Well, dear readers, today’s notes may be mercurial in tone because as I write them my iPod is spewing forth music and music, of course, affects the way we feel, affects our emotions. So, some of the notes may be extremely dramatic, some may be lovey-dovey, some may be humorously humorous, some may be jazzy, some may be angular, and some may be depressing. For example, right now a lonely harmonica (Toots Thielmans) is wailing away plaintively on Vladimir Cosma’s beautiful theme from the motion picture entertainment Salut l’Artiste. Therefore, I shall wail away plaintively right now: A plaintive wail am I making, and I make it loudly and proudly. I am like a lonely harmonica in the night, wailing like a gazelle in pantaloons. You see how music has affected the writing of these here notes? They are quite plaintive, don’t you think? Now Harvey Schmidt is performing his rather frolicsome version of Soon It’s Gonna Rain. And suddenly the notes are frolicsome, like a gazelle picking cherries on a sunny day. I love musical notes, don’t you? I find them refreshing in a refreshing way. And now, Guy Haines is singing The Sweetest of Night and The Finest of Days. And suddenly I feel there is hope for all humanity and I feel positively positive and the notes reflect this, don’t they? Suddenly we have positive notes, filled with hope and desire and good wishes. For example, I’m feeling all warm and toasty as I write these here notes, all because the music is taking me there. Isn’t that exctiting? Isn’t that just too too?
Last night I watched a motion picture on DVD entitled Mikey and Nicky, a film of Elaine May. This film has a cult following which I’ve never understood. Yes, Mr. Falk and Mr. Cassavetes are fine actors and fun to watch. Yes, when they occasionally stick to the script there are some very amusing Elaine May lines, but most of it is pure improv and riffing, and I find it tiresome and sometimes even embarrassing to watch. The film is very amateurishly directed, but that’s probably what she was going for. Like several other films of the seventies, this is yet another case of a filmmaker (and her stars) running amok, and the studio (Paramount) allowing them to. Ultimately, Miss May shot over one million feet of film, a record in those days, and I don’t really know if it’s ever been topped. To put it in context, Gone with the Wind shot just over 400,000 feet of film. She then spent over two count them two years trying to edit the film. Paramount finally had enough and took it away from her, cobbled together whatever wasn’t completely finished, and released the film at 119 minutes. They pretty much buried it, and audiences were completely apathetic and didn’t come. At that length, the film was riddled with continuity errors. At some point, critics began championing it, and if one pays a visit to the imdb you will see a bunch of pretentious twits going on about how it’s one of the five best films ever made. I mean, even if you like it, that’s just a wee bit hyperbolic. It certainly has its moments, but other moments are truly excruciating. At some point, Miss May went back in and cut the film down to its present 105 minutes, deleting many of the continuity errors, but not all of them. In one rather astonishing shot, Falk and Cassavetes are holed up in a small hotel room, just the two of them, for an extremely long opening scene. In one shot, the camera pans with one of them and you can clearly see a crew member sitting there (what he was doing there is anyone’s guess). There are several new interviews with the producer and the cameraman, Victor Kemper. You can tell they’re skirting issues and trying to be nice, but their portrait of May is hilarious, almost like a Nichols and May sketch. They tell the story of a dolly shot where the camera is behind the two stars as they walk down the street. At some point they turn the corner and leave frame. After a few seconds, when Miss May did not call “cut”, the camera operator did. She was livid and screamed at him, “Why did you stop rolling?” He said, “Well, Elaine, the frame was empty, there was nothing there.” She said, “Well, they might have come back.” The DVD is worth it just for the sixty minutes of these interviews. The transfer perfectly replicates the ugly grainy badly exposed photography.
Chinatown is now playing. I feel very noir now. I feel like a dame may come around the corner at any moment. A bad dame. An evil dame with murder on her mind. Perhaps we’d all better click on the Unseemly Button below before we get involved in shadowy doings on rain-slicked streets, like a gazelle in a trench coat and a fedora.
Petula Clark is now singing I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love and now I’m happy and dancing about like a gazelle in go-go boots and a mini-skirt. Is there anything happier than hearing Miss Petula Clark rock her way through a Tony Hatch-Jackie Trent song? We must speak of happy things, like balloons and red licorice and cotton candy and cotton underpants. Yes, all is right with the notes when Miss Petula Clark is singing.
My goodness, these notes are mecurial aren’t they? And all because the music issuing forth from the iPod is affecting my mood as I type merrily away on the Powerbook. I must say it’s much easier typing on the Powerbook than it was on the Dell. I don’t know why, really, but it is.
I have made a decision to rid myself of all this extraneous paper laying near my phone, with years’ worth of phone numbers scribbled down here, there, and everywhere. I’m going to begin adding them into my computer address book – once there I can toss the papers. I can also synch the address book with the iPod and import them into there, too. It will be ever so much more civilized, don’t you think? Too much extraneous paper laying about has been known to cause excessive drooling in people of a certain age.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must make more notes, I must enter names and numbers into my address book, I must drive about in my motor car and I must feel like a vagabond because Harvey Schmidt is now pounding out La Vagabonde from Collette, Collage. Yes, I shall be a vagabond and a nomad and I shall wander and roam the streets looking for love in all the wrong places. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s time to resurrect an old topic, just because I’ve been so into it lately – what are your favorite songs of the sixties? What a decade it was for great songs of every kind – we will not see its like again, ever. Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we?