Jasper Jaxon at Dixon Place and a Minor Ode To the Forgotten Pinup Girls of Yore

It's sometimes a sad old world, isn't it?

Last month, 1959 Playboy Playmate (July if you're curious) and B-movie actress Yvette Vickers was found dead in her house by a neighbor. Now, don't get the wrong idea, there was no scandal per se, she died of heart failure at the age of 82 or so. The thing is, she's been dead for nearly a year the medical examiner said, as her body was actually mummified.

Which, in a startling segue, leads me to my inamorato (the man self-styled Trav S.D.) and his performance of The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon at Dixon Place. The performance was lovely, if I do say so. Jasper Jaxon is based on real life bank robber Elmer McCurdy, who upon his death in 1911 was over-embalmed and was displayed in various traveling side-shows and theater lobbies with various purposes until it was forgotten who this fellow had been or even that he was an actual mummified person and not just a prop. Like all great true American stories it is both tragic and hilarious.

Along with her Playmate of the Month fame, Miss Vickers had a pretty impressive monster movie career. She has the typical career of small roles in big pictures (her debut was in Sunset Boulevard!) and big roles in small pictures. Most well known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, she worked in television through the 1970s and appeared in other B horror movies, including Attack of the Giant Leeches, whose wonderful poster you can see below.

The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon is a long, rambling and extremely catchy song in the style of Woody Guthrie with definite shades of Bob Dylan. There's a certain species of Americana that seems to have fallen out of favor recently in our glittery techno present, and it's an awful shame mostly. In general, a sense of history is slowly being eroded. The internet in some ways both helps and hinders. There's such wonderful access to nearly everything, but the ease of finding whatever piece of whatever what puzzle one comes across, also serves to flatten it somewhat. The screen with which we view everything can decontextualize nearly everything until it's all just floating in a digital present.

Yvette Vickers cheerfully attended film festivals around the country in her old age. The fact that she could have disappeared for so long without anyone noticing breaks one's heart a little. The world is a lonely place for so many people, and one of my biggest fears, as it is for so many childless people, is that an end like that of Miss Vickers awaits us in the future. Both Yvette Vickers and the hapless crook Jasper Jaxon lived strange, picaresque and particularly American lives, only to wind up mummified, stuck in the parts of the newspapers designated for the weird and the uncanny, ready made to be turned, as all good American stories should be, into folk songs and B movies.

The Ballad of Jasper Jaxon will go on, no doubt and I will be sure to let you know of an recordings or return engagements.

Memorial Day

May everyone be enduring this muggy Memorial Day by ingesting hot dogs galore and cavorting in the surf.

On this day I would like to salute the lovely and brilliant Carole Lombard. She died, tragically, at the age of 33 when her plane crashed after attending a rally in her home state of Indiana during which she raised over $2 million for the war effort.

Few movie stars are more missed. I have no doubt she would have segued seamlessly into daffy little old ladyhood.

photo via The Profane Angel

RIP Leonora Carrington

"I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist." - Leonora Carrington, 1983

But still, in the very first sentence of her New York Times obit, her relationship with Max Ernst is referenced. I have a feeling that might have rankled, though she admitted her debt to him, often. She was a wonderful painter who lived a long, productive and interesting life.

Like all artists (particularly of the female variety) she was remarkably self determined. Born into an upper class English family, running off to Paris to join the Surrealists wasn't precisely what her parents had in mind for her, to say the least. She ran off with the much older Ernst when she was about 20 and painted and wrote. There's a great anecdote about Jean Miro handing her some money and telling her to go get some cigarettes, which she essentially threw back in his face.

She first came to my attention because of her obsessions with the occult, alchemy and myth. She wrote as well as painted and I think I first encountered her work in an anthology of fantasy written by women. Like Ernst, she was a surrealist down to her very marrow. Her work is strange and autobiographical, oddly matter of fact in tone.

As for most everyone of her generation, the war was the defining event in her life. Ernst was imprisoned by the Nazis (but arrested first by the French Vichy government I think it's worth noting), and Leonora fled to Spain. She suffered a breakdown and her parents had her committed to a horrific asylum. I have no idea how apocryphal this is, but I read that she was rescued from the madhouse by her former Nanny, who arrived in a submarine. She eventually made her way to Mexico where she spent most of the remainder of her life. She and Ernst, both damaged by the war, never reconnected.

In addition to her painting and writing, she also designed for the theater. The picture above shows costumes she created for a show directed by Chilean director and filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky, who she mentored. Her life was long and interesting and productive but, naturally, I suppose, most people want to hear about the short years with the Surrealists in Paris. It was a time of such outrageous creativity, one just longs to have been there. At least I do - in my time machine wish list, Paris between the wars ranks high.

Leonora Carrington died this past week at the age of 94. In an odd way, I wish she could come back, as she is a painter uniquely suited, I believe, to showing us what the afterlife looks like.

RIP Liz

What a face! What a life!

For some reason it feels like the end of an era as the last of the great movie stars shrugs off this mortal coil. It's impossible to write about Elizabeth Taylor without hyperbole. The MOST beautiful, the MOST grotesque, the MOST married, the MOST scandalous, the MOST tragic. She was a monster and a saint and an icon. The idea of a movie star made flesh.

I don't think there was a moment in my life when I didn't know who she was. Growing up, we had that Life magazine Movie book - full of pictures of movie stars and films. I spent hours and hours and hours gazing at this book and it had untold influence on me. I knew who all these old time movie stars were from their extraordinary faces long before I saw any of their films. Lots, of course, were of Liz. I remember a lovely picture of her at 17 in a gold dress that I thought was just the loveliest thing I'd ever seen.

Beauty is destiny. Being the MOST beautiful is such a crazy double edged sword and Liz certainly had the best and some of the worst of it. Have I mentioned she was also an actress? I saw her in Jane Eyre, Lassie Come Home and National Velvet when I was little. And then A Place in the Sun, Butterfield 8 (which is also a really good novel that no one but me seems to have read), Giant, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I mean, what a run! Then Cleopatra and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Just awesome.

Then, late in life, she nearly single handedly created a national dialogue and awareness of AIDS after the death of her friend and co-star Rock Hudson. There are a lot of adults alive right now who probably don't remember the complete silence surrounding homosexuality in general and AIDS in particular. Liz Taylor did a great deal of very effective work to change that.

If you would like to make a donation to amfAR, which Liz helped found, click here.

To quote myself: What a life! What a dame!

From A Place in the Sun:

Palaces, Freaks and Mae West

Last night, my inamorato and I traveled out to the glorious Landmark Lowe’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City to meet up with friends and to watch a really odd, yet completely entertaining double feature consisting of Freaks and She Done Him Wrong. I’d never seen Freaks on the big screen and this was my first viewing of the Mae West flick.

First, though, a word about the movie theater itself: It’s a gorgeous, half-restored old time movie palace. Though marred by decay and neglect, it’s still romantic and beautiful. There’s even an organ that rises up through the floor Phantom of the Opra style. Oh, to see the Abominable Dr. Phibes there! It’s just across the street from the Journal Square PATH station, so it’s incredibly easy to get to from Manhattan. There’s really no excuse not to visit.

Back to the movies. As I said, it’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen Freaks. It’s still so wonderful, creepy and dreamlike. I’ve always loved circus stories, and this one is just great. I wonder how much influence it had on Angela Carter when she was working on her brilliant novel Nights At the Circus? It has that strange air so common in the films of the 20s and very early 30s, in which the setting is ill defined, is it America? Is it Europe? Is it modern? Is it Victorian? It’s impossible to tell, as they exist in a fictional film world dreamscape that you could never find on an ordinary map. Also of great interest to me, was seeing Olga Baclanova, one of the stars of The Man Who Laughs in a talkie role as the devious aerialist, Cleopatra.

She Done Him Wrong is a crazily over plotted hour of melodramatic, musical comedy, crime drama. Mae West was a wonder. Her sexual aggression is still completely transgressive and pretty shocking. Cary Grant is handsome as "The Hawk" and, really, I'm bound to be a fan of most anything where a shady character is known as "The Hawk". West spends the whole movie draped in diamonds and sequins and feathers, heavily corseted and in early middle age, she is a wonder. It's a performance that has launched a thousand drag queens, but I wish it had launched more lady performers, too. Women tend to be punished and mocked for sexual forthrightness, so it's not an easy path to take.

As my inamorato wrote a couple of days ago, the Landmark holds a special significance for us, as it was the site of our first date. We had time to kill before the start of the double feature, so we had gin and tonics in the dive next door, where we happened to make the acquaintance of the Landmark Lowes organist. He seemed very nice. Sadly, last night we found out that organist Ralph Ringstad, Jr. passed away in December from a fall. He was still a relatively young man, so his loss is particularly sad. He will be missed. You can see video of him performing here.

Tonight, continuing their weekend long pre-Code Festival, The Landmark Lowes will be presenting a double feature of Morocco (starring Marlene Dietrich) and Baby Face (starring Barbara Stanwyck). Information can be found here. These are two of my favorites, so you can bet that if it wasn't for tonight's performance of Dainty Cadaver, I would most certainly be in attendance!

"Now is the time to make real the promises of Democracy..."

Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell

This has been an action packed week indeed: library talk in West Egg, beginning again at my old day job, Dainty Cadaver chapter to be written, apartment hunting commencing, big decisions being made all over the place, and lots of theater being seen and reviewed.

Oh, theater. There's been so much to see, with Under the Radar over at The Public, and Coil in full swing over at PS122 (and points North - more on that later). Inamorato and I began our week of theatrical viewing with the anger-making depression factory (pun intended) Gob Squad's Kitchen, then the next night we were lucky enough to catch Stories Left To Tell: Created from classic and unpublished work of Spalding Gray. Sadly, I was never able to ever see Gray perform when he was alive - aside from the films of his solo performances and his often inexplicable movie roles (Beaches - need I say more?).

It's funny, even though I've read his novel (and I use the word "novel" advisedly, as it is clearly as autobiographical as anything else he's done), I never really thought of him as a writer - but as a storyteller and performer. We live so much in the world of the theatrical one man band, the idea of a performer's voice as a writer and that writer's performance have become nearly unseperably linked. I mean, can any of us picture someone else performing one of Mike Daisey's shows? No, me either. So I wondered how it would be seeing a bunch of other people read Gray's words.

All I can say is that screw everything else - Gray is a writer. Not only does it hold up, hearing and watching his work being performed by others was nothing short of a major revelation.A disperate group of four performers read pieces of Grey's monologues, letters and journals and it was incredibly moving and hilarious. His work is a gift. Kathleen Chalfant (who I last saw on stage many years ago in Angels in America), Hazelle Goodman (who, I was thrilled to discover, played Georgia Rae Mahoney on Homicide: Life On the Streets), Bob Holman (poet and founder of the Bowery Poetry Club), and playwright Ain Gordon performed for the audience and for each other. The guest performer on the night I was there was David Straithairn. It was completely joyful.

I know it's silly, but like with Calvin Trillin and his Alice, I feel as if I knew Spalding Gray. He wrote about an acting exercise in which he was supposed to tell his acting partner a secret he had never shared with anyone. And he had nothing, he had no secrets. Following his work over the years, you knew about his long time girlfriend Renée, about his mother's suicide, about his childhood in Rhode Island, about his affairs, about his hypochondria, about his health problems, about his work, about his sexual hang-ups, about his children when they were born, about everything. So, when he committed suicide in 2004 is was such a shock, it seemed such a waste. But hearing further details about the terrible car accident in Ireland, about some possibly botched surgery, about what sound like debilitating health problems, about going mad - it's all devastatingly sad, but understandable.

So, Spalding Gray was a writer, maybe one of the best. He is missed. Read what my inamorato and fellow Rhode Island native has to say.

Scobee Diner: A Lament

Maybe I am a sentamentalist at heart, all previous denials to the contrary. Maybe I do look askance at what is mistakenly called progress.

Today is the final day of Scobee's existence. If you, like me, grew up on the peninsula of West Egg, you too would have spent long hours sitting in the vinyl covered booths of my increasingly distant adolescence. I should have known things would never be the same the moment they removed the jukeboxes.

Diners seem to be disappearing from the landscape all over the five boroughs. Where else can one go at three in the morning and sit with a plate of french fries for two hours? The last diner closing that made me sad was the long lost Astor Riviera. It used to be where that giant Starbucks on Astor Place now sits. I guess that's the thing that has changed the face of this country and now finally the city more than anything: the loss of privately owned businesses. But that's a rant for another day.



So let's all lift a gravy covered french fry and salute the New York City diners of our youth! Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan and The Bronx! Alas! Alas!

RIP, Mr. De Laurentiis

Oh, how I love an impresario, as they seem to be a dying breed in this era of bean counters and pencil pushers.

Then suddenly (well, he was 91 and had cancer, so the "suddenly" is hyperbole. Something with which Mr. De Laurentiis was familiar), with his passing, came the end of an era. His IMDB page lists 166 producer credits covering a span of a mind-boggling 70 years. I'm pretty sure that sort of career is simply not possible in these days of bloat and turnaround. Not that Mr. De Laurentiis wasn't one of the inventors of what we now know, loathe and line for each summer as the producer of Flash Gordon, Conan: The Barbarian (starring the current Governor of California), King Kong (the one from the 70s), and Dune. So some of the responsibility for that bloat lies at his Gucci loafers.

He produced nearly every kind of movie imaginable. From one of my all time favorites, Fellini's Nights of Cabiria starring the brilliant, brilliant Giulietta Masina, Italian neo-realist classic Bitter Rice, cheapie schlock like Goliath and the Vampires (as always, I use the phrase "cheapie schlock" with love), and Barbarella. And then, in America, he continued to produce all kinds of different films, from arty prestige pictures like Blue Velvet and Ragtime to Charles Bronson fare like Death Wish to Hanibal Lecter's first outing in Manhunter. Subtlety really, really wasn't his bag. I hope his funeral will be operatic in scope. May there be vampires and gangsters and space invaders and explosions! And maybe the ghost of Ms. Masina doing a sad little dance as she smiles slightly with her wonderful clown face, as she leads the great impresario off the the movie studio in the great beyond.

P.S. In researching this I just discovered that Giada De Laurentiis of Food Network fame is his grand-daughter! Who knew?

RIP Paul, the Prognosticating Octopus

Sad news hit my inbox this morning as I discovered that Paul, the octopus who predicted the outcome of all the World Cup games has shrugged off this mortal coil. According to Sea Life aquarium in Germany (where Paul resided until his untimely demise) he died of natural causes.

Hm. I wonder if a cephalopod necropsy has been performed. In case you have forgotten, after Paul successfully predicted to outcome of the Wold Cup final, there were threats to his life from disgruntled soccer fans. It was suggested that a proper place for Paul was to be deep fried and placed on a platter next to a bowl of dipping sauce, that is to say, that he should be made into calamari. I think a call for an investigation is in order. Was it a mob hit? Disgruntled supporters of the Netherland's football team? We won't know until this is properly looked into, but all suggestions (in my imagination) to do so have been ignored!

I smell foul play!

BREAKING: I am not the only Paul conspiracy theorist! See today's Guardian.

RIP Ari Up

Punk rock (like most all other rock) was pretty much a boy's club, which was one of the things that made The Slits so super cool and exciting to me when I was growing up. Another thing that isn't paid enough attention to these days is how much the bands (in both NYC & London) that were collected under the umbrella of punk rock differed from each other stylistically. The Slits were punk as fuck, but sounded nothing like The Clash or The Sex Pistols, or anyone else really.

Well, Ari Up, lead singer and driving force behind The Slits died yesterday at the age of 48. She will be missed.

RIP Laptop: Sword of Vengeance

Perhaps some of you have been wondering where I've been for the last week. Perhaps not. I just wanted to take this time to assure my readers that (never fear!) I have in no way abandoned you, or it. See my short explanation below:




And, okay. I know it's messy. But it's my first. And I'm grieving.

RIP Tony Curtis

There are few, if any, movies I've seen more times than Some Like It Hot. Honestly, I feel as if I had the whole thing pretty much by heart by the time I was 10. I wrote at least one paper on it when I was at NYU. It's just the best.

From the Chicago gangland beginning, the reveal of the liquor bottles in the coffin, the raid on the speakeasy, George Raft doing his schtick, the fantastic score, our first view of Jack Lemmon's hapless Daphne and Tony Curtis's prissy Josephine as they sashay down the train platform, our first view of Marilyn's Sugar Kane (neé Kowalczyk), the massacre in the garage ("Gooodbye, Charlie"), the madcap party in the Pullman berth, Curtis's hilarious Cary Grant impression ("Nobody talks that way!"), Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown's tango with the band blindfolded ("Zowie!"), the Italian American Opera Lovers Association, the slapstick chase through the lobby of the Miami Seminole-Ritz, all of Marilyn's musical numbers, and possibly the greatest last line in comedy movie history.

For my money (let's all have a hearty laugh here), it's one of the world's perfect movies. Billy Wilder was a stone cold genius and this is his best (controversy!). Tony Curtis was great as both Joe and Josephine. His career was checkered, to say the least. But his is the sort off career I like best, he never stopped working and would play in anything. From prestige pictures like The Defiant Ones to the Agatha Christie camp-fest The Mirror Crack'd (Tony Curtis, Elizabeth Taylor and Ann-Margaret) to his hosting of my favorite terrible TV show, Hollywood Babylon. It was based on the Kenneth Anger book and features Curtis intoning portentously about past Show Biz scandals. Then, oh joy, there are bargain basement re-enactments by terrible actors.

Tony Curtis was a tough Jew from New York who grew up in the Bronx and went to high school on the Lower East Side and made it to movie stardom and a 60+ year career. He will be missed.

Below is the only clip from Hollywood Babylon I could find on YouTube. Enjoy!