In the 1920s, Thanksgiving was spare for Charlie Chaplin in this classic scene from "The Gold Rush." The film was first released as a silent film in 1925, and re-released with sound in 1942. The narrator is Chaplin himself.
In the 1950s, Thanksgiving dinner was a tad more festive, especially if your guests included Dinah Shore, Louis Prima, Keely Smith, Ernie Kovacs, Edie Adams and her husband George Montgomery. I always suspected Louis Prima was a left winger. Good for him.
In the 1940s, zany cartoonist Tex Avery brought us "Jerky Turkey" for Thanksgiving during WWII. Food rationing and a black market turkey (who looks an awful lot like Jimmy Durante) all played important roles in this wacky wartime cartoon. Buy war bonds.
News from outer space. NASA has done it again. This is one of the first visible pictures of a planet circling a distant star, and in honor of the accomplishment we dedicate "Moon River" to Formalhaut B, our new distant cousin in outer space. (Actually, I have other distant cousins in outer space, but that's another story.) Formalhaut B is only twenty five light years away, and we hope it sustains life and we hope that that life is not giant, insectoid, and ravenous.
To planet Formalhaut B: here's a song based on a universal theme (we hope) of love:
Moon River first appeared in Breakfast at Tiffany's, a 1961 film loosely based on a story by Truman Capote. The song was written by Johnny Mercer (words) and Henry Mancini (music). In this clip, an elfin Audrey Hepburn tugs at guitar strings and heartstrings and shows one of myriad distractions a writer must face.
Andy Williams sang the popular version that still plays on easy listening stations. After a couple tumblers of Scotch, Uncle Ed sang it at the wedding. He nearly burst a cummerbund. Don't let that experience sway you. No less a songwriter than Bob Dylan once called this a perfect song.
In this clip from the British television show "The Old Grey Whistle Test," an early REM plays Moon River and then jumps into Pretty Persuasion. Since the new planet is twenty five light years away, 1980s television is finally just getting there. Sorry, Formalhautians. We apologize for that decade. Still, we think you'll enjoy this clip.
Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and here are two old men as different as night and day saying their Thanksgiving prayers. Like good and evil, it might be hard to decide between the two, but you make up your own mind.
Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, sings a Thanksgiving prayer as warm as a bellyful of whiskey and a bowl of candied yams.
Williams S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, offers a frozen Thanksgiving prayer on the end of a cold fork.
Everyday I write the book. Some days are better than others. It's been said that Balzac could knock off a novel by noon. I assume that was only the first draft. Even so, it was quite an accomplishment. Some write novels in their sleep, with one hand tied behind their back, or on the head of a pin. It takes me much longer than those circus freaks. I sweat over every word, and then rewrite what I've written. Maybe I'm a perfectionist. I can dash off emails or blog posts as if they were Post-it Notes, which I can dash off like Balzac, but send me anywhere near "important" writing and I have to use an axe to break through the ice. Sometimes it's easier and the story carries me along, but I think people who brag that "the story wrote itself" are either bald-faced liars or aren't writing deep enough, and the last thing the world needs is more formulaic crap.
What's going on in my brain? One person who might know is neurologist Alice W. Flaherty, the author of Midnight Disease: the Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain.What a wonderful, mind-boggling read. (She's on a panel discussion linked below.)
Another person who might have a clue about writing--and the creative process-- is author Francine Prose, who has written a number of novels and a book on writing, Reading Like a Writer.
Writer David Foster Wallace suffered from depression and eventually took his own life, but was extremely creative, prolific, and successful. Was his pathology somehow linked to his prodigious creative output, or was that purely circumstantial? In this interview with Le Conversazioni in 2006 he seems like a mollusk without a shell. Here he discusses failure:
The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination is devoted to exploring creativity and the imaginative process. Not long ago, they hosted Hypergraphia and Hypographia, a roundtable discussion featuring Jonathan Lethem, Alice W. Flaherty, Pedro Reyes, Francis Levy, Alan Jacobs, and Lois Oppenheim. The panel examined the neurological and psychodynamic basis for writer's block and the opposite affliction, hypergraphia, which compels the artist to write, write, write uncontrollably.
It's a fascinating discussion, and to watch it click HERE and select video.
The first time I heard this song was on shitty headphones in Nicaragua, in 1985. The cassette player belonged to the legendary Steve Krekel, a journalist out of Chico, CA, who was in the tropics making a documentary on the Sandinista revolution. Songs hook themselves to associations and live forever joined in our minds, and for me this song is welded to wise-cracking Steve in his baseball cap as well as corrugated tin roofs, ratty palm trees, soldiers in dark green, the Barrio Martha Quesada, gallo pinto, the sound of anti-aircraft guns mixing with fireworks, a wild parrot that wanted to kill me, a humorless german, a one-eyed blind man, and a bad case of amoebic dysentery contracted in Matagalpa.
I don't mean to trivialize the struggle and gravity of the situation--there was a war going on and people died and some became heroes and some became martyrs. My discomforts were trivial and I was out of harm's way--but there was a war going on and Reagan was sending guns and money and the CIA to undermine this tiny country that had the balls to overthrow a US-supported dictator. People had come from all over the world to help the Nicas rebuild, to show solidarity, to work for the revolution. Coming home that time, after six months in Latin America, I experienced a surreal sense of alienation when I discovered that the battle that captivated most Americans--North Americans, that is--was the war between New Coke and Classic Coke. It was like getting kicked in the head!
Strange how the mind works. Time, memory. Who would figure this song--and reaching across a wobbly card table to take a pair of headphones--would stick with me so long, and come to stand in for so many things? There's really no sense to it.
To truly appreciate this song you must experience it under similar conditions--or at the very least with a low grade fever. The first version is played by Pete Townshend, formerly of the Who, and the second is the original version by the English Beat, the song I heard a few lifetimes ago. Save it for later, like a memory.
Krekel, if you're out there and see this, drop me a note.
That's the headline of the New York Times, anyway. It turns out thousands of remarkable facsimiles of the newspaper were delivered this morning--nationwide--stunning readers with the news that the war was over. The paper also reported that Bush had been indicted for treason, and that columnist Thomas Friedman had confessed: "I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write."
The Yes Men: high concept anti-corporate pranksters
As far as we can tell, the parody is the work of brilliant satirists and pro-consumer pranksters, The Yes Men. You may have seen the 2003 film of the same name documenting their exploits (if not, I highly recommend it). These guys frequently pose as corporate or government spokesmen and lobby for shocking anti-consumer projects--and get the full support of the unwitting profit-seekers of the private sector. It's best to see for yourself. These guys have elevated guerrilla theater to an art form.
Jonathan Swift: don't believe him either
Original Yes Man Jonathan Swift punked the entire English-speaking world with his book--pamphlet, really--A Modest Proposal. In the essay, Swift eloquently, reasonably, suggested that Ireland's poor escape their poverty by selling their children as food to the rich:
"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food...”
The Yes Men documentary trailer
Watch these clips of their exploits. It's amazing how far they get! Like the secret agents in Mission Impossible (the television series) a suit and an official-looking letterhead seems to grant them complete access.
BBC: You've been punked!
The Yes Men proposing slavery...well, sort of
YES MEN links:
-Read their answers to "frequently asked questions" here. -Follow their latest hijinks here. -Get the fake New York Times at the fake Times website here.
The Association were never the hippest band around, more like a clean-cut glee club that happened to find a lid under the couch cushions, and, well...wrote this tune about it. The song was so joyously poppy nobody noticed what they were getting at. As my cousin Duane would say, you probably had to be stoned to understand it. All I can say, for sure, is that some overzealous fed analyzed the lyrics and discovered "possible drug content" and put the song on a kill list that was sent to radio stations to discourage disc jockeys from playing it on the air.
Come on, guys. What's was so bad about Mary?
The Association: their hair is getting good now
If you listen closely, you'll notice the words are silly, ornate hophead juvenelia, something you might find scribbled in an adolescent's PeeChee, but the music is good bouncy fun. It's a nice, well-crafted pop song. Dig the metronomic intro, a premonition of DEVO still a good decade to come. This clip is from the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, the night Otis Redding sang his soul out, the Who destroyed their instruments, and Jimi Hendrix made his monumental American debut--and lit his guitar on fire. They were completely overshadowed by the heavies. Even so, their empty cup tasted sweet as the punch.
