IDYLLOPUS PRESS IS A VALIANT LITTLE ROWBOAT

I wasted my time reading about bags this morning, because I get the Review-a-Day from Powells.com and today’s review was fashion writer Lynn Yaeger, of the Village Voice, on three different books on handbag style.

She writes:

Forty years ago — even 30 — there was no such thing as a “hot” bag. You had something square and black, or brown and squashy, that you carried in the daytime; something smaller and shinier for evening; and maybe something made of velvet or straw if you were a hippie. Now an impressively large number of women, in addition to worrying about how thin they are and whether they can walk a block in the shoes they’re wearing, also feel compelled to spend in the neighborhood of $2,000 on a purse. And it isn’t only wealthy women who are shelling out; middle-class women, working women, even schoolgirls are also deeply conscious of what they are carrying. If a serious bag once signified that you were a grown-up, now the brand name on your bag signifies what kind of grown-up you are.

The article finishes with her account of buying a replica Louis Vuitton bag when the one she had on order didn’t show up, then shoving it to the back of the closet because of her reluctance to carry a second-hand-status bag despite the number of compliments she’d gotten on it.

She’s a little wrong on her history. When I was a kid and moved down South in 1967, I arrived in a place where status was absolutely bespoken by some mahogany brown and tweed style of handbag which was all to do with its NAME which I don’t recollect but it was relatively expensive for the time–and this was in the fifth grade in public school.

I’d no clue what magic the bag conferred, but those fifth grade Southern WASP girl gangs wore Brooks Brothers button down pastel shirts under Brooks Brothers pastel cardigans with either a flippy Brooks Brothers pleated skirt or a more confining A-line, and carried the ubiquitous tweed and mahogany leather bag, and wouldn’t let you play jump rope with them though it was the school jump rope. Or at least not me. So the bag was truly magical. I (who argued that the school jump rope was a public jump rope and so we should all be able to play jump rope, which only succeeded in having me branded as a Communist by the teacher) was from the West Coast and in my neighborhood there hadn’t been much stress on clothing except for what looked sun worthy (tank tops and shorts). My dress-up attire consisted of a miniskirt that rode on the hips and was boldly printed with blue flowers, which came with its own fake wide patent leather black belt, and a pair of fishnet stockings with black patent flats and a nondescript white shirt. Yet it wasn’t just the difference in what we thought was fashionably cool that revealed the WASP girls and I not sharing much the same values. I was still looking for trees to climb and riding around on my skateboard and here were these girls wholly preoccupied with THE BAG, which was much the same as their mother’s fashionable bag.

In a town which offered nothing familiar recreation or fashion wise, my burgeoning sense of fashion, which had been wholly West Coast, collapsed, aided also by my mother who about that time went through her own fashion crisis and decided I should start dressing like my two-year-old sister, or her, she couldn’t decide which, but also by a friend who was determined I should have THE BAG (there were knock offs then, too) and because that was really about all there was on the budget tables of Augusta’s major department store, that’s another reason I ended up buying a knock-off of the bag, which I hated with every ounce of my flesh and even offended my nose because I could smell it from ten paces and hated its smell. I hated its feeble combination of cheap vinyl and cheaper leather and the obligatory pseudo designer monogram in metal. I hated its little buckles. I loathed that bag and the bags it was supposed to emulate which were slung over the arm of every Augusta woman worth a ticket to the Masters, and their daughters’ arms as well. My skateboard soon deteriorating and there being no skateboards in town and no skateboarders, no trees to climb, no desert to roam, no tumbleweed to dodge, I was left sitting on the suburban curb in a green and white checked matching shirt and short set (with ruffles) my mother had purchased for me (which I eventually intentionally strategically ripped, not on a seam, when I realized no it wouldn’t be a cardinal sin for me to do so) watching the other girls ride by on their way to riding lessons (not western saddles, no no, had to be eastern) and the boys zipping up and down the street on their bikes throwing frogs and dashing their innards out on the asphalt.

The times, they were ugly.

I was thrown for a loop from which there was no social or emotional recovery and stuck things out as best as I could until I was thirteen and pants, not jeans, were finally allowed in the schools and you could make your own bags out of macrame. Buying my own clothes with my babysitting money from the age of eleven or twelve, I dove into jeans as two pair would do you (I lavishly embroidered them) and did yes wear them to school despite the ban. One’s homeroom teacher was responsible for turning you in if you weren’t appropriately dressed. “I’m going to have to send you to the principal’s office,” my Brooks Brothers wearing homeroom teacher would sigh and said nearly daily, shaking her head. My response? “If the school wants to tell me what to wear, then the school can buy my clothes.” She never turned me in for the jeans and if you made it past your homeroom teacher for some weird reason you were home free. I think she felt for me because I very obviously had “issues”. Plus, both my home economics teacher and the vice principal had been preoccupied with getting me booted from school and I guess she figured her paperwork, added to the mounting pile condemning me for insolence, would be overkill.

The parents of the girl who’d been my other best friend owned a clothing boutique stocked with treats gathered from regular buying expeditions to New York. She and I split in Junior High over several things, one of the issues being clothing. She said that morally she could never wear jeans. She had to dress in outfits, not only because of the family store but because jeans were common. Get this. Yes, she one day sat me down for a heart-to-heart on how we must part ways on this account, because I had gone the way of jeans. Again, there were other issues (there always were) but I remember her little talk well on the moral and ethical failings of common jeans and how her world was moving in a very different direction than mine as symbolized by those jeans and how she must instead dress for success. She could wear pants, but not ever the lowly jeans.

Here I’d thought jeans were just wonderful for dressing for success because as long as you were in jeans no one could rag you for wearing the same outfit several days in a row. I’d thought this was a wonderful way of broadening the field and making us all a little more equal, which to me was successful living.

By then, the tweed and mahogany bags were falling out of fashion but it still vaguely mattered what kind of bag you carried though it didn’t need to be stamped with a name. Big velvet Mary Poppins bags were popular and leather bags painted with flowers. If you didn’t carry the velvet bag you did the macrame bag. Because the velvet bags were pricey, I made my own macrame bag. And my friend who wouldn’t wear jeans eventually bought my macrame bag off me and one of the crocheted shawls I’d made and one of the leather hats I’d made. Yes, I even made floppy leather hats. By the time she bought the bag I’d discovered the army surplus knapsack, which was what I used for carting my belongings, or an army cartridge pack, until the 1996 Olympics came to Atlanta and there was the bomb that killed one person and injured a number of others. We’re talking over two decades of army surplus knapsacks, but I got rid of mine that summer because I kept thinking guns and ammo when I looked at it, and got myself a nylon backpack from Target instead.

Nowadays I carry a leather backpack/sling that my mother gave me a couple of years ago because it turned out to be a style she couldn’t use. This isn’t an expensive leather backpack and yet, after decades of army surplus and nylon backpacks, I had to take a serious look at it before transferring my belongings to it. Did I really want to move “upscale” into this leather pack that had lots of convenient hidden zippered pockets? Yes. I really liked it and it was convenient and its size kept me from stuffing twenty pounds of books into it. The leather also stands between me and the edgy jibs and jabs of whatever is in the pack. Nice. (Only drawback is it’s a little small and nowadays I wish I’d a larger one that would accommodate my camera, but I still manage to fit it in there.)

And that is my personal history of the bag. From the macrame to the army knapsack to the nylon knapsack to the leather backpack that has no ID as to maker, just an interior label that guarantees the leather as real and from Columbia.

This morning after reading the book review on BAGS I looked up some of the bags talked about, of which I was already aware because of the computer and you’re just going to end up aware. I found a bag forum where you can not only discuss your love of your bags but where you can post photos of your collection of bags, and many bag blogs where women write in concerned that the $400 Fendi they just purchased on Ebay might be NOT REAL after all.

Duh.

How you can have the brains to make even $400 you can spend on a handbag but not have the common sense to know what you’re buying on E Bay is a knock-off, I don’t know.

Don’t call them knock-offs though. Call them replicas.

The forum devoted to REAL handbag enthusiasts is broken down by designer. The Louis Vuitton forum beats out the others with 21,586 threads and 605,372 posts (all those girls I knew back in fifth grade). Next in the running is the Hermes with 5,778 threads and 221,326 posts, then Balenciaga with 7,885 threads and 192,951 posts.

I like the post from the woman who was on the subway and saw a woman carrying a fake olive Balenciaga and wanted to leap through the glass and “tear her a new a**hole!” but didn’t say anything to her because the offending woman was with her child and protected by glass. This was followed by rants from other women yelling about people who knowingly carry fake handbags and talking about how they’ll approach people who are carrying fake bags and ask about the bags in order to make them uncomfortable.

Then there’s the post from the woman who within two months got a “vert gazon GH city” and then a Chloe and a Coach and was experiencing doubts because she had all her other bags and just didn’t know how to fit them all into her life, and yet every time she got a bag there was a new one she wanted…and she was hoping for words of wisdom from the pack on whether or not one could have too many bags.

If you don’t mind not owning then you can “borrow” a Balenciaga bag from begborroworsteal.com for $205 a month.

They post photos of themselves with their bags. They are mostly dressed in unimaginative, nondescript clothing standing in rooms that are unimaginative and nondescript. Their environments and clothing largely don’t look on the scale of supporting numerous expensive handbags, but appearances can be deceiving. Their jeans are, at least, probably expensive jeans. I’ve no idea if I know any women who carry such bags but I do know if I ever pass such on the street they probably are taking in a quick glance of the bags other women are sporting, with no conscious effort recognize mine is of no significance and pass me over, while never for a second does it even register for me if someone else is carrying a bag much less what kind of bag.

If I stretch the imagination I can envision someone showing me their $2000 bag and me feeling the leather and looking at the workmanship and remarking on how indeed that’s a nice, well made bag.

“What’s this?” Marty asked looking over my shoulder at the bag forum and its pictures of bags.

“Something you don’t even know exists,” I told him.

“You’re right, I don’t,” he said.

Which is one reason we’re together for three decades.

Lynn Yaeger is a serious fashionata who I read is highly respected and people consider her to have an original, artistic, and egalitarian view on fashion, writing intelligently on it.

I’m trying hard here to reconcile $2000 handbags with egalitarian fashion, but am having real troubles doing so, especially with today’s economy and the radical division of wealth, not to mention the status that a genuine name bag confers and the the implication of having made it, which is so much a part of THE BAG as messenger dictating how you should view its carrier as a person of significance. Not to mention viewing them as an individual whose handbag is perhaps worth stealing, not only for its contents but its resale value.

Repeating Lynn Yaeger, she wrote, “If a serious bag once signified that you were a grown-up, now the brand name on your bag signifies what kind of grown-up you are.”

Because Lynn carries expensive bags and confesses to having a closet of them from seasons past, I think what she intended that sentence to read as and how I read it to be two entirely different things and she wouldn’t care for my take on it. On the other hand, I’m confident Lynn Yaeger wouldn’t want to be me, nor would I want her to be me. I still have way too many issues for me to wish myself on anyone else. And I’m pretty certain none of those issues could be mollified by a brand name bag. Which I suppose is more the pity, because absolute peace of mind for the price of a $2000 handbag is really very cheap medicine.

The Magic Computer Show, May 2007

Pic looks much nicer at Flickr, if you click on it.

We’re still waiting on the computer.

Also waiting on news of my newest niece who is now in the process of being ushered into the world. I keep checking the email and calling relatives, and that’s all I’m doing this morning and afternoon.

And finishing up a painting I began a few days ago.

New niece delivered by C Section (she had turned sideways) at about 4:30. Weighs 5 lb. 12 ounces. Had to be induced three weeks early for health reasons. But mother and daughter are just fine. Good news. Great news. We’re all happy and looking forward to a visit soon.

“Can I put my ear against yours and hear what you’re hearing?”

H.o.p.

On one of the homeschool groups I’m on, an almost-war popped up over home science. One person had written in something about homeschool and science needs and how they were amazed at the materials some people had at home or had easy access to. The person ended the comment with a smiley, which indicates good will and that they weren’t snarking about it. And the post didn’t read like someone snarking.

Someone responded with a smackdown saying they were stunned by the person’s attitude and progressed to give a list of everything they had stockpiled at home for a good homeschool science program base, including glass metric beakers and different scales and test tubes and syringes and a butane torch from Williams-Sonoma that is for melting sugar on creme brulee (I checked the price, $40.00) and more scales and all kinds of copper wire and clippers and drapery pulleys and all kinds of tapes and jars of different things and magnets (magnets are damn expensive, by the way) and switches and tubings and just about anything you can imagine plus more and a tool chest full of stuff and scrap wood and all kinds of chemicals and a neighbor with a motorized microscope and boxes in the garage filled with boxes and cans and jars and plasticware and anything you’d like to get to dissect ordered special online.

Thus began the discussion on dissections, with others writing in about dissecting foetal pigs and rats and frogs and all kinds of other crap at home, so you begin to get a picture of all these people with dead rats and frogs and foetal pigs in the refrigerator waiting to be taken apart, sitting along side the cheese and carrots and lunch meat.

Then began to trickle in the posts from homeschoolers who live in minuscule apartments (some with less space than ours and more people in them) and people living in minuscule apartments on army bases etc., or in way out of the way places at the edge of the world, going, “Whoa! We hardly have room for ourselves! We can’t stockpile!”

And some of us aren’t crazy about dissecting, either.

We’ve got enough with what H.o.p. stockpiles for his movies (and prospective movies). Our shelves overflow with books and clay, clay, clay and books and boxes filled with clay sculptures from movies past and more books and more books and mountains of stacks of drawings and more books and ten other boxes of sculptures and bins full of legos and nuts and bolts and a bookcase alone devoted to housing scenes and creations for movies on which he’s currently working so we can get a little bit of table room now and then (and most of these movies he doesn’t even finish or save these days, because he gets half-way through them and decides he hasn’t done as well with it as he wants and he scraps the project and starts another). Plus the different musical instruments H.o.p. has begun to accumulate, including the piano (lessons) and a number of different flutes and drums and now he’s always on the look out for percussion instruments to add to his collection which he uses for making sounds in the puppet shows he puts on and which he plans on using for his little “radio” recordings, and yes then there are all the puppets we have, including the puppets H.o.p. buys now with his own money. While he was hunting for another dragon puppet at Ebay we came across some wonderful Chinese dragon puppets I’m considering getting for him as a surprise.

But that’s not the point of the post. What I was thinking about was my dad is a scientist and it’s likely the only vaguely scientific thing his mom had at home was a thermometer, and I doubt he had much in the way of this kind of science in public school, just like I didn’t and I know that my brother who is a highly specialized pediatrics physician, who has the depressing work of trying to save a child here and there from illness that usually means certain death, had nothing in public school in the way of this kind of science, and again in our home the only vaguely scientific thing we had when I was a kid was the thermometer that would occasionally reward us with a day off from school.

Some kids just aren’t built for certain kinds of science. Like dissecting.

Me: H.o.p., what would you think about dissecting a frog?

H.o.p.: Dissecting a frog?

Me: Y’know, where they cut into something and take it apart to see its mechanics…

H.o.p.: Oh, gross! Don’t even say that to me! No! I’m not going to dissect anything!

Me: Ok.

And off I go to the computer to write this post, feeling a bit of relief, as I was the kid in school who got out of the one day science experiment we had in tenth grade of dissecting a frog, because the smell of the formaldehyde was so strong I became ill and literally couldn’t breathe and thought I was going to pass out.

I read about all these kids dissecting things…like foetal pigs… and I kind of wonder why when there are virtual dissections online…and I’m a bad science mom because, like H.o.p., I think, “Oh, gross!” to any of it. Plus…

Several hours later

So I was at the hospital visiting my sister and telling her about the foetal pigs and rats and frogs. “Oh, you can get those vacuum packed,” she said, being a homeschooler herself and her eldest daughter having enjoyed dissecting when about 15.

The baby is beautiful. I stayed several hours and we tried not to laugh too much as she has something like 15 staples in her abdomen. Her doctor dropped by while I was there and, true to everything she’s told me about him, he’s got to be one of the more remarkable doctors I’ve ever met.

Then my sister’s oldest daughter arrived to spend the night and rather than leave right away I was munching on tomato chips with her, when the phone rang.

And speaking of dissection…

It was Marty. “You have to leave now,” he said. “I just sliced my hand open.”

Just what you want to hear from a keyboardist.

He’d cut his hand on a glass while he was washing dishes. He didn’t know it was there in the sink, broken. (Neither did I. I had been looking at that sink of dishes before going to visit my sister in the hospital and thinking I should get them washed but decided I’d wait until I got home.) So there he was washing those dishes while I was visiting my sister and the broken glass found him and sliced open the area between his fourth and fifth fingers on his left hand. Luckily it didn’t slice a tendon. Or a nerve. But man was it nasty. I mean really really very very nasty. The kind of nasty where you get a nice picture of the inner workings of the muscles of the hand as the flesh has been clean sliced away.

He spent from 9:30 until after 1:00 am in the emergency room. It took them 20 minutes to stitch his hand. He has 11 stitches.

They tell him if his hand is unbandaged, it stands a good chance of ripping open. But if it’s bandaged, that part of the body collects water easily, won’t dry out, and he has a good chance of the tissue becoming soft and the stitches ripping open. The nurses didn’t come right out and say it but gave him the feeling that those stitches are going to rip open and he’s going to be back in sooner than he’s supposed to be.

Thus ends today’s science/physiology lesson (an expensive one) which left H.o.p. grossed out and me reading him for a long time tonight a very soothing, funny book before he fell asleep. Sometimes I incorporate him into the plots and it was one of those nights where H.o.p. was an improvised character.

No, H.o.p. didn’t run screaming from the room. I’d titled this post hours before The Big Event, just a kind of humorous remark on H.o.p.’s reaction to dissection.

All our Ikea glasses are now in the trash. We’ve had a major problem with one after another breaking in that sink (an old steel one with a very thin wash of almost vanished porcelain). “I don’t want to see another Ikea glass,” Marty said. So I dumped them. Our next glasses will be plastic.

I’ve posted a couple of times on some beefs I have with No Impact Man. It may seem like more than that but in reality I’ve only posted three times, which is changing today to four times.

When No Impact Man advertised that he was looking for a volunteer assistant to do computer and phone duty at their own location, for free, I wrote about that because it rubbed me the wrong way in several different ways but mostly because it seemed to me No Impact Man was doing a too classic American Missions Big Me thing of raking in the Do Gooder Glory while screwing over Little Guy on the side. It seemed to me right down that long profit alley of Americans shining the democracy and freedom land light while chewing up the freedoms and land (income and time in this case) of someone else. Always with an excuse.

“But the land of the free wasn’t for the American Indian, they got screwed. And killed!”

“Yeah, but uh, well, we are the Big Boys of Democracy! It was a necessary sacrifice for the good of mankind! Besides which, they learned how to read and speak English.”

And though I might see a continuum here, you may not, so let’s boil it down to No Shades of Gray Land in which individuals keep their white hats shiny and clean by passing the devilish pitchforking the coal work along to someone else. Yes I know that pitchforks are used for hay and the pitchfork probably descends from Poseidon’s Trident, but never mind.

No Impact Man struck me as being one of those who happily takethed the oil and gases, and all those other lovely minerals, then decided he would no longer taketh the oil and gases and eat electricity and all those other lovely minerals (for a year, and do a book about it and a movie in the process), and since he couldn’t taketh but needed a way to be able to do it, thus the assistant with electricity–but to not even pay them? Just seemed to me like more take-take.

Considering No Impact Man’s former lifestyle, it surprised me that he wrote he hadn’t the income to pay an assistant. I thought to myself, “I bet they’re saving enough on breakfast alone to pay an assistant.”

Well, wouldn’t you know it! No Impact Man wrote last week a post titled Money is Green (wrap your mind around that) from which I’ve extracted the two following paragraphs:

Breakfast alone used to cost us $20. Ashamed as I am to admit it, we used to Google the number for Bagel Bob’s every morning, and then dial for coffee in plastic cups and bagels wrapped in reams of paper. The scene was so familiar to Isabella that when she saw a delivery man on his bike on the street, she would point and shout “the man, the man” as though greeting a long lost friend.

Believe me, when it came to lunch and dinner, in terms of both cost and damage to the environment, it all went down hill from there. In fact, when the project began, we were without a dime in savings and, though not in credit card debt (I’ve been there, done that), we were both way too comfortable being in overdraft. Now, the money idles provocatively in our bank accounts. We’re living on one salary and stashing the other.

So, he WAS saving enough on breakfast to pay for an assistant for ten hours a week, plus compensate them for electric for computer and for DSL and for phone and for the general running around they may (probably) have to do for him.

I thought well I will write No Impact Man a personal note, rather than posting a comment on his blog. I will write him a non-combative friendly note about this. I will write him a personal note so he won’t see it as an open challenge which he might consider it to be if it was a comment on his blog. And I hoped he would reply positively. I really hoped he would reconsider and if he did I would never rag on him again for posts like his Diced Cat Koan lesson. I would shut the hell up.

I wrote a very brief note. Not long-winded. Easy reading. I said,

Was glad to read you’re saving so much money, which was one of the first things I considered, that you would be saving a good deal of money by not eating out alone. For which reason I was surprised when you announced your need for a volunteer intern as you said you hadn’t the money to pay them. What also concerned me is that this intern would be using their computer/electricity to further your No Impact project, but likely at their own expense.

I am wondering if you have reconsidered paying your intern. Or are you, at the very least, considering paying for their electricity, DSL, phone (they are probably doing a good bit of phone for you) and general computer wear and tear?

Though paying an individual to do Impact duties for you would seem to run counter to your project, I would imagine you’d score some points with your readers if you announced you were paying your intern and providing compensation for their expenses via your savings.

I wrote that note early May 3rd and I looked at it before punching the “send” button and I thought, “You are just proving again how dumb you are,” but y’know I’ve done a lot of that in my life and it’s too late to stop now. I will be that kind of stupid until the day I die.

So I punched “send”.

I have not heard back from No Impact Man. He did not send a positive response. He did not send a negative response. He did not send a response saying simply, “Nice weather here. Thanks for writing!”

I am not worthy.

I am not worthy! Shall I fall on my knees and cover my head in dust and shame for not being worthy of a response from the much ballyhooed and beloved No Impact Man?

P.S. Stonebridge wrote a great post on the Low Impact Crusade which I really should link to at least once. Probably twice. So here it is again.

Stan Goff wrote a great post, Cover Letters, which was actually written by a commenter, which he thought ought to be highlighted. A slightly modified version was perhaps written by No Impact Man’s now fabulous intern who is doing his electrical and DSL duties for him. The post is a nice overview of some reasons we homeschool.

Here it is, me and my bucket of dust and shame (see previous post on No Impact Man not responding to my suggestion he pay his personal assistant and compensate them for their electrical and DSL investment in his project) and poor humiliated H.o.p. attempting to solace and rescue me from my pitiful estate.

P.S. The belt is one that Marty beaded many years ago. He’s quite good at loom beading. “Show the belt,” I said. “Show the belt, so it won’t just be me and my pitiful bucket of dust and shame.”

Pain and the Dangerous Sport of Dish Washing
May 2007

For better view click to go to Flickr and then click on All Sizes. This one is all jaggedy because of resizing.

Anyway, there it is, Marty’s encounter with one of those overly brittle Ikea glasses that shatter so easily (and quietly) in the sink. Eleven stitches worth. Thus far things seem to be going smoothly in the healing end.

I don’t do shit like this. And I’m feeling like a bumbling fool. But here’s the story.

Sierra Magazine (y’know, Sierra Club) emailed me out of the blue saying they had found on Flickr an image of mine that they want to use for a 1/2 page spread on the last page of their July/August issue. “Excellent” they said of an image marrying landscape and people that no one had ever commented on or favorited. One of my photos taken out West. (One of my favorite things in the world is taking pictures out West. I love the West.) They said to get back as quickly to them as possible as they were on a tight deadline. I did but I didn’t hear back.

“Call them!” Marty said.

I don’t do this. I don’t make calls like this. I’m also very used to shit falling through and despite my love for the world in general have become a die hard pessimist.

“Call them!” Marty kept saying, driving me nuts until I finally said, OK, OK, just to make him shut the hell up, because he wasn’t going to stop saying, “Call them!”

So I called. I was having a hard time hearing over the cell (it was crackly at least on my end) and the right person answered but I wasn’t clear on what he said so I asked for so-and-so, who had already identified himself. Marty says I didn’t sound like a bumbling fool, that he was listening and I sounded just fine, fine, fine, he said.

“Are you sure I sounded fine?”

“You sounded fine!”

Yeah, sure.

But they will it seems be using my photo and now I just have to invoice them. At least I was told they will be.

Talk about your Dumb Luck. This is some Dumb Luck. I don’t know what to think about this stroke of Dumb Luck. Which is all it is. Some very very nice Dumb Luck.

(Now if only I had a bit of Dumb Luck with “Unending Wonders of a Subatomic World” because Dumb Luck is its only opportunity.)

Whew. Well. Sigh. It looks like if you pick up the July/August issue of Sierra Club magazine you’ll see my pic and byline on the last page. I felt more secure about things when he asked me to invoice them.

My stomach is somersaulting all over the place.

I’m going to go now and buy some cactus to replace some of our plants that didn’t fare too well over the winter. (I love the West, thus the cactus, plus they are plants that generally do well for me.) I wonder if that will settle my stomach. I doubt it.

I guess I’ll be writing an invoice tonight.

Nearly 40 years after, here I sit watching The Monkees’ one and only feature film, Head, on a little Toshiba (won’t play on the ‘puter), my mind pretty well blown away by the fact this was co-written and co-produced by none other than Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens) and how bizarre is that. This is my second viewing of the movie, so I could blog about it. The first time, Marty was watching with me and said, “Wait a minute, is that Jack Nicholson walking through?” “Nah,” I replied, still focused on the unexpected appearance of Not-Divine. (Note: Oops! See the comments. Jennifer at Saying Yes saved me on this one. I’d identified initially the actor as Divine but it’s not Divine. It’s T. C. Jones, died 1971, and a good 25 years younger than Divine. No WONDER Divine was sooooooo unexpected.) But it was Jack Nicholson, and I wonder if it was Nicholson or Rafelson who decided The Monkees should play dandruff vacuumed out of the hair of Victor Mature, who afterwards gleefully terrorizes them as the Jolly Green Giant on the back sets of Hollywoodland, laughing as he stomps about and they run. I’m guessing the choice of Victor Mature has something to do with his playing Sampson, but what do I know. Mature’s tyrannical pursuit of the American Fab Four could instead be inspired by his having once remarked, “I’m not an actor - and I’ve got 67 films to prove it!” If there was one thing that would follow The Monkees, purportedly (according to their theme song) the voice of youth, the up-and-coming who had “something to say”, was if these spokesmen were musicians, were even actors, if they were anything beyond an advertising scheme a cut above the Lucky Charms Leprechaun (Kellogs being one of their sponsors), a wildly successful marriage of faces and fast-paced slapstick and accessible voices that took the selling of music from local radio to national television, priming the preteens for MTV, a concept sold by Nesmith to Warner Amex as Popclips.

The movie begins with a shot of red ribbon and feedback all through my ears (I’ve got on earphones, ooow), security, police, press and lots of suits.

“I think we’re ready to go, Mayor,” says security to one of the suits, helping him out of his car.

The mayor begins his speech but keeps getting feedback on his mic. As he continues with his dedication of the bridge, one of the largest arch suspension bridges in the world, comes crashing through the red tape, Micky Dolenz, followed by the other Monkees, sirens pursuing. Micky leaps from the bridge into the water, the other Monkees halting at the guardrail and watching him fall fall fall fall fall fall fall fall as The Porpoise Song starts and Mickey’s dummy hits the water.

“But the porpoise is laughing, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…”

Psychedelic mermaids with zippers unabashedly, prominently running the length of their flippers show up to escort The Crazy Monkee through the color bombardment that was so popular then for depicting a mind supposedly bent by drugs.

And since this IS the movie’s opening tune, seems essential to give its lyrics in full.

My, my the clock in the sky is pounding away
There’s so much to say
A face, a voice, an overdub has no choice
And it cannot rejoice

Wanting to be, to hear and to see
Crying to the sky

But the porpoise is laughing good-bye, good-bye
good-bye, good-bye, good-bye

Clicks, clacks
Riding the backs of giraffes for laughs is alright for a while
The ego sings of castles and kings and things
That go with a life of style

Wanting to feel, to know what is real
Living is a lie

But the porpoise is waiting good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye

There you have it. A life of style. Ego. What is real? And, more significantly, riding tandem on that bike, “an overdub has no choice”.

Shall we move along, bidding goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to The Monkees’ fan base of pre-teens (I was one of them, who hearted The Monkees deeply, at least for a season) with “Head”, a movie I never saw as a child but was already over my infatuation with The Monkees by 1967, a year before their show was canceled, a year into the phenomena, having already decided the packaging was too saccharine. Besides which, the 1968 movie was probably released with a mature rating, officially estranging the fan base which wouldn’t be left hanging but shifted to Bobby Sherman and then The Partridge Family, the elder siblings of soon-to-be MTVers already prepped from infancy by the Mickey Mouse Club’s Mouseketeers which gave them Annette Funicello and eventually introduced their children to Christine Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.

Micky! Micky!

Dolenz ascends to the cry of porpoises.

Oh my! Sex! He is kissing a young woman, not an eight-year-old fan, in a rather too real not for avid consumers of marshmallowy breakfast cereal way! Tinkle of druggy wind chimes in the background as the woman moves away from him with a dubious backward glance (bright blue eye shadow, residual water fillip recalling the savior mermaids), moves on to OH MY kiss Mike Nesmith full on the lips (and he was married, gasp) then Peter Tork and lastly, before a stained glass window, the heartthrob of millions of eight-year-old girls, Davy Jones, the windows opening with a surge of dramatic strings, seagulls playing in the blue sky beyond. The windows close. The young woman picks up her coat and as she leaves Mike asks her, “Well?” “Even,” she replies, not very impressed. When Mike whispers, “Why don’t you come back later?” she laughs “Are you kidding?” and is gone.

KISS-OFF! NO ONE LOVES THE MONKEES! KISS-OFF YOU EIGHT-YEAR-OLD FREAKS, DESPITE THE FACT WE PRETTY WELL HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE AND WE KNOW ANYONE OVER THE AGE OF CONSENT ROLLS THEIR EYES IN DISDAIN, GUESS WHAT, WE ARE FULL GROWN MEN (well, most of us) WITH CAREERS (well, hopefully) AND WE LIKE BIG GIRLS, GOT IT? WE LIKE BIG GIRLS IN BIG BOY WAYS.

But the big girl’s not sticking around.

Mike faces a mirror to straighten his tie.

Begin a pile-up of scenes from the movie as stills grabbed from television screens, and instead of The Monkees’ anthem that started each show informing they were too joyously making music to put anybody down, there is now the rapid-fire rant,

Hey hey, we are The Monkees, you know we love to please, a manufactured image with no philosophies. We hope you’ll like our story, although there isn’t one, that is to say there’s many, that way there is more fun! You told us you like action, and games of many kinds, you like to dance, we like to sing, so let’s all lose our minds! We know it doesn’t matter, ’cause what you came to see, is what we’d love to give you, and give it one two three! But it may come three two one two and jump to nine to five, and when you see the end in sight, the beginning may arrive! For those who look for meanings, and form as they do fact, we might tell you one thing, but we only take it back. Not back like in a box back, not back like in a race, not back so we can keep it, but back in time and space! You say we’re manufactured, to that we all agree, so make your choice and we’ll rejoice in never being free! Hey hey, we are The Monkees, we’ve said it all before, the money’s in, we’re made of tin, we’re here to give you more!”

BANG!!

The last television screen image becomes a moving one and is the famous footage of Chief Brig Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing Viet Cong officer, Nguyen Van Lem, with a shot to the head, February 1 1968.

The next television screen footage is a girl screaming.

Not at the shooting but for the Monkees! One of those 1960s freak-faint-and-fall teenybopper Dionysian heathen rites where they piled into auditoriums and concert halls and blew out their vocal chords in hysterical fits of mass passion.

Teenyboppers no longer go into hysterical panics over their stars. Neither does the media expose them any longer to the kind of footage and shots of the Vietnam War to which we were exposed back in the 1960s. Still, I can tell you, that had a preteener been in the movie audience for “Head”, the execution quickly following THE KISS OFF, would have sent them out in the lobby dialing up mom or dad to come pick them up and take them home.

Actually, preteens going in packs, the offended one would have been dragging down the aisle to the lobby the friend who was confused by the film but wanted to stay and see what happened next.

“But, but…!”

* * * * * * * *

And now may I take a moment’s break here to discuss the title of the movie, “Head”, that execution scene having featured toward the beginning. What does “Head” refer to any way?

Could it possibly be referencing the argument with Don Kirshner about 1967 when Nesmith put a hole in the wall, declaring, “That could have been your head!”, after which The Monkees gained recording control of their songs.

* * * * * * * *

Head. “It’s War!” Mickey Dolenz gives his helmet to Davy Jones who needs a boost to see what’s going on outside the trenches. Peter Tork does a run for ammo only to be continually butted by “We’re Number One!” Ray Nitschke of the Green Bay Packers. When he flees, Nitschke throws his golden helmet after him, which Tork gives to Dolenz, who likes the STARS.

* * * * * * * *

Head. “What you say, you and me, go some place where we won’t bump into each other again,” Davy Jones says to T. C. Jones who’s played a Bette Davis talking waitress haggling them. S/he responds with a slap, and down he goes in the ring now, getting pummeled by Sonny Liston, made up so he’s bloodied, one eye swollen shut, the wide-eyed white-toothed smile that he brandished throughout the television series, carried into the movie where it becomes nearly freakishly absurd, replaced by a large white mouth guard that even further disfigures his face, making him nearly unrecognizable. “Stay down!” Mickey yells. “Stay down!” But Davy, senseless, keeps struggling back to his feet.

* * * * * * * *

Head. Here is an interview with Eddie Adams, who took the famous Pulitzer Prize winning image of Nguyen Van Lem being shot, which is sometimes called the shot that ended the war. A horrible picture that made a star of Adams, but he didn’t want the responsibility that came with the public’s judgment of that pic, didn’t understand how they could criticize Nguyen Ngoc Loan, who he had personally known, when he had shot Nguyen Van Lem in war time. Two people died that day, he says of the event and its aftermath. And playing over it is “Porpoise Song”, so loud as to drown out his voice, which is an mp3 from this page where I got the lyrics for Porpoise Song, coincidentally loading in and beginning at the same time as the interview. The song and interview began so and-a-one-two-three on cue together that for a moment I thought “Porpoise Song” had been purposefully laid in over Eddie Adams.

* * * * * * * *

At which point a great sadness overtakes me, and I’m not even a few minutes into my second viewing of the movie.

And I decide that is really all that needs to be blogged about the film which is, no, not a good movie, but is certainly a document of its time, cynical and self-immolating and straightforwardly ambiguous in its hate/love for marketing and its vision of what makes for an acceptable future in virtuals sold as real. “Suck it before the venom reaches my heart,” Terri Garr says in another scene. But no one does. And eventually, in perhaps the most bizarre moment of the movie there is a bikini-clad girl atop a building, screaming she’s going to jump, clumsily gyrating in a way that looks every bit like unbalanced Edie Sedgwick in “Ciao, Manhattan,” her plaintive, sluggish, garbled cries of “You don’t think I’m going to do it!” “I’m going to do it!” sounding every bit like Edie Sedgwick, predating her 1971 broken doll performance as Susan Superstar. Though ending undramatically and with a not-to-be-bypassed opportunity for the camera to make eye candy of her charming, bikini-clad exterior, if there is one disarming delphic flash of inspiration floating in the snap, crackle, pop, it is that one.

* * * * * * * *

“So long and thanks for all the fish!”

(Yes, yes, dolphins are not the same as porpoises, but they are cousins. Just begged to be said.)

* * * * * * * *

Postscript

Marty (as I play the “Porpoise Song” at Youtube): I just realized what the key to the Monkees’ sound is. Micky Dolenz is always flat. It never fails.

Me: But it works.

Marty: Well, he’s not the only one. I know other singers who are always flat.

Whom I will not name here because you may get the idea they are bad musicians when in fact they are excellent.

And though Marty had two Monkees’ albums in his collection as a teen, it was more for appreciation of the writers who penned the early songs. What can’t be recreated for today’s listener is how good some of this material sounded on our tinny little mono radios back in the 60s. Straight forward, finely tuned pop refrains cutting through the sun, background music that buoyed you from street to street, making your day your very own musical in which you starred, which is also what the show sold, you in the musical that is your life via the ministrations of The Monkees. “Take the last train to Clarksville…” Accessible music to young ears that sold emotional rather than sensational stories. “I’m a believer…” The furor over who did what didn’t escape my youthful notice, and expanded my awareness to the idea of the studio musician. Because at a young age I had assumed all music came in band packages, and was surprised to learn that there was this thing called a Studio Musician, faceless and largely nameless to the general public, most kids not paying attention to anything but the bold print. “What? There are people who are called in to play on songs who aren’t in bands? And this is just what they do? They’re musicians and this is what they do despite the fact of getting no glory? And they help create a sound that a band might otherwise have not achieved, and they get no glory?” Who were these shadow entities? I absorbed it on a very basic, physical level. Such as “The Monkees” as the manufactured band and sound was the sun and the open street, while the studio musicians who played the songs were the cool shadowy bedrooms in which I sat and turned the albums over and examined the back covers. And that is how it has remained with me to this day, my fresh nine-year-old awareness of the studio musician. I return to the bedroom of my slightly older friend Janice, who was swiftly outgrowing me as she moved into true preteen years, and I’m turning over in my nine-year-old hands her copy of “More of the Monkees” to wonder at the back cover, a memory which immediately gives way to some other friend’s bedroom (as kids, we lived in each others’ bedrooms) and I’m slightly older and continuity is they too have the same album and again I’m turning it over to look at the back cover and reflect on the mystery that is the studio musician. Who the hell were these guys and why did they play if it wasn’t for album cover fame and fortune?

Upon reflection, looking back at how the show helped create for us (or me) the sense of our lives with us as stars fronting our very own musical, for sing-along single-digit age kids it could have been the very fact that The Monkees weren’t the featured instrumentalists in the initial albums, but were sing-alongers, just like us. The world is your shower.

The movie communicates how the show worked making us each stand-ins, how it fit with our little brains, so when Peter Tork, in “Head”, pops the waitress in the jaw who turns out to be T. C. Jones who is a man, he can angst over having popped a woman in the jaw not only because of T. C. Jones’ s/heness but because of all the female youthful viewers of the series standing in for both male and female characters. It’s less an expression of a philosophy of every person made up of both masculine/feminine, but another example in a primer on what made the show work and how, as divulged in Head’s chant that replaces The Monkee’s anthem and is their workbook. How we were able to blend into the mirage.

The magic of the show, for its time, was that it left space for you–just like the plague of advertising does. The stories left space for the child to be a participant, because instead of selling a “story” the shows were also a kind of background wallpaper. The big screen musicals couldn’t do this, existing for the theater. Later television shows such as The Partridge Family didn’t do this because their vehicles were too constrictive, too linearly structured, too tied up around a beginning-middle-end story of some sort rather than wallpaper actions and bits that reflected your every day preteen physical movements–as in now I get up and go to the kitchen for something to eat and now I go out and run around like a fool on the playground. Walk Like Me.

So the album “Head”, with its original mylar cover reflecting your face, was right on target. As was the heart of the movie, telling us that what we vividly imagined might be experienced as real, becoming a part of us (maybe, maybe not, sort of, like vividly imagined fake tupperware becomes a part of our lives). As the chant relates, a reason for this with The Monkees was because of the break from the linear, the nine-five-ten storytelling rather than one-two-three constructions. Just as life isn’t linear.

Way too much Monkees the other day. I woke up from a dream this morning of looking at old black and white pics of them in pot cleaner ads. (I only briefly had to wonder why it was pot cleaner ads.)

But while we’re on it here’s a great Mike Nesmith quote on Hendrix opening for the Monkees.

He was opening in front of us and, of course, you know, he walked into the beast, he walked into the, there were the waving pink arms, you know, 20,000, waving pink arms, like this, so every time he would say, “Foxy!”, they’d be “Davy!” “Foxy!” “Davy!” Oh man, it was some seriously twisted moments.