How early the fruit is falling this season! —Groucho Marx as Otis B. Driftwood in A Night at the Opera
I have been granted a reprieve. In preparation for the rapidly-approaching Egg Board fellowship, I had thought that I would need to have the outline for the whole book completed, and I’d have to have all of my notes from all of my existing source material ready to go. This led to a serious case of brain constipation, night after night and weekend after weekend of flipping through books, trying to write everything down on notecards, only to roll into bed sometime after midnight, panicky, grumpy and sweating—not a good combination by any means. Then I received a piece of correspondence from the Colony asking me how many boxes I would be shipping to my room. Woo-hoo! Pressure is off! U.S.A! U.S.A! I can ship my books to Arkansas! And ship them home before I leave! I don’t have to have my research all buttoned up! I can, wonder of wonders, do some research *and* some writing! Glory be!
“Won’t that cost a lot of money?” says my practical friend Vee, who, bless her heart, tries her damnedest to save me money, from her entreaties for me to shop at Syms (which I do) to her entreaties that I read The Millionaire Next Door (which I haven’t yet). No, Vee, it won’t be cheap, but it will be an investment in my peace of mind, and as anyone unfortunate enough to have known me for a long time can tell you, my peace of mind never comes cheaply. It is my blessing, my curse and my secret shame, all wrapped up in lemon leaves and tied with raffia—no, wait, that would be pasolini. Not Pier Paolo Pasolini, the lunatic Italian film director, but pasolini, the snack sold along (I think) the Amalfi coast, little packets of raisins, baked slowly in honey and marsala and made lemony by those lemon-leaf wrappings, just made to be drunk with black coffee so strong it makes your fingernails grow. I haven’t had any luck finding a recipe link (although something tells me that Courtney would), but I do have a recipe from Sophie Grigson for raisins baked with Marsala, honey and lemon juice that approximates them. Had I not spent the afternoon making the rhubarb slump posted here by the lovely Snowball, I would be making a batch of these right now.
Dear friends, there is a point to all this foofaraw. Since I now have the luxury of doing research at the Colony, I decided that I earned a free pass from research this weekend. Thus it was that Lloyd and I kicked off the Memorial Day Weekend Multimedia ExpoFestO’Rama, broken up only by my attendance at a barbecue at a dive bar in Flushing on Saturday night; two episodes of retail therapy at Kitchen Arts and Letters on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning; and our much-procrastinated purchase of the new air conditioner, which mainly served to remind us once again that we have too damn much stuff in too small a space and we have to move. Really. No bs this time.
Our weekend film festival included A Night at the Opera, one of my top three favorite movies; Bubba Ho-Tep, starring my boyfriend Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis as JFK, and featuring a mummy/succubus who steals souls from the elderly in a very rude way indeed; Down With Love, which I liked better than pretty much everyone else on the planet did, but I would have liked it much more if Ewan had been naked; some Robert Benchley shorts that came with the Marx Bros. box set; a few hours’ worth of Tex Avery MGM cartoons and a few more hours’ worth of Warner Bros. cartoons, including one of my favorites, The Hep Cat. This was the first color Looney Tune, directed by Robert Clampett, who would have been my boyfriend if I had been born 50 years earlier. In case you had any doubt as to whether the Warners animators were dirty-minded horndogs, this cartoon will pretty much lay it to rest. It is your basic chase toon: cat tries to cross vacant lot to get to the alley where he makes time with girl kitties; dog, who patrols vacant lot, chases and tries to catch cat so that he can moiderize him; little bird with thick Noo Yawk accent acts as Greek chorus. What elevates it to a whole far greater than the sum of its parts is the sheer manic horniness of the cat. When the dog tries to trick the cat by wooing it with a long-lashed, bowlipped, concupiscent kitty hand puppet, the cat’s body stiffens in a way that suggests nothing so much as a full-body erection. As the cat takes the kitty puppet into his arms, he runs his paws down her back, where he encounters the dog’s very round, very bulbous nose. He strokes the nose twice, three times, then looks into the camera and exclaims a la Jerry Colonna, “Well! Something new has been added!” Eventually the cat gets wise, he escapes from the dog, the dog falls off a clothesline and into a baby carriage, the cat retrieves the now-empty kitty puppet and resumes wooing her. “Gee, mister,” says the little bird, “that’s not a real goil.” “Well,” says the cat, again in Jerry Colonna voice, “I can dream, can’t I?” That Robert Clampett was a dirty man, a dirty, dirty man. Ohhhhhhh, mercy.
Speaking of dirty, I honestly had no idea, when dropping Lucille Bogan’s name in the dirty blues meme, that Columbia Legacy had just released a new remastered collection of Bogan’s finest moments. Imagine my surprise to open yesterday’s New York Times and see Jon Pareles’ capsule review of the collection. Imagine my further surprise to discover that the All Music Guide biography of Bogan was written by the brilliant avant-garde guitarist Eugene Chadbourne. Is a copy of this album on its way to me, via the good people of Amazon.com? Need you even ask?
Speaking even further of dirty, the raunchy lyric meme lives on! Snowball has contributed to the discussion with some boss lyrics by way of Nina Simone. My, it’s getting warm in here…