Rest in Peace, Jill Clayburgh. She was two weeks younger than my mother.

On the Go…

[Picture by Bags and Marianne Rafter]

Got the scrawny legs but I move just like Lou Brock.

Man, I wish I had someone to wipe the sweat from my brow as I worked…

Guest Writer: Ted Berg

It’s weird to watch “Halloween” now, after Wes Craven’s meta-horror pic “Scream” explicitly exposed all the clichéd slasher-film conventions that were essentially founded by John Carpenter in his 1978 classic.

We know going in that the nerdy, chaste babysitter – played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her big-screen debut – will survive the attacks of the deranged madman and her more promiscuous friends will not. We know that the couple that has sex is pretty much doomed upon penetration. And we understand that the murderer will exhibit superhuman resolve, inexorably marching forward toward his next victim despite repeated stabbings and gunshots.

Plus, “Halloween’s” characters are flat, its dialogue wooden and its plot inane. For no clear reason, a six-year-old stabs his sister on Halloween in suburbia. Fifteen years later, he escapes a mental facility and returns to his hometown with a lust for blood.

What’s wrong with him? His doctor’s best diagnosis is, essentially, that he’s evil. Why does he choose to stalk Laurie Strode – Curtis’ character – and her friends? Well, he just kind of does. Her father is a real estate agent and she has to drop off a key at Michael Myers’ old house, and that’s apparently reason enough.

And yet despite all that, it plays, even now. Halloween is a testament to Carpenter’s directorial touch. The plot and characters, really, are secondary to perpetual cycle of suspense and startle. “Halloween” forces you to constantly scan the screen for background movement; Michael Myers is expert at the sneak-up.

Carpenter frequently uses a single, shaky, hand-held camera to simulate his killer’s field of vision. It creates an unsteady, unanchored feeling, and it’s spooky as hell. And that effect is amplified by Carpenter’s classic 5/4-timed score. The odd meter is probably important; the song feels innately disruptive and unsettling.

Curtis, for her part, proves to be a master of the terrified whimper, well-cast as the unlikely but virtuous heroine. Donald Pleasence, as Myers’ psychiatrist, is just creepy enough to deliver his ominous, heavy-handed lines with appropriate horror-movie gravitas without ever seeming totally ridiculous.

Plus the plot’s downright arbitrary nature taps into a classic element of suburban terror: At any given moment, for no clear reason, there might be a man with a huge knife peering in your window, waiting to stab all your slutty friends.

Movie Posters that scared me as a kid.

Scared me so much I didn’t see the movies until much later.

“Margot stood alone. She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.”

From the short story, “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury.

Anyone who is interested in soul records must read “Sweet Soul Music” by Peter Guralnick. There’s plenty of Solomon Burke to be found there. Guralnick called Burke,”a combination of Sam Cooke at his mellifuous best and Ray Charles at his deep-down and funkiest, an improbable mix of sincerity, dramatic artifice, bubbling good humor, and multitextured vocal artistry.”

He continues:

I remember the first time I saw Solomon Burke myself, in 1964. He was wearing a gold tuxedo with a gold cummerbund and was headlining a show that included Joe Tex, Otis Redding, and Garnet Mimms. Solomon had no competition. There has never been a warmer, more charismatic presence on stage, and when he stretched out his arms to the audience, when he declared at the outset, “There’s a song that I sing, and I believe if everybody was to sing this song, it would save the whole world,” there was scarcely anyone in that frenzied crowd who could resist either the message or the conviction that seemingly lay behind it.

Burke was a singer, a mortician, and a preacher. That was just for starters.  He was a force of nature:

“I’d go to the radio station and see the disc jockeys, go to the church and, of course, have a prayer, go to the homes and bless the homes and babies, and then maybe baptize a few people. My schedule, you see, has always been a three-way personality. There’s the artist, the religious leader, and just plain old Solomon Burke, who had his problems, who had his love life problems. Sometimes that’s another movie, you know, God help us, Jesus.”

Vietnamese Chicken Salad from white on rice couple.

Charles Pierce and Steven Goldman on Sparky Anderson.

When thinking of former Yankee managers, Clyde King is hardly the first name that comes to mind. But when it comes to former Yankee skippers who devoted their lives to the game, while doing so with intelligence, enthusiasm, and style, King’s name should be placed near the top of the list. One of the few men who served George Steinbrenner as both manager and general manager, King died Tuesday from heart-related problems. King was 86.

With baseball ravaged by World War II, King made his major league debut as a right-hander with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1944. He returned to the minor leagues after the war, but eventually returned to Brooklyn, becoming a contributor to the Dodgers’ staff in the late forties and early fifties. While with the Dodgers, King became close friends with Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the major leagues during the 20th century. The friendship surprised some, given the southern heritage of the Carolina-born King, but it was emblematic of his open-minded, outgoing, and accepting nature.

After his playing days came to an end with the Reds in 1953, King became a successful minor league manager with teams like the Atlanta Crackers and the Hollywood Stars. Noted for his knowledge of pitching, King turned to coaching with the Reds and Pirates, a springboard to his first big league managerial post in San Francisco, followed by a later stint with the Braves. As a manager, King forged a record five games better than .500, at 234-229.

King joined the Yankee front office in 1976, quickly becoming a trusted confidante of Steinbrenner. He remained with the Yankees for the next three decades, serving alternately as a super scout, coach, manager, general manager, and special advisor. King became one of Steinbrenner’s go-to men, a troubleshooter who would fill any capacity requested by the principal owner.

King moved into the Yankee spotlight in the middle of the 1982 season, when he became the team’s third manager that summer, succeeding Bob Lemon and Gene “Stick“ Michael. Under King’s leadership, the Yankees limped to a 29-33 finish. Several of the veteran Yankees claimed that he was actually a spy for Steinbrenner, a charge that King denied.

After the season, the Yankees bumped King back to the front office. In the mid-1980s, with the Yankee front office in a state of constant turmoil and upheaval, Steinbrenner turned to King to run the entire baseball operation. He promoted King to general manager, giving him [relatively] full authority to make trades and sign free agents. King impressed a number of Yankee watchers at the 1984 winter meetings. Coming to the meetings with a detailed and organized plan, King engineered a blockbuster trade for Hall of Fame leadoff man Rickey Henderson. King also swung lesser trades for useful role players like Ron Hassey and Henry Cotto, and stole hard-throwing reliever Brian Fisher from the Braves for a declining Rick Cerone. (After the winter meetings, King also acquired a young Jay Buhner from the Pirates in exchange for the washed up pair of Steve Kemp and Tim Foli.) Bolstered by the wintertime pickups, the Yankees improved by ten games in 1985, winning 97 games. Unfortunately, the Yankees ran second to a powerhouse Blue Jays team that won 99 games and claimed the American League East.

Some historians, including this one, regard King as the Yankees’ most effective general manager of the 1980s, but that stature did not prevent him from being fired in 1986. Now demoted, King returned to being a lesser known member of the front office. Whether working in a position of power or simply serving as a scout, King also developed a reputation as one of the game’s great storytellers. Always approachable, King loved to talk baseball, spinning his tales in his trademark southern drawl.

Along the way, King managed to accomplish something that few others can claim. He somehow worked for 30 years under the imposing thumb of George Steinbrenner, before finally retiring in 2005. If nothing else, lasting that long while working for “The Boss” should earn Clyde King at least half of a plaque here in Cooperstown.

Jeanne Verdoux’s got it going on.

There is a new biography of Roald Dahl.

Check out this review in the L.A. Times:

For those who do not know Dahl’s grown-up stories, one of his most beloved — if I may use that word — is called “Pig” (1959), about an orphan raised by a tender, vegetarian aunt. The boy’s talents as a young vegetarian chef are depicted in a magical, mystical tone. When the aunt dies, the boy buries her and goes to the city where he encounters, gasp … pork! He loves it, and ends up with his throat slit by a butcher. Pure horror.

“Storyteller” is a dense, satisfying book about a mercurial author. The biographer, Donald Sturrock, frankly addresses Dahl’s darker moods and speculates as to their origins in biographical details. Dahl did face struggles in childhood and as a parent, but so do many, and some even worse. What, then, can explain his dark charisma, the beauty of his threatening prose? It seems that like a character in a folk tale, he was just so inclined. And, then, in a stroke of good luck, he was at an early age introduced to folkloric, literary stories and fell in love especially with Hillaire Belloc’s “Cautionary Tales for Children” and “The Classic Fairy Tales” by Iona and Peter Opie.

Though the details of Dahl’s life — his affairs and his losses — are told sensitively here, and are riveting, “Storyteller” is most fascinating when it retells and analyzes his body of work for grown-ups and children, revealing them to be cut from the very same cloth as that of fairy tales. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales.” As with all the great fairy-tale authors, Dahl makes them new, revisiting the themes of childhood, violence, power and magic.

Good lineup at Gelf’s Varsity Letters Speaking Serious tomorrow night in BK: Howard Byrant, Tommy Craggs and Dave Jamieson.

Yo, check out this recipe for homemade Nutella over at the most cool blog, I made that!

Or if your fat ass is feelin’ lazy, just go out and cop one of these:

More Solomon…

Remakes are a tricky business. Well, I should specify remakes of great movies are a tricky business (e.g. “The Maltese Falcon” had been adapted for the screen twice before Huston & Bogart got their hands on it, and no one seemed to notice). Don Siegel’s 1956 film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is, to my view a great movie. However, it was a B-movie, made on the cheap with few resources beyond a great story (adapted from Jack Finney’s novel “The Body Snatchers”) and a terrifically skilled director. Maybe that’s what drove Philip Kaufman to remake “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in 1978. Whatever his motivations were, it’s one of the few remakes that really work: respectful of its source material, while carving out its own distinct cinematic territory in its own time. It’s also a very entertaining and truly creepy movie that blends horror with a genre that’s always been a personal favorite: the 1970s paranoia thriller.

Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland, still with the shaggy curls and mustache you all loved in “Don’t Look Now” and “National Lampoon’s Animal House”) is a city health inspector and Brooke Adams pays Elizabeth, the co-worker and friend he’s clearly pining over. Together, they begin to piece together something strange going on. Soon after the appearance of a strange new plant no one can identify, a flowering pod, people start to behave strangely. Elizabeth’s boyfriend and Matthew’s dry cleaner, among others, just don’t seem like normal anymore.  Matthew’s friends Jack and Nancy Bellicec (Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright, both excellent) find something even more disturbing at their mud bath spa. As fans of any of the film versions of Body Snatchers know, and our heroes soon discover, the pods are from “deep space” and are creating perfect, soulless replicas of everyone in sight as they sleep.

They attempt to enlist the help of Matthew’s good friend David Kibler (Leonard Nimoy) a noted psychiatrist and best-selling self-help author. Nimoy’s performance is crucial – he’s having so much fun playing Kibler, with such aloofness and measure, that the audience can’t help but keep wondering, “Is he or isn’t he?” He manages to seem both warm and friendly and cold and calculating, whether trying to reunite a concerned wife to her pod person husband, or assessing the validity of his friends’ story.

While Siegel’s film was set in a small town in California, Kaufman’s (scripted by W.D. Richter) transplants it to a big city: San Francisco. The crowds and architecture of the city serve the story well, amping up the sense of dread and paranoia. What if that cold stranger who just passed you on the street wasn’t just a cold stranger? Why is that janitor staring at you like that? Why is that mob chasing that man down the street?  (The man being chased through the streets is played by the star of the 1956 film, Kevin McCarthy, in a witty and smart cameo. Kafuman even gives Siegel himself a part as a cab driver.) Just who, really, do you trust?

Siegel’s film is widely read as an allegory about the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s. (But from which side? The fear that evil, soulless beings that look just like us could be infiltrating our happy society or that McCarthyism had turned us into unthinking, uncaring, sleeping drones?)  Kaufman and Richter set their film in the then present, the late 1970s and seem to be spoofing the near fascistic groupthink and narcissism of the “me generation.”  Once overtaken by the space pods, people claim to be happy and relaxed, but show no emotion or individuality. They’re told that it will be easier if they just relent, fall asleep and join them, where they’ll no longer feel hate or love.  It’s a future Matthew wants no part of.

However, this is no bloated, didactic lecture – the film is a hell of a lot of fun. Kaufman’s compositions and pacing keep the film taut and also give it a persistent undercurrent of dread. We know something’s wrong, even if the characters haven’t figured it out yet.

Kaufman’s remake was a critical and box-office success. (I can recall going to see it back in the winter of ’79 with a group of neighborhood kids led by my friend Will’s dad, an actor, who told us all about the original version and Kevin McCarthy on the walk home.) Pauline Kael was one of the film’s critical champions and called the film “undiluted pleasure and excitement.” She also wrote,

“…the director, Phil Kaufman, provides such confident professionalism that you sit back in the assurance that every spooky nuance you’re catching is just what was intended.”

Writing in New York magazine, David Denby said that he found Kaufman’s film even more entertaining than Siegel’s and offered this:

“Like all great horror films, is an insinuatingly sensual experience: Our morbid curiosity is engaged and then exploited. We are drawn into complicity with the dark, oozy terrors of nature run riot and human beings deformed and mutated.”

If the pod people ever do land on Earth, just make sure to throw in a copy of this movie – you’re sure not to fall asleep.

Because what’s scarier than having your body taken over against your will by an alien being? Or, as it’s more commonly known: pregnancy.

Of course, in most cases, when a woman is pregnant it’s not because her husband has arranged for some neighborly witches to have her raped by Satan in exchange for a boost to his acting career. The premise is ludicrous, but Rosemary’s Baby unfolds slowly and, by focusing on the mundane details of Rosemary’s life as well as the subtle horror, quite believably.

Lovely yuppie couple Rosemary and Guy Woodehouse, played by Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, move into an old New York City apartment building (played by the Dakota) with a disconcerting history of violence and witchcraft, which they of course ignore. Their next door neighbors, who they can occasionally hear through the walls in certain rooms, are the pushy and snooping though seemingly well-meaning Castavets (Sidney Blackmer and the fabulously irritating Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar)– though to be fair, their pushiness only makes itself felt after their young female house guest kills herself, and they realize Rosemary is… fertile.

Mia Farrow gives a great performance, from glowing, beautiful, pliant young wife to a ghostly, half-mad, desperate soon-to-be mother. The character’s passivity can be frustrating – she lets herself be pushed into doing all kinds of things she doesn’t want to do by her husband, her neighbors, and the doctor they corral her into seeing – but it’s also understandable; Rosemary doesn’t want to make a fuss, doesn’t want to be rude, doesn’t want people to be upset with her, isn’t even sure she’s right. It’s in those scenes that Rosemary’s Baby becomes something of a feminist parable, not something I expected from Roman Polanski (maybe the ultimate “love the art, hate the artist” example, for me). The real horror of Rosemary’s situation comes not from being raped by the devil and impregnated with his spawn but from feeling cut off and powerless, used as a vessel for childbirth and not much else, ignored, told not to read or do or think anything for herself. By the time she gets up enough panicked courage to take action, for the sake of her unborn baby if not herself, it’s too late.

That’s another credit to the movie: it takes Rosemary nearly the entire running time to figure out what’s happening, whereas the audience is clued in from the start – to the fact that something sinister’s afoot, at least, if not precisely what. And the somewhat surprising ending is widely known, at this point (“What have you done to his eyes?!“). But while it’s frustrating to watch Rosemary become entangled in this sinister conspiracy over the course of hours, Polanski uses that frustration to invest the audience further, to deepen the viewer’s discomfort and tension. There are few movie characters I’d like to eviscerate more than the Castavets and their friends, especially that Laura-Louise. As Roger Ebert wrote in his review,

When the conclusion comes, it works not because it is a surprise but because it is horrifyingly inevitable. Rosemary makes her dreadful discovery, and we are wrenched because we knew what was going to happen –and couldn’t help her.

For all its horror, Rosemary’s baby is often wryly funny, and the movie keeps its sense of humor til the very end (when Rosemary drops her kitchen knife in horror near her baby’s bassinet, Mrs. Castevet picks it up and quickly rubs at the mark it left in her nice wood floors). Still, that end comprises the complete triumph of evil – the banality of evil, in fact.

Use protection, kids. Beware of too-good-to-be-true New York City real estate deals. And never, ever marry an actor.

The great Solomon Burke passed away recently. Sorry I didn’t mention it. The Beat of the Day will be dedicated to Burke for the rest of the week:

[Photo Credit: Ted Barron]

Sad news from the world of basketball: Maurice Lucas is dead.

Charles Pierce remembers Lucas in the Boston Globe:

Thirty-nine years ago this fall, I moved into the 11th floor of a 12-story dormitory at the corner of 16th Street and Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was a freshman at Marquette University. (The dorm, McCormick Hall, is round and shaped like a beer can, which is remarkably appropriate in more than the metaphorical sense, and the building has been rumored for almost 40 years to be sinking into middle Earth.) Not long after I moved in, I found myself intrigued by the music coming out from under the door of the room next to mine — music which I now know to have been “Eurydice,” the closing track from Weather Report’s astounding debut album. (Mmmmmm. Wayne Shorter!) As I was listening, an extremely large man came out of the room and introduced himself. “Pretty cool, isn’t it?’ he said.

And that was how I met Maurice Lucas.

For the next couple of years, we talked about music, at least as much as Luke talked to anyone, him being what you call your campus celebrity and all during the glory days of Warrior basketball and the high-sun period of Al McGuire Era. Whatever I know about any jazz recorded after the big band records to which my father listened — Mmmmmmm. Basie! — I learned from Luke, with whom I don’t believe I ever exchanged four words about basketball.

Later that same year, when I was practicing with the fencing team in the basement of the old gymnasium while the basketball team practiced upstairs, Luke came out of the shower wearing only a towel. “Hey,” he said, “show me how to do that.” I handed him a foil and we squared off, I in my full regalia with a mask and Luke in a towel. I touched him once, lightly, in the ribs. He slapped my blade out of my hand and about 20 feet back down the hallway, hitched up his towel, and went off chuckling.

Lucas was one of the memorable characters on the Blazers’ championship team in the ’70s. I remember him later in his career–he was a professional tough guy and a fine player.

If you’ve never read David Halberstam’s “The Breaks of the Game,” you should. There’s some good stuff on Lucas in there. Did I mention that he was tough?

Before the NBA, Lucas played with the infamous Marvin “Bad News” Barnes for the St. Louis Spirits in the ABA. Spirits announcer Bob Costas told Terry Pluto in Loose Balls:

It was interesting to watch Lucas develop. Early in his rookie year, he was coming off the bench. One night the Spirits were playing Kentucky in Freedom Hall and Lucas was trading elbows with Artis Gilmore. At 7-foot-2 and 240 pounds, Gilmore just towered over Maurice. Lucas’s only chance was to beat Gilmore to a spot on the floor and then try to hold off Artis. Despite his enormous size and strength, Gilmore was never known as a ferocious player and he seldom was in a fight. But all of a sudden, Artis just got sick of Lucas’s bodying him and you could see that the big guy was really hot. Gilmore took a swipe at Lucas and missed. Lucas put up his fists, but he was backpedaling like any sane man would when confronted by Gilmore. It was almost slow motion–Gilmore would take a step, then Lucas would take a step back. It was obvious that Lucas didn’t want to fight and was trying to figure out where he could go. Finally, he was trapped in the corner; he had run out of court. He didn’t know what else to do, so he planted his feet and threw this tremendous punch at Gilmore, and it caught Artis square on the jaw. It was a frightening sight. Artis hit the deck. Lucas was going crazy. Now he really wanted a piece of Artis. Guys were holding Lucas back and Artis was still down. For whatever reason, from that point on Lucas developed into a helluva player.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Lucas.