Don Quixote sans Panza

Sunshine

Back in Santa Monica. Beautiful morning. Go run ("bathtub gin").
Power breakfast chicken breast/egg whites. pharmacy. shell station. car wash.

Favorite Films of 2013

My Top Five:
(note: what they share in common is I happened to see all them all at the right time.)

1. Inside Llewyn Davis
2. Drinking Buddies
3. The Counselor (Extended Cut)
4. Frances Ha
5. Nebraska

Five more I liked:
Dallas Buyers' Club
Enough Said (James Gandolfini. favorite performance of the year. no flash, no illness, no fame. just a
                      regular guy -- the toughest role to play)
I'm So Excited (valencia cocktail, please)
The Act of Killing (sequence of the year: up on the roof. gagging, coughing, dry heaving. the inner
                       manifested physically.)
The Wolf of Wall Street

Rusty Bucket

the sun's going down, the cold's creeping in. I take my walk. the afternoon had disappeared. waves. it's february here.
my dad is slouched in his kitchen table chair. liam neeson talks about natasha on 60 minutes. i drink a gin & tonic. he already had his. it's past the time for dinner.
go to rusty bucket. few patrons at the bar. we sit at a booth. no one else around. texas chilli and a salad. white wine. the waitress cleans up as we eat. it's a late sunday night.

kerouac was 47 years old when he died living at his mom's house in florida. either '68 or '69. he was taking care of her or maybe she was taking care of him. no one seems to remember that. on the road was published when he was 35. he was already divorced by 25. the film replaces the opening line of  "i first met dean not long after my wife and I had split up," with " i first met Dean not long after my father died."
his follow up to on the road was big sur.

big sur shows kerouac suffering from his own fame and lamenting the fact that he’s no longer young.  "All over America high school and college kids thinking ‘Jack Kerouac is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitchhiking’ while there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded.”  kerouac wanders from a cabin in Big Sur to San Francisco and back again. his headspace builds to an  alcohol-induced nervous breakdown,  and ends with the near distant hope for healing. though Kerouac behaves much the same way as he did in on the road, he doesn’t feel the same way:  death and drinking. youth and old age.

Someone brought up kerouac to me in reference to their saturday night. i folded up my dad's walker and closed the passenger side door. the parking lot was empty. we had a good spot.

time to pour myself a whiskey.

Tiger Lily

Saturday night. Chinese restaurant next door to the Rusty Bucket. Felt as much Nebraska as Indianapolis. I'm in a hooded sweatshirt. The 18 year old waitress can't advise or touch the wine. She hates kimchi. So I order seafood ramen, and yes it's ramen right out of the 25 cent package. My mistake. Not in Los Angeles.

Dad orders cashew chicken. I see if he remembers anything of Ava Gardner. She was "sultry. More sexy, than an actress." He couldn't place a film.

Found two old photo albums back home.

Afternoon

After a sandwich lunch, I've hit the bed gazing out the window in my brother's room. It's February in Indianapolis. Thinking about drifting in warm waters. Baja California waters. I'm eating rice out of a small styrofoam container. I crack into something.. It's my fork. The feeling of accidentally biting down on your fork. The metallic pain. I don't stop. I continue biting down on it even though I see one of the tines sits at the bottom of the container.

I wake up. My jaw is numb. The taste of the fork remains.

James Ellroy

Fuego.

I hate hipsters, I hate liberals, I hate rock’n’rollers, I hate the counter-culture, I hate movie people. I want to go somewhere quiet, peaceful and decorous, and be radical in my mind. I have fatuous American ideas about Britain. I want to go to the moors. I want to buy a shotgun from Purdey for a lot of money, but I understand it’s tough to buy a gun – you can’t just walk in and say, “I’m an American, give me that gun.” British people are the best readers. They speak the same language, but view the material as foreigners. There’s no class distinction for readers there. They ask the best questions and you can talk to them afterwards and go to an Indian restaurant.

Bobby Charles

As a teenager, Bobby Charles—né Robert Charles Guidry in Abbeville, Louisiana—cut several swampy, R&B-based sides for Chess and Imperial, including “See You Later, Alligator,” which the Texan Bill Haley would hit with in 1956. Then in 1960 and ‘61, Charles scored two more top-ten hits as a writer, giving the immortal “Walkin’ to New Orleans” to Fats Domino and “(I Don’t Know Why I  Love You) But I Do” to Clarence “Frogman” Henry. Though he found some touring success with R&B audiences in the late ‘50s (Leonard Chess is rumored to have booked Charles on a tour of the chitlin circuit, not having realized that his new signee was a white Cajun), he never broke through as a performer; after releasing a few barely-noticed records in the early ‘60s, he disappeared, and after being arrested for possession in Nashville in 1971, wound his way to Woodstock. He’d never heard of the festival; he just liked the name.

Though his best-known songs had by that time largely faded from the public consciousness, it was a good time to be a Louisiana musician with a rock ‘n’ roll bent. Doug Kershaw had just released The Cajun Way and was palling around with Johnny Cash, and The Band were popularizing a hybridized form of rural rock that was deeply indebted to Louisiana roots (they’d open 1973’s Moondog Matinee with a cover of another “Frogman” song, “Ain’t Got No Home”). Dr. John was helping Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton get their ya yas out. Out in L.A., upstart singer-songwriter Randy Newman was beginning to twine piano lines worthy of Professor Longhair through his sophisticated art-pop. It wasn’t exactly the British Invasion—invasions never having been Louisiana’s style—but it’s the closest mainstream rock has ever gotten to full-on gris-gris.

So it’s not terribly surprising that Charles wound up befriending The Band, or that they’d be so taken by the 33-year-old’s songs that they’d all (with the exception of Robbie Robertson) wind up playing on Bobby Charles. You don’t need to read the liner notes to know that Rick Danko had a heavy hand in the production; the ten tracks hang together with the same kind of slack grace that Danko brought to his bass, and his trademark style—more rhythmic bumping than sustained playing—forms a nice counterpoint to Charles’ seasoned vocals. Gone is the velvet-trimmed voice that tricked Leonard Chess fifteen years prior. Charles’ voice here is easy, relaxed, and he sings his songs with a kind of loose, Kristoffersonian authority: “It’s all small-town talk,” he consoles his live-in lover on the album’s lone single, “You know how people are.” Later, he and his boys will slowly turn up the heat on the poor-man lament “All the Money” till it rolls into a boil of trilling sax, splatting trumpet, and Charles jokingly complaining “He got all the power, and he won’t give me none!” These aren’t great lyrics in the way that Kristofferson’s (or even Robbie Robertson’s) are—Charles isn’t shooting for posterity here—but they’re great in the same way that “A wop bop a loo bop” is a great line, or, if you prefer, “Tipitina, tra-la-la.” It’s not so much what Charles is singing as it is the general attitude, the kind of easiness afforded by failure and foiled expectations that can animate a couplet as banal as “You got a long face/Your head’s in the wrong place.” Words and music slide out like honey.

That easiness—or maybe joy—is the record’s animating spirit. There’s no high drama, really, no attempts to reanimate Confederate corpses, no real grappling with moral or spiritual uncertainties; though the two are close stylistic cousins, Bobby Charles is the anti-On the Beach. You can practically hear the creak in Charles’ chair as he leans back in the opening moments of “Street People,” setting the record’s tone with a lazy little up-and-down guitar line and a shake of rhythm. It’s also the major difference between Charles and his Louisiana contemporaries: He lacks the alienating persona of Dr. John (who appears here) and the high-minded aspirations of Newman, and his apparent ambivalence toward mainstream success means that he has far less to prove than Kershaw. You can hear echoes of Fess’ big-handed piano playing in the opening moments of “I’m That Way” and “Long Face,” and “All the Money”’s aforementioned raveup could shut down the Maple Leaf, but Charles is just as happy to croon a lovestruck invitation over a Ben Keith pedal-steel line in “Let Yourself Go.” It’s a Louisiana record, both in spirit and in style, but it’s far less interested in that fact than just about any other Louisiana record of the era that I can think of.

Charles eventually moved home to Holly Beach, on the Gulf Coast. He lived a quiet life there, receiving Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Willie Nelson as guests and emerging with the occasional album. Like Alex Chilton, who lived a couple of hundred miles down the road in New Orleans, he remained in relative obscurity, and maybe contentedly so, a onetime casualty of the hitmaking machine living off of his old royalties. As with all those Big Star records, you can’t call Bobby Charles a masterpiece, because that would freight it with ambitions far greater than it ever sets for itself. But you can call it perfect

President's Day

Saw Philomena at the Landmark in the afternoon. The lion's den for this Stephen Frears film. It's fine. Meh.

Later was invited to watch The Bachelor with Kat, Julia, & Tristan. First time for The Bachelor. It's fine. Meh.

A good President's Day.

Dive Bars

L.A. City in the smog. city in the snow. don't you wish that you could be there too.

I fondly remember the Common Share in Adams Morgan during my time in D.C. These bars aren't in that league of that dive (and some are not dives -- Ye Olde Rustic Inn) but at least I've been to almost all these on the list and they are my go-too-bars here. The Speakeasy on Pico is a no brainer if their prices were half as much.

I do miss the joker. And the best bar in L.A. is still the lost and found.

hank's and smog cutter.

I'm Reading, I'm Writing

This passage on procrastination while writing really nails it.

Most writers manage to get by because, as the deadline creeps closer, their fear of turning in nothing eventually surpasses their fear of turning in something terrible. But I’ve watched a surprising number of young journalists wreck, or nearly wreck, their careers by simply failing to hand in articles. These are all college graduates who can write in complete sentences, so it is not that they are lazy incompetents. Rather, they seem to be paralyzed by the prospect of writing something that isn’t very good.

Charlie Rose

An interview with Bill Murray. (Chicago)

Fresh Air Remembers Philip Seymour Hoffman

Three films I'll remember him for are Scottie in Boogie Nights, Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, and Lancaster Dodd in The Master.

In the interview, he touches upon his role in Happiness, Doubt, Anthony Minghella, other life stuff.

Some excerpts:

On whether the priest he played in Doubt was a predator or mentor

I get that question a lot, and it's odd because I have never gotten that question about any other part I've played. ... People somehow think I'm an audience member when actually, no, I played the guy. So, I have to have filled in his history, but that history is mine and I would never share it because it will just so destroy the experience of the movie-goer. But yes, I do have to fill that history in, in the way that I feel is ... most compelling. ... I have to know because I'm playing the man.

On being around alcohol after being in rehab

People who don't have a problem with alcohol don't have a problem with alcohol. You know, they have their couple of glasses of wine and they go on their way. You know what I mean? And that's just the way it is. I am just not one of those people. So, it's — you know, a couple of glasses of wine is not interesting to me at all. You know what I mean? ... It's not a great pleasure for me to have a couple of glasses of wine. That just — that's kind of annoying ... Do you know what I mean? Like, why aren't you having the whole bottle? ... That's much more pleasurable. So, to somebody who doesn't understand that, they just don't understand it.

Fresh Air -- Joaquin Phoenix

This is so f - - - - - - stupid. Why am I talking about this? ... It's not interesting, it's so stupid. If I was driving and I heard this, I'd change the channel. ... I'd be like, "Joaquin, shut up."

I was really digging this part of the interview, talking about his preparation to play Freddie in The Master. Very enjoyable listen.

"Oh shit, it's Alfred Hitchcock, I don't want him to see us. Let's cross the street."

William Goldman talking to Bill Simmons. This is a public service announcement.

Sochi

Lawrence of Arabia -- 70mm -- Aero Theater

Watching it again I had thoughts of Che (Soderbergh). Similarly interesting takes on the biopic.