Into the Maelstrom, with the Night Tripper

So a few years ago, Dr. John's set on the Main Stage at Crawfish Fest was called off because of high winds and threatening rain. It sucked, but we couldn't blame anyone... the weather was clearly gonna get nasty, and cutting the set kept him -- and the audience -- safe.

But then, as the rest of the fest went on, we got word -- after the show officially ended, Dr. John was going to play in the pavilion, a quasi-indoors stage. The sides of the place were open, but there was a roof over the stage and the audience area, so we were good to go.

Well, Dr. John took the stage directly from his tour bus, parked behind it -- and all hell broke loose. The skies opened. There was thunder. There was lightning. And there were heavier torrents of rain than anything I'd ever been outdoors for. All pounding around us at all sides...

...except there in front of us was Dr. John, the Night Tripper, absolutely in his element. All around us, Nature was flexing its terrifying muscle. And amid that thunder and dread, Dr. John played a piano festooned with skulls and juju bags, laying down down-and-dirty, voodoo-infused funk. And when he sang "I Walk on Gilded Splinters," you couldn't help but shiver.

"Put gris-gris on your doorstep
And soon you be in the gutter
Melt your heart like butter
And I-I-I can make you stutter."

Eventually, the show ended. The Doctor took his bows, and headed back into his tour bus and into a nice, warm hotel. The rest of us ran back to our cars through the unrelenting rain, fueled up by a powerful hex and ready to drive through anything.

Rob

Thinking about Alan Rickman

I've seen a lot of reminiscences about Alan Rickman today -- mostly about his performance as Hans Gruber or Severus Snape, with mentions of Dogma or Galaxy Quest here or there.

But there's one movie he was in that I haven't seen anyone mention. I saw Closet Land in a film class years ago, an intense film that made a big impression on me. It had just two actors -- Rickman and Madeleine Stowe -- on one set, as Rickman interrogates Stowe, a children's book author, about subversive messages he suspects she's inserting into her books. It knocked me out, this two-person performance that had the power of a much grander drama.

Now, I haven't seen it in 20 years or so. It might strike me now as too sincere, or somehow quaint. The past 20 years have seen a lot of news about interrogation and torture, and today I'd be viewing the film through more experienced (more cynical? almost certainly) eyes. Roger Ebert, a little older then than I am now, thought it pious and smug. But I suspect with actors the caliber of Rickman and Stowe, it's as good as it ever was. And it made such an impression on me, that when I heard he'd died, this was the first movie I thought of. The particulars of the film had faded, but it had one resounding lasting impression: the memory that Alan Rickman blew me the hell away.

The movie is hard to find: Amazon has only six VHS copies available, and I don't think it was ever pressed onto DVD in the US. (Apparently there's a Spanish version that you can switch the language to the original English.) But if you want to see for yourself, your best best is probably YouTube, where it's available in 9 parts.

Here's part one:

Rob

David Brenner

David Brenner passed away yesterday.

There was a time, when I was young, when he was my favorite comedian. There were two reasons for that. The first was that he guest-hosted for Johnny Carson on the tonight show on so many occasions. While I never thought of Johnny as a comic -- he was a host -- David was a comedian filling in for the host. And at the time, he always made me laugh, maybe even more than Johnny did.

Second, he was from Philadelphia. It seems a strange thing to matter so much to me, but it did. He was one of ours, a guy from that same area that became a big star. David Brenner, because of his local origins, but also because he always seemed to wear those origins on his sleeve, somehow made the idea of success real. That's important to a kid. (I feel the same sense of local pride in Tina Fey. When the Phillie Phanatic showed up on an episode of 30 Rock, Kathy probably got a sunburn from the sheer joy on my face.)

Mark Evanier has a great remembrance of David Brenner on his blog.

I've got nothing but warm memories of him, and how much he made me laugh when I was younger. But there was one day... Kathy and I were walking up the strip -- forever, it seemed, as distances are illusions out there, and objects are much further than they appear. And all the while, we were being paced in the bumper-to-bumper traffic by a truck with a loudspeaker and a billboard that was blasting raucous, canned laughter, punctuated by David Brenner's voice urging us to come to his show. The laughs were eardrum-piercing, meant to grab attention for the brief moment as the truck drove past. But it was crawling along in a traffic jam, and we were walking the same unfortunate direction. So instead of hearing it for 20 seconds or so, we heard it for fifteen minutes, on an interminable loop.

For refuge, we ducked into a shop that was selling cheap tourist bait, and holed up there among the "What Happens In Vegas" T-shits and souvenir dice. Eventually, the truck crawled by, and the danger had passed. I can't stress enough to you how aggravating the sound of all that phony laughter on the recording was, and how much of it we heard. I can only say this: Had it been Carrot Top, I'd still be livid about it today.

But David Brenner? I could forgive him anything.

Rest in Peace, David. Thanks for almost all of the laughs.

Rob

Signal From Space

I noticed that Forbidden Planet was on TCM today, and remembered that it was Steve Friedman's favorite movie. I used to listen to Friedman's Mr. Movie radio show on 1210AM late at nights, driving home after a weekend with Kathy. The long gaps for commercials would drive me crazy, but in the days before podcasts, it was a radio talk show I found interesting and engaging, and it kept me awake and on the road when I needed it. Steve was an old-time movie fan, and I'd be lying if I said I always agreed with his opinions, particularly about newer films. But he kept me listening, and kept me interested, and I always learned something about some older movie or star that I hadn't known before.

So when I saw the listing for Forbidden Planet, I looked him up, to see if he was still doing his late-night program. Sadly, he passed away in 2009, shortly after recording a show. Though I'm out of broadcast range, Philadelphia radio (not to mention the many stations he was syndicated on) is a little less colorful without him, I'm sure.

Anyway, the news, old though it was, and his love for the film, finally inspired me to watch Forbidden Planet today. And it's a fine movie, full of mystery, adventure, and grand, bold ideas. (Plus, it has an awesome robot in Robbie and a gorgeous actress in Anne Francis, both of whom I'm sure Steve appreciated.) I'm glad I finally saw it; I can't believe it took me so long.

Thanks, Steve.

Rob

Mister Gus

Our good buddy—Gus, Mister Gus, Guster, the Bumble, Sweet Kisses—is gone.

This little white ferret lived a good life with us, entering our house with his three pals, Blink, the Dude, and She-Devil, eventually outlasting them all. For the last year or so of his life, he was a solo ferret, and a very good one. Being a ferret was what he loved, and he did it with pride.

Of course, he was a little OCD. That comes from being a ferret, I think. (I was going to say "anal," but that just brought memories of this.) There were a number of items that he obsessed about. He had a toy shaped like a jack that he tried to pull into a hanging hammock tube. He’d carry it in his teeth from the bottom of the cage to the top, rest it on the platform, climb into the tube and pull it. It was too big to get in, but he spent a lot of time trying. (And at one point, he even succeeded, bringing the jack through a slit at the top! A proud day.)

Then there were the jingle balls. They needed to go in the corner, in a little nook between the CD racks. We could shake the little balls and send them rolling around the room, and he’d unfailingly bring them to where he could keep an eye on them.

But his greatest accomplishment was Sweet Kisses. For Valentine’s Day, Kathy gave me a blue heart-shaped pillow that said “Sweet Kisses” on it, like one of those conversation hearts. Gus took a liking to it. (Or maybe it was hate. Who can tell?) Every day, he’d climb up onto the sofa, find the Sweet Kisses pillow and grab it in his teeth, and then jump down to the floor. Now, while it doesn’t weigh as much, the pillow is about his size. So when he would leap into the air, it was always a surprise how he’d land. Sometimes he’d land like he intended, four feet on the ground and Sweet Kisses in front of him. Other times he’d land directly on the pillow and bounce off. More often, his momentum would take him over Sweet Kisses, flipping him upside down onto the floor once the pillow hit the ground. Regardless, he’d still have that pillow in his teeth. He’d give it a shake or two, then let it go. Once it was on the floor, he could ignore it. (He did try to drag it into a corner once or twice, but the geography was a little too tight for success, and he gave up. Maybe he’d learned his lesson from the jack toy.)

These things could give us endless entertainment. He wasn’t much of a snuggler, but every now and then, if we were lucky, he would give us little kisses—particularly if Kathy had just eaten chocolate or if I’d just had a beer. And then he’d run off to fall asleep in a fleece in the corner, or behind the TV, or pretty much anywhere. He’d mastered sleep.

We miss him something terrible. There hasn’t been a day I’ve woken up since he died that I hadn’t had to work to pull myself out of bed, aware that I wouldn’t be able to get a hug from Gus once I made it downstairs. Just the same, I’m glad we had so much time with him… most likely, extra time. Last year he was pretty sick. He’d lost all the hair on his body (only his head was spared), due to symptoms from insulinoma. I worried about him every day. But our vet gave him an experimental treatment, an implant that would treat the disease. Soon, Gus was starting to grow hair again, and was certainly feeling better, too.

He had a theme song, of course:

Mister Gus! Mister Gus!

I don’t wanna cause a fuss!

But you’re so cute! You’re so cute!

In your little ferret suit!

You’re so nice! You’re so nice!

I’ll freeze you in a block of ice!

And thaw you out when it’s time!

You’ll see the future, blow your mind!

Mister GUUUUS!

(This was usually sung in several verses, some in Spanglish--“en tu pequeno ferret suit”--some with a Transylvanian accent, and so on. I’m not sure if he ever got the Captain America allusion.)

This last month or so, he started to lose strength in his hind legs. It went from a little wobble now and then to him not being able to count on them at all in a matter of weeks. We were giving him medicine to deal with the problem, but it wasn’t helping. And eventually, Gus decided he’d had enough. He started refusing all food, like it was medicine. We used a syringe to get some food into him for a little while, but eventually decided that he knew his body best, and was making a deliberate decision.

Oh, hell. All pet stories end the same, if you go on long enough. You don’t need to hear this, and I don’t want to tell anymore. What matters is this little fuzzy, fussy white guy brought a lot of love into our life, and I still can’t believe he’s gone.

Rob

My Uncle Ed

My Uncle Ed passed away recently.

I can't write about him without writing about New Year's Day. For years, my mom and dad threw the best New Year's party I'd ever been to, and it started up hours after the ball dropped in Times Square. It started out, I believe, as simply the day we'd invite my dad's cousins over to the house, and we'd have hors d'oeuvres and dinner and watch the parades and bowl games. I was a little kid at the start of these. I have a distinct memory of making designs with my Spirograph with my cousin Wendy, in the house we lived in up until I was in second grade. Anyhow, I saw my mom's side of the family all the time, but this was really the one day of the year I could count on seeing my dad's side.

As we got older, the party changed a bit. My cousins started bringing their kids, and the party grew. Other family friends would come over, and the party grew. My brothers, my sister and I would invite a couple friends, and the party grew. People would be happily jammed into the kitchen, dining room and family room, talking and watching the game and digging into the buffalo chicken dip and eating delicious little jellied hot dogs on toothpicks. Man, I loved those things.

But in the living room, my Uncle Ed and Aunt Florence would be holding court. He'd have his harmonica out, telling jokes and stories, reciting poems, and playing songs with his sons and daughters and daughters-in-law and grandkids. And us. Singing old songs: folk music like "Mountain Dew," or pieces of Americana like "Daisy," written before most of us were born. The crowd gathered, the crowd stayed, the crowd piped up. There was no fire in the fireplace. We didn't need one. Uncle Ed and his harmonica were the spark, and Jim and his guitar and Brian with his concertina fanned the flame. And New Year's Day was my favorite day of the year.

Uncle Ed was 52 when I was born; he was 93 when he passed away. I realize now that I have no earthly idea what he did as an occupation between coming home as a veteran of World War II and taking up coaching tennis in his retirement. I'm okay with having that gap in my knowledge. I don't need to think of him at a desk, getting the bills paid. To me, he'll always be on my mom's sofa, playing that harp. The happiest man I know.

Play us out, Uncle Ed.

Rob

Some Sad News This Morning

My godmother passed away this morning. She'd been sick for a little while, or rather, sick for probably a long while and mercifully only felt its effects in the last couple months. Death is where we find out that things can be better than the alternative and still suck by any measure.

Anyway, late in the 1960s my parents chose their friends Doris and Bob to be my godparents, and they couldn't have chosen better. Aunt Doris was smart -- so smart -- and loved literature, and loved to read. She was outspoken and sardonic, and always knew which drum she was dancing to. Uncle Bob has always been a man of good humor and warmth (and impeccable facial hair), more softspoken than Doris but always knowing just how to get her ear. A great couple, who have raised three incredible daughters.

Between my parents and Aunt Doris & Uncle Bob, I couldn't have asked for better examples of how to be a grown-up.

Rest in peace, Aunt Doris. We miss you.

Rob

A Pretty Little Devil

Climb, She-She, climb!

We’re on vacation, so I don’t have any photos to share right now. But I wanted to write a little about She-Devil, our ferret who we lost a couple days ago.

She was a pretty little sable ferret, who we called “the beautiful lady.” (Or climby-girl, because of her high-altitude exploits. Or slinky-girl, because of the way she'd positively ooze herself out of the ferret bed, like one of Dali's melted clocks.) We got her several years ago, along with Gus, Blink and the Dude, from neighbors of friends, who found them too much to handle. And they were a handful, to be sure.

I always had trouble telling Blink apart from She-Devil. They were both sables, but Blink was a little smaller and lighter than She, and had a different coloration on her nose. They were so similar, in fact, that after Blink passed away, I sometimes imagined that we’d gotten the IDs wrong, and thought that Blink was adjusting to her new life getting called She-Devil.

She-Devil and me

But no, She-Devil was all she-devil -- in causing trouble, at least, though not in temperament. She regularly climbed up the outside of her cage, King Kong style, and then would peer over the gate that sealed off the family room, and drop the two and a half feet into the kitchen when we weren’t looking. Then, she could explore. She loved to explore, walking around not only the first floor, but climbing the stairs to the second floor so she could sneak around the office and our bedroom as well.

In later years, she gradually lost her sight completely. This did not deter her in the least. She’d climb, look around the corner, and drop into the dark, trusting that the kitchen floor would catch her. The only concession to her blindness was that, when she would leave her cage, she would walk the perimeter of our family room to make sure everything was where she expected it to be.

The Fab Four, piled behind a speaker in early days

I always worried about She-Devil. Part of that was that she was the oldest of our ferrets, and I think part had to do with the way Blink passed away. Blink got really sick, really quickly. One night, we noticed she wasn’t well, and resolved to take her to the vet the next morning. When I woke up to check on her, she was already beyond any help. There was nothing we could do.

She-Devil somehow spared us that. There was no feeling of helplessness with her; we were on vacation, but even our niece, who was ferret sitting for us, says that she just walked into her room to check on them, and She-Devil didn’t move. No prolonged illness; she just stopped.

She-Devil and Gus

Or that’s what it seems like to us, from the outside. Earlier in the year, She-Devil had a growth on the side of her face. The doctor said it wasn’t any trouble unless it interfered with her eating, but he could remove it if we liked. We’d worried about invasive surgery, so we didn’t opt to remove it until it grew to be about the size of a raspberry – it was like she was growing a second head. A couple of months ago, we removed it, and then a few weeks ago her stitches fell out. She was growing fur back in the places on her neck the doctor had needed to shave for surgery. For the first time in months, she looked truly healthy.

And somehow, the whole episode let me finally let go of the worry I’d always harbored. She seemed happy and well at last, and that’s how I’ll remember her. A dedicated escape artist, and a clever, brave girl who would kiss me on the nose a little almost every day.

We’ll miss you, She-She.

Rob

UPDATE: As you can see, I've added some photos of She-Devil and her friends. Here are also a couple links to some of her greatest hits.

Grrr.

Somehow I lost all the text to a long-ish post about (well, sort of about) Harvey Pekar, the great comics author who died yesterday. Hopefully I'll be able to recreate it, but in the meantime, here's a link to an interview from a few years ago, and Heidi MacDonald's rundown of the tributes and retrospectives.

Rob

Goodbye, Koko

Koko Taylor has died at age 80, less than four weeks after her last performance. I had the privilege of seeing her perform a few times, and she was never less than thrilling. But this video is the first one I've ever seen of her performing not as the Queen of the Blues, but as an up-and-coming star. Her voice, though -- her voice is still right there, already able to shake you to the soles of your feet.

Rest in peace, Koko. I hope that wherever you are, you're pitching a wang-dang doodle.

Rob

Bettie Page, R.I.P.

There are some people whom our imaginations never let grow old.

Rest in peace, Bettie.

Rob

A Moment of Silence

It's the 10th annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance, and too few news outlets are reporting on it. The day raises awareness of hate crimes against transgender people, and commemorates those who have been killed in violence fueled by prejudice.

Judging from Google News, the national media has very little to say about it.

I would never have heard of it, if not for my friend Ami. But now I have, and now you have too.

So take a moment of silence, and think about some people gone too soon, for the worst of reasons.

And then tell someone else. Because silence doesn't do anyone any good.

Rob

Freeze on Action

Paul Newman has passed on at 83.

Rob

In a World...

... without Don LaFontaine.

Rest in peace, sir. I'll miss your voice.

Rob

How to Wave Goodbye Without Moving Your Arms

The first time I ever broke up with a girl, it was because of George Carlin.

She was a couple of years younger than me, and we had very little in common. Different taste in music (she was a U2 fan; looking back, her taste was better than mine), different tastes in TV, different tastes in friends. We both liked to make out, but that was pretty much the breadth of our recreational intersection.

And so one night, we're at a dance at the high school, talking with a bunch of my friends and our dates, and not really connecting, as always. We start talking about comedians. Eddie Murphy's Delirious was really big at the time, and she mentioned it. I mentioned how much I loved George Carlin; when I'd had a paper route a few years before, I played a cassette of A Place for My Stuff over and over again until long past I had the thing memorized. And she said,

"Who's George Carlin?"

You can't break up with someone on the spot at a big school dance. It's just rude. But those three words were like the anti-Thunderbolt: a clear sign reading You Are Not Compatible.

A week later, we were through.

George Carlin is immensely important to me; never mind that he was funny as hell, there was a weight, an importance to his words that few comedians achieve.

Because he chose his words carefully. He loved his words. Words were one of his chief sources of humor. He settled for nothing less than exactness, and lampooned the vague and the wishy-washy. Euphemisms were dicti non grata.

His other target was authority. He'd skewer the powerful with moral outrage or impish glee, usually by turning their own jargon against them in a form of linguistic judo. It usually wasn't anyone specific he was going after; more often, he was challenging the very idea of authority. He could be blisteringly funny, or blisteringly angry. His humor wasn't always comfortable. There was a knife-twist, an unkind mirror. I'm tempted to say that if Joseph Heller did stand-up, it would sound like he'd cribbed from Carlin. But the fact is there was no one like Carlin, and now there is no one like Carlin.

But I'd bet that there are some people who are better, smarter and more independent than they would have been without him.

Rest in peace, George.

Rob

Caught the Westbound

Folk troubadour, raconteur and activist Utah Phillips died last week. The Times has an obituary.


Hallelujah, he was a bum... and when he sang, it was easy to remember that we all are: We all need a handout, a leg up, or someone to stand by us sometimes. He was always a good friend to those in need.

Rest in peace, Utah. We'll miss you at Fest.

Rob

Remembering the Dude

I'm trying not to let this blog go to an all-ferrets-all-the-time mode, but I wanted to write a few words about the Dude.

When we first brought him and his pals home, two of them, the Dude (then known as the ferret formerly known as Snowball) and Gus, were wearing little collars with bells on them. We thought they looked ridiculous. We took Gus's off with no problem -- it was tight on his neck, but not too bad. But the Dude's was on really tight... and when I peeled it off, it came attached to skin and hair. We took him to the vet immediately, and had to keep him in isolation until the raw wound on his neck had healed.

It's not surprising that this nameless little tough guy immediately won my heart. He was the first ferret of the bunch we had to treat as an individual, not as part of a big, unruly group. We refused to call him Snowball (he was tan, for Christ's sake) but we didn't have a suitable name for him. But we had to call him something as he wandered into places we didn't want him to go -- so I called him "dude," until we realized that his laid-back personality and his earth-tone coloring matched Jeff Lebowski's.

He had a genius for trouble. His propensity for getting under our fold-out couch and coiling up in the springs (causing us nail-biting worry) led us to take the feet off the couch so it rested on the ground, and safety-pin its cover on. It took a lot to make that couch impervious to the Dude. He was a master safecracker.

He was also the ruler of the roost for a while. Once we put him back in gen-pop, he and Gus (accustomed to being the sole dominant ferret in his absence) had some legendary knock-down drag-out fights for dominance. Usually they involved Dude dragging Gus by his head or neck to behind the TV. A few years later, the fights started happening again; this time the heartier Gus did the dragging.

He had his own theme song, to the tune of a Budweiser commercial, I think:

(Here comes the Dude)
Here comes the Dude oh yes he's A-Number-1!
(Here comes the Dude)
Here comes the Dude oh yes he's nothin' but fun!

and so on, filling in rhymes as I went.

Over the last few months, I felt like I was seeing less and less of the Dude, even though I was spending more time with him than the other ferrets. We were giving him different medicines twice a day, some of which he liked, and some he hated. And by the end, he was so droopy that the only time I'd see the old Dude spark was when he was fighting off a syringe full of yuck.

But even then, I could just sit on the couch with him on my lap, petting him softly, singing little songs to him. I wish I could do it now.

Rob

Some Days You Eat the B'ar...

Rest in peace, Dude.


Rob

Goodbyes to Men of Myth

My editor passed along a photocopy of this obituary of Ben Chapman, the man who played Creature from the Black Lagoon, in a recent issue of The Economist. I figured I'd link to it if it was online so y'all could read it. But in looking for it, I also found their most recent obituary, for Gary Gygax.


I never met either one of them, but both men made my life richer just the same.

Rob

In Memory of a Monster

I just found out from a coworker that Ben Chapman, the man who played the Gill Man in The Creature From the Black Lagoon, has died. The Gill Man has long been my favorite Universal monster, and I'm sorry to hear of his passing. Here's a picture of Mr. Chapman in happier times, carrying the beautiful Ginger Stanley off to his lair.


Rest in peace, Mr. Chapman. And thank you for the scares.

Rob