more adhesive than elastic. She would have generated more tension on the web if she weren't so tightly stuck to her spot.

I couldn't help but notice that they seemed to glance at one another intermittently as they tried to escape. Each of them had a clear look at the fate of the other. I wondered if they wondered what the spider was going to do.

I wondered if they even knew that spiders existed. I wondered if they were afraid. I wondered if they were sympathetic towards each other.The male got even more wrapped up when he realized the female was in a predicament. Was he trying to rescue her?

Of course the possibility existed that they thought this was play, perhaps even foreplay.

I know I wasn't playing.

I know there is such a thing as spiders.

I wondered what this spider was going to do.

Mona was middle aged.

She was six months old.

Every spider month is equivalent to seven years of human life. In human terms Mona was forty two. The last of her spiderlings had balooned away. Her mate died right after mating with Mona. Such is nature.

If you've seen Spiderman, you know what balooning is. The spiderling projects a single thread of silk which sticks to a nearby object. The spider then swings to that object and baloons again. Depending on how far they want to get away from their mother, the spiderling continues to baloon and baloon.

As a mother, Mona paid attention to the spider parental creed. Make sure the spiderlings get webs and wings. This creed meant that it was important for each spiderling to feel a sense of security so that they would be willing to leave the web and establish a home of their own. The stronger the sense of web the stronger the sense of wing. The more that a spiderling loved his mother's web, the further he would distance himself from it when he finally balooned. The further away he got, the less competition his web would be for the web of his momma.

Mona's spiderlings were far, far away. They had been well raised and they loved their mother.

Mona was an empty webber.

She was acutely aware of the double disturbance in her web as she sat in her den. Her experience had taught her that it was very unlikely for two disturbances to occurr so simultaneously. She figured the commotion could be traced back to one of two possibilities. The disturbances, soon to become prey, then to become liquid then to become food, must have been romantically involved. That's why they were fluttering so near to one another.

And flying blind.

Or else the Giant had delivered them.

The Giant had been feeding Mona since she was a girl, before the mating and the spiderlings and all that jazz. She had grown to trust the Giant.

Most urgent, however, was the hunger.

I should be more specific.

Mona wouldn't take a nibble. Mona would take a suck.

Before sucking, Mona would inject either Ray or Lisa or both with venom that would turn their insides into liquid.

She would go back to her den and wait for the innards of her prey to liquify. Then she would begin to suck. Sometimes, the sucking took place right out in the open. Other times, Mona would take her silk wrapped supper into her den where she could suck in private.

I've tried to imagine what it must be like to feel my insides turning into liquid. I had food poisoning once and that did some serious liquefying.

Maximum diarrhea mixed with technicolor yawning.

I have experienced emotional liquification more frequently than physical liquification over the course of my life. When I am injected with the contempt of another person, my convictions tend to liquify. Contempt is a powerful venom. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Resentment is the natural reaction to contempt.Here's the equation to avoid.

You have contempt for me, I have resentment for you. Or vice versa.

If turning someones insides into liquid can be viewed as a physical manifestation of contempt, then I suppose the prey being liquified must be pretty resentful.

Resentment resembles jealousy and jealousy is the green eyed monster that mocks the meat it feeds upon.

Contempt is an eight eyed, eight legged empty webbed widow who injects whatever she has trapped with a poison that turns their convictions into liquid so she can suck them dry and ignore their resentment.

Does contempt poison itself when it inadvertently sucks up poisoned convictions concealed within resentment?

I wondered if I would be able to pick up on any of these emotions or answer any essntial questions as I patiently sat and watched and wondered what the spider might do.

PALP FRICTION

I play the guitar a little bit.

I drink a little bit.

Sometimes I drink a little bit before I play the guitar.

Sometimes people tell me I sound better on the guitar after I've drank a little bit.

I'm pretty sure I don't sound any better but somehow when I play, I make the people who listening to me want to drink.

The more I play, the more they drink.

The more they drink, the better I sound.

So I drink even more so I can sound even better so they can drink more because I sound better which makes me want to drink more so I can sound better which will make them drink more which will make me drink more so that.......

Ya know, the usual.

I've often wished that I could drink while I was playing the guitar not just before or after. I've wondered if that would actually make my guitar playing sound even better to the folks who were listening because unlike me when I play, they are actually drinking whlle they are listening whereas I am playing under the disadvantage of not  drinking at the same instant that I am playing which puts me a little out of synch with the drunks who are listening.

I wish I had a couple of extra hands coming out of my mouth.

If I did, I could pour the beer down my throat while at the same time playing the guitar with my other two hands.

Spiders have two little hands coming out of their mouths.

Those two little hands are called palps. Spiders use those pulps to hold on to whatever they are going to sink their fangs into. Sometimes they use the palps to make changes in the thread of their webs. They grasp the thread with their palps and amend the web with thier mouths.

Spiders don't play the guitar unless of course, they happen to be Spiders from Mars.

The moths are in the web.

I've got a cold beer in my hands.

I'm sipping the beer and wondering what the spider's gonna do.

Let's remember, the moth nearest the spider was the moth who ate the poisoned peas.

I figured that the spider would go to the nearest meal. The spider would nibble on the pregnant moth with the poisoned peas. The spider would realize that something was wrong. The spider would choose one of her escape routes. She would return to her corner.

She would feel weak. She would ascertain from the vibes coming through the silk that the meal furthest away was too strong for her to overwhelm. She would wait until her queasiness subsided. Then she would return to the near meal and nibble a little bit more.

I knew something that she couldn't possibly know. The meal she was nibbling on was poisonous. Every nibble would make her weaker.

I didn't know who would die first, the poisoned spider or the moths struggling in the web.I wondered if it was the silk that killed the moth or was it the spider. If the spider died first, I would free the moths from the web.

I figured the whole deal might take a day after the first taste. This is what I thought the spider might do.

I waited to find out what the spider would actually do.

SIX YEAR DAY

Every day in the life of a moth is like six years in the life of a human.

Lisa was six days old in real time which means thirty six years old in human time.

Lisa had spent the first twenty four years of her life in heat. During those years she had rubbed plenty of abdomens while being embraced by many a clasper.

Twice she had felt threatened during a momentary mating session. Moths are pollinators not fighters. When the choice comes to fight or flight, the moth will choose flight. Lisa and her lover took off as one, the claspers coming off his abdomen holding her close even as they fluttered away, conjoined amorously, from the perceived danger.

Lisa remembered both of those occasions. They were thrilling and embarrasing at the same time. Even though they were memorable, the couplings were meaningless. Lisa and her mate were both distracted while flying away from danger and although they completed their intercourse, lack of purposeful, reproductive concentration assured that neither coupling would be fertile.

In human life, this is known as a flying fuck. Of course humans can not fly and will very often choose fight over flight when threatened. The human term "flying fuckk" refers to not paying proper attention to an endeavor due to a lack of committment in that project.

When Lisa finally met Ray, they both had a chance to concentrate. Ray was a big moth to begin with but he transferred ten percent of his body mass, in the form of spermatazoa, into Lisa.

This transfer proved to be fertile.

Lisa, in the web, was very pregnant.

And loaded with nutrients.

And poison.

Ray had struggled with liquidity and silk before. He didn't think it was such a bad thing. Ray held no resentment for that struggle. As a matter of fact, he saw his situation as another shot at renewal.

Remember, Ray had ben Yar.

Dejavu all over again.

When Yar, the poison free caterpillar, had reached his full size, he had already prepared to complete metamorphosis, the radical change in body form that turns a caterpillar into a moth.  Yar had pupated  himself to a twig.  To anchor himself to his twig, Yar had spun a button of silk from his mouthparts, then grasped the silk button with his cremaster, a clawlike structure at the end of the abdomen. Hanging from the twig, Yar had shed his skin to reveal the pupa underneath. Before becoming a pupa, Yar had spun a cocoon of silk around his body.  The silk of the past had protected Yar from predators and from drying out.

Silk was neither an enemy nor a stranger.

Within the pupa, Yar's tissues and organs had broken  down into a soupy liquid, and then reassembled into the tissues and organs of Ray. Groups of cells known as the imaginal discs remained complete, and Ray's mighty structure took shape as directed by these cells.

When Ray's development was complete, he had split the pupal shell and crawled out. Then he had unfolded his wings which pumped blood into his veins. Ray remembered spreading his wings until they dried and hardened. Ray flew away and eventually mated with Lisa.

And now he found himself in silk once again.

Ray was confident this was just another stage of maturity.

He would emerge from this silk and fly away again.

Ray thought he was turning into a bird.

He looked forward to spreading new wings.

Ray had no idea that spiders even existed so he didn't wonder at all what Mona would do.

Ray had changed a lot since the days of Yar.

Ya might say he matured. He was no longer thinking primarily about crawling and feeding, he was thinking now about flying and breeding. He suspected the web was another form of cocoon which meant it was another stage in development.

Another passage.

Another promotion.

Ray was happy that Lisa was involved in the same passage, the same struggle, the same silk at the same time in the same place.

Ray began to understand love.

He and Lisa would become birds together. They would build a nest on some distant chapparal and have babies. He would become Ayr. Lisa wpould become Sail. Together they would sail through the air until they found the acre or two of brushy teritory which would be their secret homeland.

They would be secure.

They would be mates for life. They would never wander from their nest. Their nest would be a compact cup of grass, fibers and bark bound with silk.

Each day, they would make the rounds of their territory, right up to the river. They would feed, bathe, take care of their young and fend off interlopers. Sail would be Ayr's constant companion. They would take delight in bouts of mutual preening as they took care to inspect and arrange each other's plumage. By night, they'd huddle together against the chill. They'd face in the same direction so near together that they would appear as a single ball of feathers from which tails, wings and feet protruded.

They would always be together.

They would stay out of sight.

They would be heard more than they would be seen but they wouldn't be heard very often.

They'd live in a tree fifteen feet off the ground when they weren't sailing through the air.

Ray was thinking about Ayr and Sail when Mona sank her fang into him.

Love hurts.

After the puncture, while his insides were turning to liquid and just before his final breath Ray, still expecting to become a bird, thought his final thought. This is what he thought:

It could have been worse.

Lisa, on the other hand, continued to be more mature than Ray. Lisa had moved beyond contemplations of breeding and feeding and had moved towards contemplations of death and deliverance but not in that order.

Lisa observed the death of Ray. She felt no sadness.Ray had done his job. She still needed to do hers. She needed to deliver the eggs that she and Ray had created.

She knew she was going to die.

Ray, in his immmaturity, had considered himself immortal with death merely another stage of metamorphasis.

Ray's immaturity prevented him from the fear of death.

Lisa was afraid to die.

Lisa knew that her life was incomplete.

Lisa had learned what a spider is and the part a spider can play in deathmaking.

Lisa knew she was next.

Her eggs would die with her.

It couldn't get any worse.

The spider returned and rappeled down the silk towards the moth that I had raised on poisoned peas.

Poison's a funny thing. Poison consists of chemicals. After we ingest poison, our liver uses enzymes to convert those chemicals into poisons. If we don't have the enzymes that convert the chemicals into poisons than the chemicals within the poison are of no threat to us.

The moth was missing the enzymes that would turn the chemicals from the peas into poison but the spider possessed those enzymes in spades.

If the spider ate the moth whose innards she had already liquified, there would be no problem.

If the spider ate he second moth, there would be a big problem.

Death by poison for Mona

Death by liquidity for Lisa.

Choices, decisions, consequences.

The spider was all fangs and palps.

The moth was all vulnerability except for the wild card of hidden toxicity.

The spider decided that she didn't want the moth. She backed off. She began cutting. She took the thread with her palps and put it in her mouth. She cut a perfect window in the web with her sharp fangs.

The moth fell free from the web.

The moth took flight.

The spider returned to her watch.

I found out what the spider would do.

Lisa delivered.

Spiders will do what Mona did.

They recognize poison when they sense it and hungry is better than dead, especially with delicious Ray a goner in the silk.

After the puncture, while his insides were turning to liquid and just before his final breath Ray, still expecting to become a bird, thought his final thought. This is what he thought:

It could have been worse.

Lisa, on the other hand, continued to be more mature than Ray. Lisa had moved beyond contemplations of breeding and feeding and had moved towards contemplations of death and deliverance but not in that order.

Lisa observed the death of Ray. She felt no sadness.Ray had done his job. She still needed to do hers. She needed to deliver the eggs that she and Ray had created.

She knew she was going to die.

Ray, in his immmaturity, had considered himself immortal with death merely another stage of metamorphasis.

Ray's immaturity prevented him from the fear of death.

Lisa was afraid to die.

Lisa knew that her life was incomplete.

Lisa had learned what a spider is and the part a spider can play in deathmaking.

Lisa knew she was next.

Her eggs would die with her.

It couldn't get any worse.

The spider returned and rappeled down the silk towards the moth that I had raised on poisoned peas.

Poison's a funny thing. Poison consists of chemicals. After we ingest poison, our liver uses enzymes to convert those chemicals into poisons. If we don't have the enzymes that convert the chemicals into poisons than the chemicals within the poison are of no threat to us.

The moth was missing the enzymes that would turn the chemicals from the peas into poison but the spider possessed those enzymes in spades.

If the spider ate the moth whose innards she had already liquified, there would be no problem.

If the spider ate he second moth, there would be a big problem.

Death by poison for Mona

Death by liquidity for Lisa.

Choices, decisions, consequences.

The spider was all fangs and palps.

The moth was all vulnerability except for the wild card of hidden toxicity.

The spider decided that she didn't want the moth. She backed off. She began cutting. She took the thread with her palps and put it in her mouth. She cut a perfect window in the web with her sharp fangs.

The moth fell free from the web.

The moth took flight.

The spider returned to her watch.

I found out what the spider would do.

Lisa delivered.

Spiders will do what Mona did.

They recognize poison when they sense it and hungry is better than dead, especially with delicious Ray a goner in the silk.

I felt pretty good after I found out what the spider did. I didn't know whether or not the spider would be smart enough to avoid the moth who had eaten the poisoned peas. The spider was smart enough to discern the presence of poison in her web. If we were all smart enough to know which moth is poisoned and which one ain't. If we resisted the urge to do what we can do and instead focused on doing what we should do, the world would be a much better place.

Speaking of better places, Lisa's delivery was a better begining. Her offspring, half poison and half not would never have to liquefy in silk and contempt.

As evening fell, I decided to smoke a cigar.

My work was done.

I know I shouldn't smoke but what the hell, I had just learned a great lesson.

The night was still. Fireflies were everywhere. I lit a candle. I stuck the end of my cigar into the flame of the candle. I took a couple of puffs.

I blew three perfect smoke rings.

Perfect smoke rings are possible on a windless night.

As the third smoke ring floated away, a moth flew right through the midddle of it and headed towards the candle flame.

As the moth neared the flame, I noticed threads of silk dangling from the wings of the moth.

The moth didn't get any nearer to the flame than moths always get to a flame but not too many moths are carrying a thread of silk.

It was the silk, not the moth, that kissed the candle. The flame shot right up the silk. The moth burst into fire and headed towards the smoke rings expanding in the distance.

The moth momentarily stood out amidst the fireflies.

The moth had become flying fire.

Then it disappeared from my view forever.

Peace, at last.

[blind-rats]

Veronica Mars Movie Costume Designer Interview

Genevieve Tyrrell dished on Veronica’s grown-up steez, Bonnie’s rock-roots fashion inspiration, and why modern-day Logan presented her with a “wardrobe conundrum.” 

So when you signed on to the film, what was your first step in planning the characters’ style?

We did a breakdown of the progression of the characters. With Veronica in particular, because the series has a more ��90s sensibility, we wanted to show the passage of time, to show that she had graduated college, that she was this professional New York adult woman now. We also set about to make the initial changes that we see at the beginning in New York be different from what we then were moving to when she gets back to Neptune.

Salvador Perez (Veronica Mar series costume designer) mentioned you hadn’t seen much of the series. Did you end up having to watch a lot of it to get prepped?

Well, I watched the first season and the last season, and I talked to Sal about how he saw the characters during the series, and he gave me a ton of information about their personalities, which was incredibly helpful. And then, you know, talking to [creator] Rob [Thomas], talking to some of the producers—because we see the characters in this one-week period in the movie. Dick and Logan and everybody has had life happen since we last saw them, so it was important to get that information.

What would you say are some of the signature differences between Veronica’s New York and Neptune style?

Well, she definitely goes from a more-polished business look to a more casual, funky—back to the roots of who Veronica was back in the series. Back then she wore a lot of denim jackets, or, you know, T-shirts with jeans, all with a colorful canvas jacket.

We wanted to keep some of those silhouettes. So when we get back to Neptune, there’s a lot of Helmut Lang and AllSaints and Paige Denim. She’s more mature. She’s also developed a sophistication away from Neptune and away from that life. The series was much more colorful, but again, they were kids. I feel like we kept a much stricter palette in the film to age them a little.

And as Veronica transitions from New York style to her Neptune roots, she goes from fitted blazers to leather jackets?

Right. She wore a lot of cropped denim jackets and things like that in the series—and there are a couple places that I placed a striped T-shirt with a little cropped denim jacket on her. Like when you see her in her full Veronica Mars P.I. garb.

In the series, Veronica is known for having black boots and a militarist vibe. As an adult, does she have any signature accessories?

Yeah, she wears two things: Little initial earrings, one’s a V and one’s an M—they’re very small—and then she also wears these little star earrings that harken back to the original series.

As in the star necklace that Lilly gave her?

Yeah. We wanted to replicate that, to give the Marshmallows some of those key pieces. That’s also why we brought back the bag that she used in the series. There’s a few Easter eggs that were original to the series.

We learned that while the show was filming, the wardrobe was meticulously organized in a warehouse. Was it easy to get these pieces?

Funnily enough, the girl who is the archivist for Warner Bros. was a big fan of the series, and so when it wrapped, she went through the boxes of wardrobe and pulled out tons of stuff she thought was important to keep, which, I mean, is crazy in a way. Who would ever think that this many years later there would be a movie? That you would need any of it? The odds are so completely against that.

Speaking of fans, some of the donors to the Kickstarter campaign got to be extras. What was it like to style them?

Honestly, that’s one of the things that was so great. Everyone would come with this wonderful energy and enthusiasm to be part of this. And there were just amazing stories of people who had traveled across the country, and had been a fan forever, and it just made the vibe like the best independent film you could ever work on. People will complain about being on a low-budget production, but nobody ever complained about being on this movie.

You mentioned Veronica is wearing Helmut Lang and AllSaints. Did you have specific designers in mind for the other characters? Who were you drawn to for Logan?

He has such a great upper body, and it becomes one of those things, like, it’s such a shame to put him in anything loose-fitting, silhouette-wise. So there’s a lot of T-shirts and muted colors, and it’s John Varvatos, sort of rock ’n’ roll, easy-going. And we see him in his dress whites at the top and bottom of the movie.

Yes, we were shocked to see Logan in uniform. Nobody expected that, especially not for the first shot of him. Were you given any background to work with?

It was definitely scripted that he’s now in the military. Certainly, the dress whites—he’d mentioned he just came from a JAG thing, and that was all Rob wanting to create where Logan has been and what he’s been up to, in addition to the other things that happen in the movie. Certainly, it has a lot of dramatic flair. He has such a great physique that he can definitely pull that off. It was romantic, wasn’t it?

It was, their chemistry is just so good. With Veronica asking Logan if he was planning to carry her through the airport, it certainly came off as a direct nod to An Officer and a Gentleman and just the idea of a man in uniform and the sexiness around that.

Yeah, certainly. I can’t get inside Rob’s head and answer that, but certainly, I think it has a nod to An Officer and a Gentleman, for sure. So iconic.

Were those authentic dress whites or were they custom made for the movie?

They’re authentic in that they come from a costume house. They’re authentically from a costume house. But they’re the true uniforms that are worn in the military, but you need a specific letter and it has to be verified [in order to purchase them].

On the series, Logan was often dressed in autumnal colors, which came from Jason at the time saying he wore "rack colors.” Did you consider adding any orange to his adult style?

No! I really love seeing him [Jason] in deep olive tones, deep browns, charcoals, and so forth. He was kind of a wardrobe conundrum. Given his military life, dating Bonnie DeVille seemed so wildly divergent. How do you make it look like he would be dating her? It’s a hard matchup, visually. We tried to keep his wardrobe as simple as possible, like jeans, a T-shirt, and a leather jacket. Like, I’m just a dude.

Did you feel you had to distinguish him from Piz?

Differentiating between Logan and Piz, I think it's more about silhouette because I put Piz in more button-up, plaid versions of things, but muted still. I would say it's more about the fit.

Now Dick is one of our favorite characters. Did you consider incorporating any of the ironic statement T-shirts he used to wear back in the day?

You know, we didn’t really. In large part we felt like that was who he was when he was a teenager, and he’s still that smartass character, but he’s progressed slightly, if only just a smidge. He has a flask belt.

Yeah, please tell us where to get one of those.

That’s your aspirational accessory right now? The props department custom made that for a douche-y moment he has at the reunion.

There’s a scene in the reunion where everybody gets drenched. How many takes were there?

I don’t know the exact number, but it was an all-day event. It was a lot of people wet all day—mostly stunt people. But Madison [Amanda Noret] was truly wet in that little Herve Leger bandage dress.

How did you decide on that dress for her?

Well, honestly, I had multiples of it, so it became the obvious frontrunner. We were on a tight budget and there was a huge CSI warehouse sale of great clothes from the show. A lot of what people wore in that scene came down to what were we able to get multiples of.

We loved the dress Gia Goodman [Krysten Ritter] wore to the reunion. What can you tell us about it?

It’s an Alice + Olivia dress and we completely recut it. It was originally an A-line shift and we made it more bodycon. It took a lot of seamstress hours to reset that dress and re-bead the sides. We completely changed the entire silhouette.

Was there any item of clothing that you totally splurged on?

Yeah, I feel like the olive-and-black Mackage overcoat that Veronica wears at the beginning—we got that wholesale, but I specifically wanted that, and it’s one of my favorite pieces.

Mac [Tina Majorino] appears to have undergone the most dramatic change. She would be that girl at the reunion who was a geek in high school and would then stun everybody with her cool hair and sexy dress. Was that what you were going for?

Oh, you know what, it’s two different pieces. It’s a Gucci top and Bebe skirt. And because Tina’s hair is so funky and cool, we wanted to give her some elements that had a little femininity, too.

Was her hair a styling decision, or is that how Tina’s hair was cut?

That’s how her hair was cut, and they did a really great job of styling it.

Bonnie DeVille struck us as a mix between Katy Perry and Lana Del Rey. How much of her look was Andrea’s own style?

I dressed her. Everything you see her in we chose for her. Andrea has her own sort of funky look for herself, with her lavender hair, but we gave her more of that rock star look. I’m always a fan of anything Gwen Stefani wears, so it was a combination of that and Topshop.

Now, the Vinnie Van Lowe character [played by Ken Marino]: What kind of fun did you have dressing him?

He’s so funny. I’m such a big fan of Burning Love [the web series Marino directs and stars in]. He came in and was like, “Yeah, you know, I’m a real douchebag.” And I thought it’d be fun—with him selling things out of his van, and him being this seedy character—to give him an almost goofy Jersey Shore kind of vibe.

Who was your favorite character to dress?

Hmm. That’s a good question. It was fun to do Bonnie—you know, I think maybe Ruby Jetson. Gaby is a total character, first of all, and she’s so into it and you want to give her wardrobe as her tools to use to emulate Bonnie. And I always think that’s fun, when you add a level of subterfuge or duplicity. There’s a little more range.

With Gaby Hoffmann playing Ruby, a Bonnie DeVille stan/imitator, did you double-up on clothes without us knowing, or did she have her own wardrobe?

She had her own clothes that were imitations of Bonnie’s. The one dress she wears when she sings [at the Beachcomber] is actually a vintage Betsey Johnson—the black one with the red velvet. We made her this low-rent version [of Bonnie], like she didn’t have the means to really dress like a true rock star. So it was things she could’ve found at a thrift store.

Just a quick question for those of us who believe in LoVe [Logan + Veronica]: Is Veronica wearing Logan’s shirt when he leaves her to report for duty?

Yes.

Why do you think Veronica Mars amassed so many loyal fans over the years that, even after seven years off the air, there was enough interest in seeing it transitioned into a movie?

Rob Thomas is such a good writer. I think there’s always going to be that allure for kids who are essentially doing something that is relegated for just adults. There’s something really wonderful and empowering [about Veronica], with her snappy dialogue. She’s got sass. All these female characters [on other series] are pandering and don’t take charge of their own lives or make things happen, and that’s the opposite of Veronica. And to take the backdrop of California and make it dark? It’s hard to take a beach and make it dark.

by  SOPHIA RAI AND PHOEBE REILLY

[the-master-cylinder]

SUMMARY Detective Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen) finally catches the serial killer named “Meat Cleaver Max” (Brion James) and watches his execution. McCarthy is shocked to see the electric chair physically burn Max before he finally dies promising revenge. Max has made a deal with the devil to frame Lucas for his murders from beyond the grave. Max scares the McCarthy family (who have moved into a new house) and the parapsychologist they hire. The parapsychologist tells Lucas that the only hope of stopping Max for good is to destroy his spirit.

As the family move in, Donna (Rita Taggart) searches the basement to find their missing cat Gazmo. She discovers their furnace turns on and flings the door open, apparently Max’s spirit is inside the house and focused on the basement. Lucas starts having hallucinations that lead him to behave erratically. Bonnie (Dedee Pfeiffer) goes to the cellar to secretly meet her boyfriend Vinnie, who is later killed by a physical manifestation of Max with a cleaver. The next night, Bonnie tells Scott (Aron Eisenberg) to come with her to look for Vinnie, while Lucas goes to the basement and angrily calls for Max to stay away from his family. Bonnie returns to the basement and finds Vinnie’s body for which Lucas is suspected of the murder.

Max kills Scott with the meat cleaver, transforms into Bonnie and decapitates the parapsychologist before holding Donna hostage. Lucas escapes from questioning and goes into the cellar to fight Max. Lucas sends Max to the electric machine where his arm gets stuck, Lucas and Donna use the chair to shock Max causing him to appear back in physical form in the house where Lucas shoots him dead.

The next day the McCarthy’s are moving out with Scott still alive. Bonnie goes into the basement and runs outside to find Gazmo in a box the family takes a photo as the screen freezes and fades to black.

DEVELOPMENT/FIRING DIRECTORS The Sean S. Cunningham production was written by Leslie Bohem, a gold record-winning country and western songwriter who also served as a member of the rock ‘n’ roll band Sparks and a group called Bates Motel. Bohem’s script-his first to be produced was rewritten by Isaac and possibly one or both of the directors who preceded him on the project. The script is credited to Bohem and “Alan Smithee,” Isaac declined to reveal Smithee’s identity or discuss the genesis of the script, which closely parallels Wes Craven’s long-in-preparation Universal release Shocker (1989), but named Fred Walton and David Blyth as the film’s earlier directors.

“Producer Sean Cunningham didn’t hit it off with (Walton).” said Isaac of THE HORROR SHOW’s first director. “I’m still not sure why. Fred wanted the film to go one way while Sean wanted the film to go another way.” Six weeks before the film’s start date Cunningham hired Blyth to direct, but fired him after a week and a half of filming. Though footage that Biyth directed is still in the film.

“At that point, the original script was not being shot,” explained Isaac. “Then one Friday night Sean called me into his office and told me that he had to let David go. I must admit it was a real shock. Sean wasn’t happy with the dailies. He wanted me to start shooting on Monday. Obviously there were some problems with the script. But there was no extra time to work things out. The original script had a lot more humor in it. Things off-the-wall. It had some wacky stuff.”

Isaac recalled that the mood on the set of THE HORROR SHOW was tense as he took charge of the directing. The cast and crew, he felt, were unsure of him. “I felt especially bad for the actors,” he said. “They were trying very hard to make this movie more than just another slasher film. They also had some input in the script. Of course, I had been involved in the script before they started shooting. But, the actors didn’t know that.”

“Firing the director is the last thing in the world you want to do,” Cunningham said, “because it undermines everything. But if you know it’s not working, you have to come to grips with the consequences of not firing the director. You’ve got to make a change, or walk away from the whole thing.

“When Horror Show started to fall apart I had a real problem. I couldn’t direct it myself, and even if I had been able to, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. On the face of it, Jim wasn’t in line to direct, but he was in the right place at the right time. Jim was Visual Effects Supervisor on DeepStar Six (1989), and there was nothing I could throw at him that he couldn’t handle. I knew he wanted to direct, he knew all the effects, he knew me and I trusted him to ride this thing out and make it work.

“Sean brought me into his office and said, ‘Jim, I have to talk to you’, and just stared at me, while I was trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. I thought he was going to say something like, ‘Well, you know Jim, there just isn’t enough work to go around right now and I think I’m going to have to lay you off.’ Instead, he said, ‘I just had to let the director of Horror Show go, I’d like you to take over the picture, and you’ll have to start on Monday.’ Initially there was an idea that we’d direct together, but the more we talked about it the more it was obvious that one person really needed to take hold of Deepstar Six and one person needed to grab onto Horror Show.”

PRODUCTION The film was shot non-union in seven weeks in Los Angeles on a budget of $4 million. “I’d have to get in a certain amount of set-ups a day,” said Isaac. “Id average 25 to 30 set-ups.” After shooting for a few weeks, Isaac was happy with the footage. “Sean was pleased too,” said Isaac. “Yet, I knew when it came time to edit the film, we were going to have some problems. There had been some suggestion of electricity that would bring killer Max Jenke back to life. But since it was a rush job, there wasn’t enough time to make it clear.”

In the director’s first cut, the film was pretty dark. Isaac took about 20 minutes out of the film that didn’t work. “We were left with a film that had some major gaps in it,” said Isaac. “Of course, Sean was well aware of the situation. I asked him if I could add some new scenes and have an extra week of shooting. Sean tried to get some money from UA. That didn’t quite work out. He said we’d do it anyway.”

Isaac spent about two weeks writing new scenes for the film. “We needed to see that Max Jenke is a wacky guy,” said Isaac. “For example, the scene where Max appears in the turkey at the family dinner. Lucas (Lance Henriksen) picks up the carving knife and starts to stab the turkey. The family needed to see that Lucas was going off the deep end.”

“We’ve been really kicking ass with this thing.” Henriksen says firmly. “It’s a surprise to everybody. This has a powerhouse cast; it really took off.”

When the slight similarities to the Nightmare movies are mentioned, Henriksen disarmingly agrees. “Yeah, but it evolved,” he nods. “To Sean Cunningham’s credit, we got together and did a round-table reading of the script, and everything that was bogus, we red penciled. We’re maybe a fifth-generation script away from what it originally was, which is great. For me, this has been a real pleasure the hardest work I’ve ever done on a movie, but the most rewarding.”

The change in directors caused giant troubles.” Henriksen sighs. When you start with a director, you really bond with him. And that bond is something you defend. you work with. you nurture throughout a whole movie. The replacement left us high and dry for about a week, and it was traumatic. The reshoots were very difficult, but as we got into the scenes with Jim Isaac, we realized he was allowing us to do our work, so we were able to get into new areas for this genre. Oh sure. you still have to serve the special efsects, but we were able to take it to another level. Jim has allowed me to be really spontaneous about the reactions of this guy.” – Lance Henriksen

SPECIAL EFFECTS Greg Nicotero, Robert Kurzman, and Howard Berger (KNB) supervised the special effects. Kurzman handled Max Jenke’s electrocution make-up. They used a dummy head that split open for the scene. The effects were designed to make Max unique. “He’s not Freddy and he’s not Jason,” said Isaac. “His facial burns are unlike Freddy’s hideous scars. When Max is electrocuted, he’s fried to a crisp. There’s smoke and sparks all over the place.”

But we wanted Jenke to have a unique identity.” The thing we were all really afraid of was having him be anything like Freddy Krueger,” Nicotero elaborated. “So we devised ways the effects could be used to make Jenke a very different kind of monster. Even the burn make-up is designed so it’s not like Freddy burns-it’s crispy and black.” “Jenke is a murderer who comes back from another dimension to torture the detective who caught him by destroying his family,” concluded Isaac. “He threatens to tear this guy’s world apart, and that’s pretty much what he does.”

Take Jenke’s execution. “Bob did the electrocution make-up,” explained Nicotero, “which took four days to shoot. The first stage burn make-up comes after they put the headpiece on him and start the juice, you just have a series of little burns around his temples. The first prosthetic stage starts with his face looking normal, then the skin begins bubbling and little veins show through. The second stage of make-up has more burns, and Bob scored the bladders so that when they started swelling the skin would split…that took us to the third stage, where we had a full dummy head and torso that Howard did, with the skin split open even more. We were able to squib that with a lot of sparks, so you could actually see sparks on his body. There were smoke tubes in his clothing the whole time, so you also saw little curls of smoke. The fourth and final stage was a straight prosthetic make-up so Brion can get up out of the chair and move towards Lance.”

With his dying breath, Jenke-who has been secretly experimenting with a home electric chair, devising a method by which he can project his spirit into another dimension as his body dies-threatens to make McCarthy’s life a living hell.

That he makes good on his promise is clear from the following sequences. “There’s a scene where the daughter, Bonnie (DeDee Pfeiffer), is in bed crying. Lucas comes in, she pulls her nightgown up and she has this huge, pulsating pregnant stomach, then Jenke’s face appears stretching through from under the skin,” noted Nicotero. “And it goes one step further-Jenke starts talking to Lucas, saying really obnoxious, offensive things to him about his daughter.

“We were actually able to get all three of them into the same shot. DeDee and Brion were both dropped through a fake bed; we positioned her off to the left and him to the right. He had his face stuck up into the belly appliance and Lance is leaning over them both. The shot is really disturbing, because you can see they’re all there in the same space.

In that same scene, Lucas falls back against the wall and pulls his chest open-there’s a dream sequence earlier when we see Jenke bury a meat cleaver in Lucas’ chest, so we know its something he’s touchy about-and is trying to keep his heart and every. thing else inside. It has a Videodrome feel. We did a full torso appliance and put Lance through the wall on a slantboard-only the head, arms and shoulders was really Lance.”

Horror Show also features the nastiest uninvited dinner guest scene since the debut of Alien’s chestburster. As the McCarthys gather for a moment of family harmony, “Lucas looks down at the turkey and sees it’s not the same turkey anymore-it’s a weird, stretching, mutated turkey, a la The Thing.” Nicotero explained. “In the first shot all these tentacles shoot out and grab hold of the table. In the next shot, the turkey leg lifts up and it’s got three human fingers and two turkey fingers, as though it’s metamorphosing into something. Then this big turkey head that’s been lying on the table all covered with slime, lifts up and looks at Lucas, and there’s a little mechanical Jenke face growing out of the side that starts to talk to him. At that point Lucas picks up a knife and starts to stab it. It’s a whole creature transformation, and it’s pretty weird and gross.”

The corpse of a little girl in a nightdress, her head loosely attached by a bloody line, dangles from the wall. This is one of Max Jenke’s (Brion James) victims from Horror Show. There’s also a hot-melt vinyl head found in a deep-fat fryer in Horror Show, which comes up from under the fat with exploding eyes.

The Things I Have Done To Our Love Gleaming Spires Performed by Gleaming Spires

CAST/CREW Directed by James Isaac David Blyth

Produced by Sean S. Cunningham

Written by Allyn Warner Leslie Bohem

Lance Henriksen as Detective Lucas McCarthy Brion James as Max Jenke Rita Taggart as Donna McCarthy Dedee Pfeiffer as Bonnie McCarthy Aron Eisenberg as Scott McCarthy Thom Bray as Peter Campbell Matt Clark as Dr. Tower David Oliver as Vinnie Terry Alexander as Casey

Special Effects by Howard Berger … special effects Kit Cathcary … special effects apprentice Keith Claridge … special effects technician Ken Ebert … special effects technician Robert Kurtzman … special effects Greg Nicotero … special effects (as Gregory Nicotero) Doyle Smiley … special effects technician F. Lee Stone … electronics specialist Richard Stutsman … floor effects supervisor

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY Fangoria#81 p.36-39 Fangoria#81 p.40-43 Gorezone#07 Horrorfan#02 Cinefantastique v20 n03

The Horror Show (1989) Retrospective SUMMARY Detective Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen) finally catches the serial killer named "Meat Cleaver Max" (Brion James) and watches his execution.