WHEN MV MET SALLY

RIP to the glorious, goddessy yet sweetly vulnerable Sally Kirkland, departed at the age of 84.

Your Humble Narrator got to meet her once. Back in '93 or '94, one of the first attempts at a Phoenix film festival was held downtown at the Herberger. Co-sponsored by Hotel San Carlos, it was a pretty scrappy, underfunded affair, but it did have a celebrity guest. As the newish young film critic for the Phoenix New Times, I was greeted effusively by the festival folks and proudly introduced to their guest star: Sally Kirkland.

I meet celebrities quite often, so I'm not usually starstruck, but meeting Sally Kirkland left me stammering more than meeting Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise would have. Nonetheless, I was able to express my worshipful devotion to her, and she seemed to take it rather well; she gripped me by the hand and dragged me into the theater with her.

Sally was there in support of Double Threat, an excruciating "erotic thriller" of the Cinemax-at-three-in-the-morning sort.

She starred as an aging actress, a faded bombshell driven to jealousy by her young body double. The movie itself, which also starred Andrew Stevens, Tony Franciosa, Richard Lynch and Chick Vennera, was a laugh-riot; it played like an SCTV noir spoof. But there in the middle of it was Sally, intensely sexy yet baleful, a true movie star presence in a preposterous vehicle, utterly negating her young supposed rival.

Anyway, I sat through Double Threat in the front row, holding hands with the star. After that evening I thought of getting in touch with her to suggest that I ghostwrite what I suspect could have been quite a juicy, page-turning memoir, but I never worked up the nerve. Shame on me; as far as I can tell she never wrote one.

LEHRER WITHAL

This one hurts. The great Tom Lehrer has departed us, at 97. Too soon, as far as I'm concerned.

In the late '60s, we had the album That Was the Year That Was in our house...

It's a live recording, made at the hungry i in San Francisco in 1965, of Lehrer performing topical songs he had written for the NBC comedy series That Was the Week That Was, interspersed with his commentary. At 6 or 7 years old, I of course understood very little of what he was singing about. When he said "dirty books are fun, that's all there is to it," in the intro to his marching anthem "Smut" I can remember wondering why a physically unclean book would be fun, and when, in the song itself, he refers to "...a dirty novel I can't shut," I can remember picturing a book with a broken spine that he literally couldn't close.

So you can imagine how little of the political and social material I grasped. But it didn't matter. I listened to the album endlessly. It's probably my favorite record of all time, to this day. The reason, of course, is the sensibility; the snide, snarky yet genial and affable manner. Tom Lehrer was exactly the smartass I wanted to be when I grew up. And now, at 63, I'm not sure I see much reason to revise or abandon that ambition.

Lehrer was also the first of many lyricists and poets to teach me a love of rhyme I've never gotten over. From "Smut," for instance, comes Lehrer's admirable "As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense/To be smut it must be ut/Terrly without redeeming social importance..." Or, from his  splendid ballad "Alma" (about Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel): "and that is the story of Alma/Who knew how to recieve and to give/The body that reached her embalm-ah/Was one that had known how to live!"

So was yours, good sir.

Also, in one of the more badass show-business gestures ever, in 2020 Lehrer, a lifelong bachelor with no children, released all of his songs to the public domain.

Back in 2000, one of the few music reviews I ever wrote at New Times (for the great Gilbert Garcia, then Music Editor) was of a Lehrer boxed set containing almost all of his recorded work, including a couple of marvelous tunes he wrote and sang for The Electric Company.

Peace and joy eternal to you great man, and as my friend Owen Kerr would rightly say, Ave, magister.

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A WOMAN

In 2000, I got to briefly interview Gena Rowlands for Phoenix New Times ahead of her appearance at a showing of A Woman Under the Influence in Scottsdale.

At the beginning of this chat, I indulged in a rather shamelessly unprofessional bit of gush:

"You know, I talk to famous people all the time, so I don't get starstruck much any more," I told her. "But talking to you is an exception."

She acted very girlishly flattered. Maybe she really was, or maybe she was just acting. Either way, it was an honor to be on the receiving end of it.

The word awesome gets thrown around a lot, but Gena Rowlands was awesome.

She did a lot of routine roles that seemed like they were just to pay the bills, and she was good even in that stuff, but when she worked with John Cassavetes--in A Woman Under the Influence, in Minnie and Moskowitz, in Gloria, in the underrated Tempest (directed by Paul Mazursky, but opposite a brilliant Cassavetes as her leading man) or in the grueling Opening Night--she was luminous. Potent as they are at their best, the films that Cassavetes directed can also be overwrought and exhausting, but her classic performances make them indispensably worth it.

Just a few days ago I happened to see her, very young, in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour called "Ride the Nightmare," opposite Hugh O'Brian.

One of O'Brian's criminal cronies, who he betrayed years earlier, has come seeking revenge, and is holding him at gunpoint. But when the crook gets a load of Rowlands, as O'Brian's wife, he can't help but remark "You did alright for yourself; she's a winner."

Indeed she is. Rest in peace and joy goddess.

DINE AND DASH

In July Pete Wells, the restaurant critic for the New York Times, announced that he was stepping down from that job after 12 years. His principal reason was what the work had done to his cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar and weight. He noted the short life spans of legendary food writers like A. A. Gill and Jonathan Gold. But he also said, simply, that "I realized I wasn't hungry anymore. And I'm still not, at least not the way I used to be."

All this rang true in my experience.

For most of my years working for newspapers and magazines, I have principally been an entertainment writer, focusing on movie reviews with occasional forays into writing about theatre, television, music, books. But I've also written about dining, for various publications, for decades.

I was a fill-in restaurant reviewer at Phoenix New Times, where I also had a weekly food review/interview column called "Lunch Meet." I've reviewed or profiled many East Valley eateries for the Wrangler News, and more recently I wrote a monthly column called "Four Corners" in Phoenix Magazine, in which I reviewed four different restaurants from four ends of the Valley, for slightly over four years, until it was shut down by COVID. I've also written many food-related entries for "Best of the Valley" and features like that.

And fun and delicious as all of this was, I too have suffered burnout. I don't expect any sympathy for this, of course; as Wells hastens to add: "The first thing you learn as a restaurant critic is that nobody wants to hear you complain."

This is understandable. Restaurant reviewing is a quintessential example of Nice Work If You Can Get It. Nobody doing data entry or telephone customer service, let alone paving roads in the Arizona heat, should have to endure somebody whining about what a drag it is to eat at nice restaurants for free and then write about it.

The day I was offered the food writing gig at Phoenix Magazine, I was driving home from the doctor's office where I had just learned I had diabetes. I immediately accepted the offer. My pancreas was just going to have to learn to cope.

All the same, after a few years even that nice work can grow old. First of all, not every restaurant is good. It's not fun--at least, it isn't fun for me--to write negatively about a small business into which people have poured their heart and soul and fortune, and on which their dreams are riding.

Besides, poor food can be hard on you. Substandard, misfired meals can clobber your digestion and leave you feeling hung over and help expand your waistline, all without the compensatory pleasure of a culinary success. As Wells says, after a few years you may find you're not so hungry anymore.

Even when the food is good, however, writing about it, for me, was often difficult. Applied to food, adjectives tend to wear out fast through repetition. I adore a good burrito, but it's hard to find a new word to describe even the most heavenly burrito on the planet.

Truthfully, I have sometimes found this same syndrome creeping into my movie reviewing. For most of about nine years, that was my main job--going to see movies and then writing down my thoughts about them. No doubt, if you're a cinema lover, it beats work.

Still, it's not certain that spending your days sedentary, in a cold dark room, eating greasy popcorn and Dots and Junior Mints and drinking Dr. Pepper, is the surest ticket to health and well-being. Certainly there are many movie critics who lived to old age, but two of the most famous departed on the early side, Gene Siskel at 53 and Roger Ebert at 70.

After long stretches of movie reviewing, a sense can sometimes set in that you've seen, and reviewed, all the movies, just with different titles and actors, just as when you're reviewing restaurants, a sense can set in that you've written up all the burritos, just with different dining rooms surrounding them. In my full-time critic days, people used to sometimes say, wow, you're lucky, you get to see all the movies. 

I would agree that I was very lucky. But then remember, I would add, it's not that I get to see all the movies, it's that I have to see all the movies.

Again, I do understand how absurdly fortunate I've been to spend so much of my working life in these amusing pursuits, and I'm inexpressibly grateful for it. My only point in all this, I suppose, is that no matter how cushy a job is, in the end it's still a job. So I wish Pete Wells a happy, and hungry, post-reviewing life.

EXTREMELY LOUDON & INCREDIBLY CLOSE

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The Phoenix Film Critics Society, of which I am a proud founding member, released its 2017 award nominations this week. As always, some of the choices represent my nominations and some do not, but there are lots of movies worth seeing on the list.

One of my choices which is well represented is The Shape of Water, which leads the field with nominations for Best Picture and in 13 other categories. So...

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