"Huell Howser At Canters."

When I left LA and LIKE A DUMMY came back to the old country, I was determined to keep watching Huell Howser every day to keep my favourite state alive in my life. We got to England, a quaint village name of Streatley which didn't have an internet connection and there went that plan.

It didn't barely have electricity.
What we had a lot of was carpet moths which love pure wool carpets, which we had in abundance.

Eventually we got TV and internet set up but the damage was done. I was too long away from Huell and California's Gold and it felt fake –– off –– insipid –– pathetic –– faraway –– creepy -- insincere –– watching Huell from Oxfordshire now.

I fell instead to watching NHK's world service and their Huell equivalent show, the superb Document 72 Hours. I'd been watching NHK in LA and so this felt like a bit of continuity at least that fed that pathetic appetite. Well we left there and gave up our satellite dish and now we watch NHK online and it doesn't even show Document 72 Hours. And yet you can tune in any day of the week and catch THANE CAMUS or MATT ALT on there. It don't seem fair. Probably KYLE CARD is still kicking around on NHK and I can't watch Document 72 Hours?

You know who I like?, I like Ali Marie and Marie Krause. That's who I like.
In fact I also like Peter Barakan.

Yyyyyyyyesterday after a long time apart, a long time watching Million Dollar Listing New York trying to decide who I hated less out of Ryan and Luis, I thought, spontaneously, "It's time to watch Huell again." I wanted to see the one where Huell visits Laguna but I ended up watching the "Tamales" episode. It was okay –– Huell was phoning it in somewhat. He had an unresponsive crowd in Indio at the Tamale Festival. The woman showing him around in particular didn't seem to be into it. She didn't seem to be in the best of moods. Also Huell was saying to all these Mexicans, "Stand in a lahn for a photograhph!" and they were all shuffling nervously trying to avoid undue attention.

I watch old Huell episodes and this unpleasant thought enters my head quite regularly: "Everybody now visible onscreen must be dead now." I think it all the time.

After that I found the episode where Huell goes to Canters the Jewish deli-bakery-restaurant on Fairfax (Visiting, #125). I love Canters. You can go in there and you might see that sad sack Rodney Bingenheimer sitting in a corner talking to the schoolchildren ABOUT THEIR FAVOURITE RECORDS ALL RIGHT.

It's a bona fide classic. Firstly Huell is weirdly ultra negative. It's like he's sick of LA or something. I think it wasn't long after an earthquake and of course the riots and nobody seems sure how they feel. Huell is having one of his seemingly standard confabs with an elderly lady who works at Canters and he's saying, "And yeou live around here?" Then he goes, "And it's safe?" And she goes, "No. Not safe at all." Soon she's musing about how she has been mugged twice in the street, and twice more in her home. And Huell doesn't say "Cut, let's go to something more cheerful," he starts demanding grisly details of this home invasion, wringing his hands. The old lady was philosophical. "They vanted something. They didn't got it."

He speaks to another old lady who works at Canters asking pointedly when she's going to retire?, and when she does retire, what is she going to do with all that free time, won't you get bored? He keeps drilling her like this, "But won't you get bored?" It's an existential critique of bourgeois life is what it is. "When ya retire, ain't ya gonna be bored?" The women were phlegmatic about it.

Another moment he is talking to a woman working the cash register and she's from the fahn state of Mississippi so they're about to get into a rale naice Southroners in California conversation when along happens a customer, also a Southroner, a young male college buck from North Carolina, and Huell's face lights up and he quite simply turns his back on Old Massassip mid-sentence and starts talking to the young rump of manstuff to his right. Huell might as well have shoved his hand into her face and said "Not today lady. Not ever." As it is Huell produces a drool cup from seemingly nowhere and proceeds to employ it in the manner for which it is intended.  The poor old schoolmarm from Mississippi is quite forgotten –– we never speak to or hear from her again for the rest of the episode. Her chance to speak to Huell was forever lost because of Huell's notorious primal instincts. Women always come off worse in these situations. The North Carolina blowhard weaves the standard Hollywood yarn of a white male used to the easy way of things. "Haow kin yeou jist fahnd work in this hard clahmate?" Huell asks, mouth agog. "Aow, ah happen to know a few of the raht people," replies Chapel Hill, "Lil ole me allus seems to land the raht way up. Ahm stayin with mah friend's uncle rent free on his couch." You can feel Huell bursting to cry out, "Yall want me to be that uncle? Ah'll deou hit! Ah say ah'll deou hit! But yall won't need a couch where ah'm takin' yeou! Whoo BOY HOWDY!"

Like the lady said, "They vanted something. They didn't got it."

"Huell Howser Water Car Episode."

Been binge–watching Huell Howser lately.  At first you're mildly charmed by him, get some local education, but not particularly concerned. The addiction doesn't come immediately. Maybe you see an unfortunate episode, like the Hatch green peppers one, or the one at the railway museum where even Huell is visibly bored. Eventually you become adept at sifting through the episodes and winnowing wheat from chaff as you go. You find episodes about places you have been to –– Fern Dell or Musso and Frank's or Pink's Hot Dogs. You might see a classic episode, like the one about the lady who makes art from lint or the basset hound picnic one. I even printed up a complete (six-page) list of all the episodes to "cherry pick" the interesting episodes on Youtube or through Chapman College's site.

Even so, I record all Huell episodes on the PBS channels as they come, and so on Labor Day I found myself watching the "Road Trip" episode in Eureka. I said to my wife, "Isn't Eureka where Bob Durst used to go and hide out for months at a time, pretending to be a deaf mute female?"
Yes it is.
I was watching to see if Huell would chance upon Durst in disguise and ask him what he was eating. "Whatcha doin'?" With his patented guilelessness Bob would blurt, "Oh, hiding out after killing my wife."
Then I watched the episode with the "Whistling Champ."

Now I started the "Water Car" episode. Huell was in an aquatic car heading down to the lake's edge and he was being cute and clever about what they were doing. He said, "We're drahving down to the lake to get in the boat." He was not going to simply say, "We're in an aquatic car," he was being opaque and ironic. "The only catch is, whaaat yer gonna fahnd unbelievable is the boat we're gonna spend the ahfternoon on, is unlahk any other you ever seed befowah."

To read my writing you'd think he was Rogue of the X-Men.

Huell was really laying it on, he goes, "We're drahving the car raight daown to the aydge of the water." When the car reached the lakeside, he turned to the car's owner ("Mr. Tate") and said, "Whah doan't yeou reveal our story to everybody?" But TATE was also trying to be cute and obscure, so he goes "Well the catch is you'd better make sure the belt's plugged in and the doors are securely latched, else we might be swimming back, Huell." He didn't come out and say what he was meant to; that the car was a boat.

Huell gently tried to prompt him, saying, "Awl raht, wait a minute, the story is:" Still the guy wanted to drag out the suspense, so fudging the suspense he goes "When mum and dad originally bought this in Sixty-seven, brand new, they were lookin' for a, um, second ve–hic–le, but yet they wanted a boat. And, uh, they came across a lot that had this, and Dad put a tow bar on hit, an' said, 'I'll tow hit out of here'––"

Having heard enough Huell exploded here, "The story is, this isn't a car––" and thrust the microphone at the guy to get the cue and say, "No: it's a BOAT!," but the guy missed the nod and said "Waal you'll just have to fahnd out" and then Huell messed it up further and said "Waal hit aint a boat––?" and the guy Mr. Tate said, "Waal I guess you would say it's an amphicar."

Amphicar meaning an amphibious car. But that's a neologism and hardly recognizable to the lay viewer, so I think you'll agree with me when I say that between them they all fudged the story royally.
They should have just said, "This is a car and it's a boat!"

Well the episode's called "Water Car" anyway.

"California Gold."

I wonder if there were any occasions, caught on camera even, when at the end of filming an episode of Visiting Huell Howser said, in his end of show round–up, "this is a true example of... California's gold!"

Then somebody says, "It's an episode of Visiting, not California's Gold."

"Oh mah gosh."

Are none of the things and places visited on Visiting also California gold?

I submit to the court that they are.

"Housewives Is An Existentialism."

Existentialism is an old–fashioned thing to get worked up over. 

To have existential crises is a modern–day nostalgic luxury. It's a willfully "retro" stance. 

Still the Housewives of Atlanta seem to have transcended mere postmodernism and rediscovered the authentic existentialism, "in good faith".

The funny things they do––!

I was watching some old episodes I'd missed in 2015, because I was in England. This was when the Housewives went to the Philippines, while NeNe Leakes was on Broadway. 

(There were scenes where "Greeg" Leakes would ferry NeNe about midtown Manhattan and take her to one place or another and act like he was her benefactor, when in fact he was just holding the door for her with his hand out. Like the homeless people at Los Feliz Post Office. Either NeNe or Bravo was paying for everything. Creepy crazy opportunism of the man called "Greeg".)

They climbed a mountain on the backs of shetland ponies and then they pitched golf balls off the peak into a lake far below.

It was not explained why or wherefore they did it. 

And now, in the new series, as a signal that her anger management psychotherapy was working Porsha invited all the characters to a mall where they went into these two rooms and tried to solve pre-set mysteries in a limited amount of time.

Phaedra was with Kandi and Sheree in one room, donning deerstalkers and wielding magnifying glasses. If they were struggling with one of the puzzles, they could incur a time penalty to receive a clue to help solve the puzzle. 

Phaedra said, "Shall we just get a clue on this because I'm super–confused with this one."

Kandi said, "I hate to waste clues. "

She said it in an odd voice, but that was only half of the fun. She also said it like it was a general maxim she followed for life. "I always hate to waste clues." Like she was always in situations in day-to-day existence where she had clues, and she hated to waste them.

These are grown women who have run out of conventional things to do. They have exhausted the bounds of normal human relations. They have also plumbed thoroughly the mysteries of abnormal and abhorrent social behaviours. They have hollered, cried and laughed with each other. They have "read" each other and "cast shade". They have thrown canapés and cheap plonk at each other on numerous occasions. They have accused each others' husbands of being homosexual on numerous occasions. They have run the gamut as far as social norms and extremes go.

The following week they were playing lazer tag and strafing each other in the face with virtual pulses of ultra–mutually–assured–psychic–destruction.

"Mary's Spitting Out Teeth." Or, "Mary Berry Biscotti."

Every time Paul Hollywood gives Mary Berry a biscotti to try and she bites down on it and you hear this tremendous crunch, I expect in the next moment to see Mary spitting out all her teeth.

This grand old woman is very decrepit. Don't be deluded. People think, "Mary only popped up on the scene in the last few years. She's going to be around for years." People think, "Mary's on TV. She cannot die." Nice thought but wrong. She's old and she's going to go quite suddenly. Old man Death is like God in the Bible, who "cometh like a thief in the night."

Mary will pine and keen and sicken and go down hard and fast. People will be looking at their newspapers in disbelief. "But she was only on TV last year, eating biscotti! Admittedly her teeth all fell out live on air, but I thought there were years in the old girl."

Like Spiderman's Aunt May. When Spider-Man first appeared (1962) Aunt May was a timorous old Civil War widow ("hard-boiled dog-faced Civil War jarhead veteran"). Now they've reinvented her as a semi-sexy GILF. Awful creepy move. 

Marvel readers, like viewers of Bake-Off, hate to accept that even the well-oiled body ("the well-tempered clavichord") is mortal, does wither and sicken on the vine, and begad and begob verily it shall croak.

Please. As you go about your banal day to day activities do me a favor would you and REMEMBER YOU MUST DIE.

Update, 2017.

We complain about globalism, but in phone calls home I am refreshed to realise that the British and the Americans remain supremely uninterested in 98% of each other's business or "news." We were told that "the UK" was collectively livid about Trump claiming that the British bugged Trump Tower on Obama's behalf. Apparently this went by with minimal comment in the UK.

Also, I would get updates on Bruce Forsyth's death vigil from MSNUK on my Hotmail account. Was Britain uninterested in the mad doings of Old King Trump but wringing its hands over the noble battle between Brucey and the Reaper? 

My only remark was, predictably, a facetious one, and it serves as an addendum to the "Mary Berry Biscotti" remarks.

I said: "Come children. Come diddums come. Bruce is not to be uniquely exempted from the rough handling and bad mistreatment that is to come for all of us from Mistress Death. Bruce must die! In fact it could be argued by the Sophists that nobody deserves to die more than... Bruce Forsyth!"

[Reader:  "So, you're not unduly upset by the news then, Fabian?"]

"I Am Sidon Ithano." Or, "Sarco Plank, C'est Moi."

[Portions of this post originally appeared in an email to M.K. Price of Northamptonshire, England. Reprinted by kind permission.]

We saw The Force Awakens on Friday in Glendale. Grown woman dressed up as a Jawa. Check. Putzes that spend their whole lives in pajama bottoms . Check. He was there at the cinema in his pajama bottoms and Yoda t-shirt. Whose favorite character is Yoda? While there is the life in me give me Hammerhead, Bossk and Greedo. 

I avoided all spoilers so was happily shocked and saddened by the "aha moment" (Oprah), the "pinch me moment" (my wife) when "Rilo Kiley"  ––

[ https://twitter.com/alisonwillmore/status/653613875728883712 ]

–– drove a light saber through Han Solo's lower intestine, shook him off his sword into a bottomless pit, and then the planet blew up. Wife goes, "Do you think he's alive?" 

I especially recommend the scenes on Jakku, the "Niima Outpost" there, and in the orange dwarf woman (okay I'll bite, Maz Kanata)'s rebel compound –– albeit it was rather a nebulous place designed expressly for Mos Eisley / Jabba's sail barge junkies like me. (It's a castle, it's a dive bar.) We got to shamelessly relive our cantina highs and they got to showcase the Henson monsters and assorted bounty scum. 

As I said to Pete Kline on speakerphone in the car heading over there, "There is a rarefied breed that eschews the spaceship chases and aerial sharp-shooting showmanship as routine and dreary. There is a refined element, an elevated subset, a high cultus, which drifts deliberately to the lower psychosociogeographic strata of the galaxy spaceways; what Jesse Lemisch would call Star Wars from the bottom up." I rather rasped this –– leered it, with my lips recoiling from my teeth, over-enunciating it, in a Massachusetts mid-Atlantic accent, and Pete hung up.

The final reveal, Mark Hammil, was somewhat bathetic after all that came before it, further fumbled because of the wretched poor man's Joker impersonation, the bum hash bad ham fist of a performance he gave a week earlier as The Trickster on The Flash. I cannot take Luke so seriously after that disgrace. I bet J.J. Abrams was livid when he saw that on his TV screen.

Boring. I'm being boring. Okay, that's me. Boring work to do.

"Getting Out of Boring Time Biting Into Boring Pie," as God Is My Co-Pilot useda say.

"Top Chef, Low Man on a Totem Pole."

Kwame on Top Chef said a funny thing yesterday. I happened to hear him saying it because I was watching him on that same TV program Top Chef at the time. 

Talking about his meteoric rise to "James Beard nominee status" he said, "I was literally the lowest man on  the totem pole." 

He went on to explain that he was not strictly somehow mystically embedded within a totem pole, where he was the bottom face, but he was actually (or, to use another synonym of actually, "literally") a "line cook in a kitchen."

People never tire of misusing the word "literally" and I never tire of pointing it out when they do.

Wonder which of us is the more boring.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Related: I was walking around in Iliad Books today, saw a woman with blue hair. I thought, "She looks like a Top Chef character."

Has it come to this?

"New Fargo. New Kit-Kat. All Bad."

The new series of Fargo is marvelously terrible. It's mortal grievous.  It's so bad it should be proverbial. It's a simpering, dainty thing like the saccharine Garrison Keillor dreamt it up after one of his midnight snacks of whoopee pie, johnny cake and fiddle-faddle. I recently wrote to a dear old friend in the old country, who actually said that the new season of Fargo was of the same high calibre as the first. I said:

I sat watching the first two episodes with wife, exploded: "Was this written by fifteen year olds?" Every five minutes the number, the age of the showrunner, would go down –– by the end of the first episode I was attributing it to a long table of eleven-year-olds. Not even precocious ones. Vapid, unrealistic, childish stuff! I prefer to watch I Zombie. It's not Shakespere but it is a d___ sight better than the execrable Fargo (or, as it's known Farce-go, or, as it's known, True Detective Season Two in All Its Lurid Bad Awfulness Deluxe 2.0.) 

There are elements of the supremely bad Wes "Park Slope McSweeneys" Anderson in it –– I was waiting for Bill "If I Came Any More Overrated I'd Be in Sonic Youth" Murray to come limping on set and do one of his gnomic turns–– and there are bits baldly redolent of Quentin, the Mule-Faced Woman. Bad preceptors!

You shall not read ill of it, though. I have lately realised that bad reviews are now routinely buried by multinational corporations. They hire people to do it. It's an actual job people do. The other day I tried one of the new three-fingered Kit-Kats. It was bad to have. Garbage in the mouth. Like eating Fargo Season Two in fact. I couldn't believe Kit-Kat had so willingly pissed away their advantage in the game of chocolatiers! I couldn't believe they had whored out their good name and the delicate and exquisite memories we had of Kit-Kats as children. I googled "THE ALL-NEW KIT-KAT IS HORRIBLE" looking for support from the hoi polloi and amazingly nothing came up. 

It wasn't like when I was hating Matt Jackson on Jeopardy and that was (apparently) simply me being cussed and negative. (I looked on Survivor Sucks, where one finds trolls congregating to seethe, to see if anybody else hated Matt Jackson. No such dice.) I knew that other people must hate this new inferior Kit-Kat, so where were they? Answer is, the Kit-Kat people hired "Reputation.com" or some equivalent to kill or hide all the bad reviews, to throw them to p.9999 of any Google search, those back pages where my works are usually to be found (or rather are not to be found –– ever) ––  and to glut the first hunnerd fifty, two hunnerd pages with empty boring puffs.

Believe the same thing has happened with Season Two of Fargo, because it's execrable and nobody says so. I have to believe that not everybody is that critically compromised. 

We all know about the new Golden Age of Television, it is by now a critical cliche, and it doesn't mean that everything that comes out under that aegis is actually any good. 

Folks, I give you Fargo Season Two. 

This episode, the discussion about shampoo (MOTIF: GANGSTERS TALK ABOUT TRIVIA), the gangsters' niece talking all tough (MOTIF: GANGSTER WOMEN ARE WITTY) while the silent redskin gutted a rabbit (MOTIF: GANGSTERS ARE COLORFUL AND OFF-BEAT), the hackneyed 1970s clothes (MOTIF: THE SEVENTIES WERE INTRINSICALLY AMUSING). Afros, knit sweaters, Dundreary sideburns. Ugh. Tired routines were being shamelessly egested and swatted about the soundstage. Old lees and curds sold as new stock. 

"The top of the pot is popped off with the froth."

I'd like to have been a fly on the wall when that acclaimed genius the "showrunner" had pitched this one. "Gents, have I got an idea for you. Idea's this. The movie Fargo."

"You want us to make the movie Fargo."

"I want you to make it again, but with less-talented actors and without the Coen brothers."

"Kid how could it fail."

The best thing on this episode was the commercials.  They had a new Norm MacDonald KFC one. 

Maybe I ought to go over to FX and make a pitch. 

"Fellers, let's make a TV show based on Norm MacDonald pretending he is Colonel Sanders."

"A Heist Is a Prison Escape –– Sometimes."

The other day I was trying to make it through the Lee Marvin film Point Blank, but it was no use. It couldn't be done. Still, I now know that the film begins with a heist that takes place in an abandoned prison. So I thought, even as my toes were curling at the badness of the film, "Governor Cuomo was right. Sometimes a heist is a prison escape."

As Laurence Remila used to say –– on a near-daily basis –– "Mea friggin' maxima culpa."

Or was it Cicero.

"Fire, Please Don't Walk With Me." Or, "Ewoks Are More Subtle."

For your intellectual edification, the film Fire Walk With Me, reevaluated with some reluctance and surprize, from a desk in the very same city where David Lynch lives they do say. I wrote it in late August. 

(Incidentally, after writing it I was in New York, sitting on one of the plush loveseats in the new Cos on Fifth Avenue,  waiting for my wife to finish clothes shopping. I'd foolishly begun flicking through a copy of Kinfolk, so my blood pressure was very high. In despair I groped for another magazine, amazingly located another $20+ rag, this one with Kyle Maclachlan on the cover. He was talking about the new Twin Peaks TV series ostensibly coming in the next year or two. I was quite impressed by the sheer anality of the interviewer, considering this was of the same class of hipster snotty-superficiality as Kinfolk. The guy was asking Lynch all about "BOB" the demonic spirit who possesses Cooper at the end of the series. Very specific questions. It was like the usually empty superficial style journalist had guiltily let his inner nerd run amok. 

That previous paragraph merely exists as a sort of prose poem, describing a Fifth Avenue vignette otherwise lost forever. It might equally have been a tanka equally but it is not.)

Now follows my revised impressionistic rundown on the Twin Peaks film:

1. I went to Los Feliz library.
2. I was looking for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
3. I saw they had Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me to rent.
4. Not many books in that library branch.
5. Nothing doing, apparently unconnectedly I took out a scholarly study of David Lynch.
6. Skim-read the chapters on Twin Peaks.
7. Got out Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me.
8. Put it in the player.
9. I put it on.
10. I said in the first ten minutes that it’s one of my favourite films.
11. I thought, almost immediately, “No it isn’t. I’m doing a disservice to many, many films by saying that. I am betraying my better judgment. I’m being nostalgic and it’s been too long since I watched any good films.”
12. Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me is like Return of the Jedi. The first half hour is great. The Chris Isaak segment is like the scene in Jabba’s court, on the sailbarge. I am even going to put in my search terms, "Chris Isaak Jabba the Hutt" and see how many readers that draws in.  
13. Continuing the comparison, the scenes with Laura Palmer are like the scenes with the Ewoks.
14. The Ewoks are however more subtle in their acting. 
15. Laura Palmer was channeling Chewbacca.
16. My wife laughed at the badness of the acting in every scene featuring poor Laura Palmer.
17. I felt defensive and indicted.
18. I ended up agreeing with her, pummeled by Laura Palmer’s constant shrill shrieking and over-emoting.
19. Half the mystery is pissed away by prosaic exposition.
20. I remembered how we lads went into London expressly to see the film.
21. We saw it again at the University in Canterbury.
22. I remembered how I bought the Secret Diary of Laura Palmer the morning of the day it came out, in Henley-on-Thames. I read it in a morning.
23. Wall-ter the American mail artist sent me a mail art piece & told me who killed Laura. 
24. We rewatched this film in New York in about 2007 and I don't recollect thinking it was bad then.
25. The question naturally follows, how have I changed between 2007 and 2015––
26. Were those hard years, or years of good growth?
27. I met David Lynch twice in New York. He is canny to a fault. He gives nothing away. He cannot be accused of bad manners or ill will to a living soul. But he can cut a man dead with a well-chosen vapidity. 
28. Laura Palmer reminded me of ––

I have finished with my list.

"Matt Jackson, Jeopardy Jerk."

Sometimes the more you will somebody to disappear, to make like a leaf and dry up and blow away,  the more tenaciously they stick around. The green team on Amazing Race is one –– infallible because they are loathsome. Then take for instance I've been wanting this unpleasant character Matt Jackson to lose on Jeopardy all week, and the rascal keeps going from strength to strength. He shan't put a foot wrong. He shines. He garners all the Daily Doubles. And they keep putting in punch-drunk burnt-out three-time-losing welterweight bums against him.

I disliked him seconds into laying eyes on him. As he was introduced he had won three days already, and so he triumphantly raised his hand with three fingers sticking up. That's unnecessary gloating. All good-minded people, I would think, hated him for his preening self-vanity and wanted him to go.

He didn't. Instead he did the exact opposite. He coasted to triumph against the addled potterers they set against him. When Matt Jackson wins a point he ungraciously punches the air. He always does the thing with his fingers at the start of the game. Alex said, "I wonder what MATT will do when he hasn't got enough fingers to show how many times he has won." A small intimation that Alex too hates the move. Matt Jackson also cuts Alex off and snaps his answers in confident clarion-like schoolmarm tones. He boasts loudly about the jejune critical theory he likes to read. He has a bad-tempered pout on all the time until the end when suddenly he leers horribly. It comes across as supreme sarcasm –– the diva who cannot smile with any sincerity because he is so frustrated by the mortals around him. Yet his autobiographical bit on Friday was strictly banal –– he said he collects Playbills from shows he's been to.

Cool story Matt.

Alex should have said that.
Alex should start saying that generally in that segment. "Cool story bro."
He would say it three times a day every day if he started it.

Purely as an experimental inquiry I typed a few unkind epithets alongside MATT's name and fed them into the search engine to see what other thinking people made of this brazen prannet. Amazingly nothing came up. I sought reassurance that other sensitive people disliked this man MATT JACKSON like I did, but the internet –– which seems to have an echo of every idiotic thought we can possibly summon –– had no comment to make on it.

I thought, "Am I really alone in resenting this guy? Does the problem lie with me?"

Then I thought, "Maybe this is a yawning opportunity –– the first man to capitalize on the nationwide hatred people feel for MATT JACKSON."

Maybe I am grasping for company in this void of human decency, this bad epoch fallen low, this Kali Yuga, this Iron Age, old buddy old pal, but it sounded to me as though Alex said something else on Friday suggesting he didn't like Matt much either. He said, "If you're one of those viewers who likes to root for a player in the competition, this week has probably been a disappointment for you. This guy MATT has won every day and we keep sending in amateurish bumbling clown school sophomores!" He couldn't come out and say it outright, but he implied a growing weariness.

Who shall rid me of this troublesome prat?

"Timothy Carey Was On Gunsmoke."

                            

Timothy Carey was on Gunsmoke.

The episode is called "The Gentleman."

I recommend you watch it if you are at all what you claim to be, id est, a discerning follower of culture.

Marshal Matt Dillon peremptorily kicked Carey out of Dodge, but not before Carey voiced the wildcat vow to come back. He was like Ezra Pound, who used to say, "I cease not to yowl."

Next scene, in walked Jack Cassidy.

Amazing cast this episode has!

Jack Cassidy was instantly spoiling for a fight with Timothy Carey. He happened to see the first scene in which Carey menaced the "working girl" with a heart of gold (VIRGINIA BAKER). Cassidy's character, a raffish gambler with a lopsided smile not to say a slantacular take on life, had a fatal heart condition, went to see the Doc, but he must revenge himself on the man who mistreated his lady love, the homely hooker (VIRGINIA BAKER), before he up and expires.

She was not exactly a pretty woman but Jack Cassidy was just moonstruck like a teenage polecat and declared her the best-looking women he ever seed.

"You can't have been looking very hard," I said to the TV at that point.

                           

The whole episode was a build-up to a showdown between these two classic character actors. These two Dick Tracy, spaghetti western grotesques.

Lovers of thespianism and cinema everywhere and for all eternity were robbed of any joy by Marshal Matt Dillon, who coolly subverted the destined meeting between the two. He punched Jack Cassidy out, rendered him unconscious with a single blow, slung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and threw him into a post-chaise leaving Dodge post-haste.

Off it went stage right and then in came Timothy Carey, stage left, running after the departing stage. Matt Dillon punched him unconscious too. That was that. Deprived of the scene all refined lovers of the craft desired by that lowbrow (but brilliant) two-fisted lawman MATT DILLON!

(It is to be noted that both Timothy Carey and Jack Cassidy would later show up on multiple episodes of Columbo, but never together.  Carey never played the killer, he used to be a character who slung hash in a greasy spoon and made a bowl of chili that Columbo particularly liked. I think he was meant to be a recurring character and then he drifted away. He never did get to have that scene with Jack Cassidy.)

"Vladimir Putin Was On Charlie Rose."

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More Tips For Junior Murderers.

1. If you're going to commit murder in Los Angeles, don't do it on Columbo's watch. Don't do it when an episode of Columbo is being filmed, or rather when the action of an episode is taking place in the fictional world.

2. If you're going to be on an episode of Columbo, don't kill anyone. Be a bit role. Be a waiter or a barman or a secretary or a construction site stalwart. Live out your life peaceably.

3. If you absolutely must commit the terrible sin of murder, kill somebody poor or irrelevant. Middle class even. Columbo don't care one damned hoot about blue collar stiffs.

4. It should be noted that Columbo is a fictional character. But perhaps the illusion of Columbo reduces homicides in LA among the fratres ignorantes, the sorts of people – and surprising their number – who believe Sherlock Holmes was an actual historical figure too.

Crime Detection Tips.

For all his canny and uncanny intuitions, Phil Columbo could solve the crimes a lot easier than people think.* Any and every time a murder occurs, he interviews those eccentric individuals who happen to be close to the victim. Strange satellites orbiting the corpse. As soon as Columbo finds his investigation being unduly challenged or perversely obstructed, even hindered, by one of those people close to the deceased, he has his man –– or woman.

Oftentimes it's a woman.

Who in real life would enthusiastically challenge the assumptions of the homicide detective on duty? Who would painstakingly try to lead the bumbling slewfoot agley? If you were innocent you'd stay  out of it wouldn't you. You wouldn't want to take up valuable time out of your life getting involved in morbidity. You'd get on with the job of living life.  If Columbo asked you something requiring your personal conjecture about the circumstances of the crime, you would shrug and say "I dunno. Whaddaya want. Christ sake you're the cop not me babe." You would not go to unusual lengths to conspicuously try to lead the police detective lieutenant off on a wild goose chase inducing him to believe a particular, often quite far-fetched, hypothesis. The only person who would waste time and energy doing that would be a very guilty person with a stake in the game. I mean a very obvious, singularly self-interested person, that is to say, the killer.

Crimes-olving [sic] is easy when you follow this simple Dick Tracy set-up.

* There is a legend, albeit it is a disgusting hoax, that Columbo's first name is "Philip." Incidentally, Columbo revealed to no less than Frank Sinatra his wife's first name in the course of a televised roast. Mrs. Columbo's first name, he said, is Rose.

Speaking of Frank, somebody on IMDB claims that the name "Frank" is "clearly visible" on Columbo's ID in two early episodes.

Has anybody commented on the irrefragable fact that Morse stole shamelessly from Columbo the motif of the slew foot with the unrevealed (forbidden) forename?

"A Heist is Not a Prison Escape." Or, "Open Letter to Governor Cuomo."

I read a piece in the Times of London about the two murderers who cunningly escaped from a prison in upstate New York, that so-called "Little Siberia". It had a remark by Andrew Cuomo who made a rudimentary error when he commented how "It could have been a plot from a movie... if there was a pot of money at the end of the rainbow."

Guy's fudging movie genres.
Guy's fucking up royally –– and doing so publicly.

Let me explain something to you, Governor Cuomo. A little Kinema 101 let us call it.

These are two separate genres you're talking about: heist movies and prison break movies. Perhaps they are similar, perhaps they are favoured by certain primo noir directors particularly from Hollywood and France, but they are separate nonetheless. In heist movies, a group of guys, regular "Johnsons" perhaps or "Yeggs" equally, determine to rob some joint (race track, bank, jeweller's) and it usually fucks up in some tragic way. Sterling Hayden collapsing in the field with the horse in, or having the meltdown at the airport. Bob Ryan and Harry Belafonte blowing each other up in Hudson, NY. You ever see that great movie, Odds Against Tomorrow? Well then perhaps you also seen Bob Le Flambeur, Kansas City Confidential, Le Doulos, The Killing, The Asphalt Jungle and Le Cercle Rouge. Becker's totally chouette Touchez Pas Au Grisbi concerns the sequel to a heist. They put on a heist season at Film Forum a few years back and it was one of the best things to happen ever, and I must have attended nearly every film I could have, but still even they neglected to include the magnificent Big Deal on Madonna Street, and that's a heist film too. Some of my favourite films are heist movies and some of yours are too.

Ditto prison escape movies, but they're diffunt is my thesis. A Man Escaped (Bresson), Le Trou (Becker), and less successful in my view, Jules Dassin's Brute Force. Something dumb about the end of that movie but I can't remember what now.

One is about escape, the other is about trying to get money without working for it, at least not in a conventional legal way. Oftentimes there is a lot of mental acumen and ingenuity exhibited by the heisters, which almost makes you think, "Ah fuck it, they deserve the cash after coming up with such a beautiful graceful scheme to rob the bank. And who loses after all, why it's just the taxman." But after all who pays the taxman? You and I!

I said to my dad in the car today, "I been engaging the taxman in an intricate dance of my own devising for a very long time now."

The same goes for the prison escapees. These are disgusting criminals, but in another sense we are rooting for them to beat the system and get out of there! It's an existential analogy and again they evidence some canny thinking when they plan the escape.

Like the killers on Columbo. You have to admire them for their creativity and thoroughness, even though murder is a horrible sin, but Columbo always catches them out somehow.

Criminals plan heists, and criminals escape from prison. In both cases they show great invention and originality and pluck and spunk and derring-do. Yet still a heist movie is not a prison break movie. Two different things, Governor Cuomo. People could fumble a heist, get sent to the hoosegow, and then escape that same hoosegow, and they'd have done a heist and then a prison break, but show me the movie where both things happen sequentially. It's one or it's the other. Yet Governor Cuomo has them all happen in one movie in his addled brain. These two guys escape "Little Siberia" and then promptly engage in a heist.

Cuomo went on to compound his sin of film ignorance by remarking that it was like The Shawshank Redemption except that the hero of that shitty film was a great guy and these guys were not so. These guys were cold-blooded criminals.

That may be so, but it's a boring thing to say!

Boring comment to make!

Plus this guy Cuomo emails me about on average at least once a week, even though it's been a year since I lived in the great city of New York.

Has it really been a year?

Columbo: "If Thine Eye Offend Thee."

You know what's great about Phil Columbo, he's never a bum to a working stiff.
Blue-collar guys, some of them anyway, come up to him and try to exercise their feeble impotent superiority on him because they assume wrongly that he's one of the few microorganisms inferior to them. He's got a fake eyeball and a dirty trench-coat. Then he reveals to them that he's a homicide lieutenant, but he always does so gently. He doesn't crow. He doesn't lord it over them. He doesn't trumpet uproariously like Chanticleer in the revelation. He is like the Buddha or Odin, walking down the country road dressed as a degenerate, a vagrant.

NB and uncoincidentally Odin also only had one eye.

I was talking about it to Pricey. About Columbo's modesty and majesty.
I said, "He's like Zatoichi. That rare thing, a humble hero."

(Zatoichi had no eyes –– or rather he had two eyes, but neither one worked a lick since childhood.)

"Columbo's Progress." Or, "Tips For Junior G-Men."

I do not intend to detract from the stellar sleuthmanship of COLUMBO, not an iota. However, every crime he's ever solved with great subtlety and ingenuity could actually be solved in less time in a more banal manner. By a three day old child.

Every week, Columbo comes upon the murder scene to investigate, and while he is doing so, one person in particular with some connection to the deceased takes a particular, you might say peculiar, interest in Columbo's progress.

Men cluster to me like moths around a flame

But if their wings burn I know I'm not to blame.

The killers fall fatally into a protracted, although (absurdly) ostensibly casual, dialogue about the murder and how it was done. The killer always tries with pronounced vigour to discount each of Columbo's ideas, and to convince him that his hypotheses are wrong. They very reluctantly concede his point finally, and pull an obviously thwarted expression.

Why doesn't anyone ever have the good sense to shut up and act uninterested? Or don't talk to Columbo at all for fear of incriminating yourself with hubris? Go take a vacation. But they must stick around. They are drawn to Columbo. They must argue it.  The vanity of the assassin! The brass neck of the psychopath.

Columbo should by now be able to identify the killer as the person who invariably takes an inordinate interest in the progress of the case, who tries to argue over every conjecture with him, who soon gets "frustrated," now peeved, finally accuses him of harassment and threatens to call his superiors.

To all this, Columbo would sagely nod and remind me: you need motive you need proof and you need opportunity.

Self-Fashioning in Columbo.

Given that Columbo is formulaic to (or past) the point of perversity, and given that Columbo –– unlike every other detective series –– forfeits the prick-teasing withholding of the killer's identity until the end of the show, you might think that Columbo was a hard sell. To continue with my vulgar figure, choosing Columbo over Inspector Morse (for instance) is like favoring premature ejaculation over delayed gratification. It is like continuing to leaf through a pornographic magazine after the "money-shot" has been and gone. It flies in the face of Aristotle, who remarked that man is the only animal to experience sadness after the sexual act. It defies the tantric logic of Sting and Trudie Styler who must postpone the event eternally –– how they jealously fetishize withholding pleasure from each other!

However, I seem to be drifting from my subject and along the way I have summoned up some grotesque images.

One reason why the strictly formulaic aspect of Columbo is irrelevant to the pleasure derived from the viewing experience is the calibre and the variety of the guest stars. This has been said before. However a further variable, I have started to perceive, particularly as the seasons progress, is the personality of Columbo. This can veer all over the place. It is subject to frequent self-fashioning, as they say all too frequently in the academy. Self-fashioning or auteur-fashioning. It is said that Falk was his own man though and I believe it.

In the early seasons, I thought Columbo is like Zatoichi. There is a similarity in that both men are seemingly shamblers, they are humble, they bow their heads and do not swagger or rear up, and yet they are unsurpassed in their respective cosmic roles: the first a homicide detective, the latter a roaming swordsman. They are, from an exterior perspective, unimpressive, yet they contain within them the gold and jewels of exceptional abilities. Zatoichi is blind (although Katsu Shintaro obviously was not). Peter Falk was half-blind. It is to be assumed, although so far as I have seen it has not been commented on, that Columbo also has a fake eyeball. That's interesting but it has little bearing on the case.

Columbo, however, shows more personality variance from episode to episode than Zatoichi does. I do not say categorically that this is preferable –– I like that Zatoichi's shining goodness is an eternal in a dark, foul world. We need Zatoichi like we need Emerson –– to guide us through the last days before the crack of doom.

Columbo's personality zig-zags are interesting rather as Louis C.K.'s purposeful lack of continuity is. (There was the excellent episode of Louis with Seinfeld [playing himself as a consummate jerk] where Louis ends up having to pay the wealthy family of the girl he punched when she tickled him in bed several million dollars in installments for the rest of his life. We do not presume that in each subsequent episode of Louis Louis actually has to maintain these payments –– the event happened and then left continuity, like a dream subsiding.) In one episode Columbo is tugging his forelock and coughing. In another he is subdued. In another he is reeling about, bleary-eyed, half-insane. He craves coffee. He is in his pajamas. He has his dick half out at a bar-mitzvah.  He is usually star-struck, even while he is poised to send that same "star" to the hoosegow or the death chamber. He blunders at social events. He frequently upsets the "help". Did you see the one where he nearly drove the snobbish elderly female retainer to a breakdown with rage. Other times he is severe, angry, even vengeful. The Biblical God. In the third of the great Jack Cassidy episodes he pursues Cassidy's ex-Nazi stage magician doggedly like one of the Eumenides –– Alecto, say. In the superb "Last Salute to The Commodore" he is more like Jerry Lewis.

And there I thought, They should have had an episode with Jerry Lewis as the killer.

 "Last Salute to The Commodore" is understandably a divisive episode in the bustling Columbo community. A casual survey I made after watching it turned up no end of dismay. A few people declared it a work of brilliance. More of them were writing to their Congressman and demanding a government inquiry into how this thing came to be made. I'd by and large side with the former. Some of it is magnificent; for instance, the avant-garde aspects, when Falk is channeling in equal parts his friend Timothy Carey, Antonin Artaud at his fist-biting best and also the Buddha in his rub my belly for luck aspect. Conversely, it is unusually conventional in its climax –– the seeming tribute to Agatha Christie. Whither Ustinov in his white suit. Problems include: the frazzled, soused daughter of the Commodore. She spends the whole episode in a drunken stupor, and over time this palls. The viewer finds that he wants to administer a cold bucket of water over her head. You want to say: Sober up. Join a club. Make friends. Get laid. Get a new hobby. Like the girl doing the Transcendental Meditation. Both of them were good looking by the way. The lush and the TM girl.*

There are several sublime scenes in it. The much-discussed, and protracted, scene where Columbo gets everybody to pile into his car and then sits in Robert Vaughn's lap and musses with his hair. He does this again later, on board the yacht ("yawl"). In this version, Columbo seems to favour crude, omnivorous sexual harassment as a key crime-solving technique. Let it be noted that Dick Tracy never did that. Also commendable is the endless, mirthful scrutiny of the terminology peculiar to the maritime community. How it makes us lubbers chuckle. "That's the mizzen mast jibe?" There is the scene on the docks where everything is shouted over the sound of a nearby drill. Falk visibly weeps with laughter in this scene. The viewer has a certain wistful consciousness of not being entirely in on the joke.

In this episode Columbo also has a young double, with a Polish surname, who inexplicably asks that he be known as "Mac". Columbo promptly, and gamely, does so. "Ya got any Irish blood in ya Mac?" He asks Mac this several times. "Ya sure ya haven't got any Irish blood in ya Mac?" Mac is a doppelganger of sorts –– the chief loves him, and he loves Columbo. He even buys a raincoat (NB, "mac") like Columbo's which shows up (again, inexplicably) in the middle of the denouement. Columbo picks it up from the back of a chair and absently asks, "Whose is this?"

The episode is hilarious and disturbing. The Columbo myth is fraying at the parameter –– the comforts of the formula have vanished as soon as it is discovered that Robert Vaughn was not the killer after all. The Columbo convention is disrupted, Columbo is virtually unrecognisable and anything could happen now. A lot of diehard viewers resent that Columbo is somewhat arrogant, wisecracking and winking in this episode. One commentator (that rare thing, an admirer of the episode) is certain that cast and crew had all ingested LSD before filming even began.

In fact, in the previous episode to this one, the also-amazing "Now You See Him" with Jack Cassidy as the Nazi legerdemain performer, Columbo is already in a new mode of existence. I said that he is vengeful (I compared him floridly to Alecto from the Aeneid). He is also, once again, arrogant and sadistic to another admirer, Bob Dishy reprising Sgt. Wilson. In this episode Columbo's wife has crucially bought him a new coat, a nice coat that looked good on him. It's a good coat. I remember thinking, If only Columbo would wear the new coat. But no, Columbo spends the episode trying to lose the coat. Wilson keeps finding it again for him. Cue muffled laughter. But my point is that Columbo's identity is in flux. His irritation with Wilson eventually turns into admiration when Wilson distinguishes himself as a slewfoot in his own right (knowing that rare article, what Columbo does not, about the typewriter) and contributes to solving the crime.

The recurrence of murderer-actors such as Jack Cassidy, Patrick McGoohan and Robert Culp is, like Louis's changing array of wives and small details, a subtle disruption of the sacred continuity traditionalists insist upon. How can Jack Cassidy now be a bad novelist, now a free man again in the guise of a publisher, now a legerdemain man? He is always Jack Cassidy after all. (In the third iteration, much is made of Cassidy's character's shifting identity –– he emerges blood-besmattered from the deathcamps of Germany to posing as a Hungarian end man, to posing as an Englishman, to posing as an American.)

"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I shall repay."

Are we, each season, deposited in an alternate universe, where the same people (Cassidy, McGoohan, Culp) have different occupations? And yet they are always killers, and they are always thwarted by Columbo, albeit each Columbo is also slightly different? I am reminded of the Borges line from "Death and the Compass" (I last used this quotation quite shamelessly in reference to an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter):

"The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting."

(When did I become the man with the Borges quotation?)

(Why am I still not employed by a university?)

That being said, Columbo scotches my thesis, because several times he has recalled past cases from previous seasons in tedious detail. He recalls the entire story in an incidental anecdote. This is peculiar, because when that motif –– an old adventure recalled in brief –– is usually employed artistically, it refers to an adventure that has not actually been delineated before; it is employed as a teaser, a story that has never actually been set down, like a fictional book within a fictional book. 

I once dreamt that I was reading a book by Proust, one that is not in any of the Proust bibliographies I am certain. 

(Idea for a bibliography category: "Dreamt Books by the Author.")

It was only at the end of this magnificent story, anyway, when Columbo is rowing off towards Japan to meet his wife at the yacht club, that it was revealed that the director of this minor masterpiece was that expert at brilliant stories with mystical not to say deeply unsatisfying conclusions, Patrick McGoohan. I saw the name –– I had what Oprah rather sickeningly calls my "aha moment". 

It is well-established that The Prisoner ended unsatisfactorily and as the result of events which occurred off-camera which precipitated a distinct compromise. McGoohan elected to leave England to live in sunny California, and so he rushed out (for Lew Grade's sake) a nonsensical ending to a job he had grown bored of. "Number Six", who was formerly known as John Drake ("Danger Man") eventually shows up in California as "Nelson Brenner" in the Columbo episode pointedly titled "Identity Crisis"(directed by Patrick McGoohan). Brenner dresses at one point in a blazer intended expressly to recall Number Six. 

As one commentator on IMDB sagely observes, "he even has the nerve to deliver the line 'Be Seeing You' repeatedly... What a star!" Interestingly, this excellent episode is also marred by McGoohan's regrettable signature, his Achilles heel: vagueness of intent and lack of proper closure. I don't have a clue why Nelson Brenner is secretly posing as an aging Eastern European who is apparently #1 on the CIA's Most Wanted list unless the answer is existential ennui. 

Vagueness of intent and lack of proper closure.

Yes.

[* I say nothing here of TM or its present messiah, Mr. DAVID LYNCH; see earlier writings elsewhere.]

"Columbo: Klaus Kinski is Still The King."

Columbo. That game of cat and mouse... where the cat always loses!
Badly!
The cat gets sent to the electric chair!

I have been watching Columbo, and I thought it only proper and right to mention this one episode that had the short German from Jules et Jim in it as the killer. 

I'm waiting for Klaus Kinski to show up in an episode as a backgammon grandmaster posing as a snaggletoothed harelipped drifter. 

Klaus Kinski as a bug-eyed bozo from Jabba's sail barge or the cantina scene. 

Klaus Kinski as Greedo. 

[In the ravaged voice of TRAILER GUY:] Klaus Kinski is: Bossk. A twelve-foot tall surly alien bounty hunter the color and consistency of peanut-butter diarrhea with all the personality of that universally-reviled medium. Who killed Han Solo? Who framed Jabba? Leave it to Columbo to work it out in his inimitable bumbling fucking way! 

Another episode you could have Jean-Louis Trintignant. 
(Did you ever see him with Kinski in The Great Silence?) 
Lino Ventura. 
Robert Ryan. 
Gabin. 
Delon. 
Phillipe Noiret. 
Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Michael Lonsdale playing Boyd Rice.

[TRAILER GUY:] "Peg Bundy" is Lisa Carver in a Hallmark miniseries: The Suckdog Story. 

There was a Columbo with Vincent Price on it in which he wasn't even the killer. Like in Laura. Imagine that, having Vincent Price and then you have the supreme dandyish audacity, or perversity, or luxurious airiness, to not have him be the killer. 
The Producer goes, "We just keep him around for the lurid local color." 
"We kind of like to keep him around for various reasons mostly pertaining to variously yucks and chuckles." 

Like Patrick McNee in that episode that took place on the cruise ship. The killer that week was Robert Vaughn from The Man From UNCLE. "Pat" was just there to enjoy the cruise I think and pop on the captain's cap when needed and put in the odd scene of support acting ("mentoring") when required. He was there, I think, to steer the ship through the "narrows".

This episode I'm watching now has acclaimed nutburger and indomitable scenery-destroyer-and-devourer, and did I mention that he is a magnificent marvelous thespian, THE LATE JACK CASSIDY, as an ex-Nazi stormtrooper, a stage magician and BTW the killer. 

This man was David Cassidy's outhouse rat of a father. Great classic dissipated Hollywood type. Terrific delineator of dissipated outhouse rats.  Look up his online bio sometime for a transient experience of shapeless, aimless ("shameless") shambling pleasure. It could be it's the greatest story ever told. Guy's that rare thing a great actor. 

He once played the role of the even greater (y mas muy loco) JACK BARRYMORE, A.K.A. "The Profile". He (JACK CASSIDY) was himself in turn portrayed by the sometimes-great (sometimes not) MALCOLM McDOWELL in a made-for-TV Hallmark movie about the life of (no not Lisa Suckdog) his son DAVID CASSIDY. Those must have been the lean years, the desolate years of hard-fought alimonies, for McDowell. Before Entourage. Before he got to share screen time with Jeremy Piven. 

PIVEN that large wig with a small man underneath it!
PIVEN that swaggering toupee, that large false aegis over a pee-wee personality.
JERMEY PIVEN says: "It's not a toupee. It's really not. It's plugs. I had mercury poisoning. My life was at stake and I got plugs."