OUR VINES HAVE TENDER CREPES/RIP HDS

Check out the September issue of Phoenix Magazine, now on the stands...

...for Your Humble Narrator's "Four Corners" column on Valley creperies.

Still saddened by the departure, at 91, of Harry Dean Stanton.

I tend to remember him as the splenetic Bud in 1984's Repo Man--contrasting with Tracey Walter's serene, visionary Miller as the role models for Otto (Emilio Estevez)--but he was also Brain in Escape From New York and Brett in Alien and Asa Hawks in Wise Blood and Jerry in Straight Time and Travis in Paris, Texas and St. Paul in The Last Temptation of Christ and Molly Ringwald's Dad in Pretty in Pink and Richard Farnsworth's Brother in The Straight Story and Sam Shepard's Old Man in Fool for Love. And that's not to mention the earlier small roles he played in everything from Cool Hand Luke to The Godfather, Part II. And somehow, through all of these roles, what he really seemed best at was being his seriously one-of-a-kind self.

UP AGAINST THE WALTER

Check out my list, on Topless Robot, of ten triumphant Tracey Walter credits.

RIP to the seriously adorable Yvonne Craig, passed on at 78. She’s hard to forget as the primly high-kicking Batgirl in the third season of the ‘60s Batman series...
 

 ...but she should also be remembered as the green-skinned, ill-fated Marta, consort of Steve Ihnat’s LOOOORD Garth in the Star Trek episode “Whom Gods Destroy.”

She’s also an example of what Mars needs in Larry Buchanan’s Mars Needs Women. Get in line, Mars.