Richard Widmark

Alas, the good night beckons us all, gently or otherwise. At the tender age of 93, one of the great screen actors of the 20th century passes away as the 21st century continues to crumble around us. Richard Widmark, good night sweet prince, and rest in peace, if not in pieces.

Close to my heart, Widmark almost single-handedly typified a certain kind of film noir actor. Not the leading man type, even when playing the leading man, Widmark made his reputation in Hollywood starting with the role of the sadistic psychopath, Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death. Among the many achievements of career, personally for me his reputation is carved in the granite by two films for the ages...as Harry Fabian in Jules Dassin's Night and the City and as Skip McCoy in Sam Fuller's Pickup on South Street.

There is not much for me to utter to the Widmark-curious other than to direct them to the two following flicks. "Night and the City" is arguably Dassin's masterpiece... wrestling-noir, London-noir...the city is a character, a beast devouring all, with Widmark as Fabian on a crazed suicide mission to tame that beast. Created on the cusp of Dassin's blacklisting and resultant exile to France, the film, and Widmark's portrayal, pulls no punches. "Pickup on South Street" is also arguably Fuller's own masterpiece. Richard Widmark's chops as an actor complete the directors' respective visions in both instances.

What is it about Widmark? Intentionally or not, he was, ironically, the leading man in a couple of unpretentious films that indicted post-WWII culture as it careened into the Communist witch-hunt days, a couple of movies crafted by directors who knew how to say something profound without making self-conscious message pictures.

The only actor I can think of in conjunction with Widmark is one of the other great noir actors, Dan Duryea, who left this mortal coil back in '68. Ultimately, Richard Widmark was just one helluva screen actor, period.

Losing Widmark has the same effect on me as losing certain figures in recent memory such as Robert Mitchum or Ike Turner. His passing leaves me quiet. Reflective with nothing seemingly left to reflect upon. Quiet, yes, but not entirely without motion...his passing leaves me silently considering a landscape which ever more increasingly becomes barren of objects upon which to gaze.

--JTD

Joli Leblon

As I mentioned last month, I was recently introduced to the wonders of Leblon Cachaca and was well pleased. So when I spied a bottle at the liquor store yesterday, I just had to pony up and take some home.

If you've taken my advice and already gone out and scored whatever brand of Cachaca you can (what? you haven't???), then you may be surprised by the stuff's, uh, rather unique grip on the palate (A gal-pal described it as "like what I imagine drinking household cleaning products would be like"). Yes, limey and sugary though a caipirinha may be, you just have to try one to understand where I'm comin' from. This ain't no girly drink. The stuff goes into you like a train, if you'll permit a Psychedelic Furs reference.

Leblon is far, far smoooooother than previous Cachacas I've tried, though, so it may be your best bet at a Caipirinha-enthusiast's starter kit. I don't mind the dirtier, nastier tang of Ypioca, but for variety's sake, Leblon's a tasty and classy diversion. And, of course, it's just as mind-bendingly intoxicating as other brands. What was it Ice Cube said in that beer commercial that got banned? "It'll get her ready quicker, get yer jimmy thicker".

- - JSH

Eggs That Are Forsaken

Earlier this year, I decided to shut down my yearly Project Egg installation wherein I'd have plastic eggs (filled with weird stuff) hidden all over the planet. Environmental concerns were the reason for my rethinking the project, after learning what plastics are doing to the oceans.

So now I'm stuck with a storage unit containing thousands of green plastic Easter eggs. When it gets warmer, I'm going to take them to a friend's farm and run 'em all through a chipper-shredder like Steve Buscemi's corpse in Fargo. The resulting particulate matter will be recycled as material to add texture to my paintings, thus keeping them out of the ecosystem. (There's also some waggish ideas being floated about making a statue of me out of them, for the forthcoming Jeffrey Scott Holland Museum.)

But before that happens, I'm giving folks one last chance to get ahold of these damn eggs. The new thing to replace Project Egg Phase Three is a sort of mail-art-in-reverse offer called Eggs That Are Forsaken (that's a biblical quote, dontcha know). Between April 1 and April 30, I will randomly select an egg from the bin and send it to anyone who requests one, free for the asking. No email requests though, that's the catch - you have to make your egg requests in writing to:

JSHNYC
242 E. 38th Street #2C
New York, NY 10016

I'm counting on most of you louts out there to be too lazy to write, so I don't get too deluged with requests, heh.

And when it's all over, I never ever want to see another egg again. Seriously. Damn. Don't even say that word, "egg". Don't say that word.

- - JSH

When Alice Cooper Ruled the Earth

Regarding Senor Dockery's musings on the Coop yesterday, I posit that the Alice Cooper gradient scale is broken down into five segments:

1. "Pretties For You". The first album which is dense, poorly-recorded, psychedelic avant-garde and, with the exception of cuts like "Today Mueller" or "Reflected", sounds nothing like the band that was to come.

2. The classic years. This would be 1969-1978, spanning from the ultimate death-glam album "Easy Action" through their magnum opus LP "Billion Dollar Babies", to the late seventies when Alice actually charted huge hits with Elton John-like ballads like "I Never Cry", "You and Me" and "How You Gonna See Me Now" while somehow still maintaining his proto-goth street cred.

3. The New Wave/Punk years. From 1979 to 1984, Alice went slightly mad and released four very odd albums that were actually far cooler, weirder, punkier and edgier than the comfortable classic-rock sound he'd settled into. From sinister technopop ("Clones", "Skeletons in my Closet", "I Am the Future") to glam-rock ("The Prettiest Cop on the Block", "You Look Good in Rags") to guitar-driven quirky new wave/power pop a la The Vapors' "Turning Japanese" ("Adaptable", "Vicious Rumours", "Nuclear Infected"). His last album in this period, "Dada", was a murky and bloated rock opera of sorts.

4. The triumphant return. After laying low for awhile, AC returned to his "Alice Cooper Show" era makeup in 1986 and started releasing a slew of albums with an updated horror-metal style. It still wasn't as good as what had come before, but it was just nice that Alice was Alice again. It was also nice to see him having bonafide hits again, like "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)", "Love's a Loaded Gun", "Feed My Frankenstein" and "Poison" .

5. Everything else. I don't have much kind to say about 1994's "The Temptation of Alice Cooper" or anything that's followed since. Maybe it's OK. I dunno. I can't get worked up about it. I can see why KISS wisely decided to stop making albums and thus prevented themselves from a similar descent into mediocrity.


- - JSH

Have You Got the Time to Find Out Who Alice Cooper Really Is?

A friend of mine's mother caught the dinosaur rock event of Alice Cooper opening for the Rolling Stones in Louisville, KY last summer. Her mom reportedly reported on the subject of Alice, "The only people I could see enjoying his show are a few old men and some teenage boys." Alas, Alice Cooper...let yer old pal Doc/Fries talk some turkey up in this thing...

The greatness of Alice Cooper resides primarily in the classic Alice Cooper Band line up that produced a string of what this reporter gazes upon as four of the greatest rock records of the 20th century. Love It To Death, Killers, School's Out & Billion Dollar Babies. If you base any bias against Cooper for latter day recordings, visit or revisit these records, and ye shall step into the light of gnosis, ye shall behold the pervasive influence on music in its wake, ye shall understand the power and glory of the classic band and know that it is good.

My partner in slime, Brian Manley (aka Eggroll), in the Smacks! and myself have recently been studying a video of Alice Cooper performing live on television the song "Is It My Body" from the LP Love It To Death. One viewing of this will shorten the process of having to revisit the albums to learn yerself some Cooper 101. Unfortunately, it seems Cooper has been revisionised into something of a "hair metal" godfather (not to mention his current persona as a golf playing conservative which besmirches things), which is true, but not entirely accurate.

One needs to consider the fact that the Alice Cooper Band went from a psychedelic act with support from Frank Zappa to a band that sharpened their theatrical rock blade with producer Bob Ezrin into a dark glitter act that performed in the early seventies with bands such as the New York Dolls and the Stooges as opening acts and fellow comrades fighting the good fight. See the matching silver jumpsuits, see and hear Alice's freaky/drunk/childlike sing-song voice/persona, dig the striptease and psyche breakdown that's not part of the LP version of the tune.

Alice knew how to put his shoe on a mic stand and put on a show. Now, THIS is a BAND. And if you dispute my findings, I know ye not.

--JTD

Klingon politics

An editorial from my New York Office blog:

I don't concern myself too much with terrestrial politics, but I do have some concerns about what's gone on with Governor Spitzer.

If you watch The Wire and agree with its premise that everything in government is the result of some sort of shady back-room dealings, then viewing these recent events make a lot more sense.

Spitzer was one of those rare, Bobby Kennedy-like politicians who actually DID something besides sit around practicing his golf swing in his office. He came down hard on radio payola, He exposed corrupt police, and he cracked down on those deceptive "crisis pregnancy center" ads that turn out to be some religious group trying to talk women out of abortion. He championed musicians who weren't getting their proper royalties from major record labels. He made actual and substantial organized crime busts, something his predecessors couldn't be bothered with. He launched massive investigations into insurance companies, securities firms, and the computer industry. And, most tellingly, he had scathing criticism for "President" Bush, declaring him to be, among other things, deliberately and illegally complicit in a conspiracy with predatory lenders.

So, needless to say, the guy pissed off just about every powerful interest in sight, including some from his own party's agenda. Not surprising, then, that some old arteriosclerotic guy must have said to another one in the lodge hall that this Spitzer guy's gotta be dealt with. Since liberals tend to be horny little devils, it's always easy to find a sex scandal if you look hard enough for one.

Not that I consider spending time in the company of a beautiful and high-class escort to be scandalous. You know, there once was a time when such things were not only considered nobody's business, they were also considered perfectly normal for a red-blooded American male. I would have loved to have seen Spitzer come out and say "Yeah, I had sex with her. So what? Fuck you", but alas, he took the mealy-mouthed diplomatic way out, and mouthed a bunch of platitudes that no one, including himself, really believes is sincere. Sigh.

Lastly, I find it chilling that what allegedly got Spitzer busted was a so-called "suspicious financial transaction" that consisted of nothing more than moving a few grand from one of his accounts to another. Hell, I do that all the time, since when is THAT a fucking red flag signifying anything? Clearly, someone was on a fishing expedition here, trying to find something, anything, that might lead to something they could use against Spitzer. Politics in America, now more than ever, consists of a handful of impotent secret-agent-wannabes trying to wage war on the not-so-impotent ones. It was so in J.Edgar Hoover's day and it's so now. It's like being on a goddamn Klingon ship around here, or the evil-Spock mirror universe where you never know which redshirt's trying to plot your demise.

"I'm gonna hold time hostage down in Florida, child."

You know what Jack Burton says about Earth, don't you? "It's a pretty amazing planet we live on".

I just got back from a secret mission to the islands and keys off the gulf coast of that weird wonderland known as Florida, a state I hadn't been to in twenty years. I'm not crazy about the touristy crap that permeates the mainland but I do like the bar hopping and island hopping, like Ernest Hemingway and Joe Strummer before me.

Unfortunately, to my amazement, I couldn't find a bartender anywhere who'd even heard of a Caipirinha, and even a decent Mojito was hard to come by in even the upscale watering holes of the islands. One bartender on Longboat Key hadn't even heard of a Mojito. I find it simply nuts that it's far easier for me to find good Cuban food and drink in Louisville and Cincinnati than in South Florida. Liquor licenses in Florida are prohibitively expensive and hard to come by, so many places were strictly beer and wine, like the restaurant at the city pier on Anna Maria Island.

I also expected to be overwhelmed by choices in local cigar stores, but a visit to an upscale cigar store on Lido Key showed only the usual brands, and not nearly as good a selection as stores back home here in Kentucky.

Despite my Lord-Fauntleroy gripes, I was, and am, inspired by the whole excursion, and Florida will definitely be figuring into my future plans regarding the cause to which we are all so devoted. There's a number of unusual timespace displacement vortices in Florida, which are possibly/probably related to the Bermuda Triangle. Another is just north of the Florida border, in Valdosta, GA. The whole area ranks about a nine on my weird-shit-o-meter. More about all that later.

Oh yeah, and the house "bar girls" sitting at the bar wearing Wicked Weasels made it all worthwhile.

- - JSH