SHELL OR HIGH WATER

Happy October everybody! My favorite month, back again.

Plenty of opining by Your Humble Narrator, in case you have time on your hands: Check out my reviews of Free Solo and Marvel's Venom, online at Phoenix Magazine...

...as well as my "Four Corners" column on Valley gastropubs, and my short item about the abruptly announced demise and just as sudden revival of Pedro's Mexican in Glendale.

It's always a wacky adventure when my pal Vince Larue visits from Normandy.

Earlier this week we were heading up East Van Buren, along the back forty of the Phoenix Zoo, when we noticed a large object in the road—a turtle. We pulled into the parking lot of the Rolling Hills golf course and crossed two lanes of traffic to get to him. So much traffic went by in that time that I was sure he’d be turtle pizza by the time we reached him, but incredibly he was intact, plodding along calmly, almost to the far side of the road.

There was just a construction site there, however, with no water I could see, and since he was obviously an aquatic species of turtle I thought we’d better try to get him back to the lagoons at the rear of the zoo, from whence I’d guess he escaped; you can often see turtles sunning themselves there. It was tough to find a spot in the fence he could get through, but we finally left him at the bottom of a steep bank, near a muddy pool that led through an abutment under the fence. But not, of course, before getting a few testudine selfies...

 

Could I look any creepier? "Hey lady, y'wanna buy a turtle...?"

Hope he’s OK. It seemed like a better spot than where we found him, anyway.

CHILL OUT

One week to Halloween, my favorite holiday!

Barry Graham was kind enough to include my zombie novel The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead on his list of “creepy reads for Halloween.” It’s available on Amazon Kindle or in a dead-tree edition with kick-ass cover art by my pal Vince Larue…

This isn’t a quid pro quo: When I started reading Graham’s classic Of Darkness and Light...

...one Friday evening about twenty years ago, it kept me awake and creeped out farther into the wee hours of Saturday than I intended.

ILLEGAL WRITE TURNS

Your Humble Narrator is humbled to be among the contributors to Southwest Noir, a new anthology of gritty yarns by writers from or in or concerned with the southwest, all illustrated by my pal Vince Larue.

Included is a short comic called “Duck”—story by me, art by Vince—as well as my short story “The Guy on TV.” Other contributors include such notables as James Sallis and Larry Fondation, as well my pals Barry Graham, Robrt Pela and Steve Shadow, among many others.

It’s great to be in such company. Several of us will be present for a book-signing this Friday at Fair Trade Café in downtown Phoenix, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.—not sure which ones or how many, but I’m planning to be there, anyway, as is Vince.

In other scribbling news, the February issue of Phoenix Magazine includes my review of Rhema Soul Cuisine in Queen Creek…

It’s on the stands now, or you can read it here.

FALLON MAN

“Thank you…”

For me, the funniest thing about Jimmy Fallon is his inflection of those two words, in his recurring “Thank You Note” segment on Late Night. If you watched the show Friday nights, you’ve seen the shtick—to the accompaniment of a poignant piano theme, Fallon takes a few minutes before the first guest segment to catch up on his thank you notes, speaking them out loud as he writes them on cards (which he doesn’t take the time to seal). They’re often addressed not to individual people but to inanimate objects and concepts, as in:

“Thank you, cotton candy, for making my grandmother’s hair look delicious.”

“Thank you, microbreweries, for making my alcoholism seem like a neat hobby.”

Clever as many of these are—two volumes of them have been published—I think it’s less the quips than Fallon’s presentation that makes them funny: his soft, lost-in-thought murmur, and the sense of spiritual cleansing provided by the music.

Born in Brooklyn but raised in upstate New York, Fallon was a Saturday Night Live nut from early childhood. He broke onto that show in his mid-20s in 1998, with his gift for impressions, especially of musicians. By 2000 he was the co-anchor, with Tina Fey, of SNL’s “Weekend Update” segment.

He acted in a few movies, notably Almost Famous, Woody Allen’s Anything Else and the dreadful action comedy Taxi, without making much of an impression, before being tapped to take over for Conan O’Brien on Late Night when O’Brien, in turn, left to take over Jay Leno’s Tonight Show for what turned out to be a painfully short tenure—NBC returned the antsy Leno to the host’s chair, and O'Brien was exiled to TBS, where he remains.

Fallon, however, settled in nicely in the Late Night slot, with his thank-you notes and his good-natured musical parodies. Now, after Leno’s teary-eyed farewell earlier this month, and some time off for the first week of the Olympics, Fallon yesterday became the 6th host of The Tonight Show (or maybe the 7th, if you count Leno twice).

It’s hard to say, but I think it could be a good fit. Although he had some fine bits—his “headlines” routine, especially—I was never able to warm up to Leno as the great Carson’s successor. Leno, with his prickly, nettled persona, was one of the best American stand-ups ever back in the ‘80s, but he grotesquely softened and dumbed-down his act for The Tonight Show—there was always something unctuous and wheedling and pitifully desperate not to offend about him. And ill-treated though he was, it must be admitted that somehow O’Brien’s aggressive brilliance didn’t quite fit the classic flavor of that show either.

Fallon, on the other hand, has always used a soft, fuzzy persona, an amiable vagueness. Talented though he is, you wouldn’t think to use the word “brilliant” in connection with him. I don’t mean to suggest that he isn’t intelligent, only that his appeal as a performer derives more from his likability than from his intelligence or wit. He’s unlikely to replace Carson—nobody’s likely to do that—but unlike Leno or O’Brien, he has no need to dumb down his humor to be easy for the mainstream audience to take. Put bluntly, he doesn’t need to sell out to succeed.

And he says he isn’t going to: “I’m not going to change anything,” he’s reportedly said. “It’s more eyeballs watching, but it’s the same show.”

Based on his first show, he seems to be keeping his word. After a brief prologue in which he acknowledged the past hosts and touchingly introduced his parents and explained what The Tonight Show meant to him as a kid, he went back behind the curtain and then re-emerged to do a more or less business-as-usual show. The guests were perhaps bigger-name than usual, and a gag early on allowed for a parade of really big-name cameos, but the loose style—a silly dance skit with Will Smith; a lovely acoustic number by U2—was the same that he’s been using for years, an hour later. Would that Leno had had the same confidence.

Check out this portrait of Your Humble Narrator...

...drawn by Vince Larue for his upcoming Southwest Noir project, to which I’m proud to be a contributor…

Check out Mr. Peabody and Sherman getting honored on Hollywood Boulevard, in anticipation of their March 7 movie…

All I can say is, it's about freaking time.

RIP to Mary Grace Canfield, TV’s perennial dowdy spinster, and guest star on “A Date for Gomer,” one of the sweetest episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, departed at 89…

HORSE/SHOW

Again, Happy (Chinese) New Year! My pal, the brilliant artist Vince Larue, made these gorgeous horses for The Kid, who was born in the previous Year of the Horse:

Check out my list, on Topless Robot, of 12 Nerdy Alternatives to the Super Bowl.

However you spend it, I hope everybody enjoys UberBowl Sunday. If, like me, you’re mostly indifferent to football, you’ll enjoy the quiet streets, sparsely populated movie theaters and short waits at restaurants. If you’re a fan, you’ll enjoy the festivity of the day, the excitement of the game and the spectacle of the show.

You may also be one of those who enjoy the Super Bowl commercials, those little exercises in corporate ego that often showcase dazzling skill in compressed cinematic narrative. Last year, one of the more popular ads was the “Team” commercial for the Hyundai Santa Fe, in which a put-upon little kid assembles a football team of other wimpy-looking kids engaged in various macho activities—wrestling bears, etc.

One kid is welding some big, round, suspended metal structure covered with what look like square shutters, making it for all the world resemble the sphere that heroes take to the Moon in The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.

Can that possibly be what was intended—that he's planning a trip to the Moon?

P.S. WE LOVE YOU

Last weekend Your Humble Narrator, The Wife and The Kid, along with one of The Chihuahuas—the other dislikes travel, and stayed with a sitter—betook ourselves to Palm Springs, California, on yet another pilgrimage to the annual Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival.

Along with Try and Get Me, which I had already seen, this year’s schedule included a really fun obscurity that was new to me: Mary Ryan, Detective, starring Marsha Hunt, who, now in her mid-90s, attended the showing.

This 1949 programmer, from Columbia, seems to have been intended as the first in a continuing series, but it ended up being a one-off. A pity; it’s delightful. I was expecting cutesy Nancy Drew stuff, but the title character was a female police detective, and plenty self-sufficient. She goes undercover to find the heads of a ring of jewel thieves, who turn out to be a Mom-and-Pop couple who run a turkey farm—they smuggle the loot out as stuffing! They also keep pointing out that the front makes dough, too; you get the feeling that it would be more cost-efficient if they just went legit.

Mom and Pop aren’t so sweet, though—at one point Mary has to remove a bullet from a wounded man who they would otherwise allow to die, and at the end they’re perfectly willing to dispose of her, too. What I liked was that there wasn’t some handsome male cop who, at the end, told Mary that her detecting days were over; he was going to make an honest woman out of her. This was probably only because they wanted to bring the character back, but still, it was refreshing.

The Kid went with me to this movie; her first noir! On the way to the Camelot she asked me if it was in black-and-white, and grumbled when I said it was (grrrr!), but she got really caught up in the story. It was also extremely cool that she got to see how pretty and adorable Marsha Hunt was in the film, and then see her brought up on stage for the Q&A afterwards, and see what a beautiful, elegant old lady she is now.

The next day I saw (by myself this time) another pretty good one, called High Tide, from 1947.

It was from Monogram, though it seemed more polished than their product usually does, and starred the great Lee Tracy as—what else?—a fast-talking newspaperman. He and Don Castle, “the poor man’s Clark Gable,” are trapped together in a wrecked car on the beach at Malibu in the opening, as the tide’s coming in, and the plot is a flashback as to how they got there.

By the end of the twisty, confusing story, I wasn’t much more enlightened than I was at the beginning, but who cares, if you get to listen to Lee Tracy talk? Though his character claims to be 42, Tracy was around 50 years old when he made this film, and he looks at least ten years older, but his acting chops were still intact.

As it happened, The International Al Jolson Society was holding its 63rd annual convention in Palm Springs that weekend as well, at the Spa Resort and Casino, so I got to stick my head in there, too, and listen to Jolie fans bellyache about how political correctness has unfairly besmirched the reputation of the man they call “The World’s Greatest Entertainer.” I went to the memorabilia auction—which the auctioneer basically treated as a chance to do stand-up, and he was quite hilarious—and scored a CD of Jolson performing schmaltzy standards as the host of the Kraft Music Hall in the late ‘40s, and trading quips with his piano accompanist Oscar Levant. Great stuff.

I also took The Kid for a ride to the top of San Jacinto Peak, on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, the world’s largest rotating aerial tram, currently celebrating its 50th year in operation.

I had ridden it once before, years ago, to an awards presentation for a film festival I was judging. Not a huge fan of heights myself, I hadn’t much enjoyed the experience, majestic though the view of the craggy mountainside and the Coachella Valley below undeniably is. But I decided it was worth a second trip to enjoy The Kid’s terror. She was disappointingly un-terrified, however. After I got home, a friend sent me an email of “Tram Safety Fun Facts” detailing all sorts of nightmarish things that have happened there over the years. Too bad I hadn’t had this information to tell The Kid beforehand.

By the way, my pal Barry Graham has completed “The Whitey Thor,” a decidedly adults-only comic about his encounter with novelist Brad Thor, illustrated by my pal Vince Larue; you can read it here.

COOKIE MONSIEUR

Friday I had lunch with Vince Larue, the splendid young illustrator who created the cover art for my zombie novel…

Vince was in town for the scheduled opening, that evening, of a show at Willo North Gallery in which his work was to be featured, but which was—for reasons unrelated to him—ignominiously cancelled after he had already made the trip from France to attend the opening (happily, the show is to open in March instead, at a venue TBA).

Anyway, for lunch we went to Beijing Garden, the newish, excellent Chinese place at COFCO Center. I had the eggplant in brown sauce—sublime—and Vince had the spicy tofu, which I sampled and which was also delicious, though a bit spicier than I prefer. When we finished, we were brought our fortune cookies.

Now, at a friend’s recommendation last year I read a charming book, which I highly recommend, called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, by a New York Times reporter named Jennifer 8 Lee (yes, her middle name is “8”). It’s about the considerable significance of Chinese food in general, and the fortune cookie in particular, in American culture.

Apparently the fortune cookie is not so familiar in Normandy. I cracked mine open, read my fortune (“Have a vision. Be demanding.”) and was crunching up the halves when I heard Vince giggling from across the table. I looked up.

“I ate the message,” he said sheepishly, spitting out a tiny wad of pulverized paper.

So his fortune remains a mystery. But if I had to take a guess, it would be that a bright future is betokened for this guy.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, everybody. To the very tiny degree that I care, I guess I‘m rooting for Baltimore, as I’ve had a lot of fun in that city, and I love that they named their football team in honor of Poe, who died there.

CHRISTMAS IN OCTOBER

Happy Halloween everybody!

Appropriate to the day, Your Humble Narrator would like to offer the great Kindle-reading public his new novel, The Night Before Christmas of the Living Dead; or, A Very Zombie Christmas…

Like my first effort, Super Eight Days, it’s available on Amazon Kindle for just 99 cents. Unlike Super Eight, it’s a gruesome, raunchy, twisted horror tale crammed with gory violence, graphic sex, warped psychology and terrible language, all set against the backdrop of Holiday consumerism. It's not for kids, or for adults with decent sensibilities.

I’m hoping that a “dead tree” edition of the book will be available soon.

The art is by Vince LaRue.

FOR WHOM THE DELL TOLLS

Today Your Humble Narrator enjoyed an excellent lunch at Haiku Grill with Vince LaRue, an up-and-coming illustrator who’s visiting from Normandy. Here we are just after…

In addition to my idiotic squint, I look like late-vintage Orson Welles.

This week (October 8) would have marked the 93rd birthday of Dead End Kid/Bowery Boy Gabriel Dell, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s give the nod to Count Dracula. That is to say, to Dell’s vinyl version of Count Dracula, from the 1963 spoken-word album Famous Monsters Speak.

Each side of this LP, which was peddled in the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, featured a dramatic monologue, one by the Frankenstein Monster, the other by Drac. The Frankie side doesn’t quite come off, but Dell’s Dracula, speaking Interview With a Vampire-style to a nosy writer who has disturbed his slumber, is memorable (it was scripted, by the way, by Cherney Berg, author of many spoken-word records for kids and son of Gertrude Berg, of radio’s The Goldbergs).

Dell was a comedian and impressionist after his Bowery Boys years, and he hammed his Bela Lugosi voice, which he had already played for laughs on The Steve Allen Show, to the corny hilt on Famous Monsters Speak. It creeped me out pretty good when I heard it at a friend’s house as a kid.

Years later The Wife, having no idea I knew the record, gave me a CD re-release of it. I still listen to it now and then—I just played it last week, to inaugurate October.

A couple more RIPs: To Alex Karras, passed on at 77, who despite his legendary status with the Detroit Lions will for many of us be most fondly remembered as Mongo in Blazing Saddles. I‘ll always disagree with his assertion that “Mongo only pawn in game of life.”

RIP also to Turhan Bey. I was amazed, quite candidly, to learn he was still alive. He was 90; I was amazed he was that young. I always liked him, even when he was sending Kharis the Mummy off to murder somebody.