"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
"This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat."
I think it is a matter of balance, whether a person is normally serious about the affairs of state or tends to be somewhat nutty with personal preferences, judgments and mitigations. You can tell how far off course the discourse has become by the shrillness of the dialogue.
The True Believer, Copyright 1951 by Eric Hoffer. Printed in the United States of America. Harper & Row, Publishers.
Saturday, September 28, 2013
Friday, September 27, 2013
CALL TO ACTION! LET'S DUMP NETWORK NATIONAL NIGHTLY NEWS!
Over the past couple of years the States have become a tame and happy place, so bright and tranquil I don't believe we need those news anchors yapping and yammering at us any more. Okay, if that's too big a leap, we can still keep the anchors and fill the half hour with the same stuff they're doing now, but let's not call them news anchors, and let's not call it news any more. Let's change the name to something like "National Nightly People, Places & Things", or "Nation Nightly Lightly" or Netty Nips & Tucks".
There was a time when with a half hour reporters couldn't shove in nearly enough of the political, economic and social news of the day. But no more, and the proof is in the pudding: Let's take last night's ABC Nightly News with Diane Sawyer as a random sample of the deterioration of the broadcast form (from Thursday, September 26, 2013):
Diane began with a sort-of bio/expose of a British lady known as the "White Widow" who was rumored to have been involved in a recent shopping mall terrorist raid on a shopping mall in Africa. This went on for nearly eight minutes of air time.
The next section was a minute or two detailing President Obama's displeasure with the Republican House of Representatives, calling them 'blackmailers' for attempting to stop Obamacare. And this was followed by a minute or so of commentary presenting ex-President Clinton siding with Obama's point of view. There was no presentation of the actual substance of the disagreement, whatever it might have been.
The next segment gave viewers the same amount of time to consider that some airline pilots are regularly sleeping in the cockpits while the giant passenger jets in their charge go hurtling through the air.
Next, a report on a major fast food chain's switch from Styrofoam to paper cups, a few minutes on the Michael Jackson Wrongful Death Suit trial (now in the hands of the jury), a short section on Deals in Shopping Malls, a 'color seg' on a 'high flying workout', and a final report on Bill Gates asserting that the Control-Alt-Delete command wasn't entirely his fault.
That's the national news for Thursday, 27 September, 2013. News Lite, not even. You see what a false pretense the name National News has become.
Meanwhile, the real jobless rate in our country isn't 7 point something it is over 15 point something because your government has fudged the numbers. The actual rate of inflation is many times over the official rate because your government jacks the numbers. The unreported disaster of Obamacare is about to rob the middleclass to give to the poor. The dirty IRS is covering up the manifest criminal acts they performed over the past five years that most certainly influenced the outcome of the last presidential election: our labor force, our hospitals and our social services are flooded with illegal immigrants: our foreign policy is a shambles: our allies wonder at our lack of direction and our sworn enemies openly poke fun at and make fools of us.
My God, none of this bad crap can possibly be true. Surely, that would have been news and it would have been reported if it were true, but it wasn't reported and so obviously isn't true. No way real Americans can accept this second world, the grim and absurd fictional one I've just made up. Americans are too smart to believe the mad rant of a fool, too educated to be duped like that. That second scenario must be something, like, well, science fiction, a literary device presenting two entirely different worlds superimposed on each other in the same place and time. That problematic second world staggering under the heavy burden of its problems of over-taxation, inflation, government corruption and international bungling, that can't be real, can't be so, can't be the way things really are. I'll close my eyes and plug my ears. Look, I'm doing it right now. Can't be. Can't be. Can't be.
There was a time when with a half hour reporters couldn't shove in nearly enough of the political, economic and social news of the day. But no more, and the proof is in the pudding: Let's take last night's ABC Nightly News with Diane Sawyer as a random sample of the deterioration of the broadcast form (from Thursday, September 26, 2013):
Diane began with a sort-of bio/expose of a British lady known as the "White Widow" who was rumored to have been involved in a recent shopping mall terrorist raid on a shopping mall in Africa. This went on for nearly eight minutes of air time.
The next section was a minute or two detailing President Obama's displeasure with the Republican House of Representatives, calling them 'blackmailers' for attempting to stop Obamacare. And this was followed by a minute or so of commentary presenting ex-President Clinton siding with Obama's point of view. There was no presentation of the actual substance of the disagreement, whatever it might have been.
The next segment gave viewers the same amount of time to consider that some airline pilots are regularly sleeping in the cockpits while the giant passenger jets in their charge go hurtling through the air.
Next, a report on a major fast food chain's switch from Styrofoam to paper cups, a few minutes on the Michael Jackson Wrongful Death Suit trial (now in the hands of the jury), a short section on Deals in Shopping Malls, a 'color seg' on a 'high flying workout', and a final report on Bill Gates asserting that the Control-Alt-Delete command wasn't entirely his fault.
That's the national news for Thursday, 27 September, 2013. News Lite, not even. You see what a false pretense the name National News has become.
Meanwhile, the real jobless rate in our country isn't 7 point something it is over 15 point something because your government has fudged the numbers. The actual rate of inflation is many times over the official rate because your government jacks the numbers. The unreported disaster of Obamacare is about to rob the middleclass to give to the poor. The dirty IRS is covering up the manifest criminal acts they performed over the past five years that most certainly influenced the outcome of the last presidential election: our labor force, our hospitals and our social services are flooded with illegal immigrants: our foreign policy is a shambles: our allies wonder at our lack of direction and our sworn enemies openly poke fun at and make fools of us.
My God, none of this bad crap can possibly be true. Surely, that would have been news and it would have been reported if it were true, but it wasn't reported and so obviously isn't true. No way real Americans can accept this second world, the grim and absurd fictional one I've just made up. Americans are too smart to believe the mad rant of a fool, too educated to be duped like that. That second scenario must be something, like, well, science fiction, a literary device presenting two entirely different worlds superimposed on each other in the same place and time. That problematic second world staggering under the heavy burden of its problems of over-taxation, inflation, government corruption and international bungling, that can't be real, can't be so, can't be the way things really are. I'll close my eyes and plug my ears. Look, I'm doing it right now. Can't be. Can't be. Can't be.
THE TRUE BELIEVER - by Eric Hoffer
"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it isn't, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
"This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves, we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat."
There have been times in history and places on this planet earth where such incidents were not pervasive. These United States of America used to be one such place, and, in shrinking sectors, still is.
"This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves, we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat."
There have been times in history and places on this planet earth where such incidents were not pervasive. These United States of America used to be one such place, and, in shrinking sectors, still is.
Monday, August 12, 2013
THE FREIGHT TRAIN OF LOVE
will make scheduled stops Sept 23 through 29 on the
ALL ABOUT MURDER THING
And because of this, price for the e-book is an
unheard of $1.99, one week only. Click on the
clickable link below to purchase, but do it before
this Sunday evening, because after that the price
goes back up to 2/3 the cost of a Starbucks Vente
Latte:
http://www.amazon.com/Freight-Train-Love-ebook/dp/B00EOY1LLK/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379972392&sr=1-1&keywords=the+freight+train+of+love
The Freight Train of Love by John Klawitter
When true love comes along, you’re just a bug on the tracks.
A CLASSIC WAR ROMANCE, ACTION/THRILLER, MURDER MYSTERY The heroine of The Freight Train of Love, Clair Moore, is an ex-NFL cheerleader with a wicked fastball, now doing very well in the real estate market in Southern California. She has fallen for an older man, the highly successful action-thriller novelist Jack Larch. Jack was born in the thick of WWII, but even though he is a so-called boomer baby, he doesn’t see himself that way. Jack thinks he’s found the fountain of youth. With three or four wives behind him, as Jack’s on-again off-again girlfriend of the past ten years, Clair is understandably hesitant to commit, even though she has a growing affection for the cranky old genius. But Jack’s wildly carefree youth is now coming back to haunt him in violent and murderous ways…spelling disaster not for Jack himself, but for anyone showing they might be falling for him.
Here are a few lines from The Freight Train of Love:
His small study desk was the usual mess. I paid his bills, gathered his checks for deposit and read his letters, which were mostly fan mail except for one. This one must have slipped behind the others, because it was dated right after New Years day, the first week in January. It was sad, in a way, because it was from the widow of an old army buddy, informing Jack that his friend had died. See there, how little I knew about the Jack-ster! He’d had another actual friend beside me, and I hadn’t even known it. I stacked the open letters in a pile with the silver letter opener on top of them. Jack would come up later in the day, put the letter opener on the shelf where it belonged and sweep the letters into the waste can without reading them.
Hey, I was done! I jumped to my feet and snapped off the green shade reading lamp on his desk. Then I bounded down the stairs, headed for the door. Free at last! I could practically taste the orange Jamba Juice I was going to have for breakfast.
I paused on the way out. “Can I drive your new bird?”
“You can drive my bird any time,” Eddie chuckled, but I pursed my lips at him. That wiped the quick grin off his face. Eddie’d had his shot with me, and he’d blown it.
I gave my voice that school-girlish, pleading tone, and push my full red lips into a sexy pout, “Please, Jack. Please, please, please, please…?”
It was a good act, but Jack was definitely not in the mood. “No, Clair-Bear,” he growled at me. “Christ, my new car’s a classic.”
I tossed my honey-blonde curls. “Jack, don’t be such a bastard. It’s not new and it’s not a classic.”
“Marilyn Monroe owned that car, and she hardly ever drove it. It was her personal car.” “Jack, a couple days ago you put my car on life support.”
There wasn’t much he could say to that. He sighed, “If you have to go out, take the Jag.” I looked over at Eddie. We’d developed our own language. He did a little sideways tilt of his head and a brief squint of his face combined with a shrug that meant Let it pass. “No bird for you, Clair,” Jack said again for effect. I gave Eddie another look, this one that said I was thinking I’d like to tell Jack where to stuff his bird. But I pulled myself back from the edge, the way I generally did with the Larch-ster. The cream-yellow Jag was a sweet little number in its own right (Jack ran around telling everybody it was once owned by one of the stars on General Hospital), and, after all, I needed a ride, and the Jag was light-years better than a taxi.
“Oh, all right,” I told him, giving my voice just enough push so he could figure I was not amused. I put on a show, flouncing through the study like I’d gotten a mad on. My real aim was to make my getaway before Jack had time to change his mind, but then I remembered the letter from his dead friend’s widow. I paused, framed in the doorway that led from the study to the great room, a huge dining hall with a giant fireplace and a long, heavy table that could seat twenty-six people if they owned the right film credits or maybe had been nominated for an Oscar.
“You got a letter from Miami,” I told him.
“The town sent me a letter?”
I’ve already told you; Jack can be a real bastard. I bit my lip, struggling to keep my temper. “No, Jack. The girl.”
“It’s Mi-a Mi-i. Mia My.” He repeated the name for emphasis, then paused, thinking about it. “Jesus, now you read my mail?”
“I’ve read your mail for years, remember? You let it pile up. Checks from publishers, threats from crazy people—everything.”
“Yeah, yeah. What did Mia My say?” Jack wasn’t really listening. His mind was miles and continents away. He was in the southern hemisphere, marching along with Dunk Stingray as the heroic fellow sauntered out of the barren Andes foothills after dispatching three Bulgarian assassins.
“Her husband died,” I told him. I have no idea how those three words will affect Jack. I was just passing on the news from a letter he obviously hadn’t cared enough about to open, even though it had been sitting on the cluttered oak secretary desk in his bedroom for months. He was in another of his foul moods, I had his permission to use the Jag, and all I wanted now was to get out of the study before some other bad thing happened. But I wasn’t fast enough.
Jack stood up with a sudden jerking motion and shouted without turning around to face me. He was half-crouched over and his sudden piercing cry was that of a man with a big spear or stage-four cancer in his guts. The harshness in his voice startled Eddie, and it was more than enough to freeze me in my tracks. “What?! NO!! It can’t be!! How?” Jack screamed his anguish, talking more to God or the devil than anyone in the room. “How could this happen?!”
As I’ve said, I’d been around Jack for quite a while, competing with the fast young crowd that wants to hang with ‘the new Hemingway,’ as he likes to be called. In that moment I’m sure I looked every bit my nearly thirty-six years…and more. My eyes darted from Jack to Eddie. I was feeling uncertain, and even afraid—not of Jack , but for him.
“Some rich kid lost control of his daddy’s SUV,” I told him. “From what Mi-a Mi-i wrote, I think he saved her when he pushed her out of the way.”
Jack sagged back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said to himself, talking in a low, defeated voice, “That’s something he would do.”
I was staring at Jack, shaking my head, the fun sucked out of my day. Eddie looked out the window and didn’t say anything. I walked back across the huge open area and sat next to Jack in the leopard print chair I use when I have to over-the-shoulder proofread for him, and after a while I gently ran one hand through his unruly stand up hair. “Jack, I honestly didn’t know,” I told him. “You never write him.”
“I send Christmas cards,” he grumbled. He glared at me as if everything was my fault, “Go do your shopping.”
I knew him well enough to let the thoughtless, abrasive side of his personality slide on by. It was part of survival in The House of Jack. I didn’t move. I could hear the antique windup clock ticking in another room as the silence lengthened between the three of us. “What the hell, Jackie-poo,” I said after a while. “I’ve got more purses than I know what to do with.”
To read the reviews on The Freight Train of Love: http://www.amazon.com/Freight-Train-Love-Michael-Klawitter/dp/0983037213/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363105591&sr=1-1&keywords=john+klawitter
And for more about the author click on: www.johnklawitter.com
ALL ABOUT MURDER THING
And because of this, price for the e-book is an
unheard of $1.99, one week only. Click on the
clickable link below to purchase, but do it before
this Sunday evening, because after that the price
goes back up to 2/3 the cost of a Starbucks Vente
Latte:
http://www.amazon.com/Freight-Train-Love-ebook/dp/B00EOY1LLK/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_kin?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1379972392&sr=1-1&keywords=the+freight+train+of+love
The Freight Train of Love by John Klawitter
When true love comes along, you’re just a bug on the tracks.
A CLASSIC WAR ROMANCE, ACTION/THRILLER, MURDER MYSTERY The heroine of The Freight Train of Love, Clair Moore, is an ex-NFL cheerleader with a wicked fastball, now doing very well in the real estate market in Southern California. She has fallen for an older man, the highly successful action-thriller novelist Jack Larch. Jack was born in the thick of WWII, but even though he is a so-called boomer baby, he doesn’t see himself that way. Jack thinks he’s found the fountain of youth. With three or four wives behind him, as Jack’s on-again off-again girlfriend of the past ten years, Clair is understandably hesitant to commit, even though she has a growing affection for the cranky old genius. But Jack’s wildly carefree youth is now coming back to haunt him in violent and murderous ways…spelling disaster not for Jack himself, but for anyone showing they might be falling for him.
Here are a few lines from The Freight Train of Love:
His small study desk was the usual mess. I paid his bills, gathered his checks for deposit and read his letters, which were mostly fan mail except for one. This one must have slipped behind the others, because it was dated right after New Years day, the first week in January. It was sad, in a way, because it was from the widow of an old army buddy, informing Jack that his friend had died. See there, how little I knew about the Jack-ster! He’d had another actual friend beside me, and I hadn’t even known it. I stacked the open letters in a pile with the silver letter opener on top of them. Jack would come up later in the day, put the letter opener on the shelf where it belonged and sweep the letters into the waste can without reading them.
Hey, I was done! I jumped to my feet and snapped off the green shade reading lamp on his desk. Then I bounded down the stairs, headed for the door. Free at last! I could practically taste the orange Jamba Juice I was going to have for breakfast.
I paused on the way out. “Can I drive your new bird?”
“You can drive my bird any time,” Eddie chuckled, but I pursed my lips at him. That wiped the quick grin off his face. Eddie’d had his shot with me, and he’d blown it.
I gave my voice that school-girlish, pleading tone, and push my full red lips into a sexy pout, “Please, Jack. Please, please, please, please…?”
It was a good act, but Jack was definitely not in the mood. “No, Clair-Bear,” he growled at me. “Christ, my new car’s a classic.”
I tossed my honey-blonde curls. “Jack, don’t be such a bastard. It’s not new and it’s not a classic.”
“Marilyn Monroe owned that car, and she hardly ever drove it. It was her personal car.” “Jack, a couple days ago you put my car on life support.”
There wasn’t much he could say to that. He sighed, “If you have to go out, take the Jag.” I looked over at Eddie. We’d developed our own language. He did a little sideways tilt of his head and a brief squint of his face combined with a shrug that meant Let it pass. “No bird for you, Clair,” Jack said again for effect. I gave Eddie another look, this one that said I was thinking I’d like to tell Jack where to stuff his bird. But I pulled myself back from the edge, the way I generally did with the Larch-ster. The cream-yellow Jag was a sweet little number in its own right (Jack ran around telling everybody it was once owned by one of the stars on General Hospital), and, after all, I needed a ride, and the Jag was light-years better than a taxi.
“Oh, all right,” I told him, giving my voice just enough push so he could figure I was not amused. I put on a show, flouncing through the study like I’d gotten a mad on. My real aim was to make my getaway before Jack had time to change his mind, but then I remembered the letter from his dead friend’s widow. I paused, framed in the doorway that led from the study to the great room, a huge dining hall with a giant fireplace and a long, heavy table that could seat twenty-six people if they owned the right film credits or maybe had been nominated for an Oscar.
“You got a letter from Miami,” I told him.
“The town sent me a letter?”
I’ve already told you; Jack can be a real bastard. I bit my lip, struggling to keep my temper. “No, Jack. The girl.”
“It’s Mi-a Mi-i. Mia My.” He repeated the name for emphasis, then paused, thinking about it. “Jesus, now you read my mail?”
“I’ve read your mail for years, remember? You let it pile up. Checks from publishers, threats from crazy people—everything.”
“Yeah, yeah. What did Mia My say?” Jack wasn’t really listening. His mind was miles and continents away. He was in the southern hemisphere, marching along with Dunk Stingray as the heroic fellow sauntered out of the barren Andes foothills after dispatching three Bulgarian assassins.
“Her husband died,” I told him. I have no idea how those three words will affect Jack. I was just passing on the news from a letter he obviously hadn’t cared enough about to open, even though it had been sitting on the cluttered oak secretary desk in his bedroom for months. He was in another of his foul moods, I had his permission to use the Jag, and all I wanted now was to get out of the study before some other bad thing happened. But I wasn’t fast enough.
Jack stood up with a sudden jerking motion and shouted without turning around to face me. He was half-crouched over and his sudden piercing cry was that of a man with a big spear or stage-four cancer in his guts. The harshness in his voice startled Eddie, and it was more than enough to freeze me in my tracks. “What?! NO!! It can’t be!! How?” Jack screamed his anguish, talking more to God or the devil than anyone in the room. “How could this happen?!”
As I’ve said, I’d been around Jack for quite a while, competing with the fast young crowd that wants to hang with ‘the new Hemingway,’ as he likes to be called. In that moment I’m sure I looked every bit my nearly thirty-six years…and more. My eyes darted from Jack to Eddie. I was feeling uncertain, and even afraid—not of Jack , but for him.
“Some rich kid lost control of his daddy’s SUV,” I told him. “From what Mi-a Mi-i wrote, I think he saved her when he pushed her out of the way.”
Jack sagged back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said to himself, talking in a low, defeated voice, “That’s something he would do.”
I was staring at Jack, shaking my head, the fun sucked out of my day. Eddie looked out the window and didn’t say anything. I walked back across the huge open area and sat next to Jack in the leopard print chair I use when I have to over-the-shoulder proofread for him, and after a while I gently ran one hand through his unruly stand up hair. “Jack, I honestly didn’t know,” I told him. “You never write him.”
“I send Christmas cards,” he grumbled. He glared at me as if everything was my fault, “Go do your shopping.”
I knew him well enough to let the thoughtless, abrasive side of his personality slide on by. It was part of survival in The House of Jack. I didn’t move. I could hear the antique windup clock ticking in another room as the silence lengthened between the three of us. “What the hell, Jackie-poo,” I said after a while. “I’ve got more purses than I know what to do with.”
To read the reviews on The Freight Train of Love: http://www.amazon.com/Freight-Train-Love-Michael-Klawitter/dp/0983037213/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363105591&sr=1-1&keywords=john+klawitter
And for more about the author click on: www.johnklawitter.com
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Ready To Push Out To Sea?
The whaling industry is unquestionably cruel. But by outlawing that business, one promotes an expansion of the whale population leading to more incidents of schooners and sailing boats running into whales during the night hours and an increased mortality rate among sailors. Although the human deaths are a direct result of the well-intentioned efforts of the anti-whaling activists, the Green Peace pirate/warriors never, ever think of it that way.
Bags of rice flown to Ethiopia as a result of ads showing wide eyed starving children with bloated stomachs save many of these urchins who grow to breed and create a new generation of children of whom a large percentage surely will die of starvation. It can be shown with absolute certainty that funding these charitable contributions leads to the inevitable deaths of tens of thousands of next-gen humans, but those giving from the heart and the well-meaning charities themselves never think of it this way.
Anti-abortion ads help save countless unwanted babies in a world of seven billion humans that are inexorably squeezing out countless species of animals, some of them, like gorillas and elephants, arguably sentient as (or more) than humans. What an odd, backwards, cold way to look at a multiplication problem...the alternative, however, is to look the other way, that is, until every way you turn you're staring at another person staring back at you. War, of course, is a solution, but the choice between killing the unborn or killing them after they grow a little is tragic either way. Which is avoidable?
And if so, how?
So there's work to be done and hard choices to be made; it is not as simple as passing legislation to save the sand dab or the spotted owl, not accurate to believe we are simply saving the whales or the rain forests, not enough to act empathetically in the pretense of solving an immediate problem while neglecting a grim, looming future. If we are to be the custodians of the earth, we have to begin to accept the responsibilities of our so-called sentiency.
There are futurists who say not to worry, there are plenty planets in the universe that we can in turn overpopulate. Yes, but getting from here to there, that is the overriding problem. As my friend, the late football great David "Deacon" Jones used to say, "To play in the Superbowl, you've go to get to the Superbowl, and to get there you've got to win the playoffs." To which I might add, in the great bowl of life, we're not yet even to the finals.
Bags of rice flown to Ethiopia as a result of ads showing wide eyed starving children with bloated stomachs save many of these urchins who grow to breed and create a new generation of children of whom a large percentage surely will die of starvation. It can be shown with absolute certainty that funding these charitable contributions leads to the inevitable deaths of tens of thousands of next-gen humans, but those giving from the heart and the well-meaning charities themselves never think of it this way.
Anti-abortion ads help save countless unwanted babies in a world of seven billion humans that are inexorably squeezing out countless species of animals, some of them, like gorillas and elephants, arguably sentient as (or more) than humans. What an odd, backwards, cold way to look at a multiplication problem...the alternative, however, is to look the other way, that is, until every way you turn you're staring at another person staring back at you. War, of course, is a solution, but the choice between killing the unborn or killing them after they grow a little is tragic either way. Which is avoidable?
And if so, how?
So there's work to be done and hard choices to be made; it is not as simple as passing legislation to save the sand dab or the spotted owl, not accurate to believe we are simply saving the whales or the rain forests, not enough to act empathetically in the pretense of solving an immediate problem while neglecting a grim, looming future. If we are to be the custodians of the earth, we have to begin to accept the responsibilities of our so-called sentiency.
There are futurists who say not to worry, there are plenty planets in the universe that we can in turn overpopulate. Yes, but getting from here to there, that is the overriding problem. As my friend, the late football great David "Deacon" Jones used to say, "To play in the Superbowl, you've go to get to the Superbowl, and to get there you've got to win the playoffs." To which I might add, in the great bowl of life, we're not yet even to the finals.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
IMMORTAL ANGELYNE
Oh, talking
about people growing older (which we weren’t, but are now), how many of you
have heard of Angelyne, the blond lady
with the come hither look, one hand idly resting on the pink wheel of her pink
Corvette as she blows you a kiss? You
know, the famous Angelyne who in the 1970’s tooled up and down Sunset
Boulevard, glowing in her tight pink blouse and tight pink short shorts? If you have no idea who I’m talking about, it
might be worth a google. Back then, her billboards
were everywhere around Hollywood, craftily placed near the studios and towering
over The Strip. Angelyne, looking down on
the hubbub and madness of show biz, her pouty red lips seeming to beg for
just one more something, her marvelous breasts spilling out over her rosy décolletage.
Rumor back
then was that she had a sugar daddy who paid for the billboards, hoping to
fulfill her dream that she might land a role and end up on the silver
screen. To my knowledge, she never did. She was the original Kardashian girl, never
got a lead role in a movie but had those billboards plastered all over the Strip
and on a good night you might see her in person at a stop light at the corner
of Hollywood and Vine and she just might blow you a pouty kiss or at least wave in your direction, and so she was
famous, in her own way, without ever having an actual film career.
Well, flash
forward - I saw her two weeks ago, working a parking lot at an Osh hardware
store in Woodland Hills! No, no, no - honest! Hang with me here for a minute: This was at the
west end of the San Fernando Valley near my hillside home studio, a long way from Old Hollywood, relatively
speaking, but of course Angelyne had the latest model of her hot pink steed to convey her about. She
was still the stellar attraction, still had matrons and their daughters and old men like me huffing across the parking lot to see her. And she was still curvaceously plump, still brimming out
of her impossibly tight pink outfit.
Unbelievable, I know, but true.
What on
earth was she doing, I asked myself, and in a flash headed over there to see
for myself: Yes, there she was,
gathering quite a crowd as they swarmed over to buy Angelyne t-shirts. Yep, she was selling t-shirts out of the back
of that shiny hot pink Corvette. “You’ll
like the Andy Warhol one,” she told me. “I
always was Andy’s favorite subject.” She
paused, thinking back, maybe about that other blond Warhol icon. “Well, one of his favorite...”
Now maybe
you think this is one of those sad nostalgia stories about one of those crippled old bag ladies wandering around Tinseltown with broken dreams, and although it easily might be, somehow I don’t feel it
is. Here is Angeline, forty years later, as
Ripley always said, Believe
it or not! My God, her makeup
was so thick I was afraid her face would crack, but it didn't and she was still flirty and
flouncy and somehow she made everything work and the show went on.
She was sexy Angelyne the legendary Hollywood Billboard Queen, bigger
than life and looking like she belonged in a Marvel comic book for
super-heroines.
I had to
have one of those t-shirts, for old time’s sake, you know. Cost me $20.
Don’t tell the wife.
Monday, April 29, 2013
ONE OF THOSE DREAMS THAT REFUSES TO DIE
It has qualifications that make it noteworthy: star power, speed, danger, champagne in big
bottles and sexy girls. I’m talking
about Steve McQueen’s 4 decades old dream to film the greatest auto racing
movie ever to hit the silver screen. It
got rolling when he sold a screenplay to CBS Cinema Center Films, then trying
to move up from the small tube to big screen projects.
Steve personally expounded on his dream once when I was running for
him the work print of a featurette I had written and was producing, the subject
being ‘The Making of McQueen’s Le Mans Racing Picture”. His hands went flying expressively in the air
and he talked of the big rush competitive racing drivers experienced. It was like flying with eagles, he said. He wanted his audience to feel what he felt,
and the only way he knew to do that was to produce the greatest racing movie
ever.
Unfortunately, his dream wasn’t anything like the screenplay
he’d sold to Cinema Center, and the production that followed was one of the sourest
in the history iof filmmaking. His mentor, director John Sturges, quit, declaring it 'the worst experience of his professional career.' Costs soared. Three big name Hollywood writers dueled side by side in their own cabanas, churning out scenes they hoped might be approved for the next day's shoot. Steve sulked, rejected everything, refused to come out of his cabana. It was rumored he chewed cordite, known from Forsythe's The Day of The Jackal novel to give one a deathly grey complexion. Time passed. The picture went into hiatus. Steve eventually sold a bunch of personal property and put up money to assure it would go forward.
The film finally was cobbled together and did make it into movie houses, and,
depending on whether you are a film buff or a racing fan, it is either a colossal
dud or a decent quasi-documentary. To
me, it is interesting that, 40 years after the event, Steve’s big idea and the
way he defied the uber-lords of the Hollywood studio system to pursue his own
vision has become a legend. I can still
see him, that skeptical little smile playing on his famous features as he tries
to explain why something so ephemeral as a feeling of joy should be worth the
effort. Looking back, I think that maybe
it was...but the way he went about it took a heavy toll.
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