"The stuff dreams are made of..."

Years later, the Horus birds are home in Kansas…

 A couple of weeks after moving to Los Angeles I found myself in Westwood in a small but prosperous-looking Egyptology shop. One half expected Kasper Gutman, Sydney Greenstreet’s character in The Maltese Falcon, to pop out of the back room offering unctuous assistance. Instead, a handsome fiftyish lady walked up next to me as I eyed a pair of large, gold painted Horus falcons. They were well over three feet tall and imposing in a 1930’s Art Moderne or Deco design. Between the legs of each bird was a Rameses-like figure, a typical Egyptian soldier or warrior.“Those birds were in Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra,” she said, “The 30’s film”

“They’re beautiful,” I said. “What are they made of?”

“Plaster, I’m sure. Most of the props of the day were Plaster of Paris. Take them home. Specially priced today.”

The real thing…

I really don’t recall exactly how much they were but the price was surprisingly reasonable, I felt, especially when she threw in a proof of authenticity from Paramount’s prop department, and the name of the art director who had them cast. I bought them with a credit card. I had no job at the time, no prospects, but enough to live on while enrolled in a McKee screenwriting class; we were studying Chinatown. Like thousands of others in L.A. I knew, just knew I had it in me to write that novel or that script that would take Hollywood by storm. Balanced by doubt, and the thought, What am I doing buying these things when I could end up sleeping in my car?

They were portents and they spoke to me. I couldn’t leave without them. We loaded them carefully in my trunk. I still have them. Before very long I had gone from dicey freelance work to a creative group head position at a large agency, so perhaps the birds were good luck. My circumstances certainly improved after acquiring the birds.

My own little piece of the mystery…

A year later, on one of my habitual pilgrimages to Venice Beach’s colorful shops, another bird landed in my collection; this time it was The Maltese Falcon. It has none of the grace of the Horus falcons; in fact it’s kind of klunky. The classic noir movie deserves a better leading bird for such a superb cast and script. But this was what Warner Bros. prop department came up with and it flew. Now I had my own replica of the bird to sit in my living room looking broodingly at the two sleekly designed Egyptian birds flanking a marble-topped bar.

I looked in vain for a pawned Oscar statuette as a placeholder for when I won best screenplay. Something about L.A.’s ozone perpetuates these dreams (and irritates the eyeballs on smog days—or at least it did back then). Anyway the bird grows on you. I began to hear rumors of high-dollar birds. I checked mine but, alas, it was not one of these. The mystery is alive and well today, with some of these squat homely birds commanding upwards of four million dollars. (This sentence is a link to Vanity Fair’s fascinating 2016 article about it.) The story even peripherally involves the famous Black Dahlia unsolved murder, in that the bird prop artist was a suspect. Leo DiCaprio is a player. If you find the right one, you can quit your day job. And, apparently, there are several black birds out there worth serious money.

My own Maltese bird was seventeen bucks. But it keeps the dream alive. Like Bogart’s Sam Spade told the cop who asked him what the bird statuette was, in the final scene, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

Happy, prosperous, healthy June to all of you. G.

 

 

           

           

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Verbs vs. Nouns, Tacos, Roses and Bieber’s New Ride

Fun book to read, not all lectury and school teacherish…

“Be the verb, not the noun” is an admonishment from the highly successful motivational writer Austin Kleon (over a million books sold—the verb here is write, and did he ever) who wraps a lot of pithiness and, yes, cliches, in an entertaining, hand-scrawled format, caught my eye. Am I a sculptor, or do I surpass the passive and actually sculpt? Am I a writer, or do I sit my derriere down and write my butt off? I prefer to think of myself as a verb in those departments. But there are, admittedly, days when I become a mouth-breathing, sighing noun. For those times, this little book might just be the spark. Open it to any page and get some go. Thanks, Austin. Enough of that, This ain’t a Ted Talk.

 The L.A. Taco, a gazette of the gastronomic plus street news, is in the throes of a never-ending quest; to find the best taco in the city of angels. I have some pretty good burnt meat memories of the delicacy from street vendors and sit-down joints where the real sizzling deal was served. I’m guessing that KC’s hispanic community could go mano a mano and place high in the rankings out there, but I’m no judge; I liked airline food back when they served it. Hospital food too. But my tastes go from bland to grand. MD 2020 to Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1984. Well, that’s stretching it a bit—I never had either one. Just grapes, right?

 But this intercity rivalry (Taco Madness) has now reached such proportions it has its own bracket. Serious stuff. And the L.A. Taco’s readership exceeds the NYT and WaPo combined. I don’t make this stuff up. Anyway, may the best mano/taco win. Here’s a checkable fact: 400,000 Norwegians eat tacos every Friday. That’s 8.2% of the country.

 In other heavily researched and fact-checked news, I saw this with my own eyes: a 1967 Shelby Cobra beat a new Dodge Challenger Hellcat decisively in a drag race. The footage is awful, but no mistaking the 50-year old Ford’s win. Even the baseline Hellcat has about 700 horsepower. Maybe s/he missed his/her shift. Ford, by the way, may be reviving its “Lightning” name for its electric F-150. There’s so much car/truck news going on that it’s rather overwhelming. Especially if you have a hundred thousand or so burning a hole in your phone wallet.

 Or $330k which is what Justin Bieber’s new custom Wraith cost him. Holy Molybdenum. Get your own one of a kind from West Coast Customs. Here a link to their Bieber build. A standing ovation from Resume Speed, Kansas.

 And in honor of Reno Pete, my gambler uncle, and the recent Kentucky Derby, an aptly named book, and a couple of observations. Freddie kept us in the money with her across-the-board bet on Medina Spirit, and I had a bunch of also-rans, but one WPS bet on Hot Rod Charlie which paid a few bucks to show. The bets were placed on TwinSpires, and the winnings and original amount will now go to the Preakness.

 The book’s title is “The Greatest Gambling Story Ever Told” and it’s an interesting read. Part of it takes place at The 1988 Kentucky Derby and some of it happens in Tijuana’s Agua Caliente track. My uncle was at Caliente daily for years, making the trip from San Diego, and, finally, moving to Tijuana for the remainder of his life. A former Army Air Corps pilot and adventurer, his life would make a pretty good book. His final thirty years or so were spent gambling on the ponies. It was his only job. My grandmother used to say, “Pete has an interesting circle of friends.” Right out of Damon Runyon. He was, of course, my favorite uncle.

 The book is by a colorful gambler nicknamed Miami Paul, and it concerns a filly named Winning Colors, trainer D. Wayne Lukas, and the Mexican cartel among its cast. Three gamblers (Miami Paul, Dino Mateo and Big Bernie) bet a 50-1 shot (a year before the Derby) to win the Derby. If I did such a thing through TwinSpires, my odds would remain the same on Derby Day even though the horse might start at 8-1 or less. IF they would even take such a bet. Las Vegas wouldn’t, back then, and there were no online betting sources. Tijuana was their only avenue for such an audacious bet. And if they won they might be killed. Caliente was in shaky financial shape. How would they get the money (a million bucks) out of Mexico even if they survived?

 Great thriller to read in the days leading up to the Run for the Roses. Or anytime. Reno Pete would have approved.

 And they’re off!

The Ides of March: The Promise of April

Just as I was beginning to think Covid had a positive facet (no mass shootings) the bottom feeders emerged. I won’t honor them by going on about their horrific eruptions of self loathing. Abide no hatred. We shouldn’t let it be just a t-shirt, a passive sentiment. How is a whole ‘nother deal. I guess it starts with the wearer.

I went to KC to get a haircut for the first time in a year. Being two weeks past a covid vaccine shot, I figured if I was careful I could do this. I didn’t know it was my barber’s last day before he quit for good and moved to SC. A sign of something. I’ve gone to him since I moved back to KC 35 years ago. We wore masks. I’ll sure miss him.

Snafu and Fubar as honklings…

Among my early memories of Easter were two ducks my mom named Snafu and Fubar. They grew from little fluffballs that followed me around, to big pushy honkers that bit the dogs. The story I got when they (were) disappeared was they were renditioned to a farm where they would have long and happy lives. The folks said we’d go visit them sometime. “When?” “We’ll see.” When rocks grow and congress passes laws for the good of the people. “We’ll see.” That phrase took its place beside the time-honored “Well, you’re not everyone else.”

The Ides. Covid is spiking again. Vaccines abound, but no pills for stupid--Spring Break! Brackets were busted to smithereens. KU lost by 34 points signalling the sad, phlegmatic end of their era when the Trojans beat them like a very old, warped gong. Enough negativism. Books are where it’s at. Always have been.

The rest of this is about books F and I found interesting, some we’re reading now, and those awaiting TBR. Freddie is reading Damaged Heritage, having finished both of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s books, The Sympathizer (2016 Pulitzer Winner) and The Committed. She did them as audio books, and I only read physical copies so I’ll have to order them. Probably will since she dug both of them. She said while they were both very good, she liked the first one best. Her present read, Damaged Heritage is a hardback so I can grab that when she’s done.

My own tastes are eclectic and not so current. Didion’s latest book isn’t real current either since most of the essays in “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” are from 1968 to 2000, but she stands up to time so well, and her phrasing is magic. “On being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice” is prescient as it addresses today’s scandals from a vantage point of 1968. And her thoughts about California back up my own: she said, in “Notes from a Native Daughter:” “...California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” Things did work out for me there, but the huge cost of living and the earthquakes finally sent me packing. I could see the ocean from where I lived and all that said to me was “you’ve run out of continent.” I often kept the blinds closed.

Do I recommend “Let Me Tell You What I Mean?” It’s required reading in my opinion. Then comes a strange little book by Beth Ann Fennelly, “Heating & Cooling, 52 Micro-Memoirs.” Some memoirs are a sentence long, lonely on an otherwise blank page, and some are several pages. All are titled. In the acknowledgments, she says, “My mom…affirms me daily…despite saying, “This book has a lot of penises, Beth Ann.” This book is alternately powerful, sad, laugh-out-loud funny. You’ll read it more than once. So, yeah, buy it.

“Design Since 1945” is a compendium of “wonderful examples of design within the realities of corporate teamwork.” (Peter Dormer) It belongs on the shelves of serious designers, collectors and anyone who has cast an envious eye on an Eames chair.

A “lost” manuscript from Capote’s younger years “Summer Crossing,” is what I’m reading now, and I’m into it. It’s, in a word, delightful. The story behind this cool find is that when he struck wealth and success in 1966 with “In Cold Blood,” he moved from his Brooklyn apartment and dumped boxes at curbside. One box contained the handwritten manuscript for the never published “Summer Crossing” which he’d started in 1943 and finally abandoned. A thoughtful house-sitter rescued the boxes and, in 2004, they were auctioned at Sotheby’s. Capote scholars had long thought this manuscript lost. As I read its bright, lilting passages, I’m glad it was rescued.

Happy April. G

(A PS about the Capote book. Having read further, I encountered a phrase using a racial slur not once but three tines in a couple of pages. That kind of tore it for me. Sure, it was 1943, but the book would have lost nothing had that phrase been eliminated. So, my original enthusiasm has dimmed for “Summer Crossing.”)

I C E P O C A L Y P S E

Weather event comfort food. These’ll mape you tawk wike dis. So don’t put one in your mouth and get on the phone.

The wind whistled down from Antarctica and Canada and brought a massive cold front, middle and back with it. Record-breaking cold. Cold so cold (chorus: How cold was it?) that you had to break the smoke from the chimney. So damn cold (How cold was it?) so cold that we had to chop up the piano for firewood—but we only got two chords. This weather event broke all the Kansas City records since 1889. All of them. The Wise Acres barn was built in 1890 and this is the coldest winter it’s ever seen.

That’s not all I learned from Icepocalypse. I learned to lie to Ferrellgas in the future about propane “keep-full” because I put in an order on February sixth and they’ve not shown yet. Today is the 20th and the level is dangerously low. From now on I tell them I need a fill at 50%. Their customer service is a cold joke all by itself. A series of recordings devised by Josef Mengele informs you alternately, that your Ferrellgas team is excited to serve you, and a tired male voice says something about the weather. I can imagine the excitement in my behalf. I can see the “team” jostling for a chance to talk to me, fighting over it. “let me, let me.” No one ever answers.

And I learned not to be hostage to a rusting, outmoded fragile bunch of power grids. Though Evergy did pretty well with conserving power blocks and rolling outages. But we’re looking at a 22.5 Kw Generac now. That would keep us going through a “weather event” or too many birds on the wire. Out here, every time you hear thunder it’s time to hunt up the lanterns.

Seriously, hostage no more. Costs would include a concrete pad for the unit, a propane fill if I can find a company that’s capable of doing it, the unit itself, an automatic smart switch, and the electrician to hook it all up. Then, when lights flicker, on goes the unit, Netflix isn’t even interrupted. Summer, the unit would shed AC if and when it became too much of a draw, but that’s acceptable. Winter it would keep Wise Haus cozy. I’m on it. So are a lot of other people. But a couple of 55 degree days (coming right up) and most of those will forget about it. Me, I’m a comfort hound, with some bulldog in the pedigree.

Books. I may be reading more during Bubonic times. And I took a Billy Collins course that got me all iambic and note-taking, thanks to a Masterclass subscription F gave me last year. It did broaden my scope in poetry, and poetry is a fine thing to mix into nonfiction and fiction. I got another round of Masterclass for Christmas, and I’m looking at a Roxanne Gay course, among others. She’s bad ass and a word priestess.

Just read in a collection of essays about a bamboo species that blossoms once every hundred years. And that goes for plants in Indonesia or a greenhouse in Michigan. They are all connected. Nature, man. F informs me that was a plot point in “Crazy Rich Asians,” that the wedding was to be held where and when a bamboo forest was to bloom in its 100-year cycle. Two more books I’m reading now: Regular Haunts, New and Previous Poems, Gerald Costanzo, is somewhat breathtaking and deserves a slow, careful read. As the author says, “When I first heard about America, it was already too late.” Let that sink into ya noggin. Another is Small-Time by Russ Shorto. Another good one. About a small town’s version of The Mob. I had to buy it new as I couldn’t wait for it to “mature” into used paperbacks. (Russ Shorto is the Americanization of the Sicilian name Rosario Sciotto)

The wind is blowing out of the south.The horrible Icepocalypse is slinking back up north. And covid vaccines are slowly becoming available. Be optimistic. Breathe. Visualize. Hydrate.  G

Time Capsule, 1950. (An excuse not to do taxes)

Cash got bored with us. He’s in the living room.

Millie is sleeping against the tax files and I don’t want to wake her. And I don’t want to do taxes. It’s on my want-to-do list though, somewhere after “Go to a rock fight.” Right before “Get a spinal tap with no anesthetic.” So, I’m looking at my coffee cup and thinking time for a blog. 

The time capsule. It was a tin Folgers can, the kind you opened with a windup key and it went “whoosh” when the key started, filling the space around it with an aromatic coffee smell. The can held an actual pound of coffee unlike today’s fake ll.3 oz. cans. I’m drinking Folgers Black Silk as I write this, and recalling how, when Folgers was still in KC you’d drive anywhere near it in downtown and it was like being suffused in a giant “whoosh” Folgers can opening; even if you didn’t drink coffee you had to like that “waking up” smell.

I wrapped it in oilcloth and taped it…

Anyway, back about 1950 I filled a Folgers tin with various boyhood items and buried it. I guess I was saying goodbye to childhood in anticipation of teenage years. But I made a map so I could come back in fifty years and dig it up. Seventy years ago. The map is gone but the can may still be there in my grandmother’s side yard. The house exists. I saw a For Sale sign in front of it a few years back, and entered it; some men were working inside, circle saws shrieking. The place had shrunk as all our childhood haunts have downsized. I probably could have found the coffee can with a metal detector, but the thought of getting permission from the seller, and the various utilities and their little dayglo marker flags was unappealing and I left.

It was full of totems. Indian head pennies, wheat cents, a Mercury dime with that thing on the back that looks like an axe. A Lone Ranger Atom Bomb ring—really, there was such a thing and I had one. Talk about shoehorning one premium in with another one, reminds me of an account we had at a little Iowa ad agency. A bank. The president was an old guy and strange. He’d bought about a thousand spoons because he thought people would play them. Like the spoon lady (check her out, she’s great!) But he was wrong. So he told us to use them as premiums in ads. Six spoons for starting a checking account. No crazier than a Lone Ranger Atom Bomb Ring, actually. Their tagline was “The oldest bank in town.” Somehow it got changed to “The oddest bank in town” with the advent of the spoon ad. I had nothing to do with it. 

More items in the can: some decoders. A Radio Orphan Annie decoder that decoded Ovaltine come-ons but we repurposed it to code certain words and teacher descriptions at grade school. Diecast toys. A dime-sized itching powder tin, empty. Arrowheads. My best swirly-color shooter marble. I might have to go back and dig that can up in the dark of night. Maybe not. It’s right off of 39th and Troost where drug deals go down. I was at a car wash near there and a guy tried to sell me a video camera, new in box, ten bucks. Back to the Lone Ranger ring. If you sat in a dark closet, took the plastic finned piece off and put your eyeball up to the little radium-filled scope thing you could see…stuff. Radioactive stuff. Maybe I could find the can with a geiger counter. You had to pay fifteen cents and a boxtop and wait weeks to get this thing that would maybe burn your eyeballs out. Thank goodness it bored me so I only looked at it maybe twice. Attention deficit can be good.

Hey, we got through January. Soon it’ll be the year birthday of the scourge. Maybe come summer we’'ll all be vaccinated and back to, uh, normal. Whatever that is. Bless you all—I hope the best for you and us. Hang in there, good people. G