Archive for November, 2008
26 items.
This entry has a photo which may not be seen in preview.
Thanksgiving. We handled it this year by eating bison and remembering its role in the lives of some of our ancestors and their appreciation of this animal and its gifts, which were of such great importance that the buffalo were one of the founding clans. It seemed apropos and helped make for a not-very-conflicted Thanksgiving.
Of course, you can’t see the bison here, as it’s been eaten. Nor can you see the bison head on the wall beyond H.o.p. because it’s hidden behind a ceiling lamp. You see, we ate at one of Ted Turner’s bison houses and he likes to adorn them with bison heads.
I told H.o.p. this was a new tradition of ours.
This was fine by him as he doesn’t like turkey, won’t touch it, but loves bison.
If you’re curious why H.o.p. has his camera to his ear it’s because he’s always making movies and was listening to a clip he’d just filmed.
”Comment
This entry has a photo which may not be seen in preview.
As we were leaving, we were told by a harried, exhausted, but friendly worker that there had been 6000 visitors in 3 hours. I wasn’t surprised to hear it. What did surprise me is we’d purchased tickets a couple of months ago because I had the impression sell-out crowds were being anticipated and that it was first come, first served as they didn’t want to overextend, and we’d wanted to make sure we’d be able to get in the day after Thanksgiving when Marty’s mother was visiting. So, we weren’t expecting quite the crush we found ourselves in. The flow was such that we felt compelled to hurry through and not examine as closely as we would have liked, and it seemed most around us felt the same pressure. Which was a shame because the exhibit was lovely and begged more time to drink it all in. Consequently, we’ll spend a good period of time examining the study guides made available by the Carlos.
Doing my yoga last night, I missed my goldfish. You see, our apartment is small enough that I have only one place I can do my yoga, which is in the walkway between the living room and computer/dining room/office which is where the fish tank is tucked in a corner next to the bathroom door. And, even there, when I lie down to do the final twists before Shavasana, I don’t have the room to extend my arms out fully, I must bend them at the elbows.
So, that is where I do my yoga, and I would watch my fish while I did my yoga and my fish would swim over to the side of the tank closest me and would watch. I’d talk to it and it would stay over on that side of the tank as long as I was doing my yoga.
Now, my goldfish is dead.
Goldfish have proven very difficult to take care of in a vertical tank. They’re fine up to a certain size and then are suddenly too big and problems begin.
Even with only one or two in a thirty gallon tank with an oxygen pump.
We grew goldfish big.
Now they are dead and gone and our five year time of living with goldfish is over, I guess.
We likely will replace with Angelfish but not right now. If we are going to be moving into the other apartment, then we don’t want to start a new tank yet.
Writing about something as if it's someone else's situation may not help with making a decision
November 25th, 2008 |Posted In: General
There was a little family that lived in an apartment in an old, old building circa 1910. Their apartment was pretty small and the woman learned a larger apartment with a better view had opened up in the front building. The woman went to look at the larger apartment.
The larger apartment was significantly larger and that was the main interest. It would mean having walking space again and not stumbling over each other and everything continually. They would be able to get a fourth chair for the dining table. The son would be able to have a bedroom that wasn’t the size of a closet.
There were two sets of french doors with leaded glass panes.
The wood floors of the larger apartment were not anywhere near as nice as the wood floors in the present apartment. In fact, the floors were pretty ratted out, the wood heavily worn and mottled and stained and couldn’t decide, from inch to inch, what color they wanted to be. There wasn’t a hint of wax left. The floors likely hadn’t seen any wax in a couple of decades. At least two boards were in dire need of being replaced, not to mention the entire floor in the hallway. It sounded like the landlord might have plans to replace one of those boards which was in a primary walkway, which was closer to being a hole in the floor than a board.
The primary walkway was between the connecting living room and dining room, separated by french doors. When open the two rooms were effectively one room. Just the kind of floor plan the woman liked.
“I wouldn’t want to show up at the emergency room with a splinter the size of a pencil having mangled one of our feet,” the woman said. “I really would want this board replaced.”
The woman wouldn’t sand old wood floors herself and knew no sanding would be done. But the landlord said they would be waxed.
There were two sets of french doors with leaded glass panes.
There would be wall space again for hanging many of the woman’s paintings which were then in storage. Not that this was a big issue as the woman’s paintings were all fairly depressing to look at. But she would have room to put up prints of more recent works.
There was a view out the front window. It was on the street and you could see people walking past and lots of rush hour cars going past and buses and the like which the woman found much more favorable than her present apartment’s view of trash cans. Indeed, the woman liked watching the rush hour cars and the buses. She liked the bright lights shining off the rain soaked streets in the dimming early evening light. She thought it might be nice to write, looking out on the traffic. If she got back to writing again.
The landlord was just finishing painting the two main rooms an ugly beige called Navajo White whereas the rooms in the present apartment were plain old eggshell white.
The woman hated Navajo White.
There were two sets of french doors with leaded glass panes.
Despite treatments, the larger apartment had significant termite damage and the pest control guys were being called back in.
There were two sets of french doors with leaded glass panes.
The hall floor was in such bad shape that plywood would need to be laid over that and something whatever over the plywood.
The woman stood and looked at the apartment, at its better size and view, at its floors. She considered the cost of moving and putting in a new line for DSL and Direct TV. She considered the cost of moving and putting in a new line for DSL and Direct TV and switching utilities would mean not having the money to paint over the Navajo White that was so wildly popular for apartments and tract homes in the 1970s. She didn’t think her son’s few cheap, tourist Kachinas would give the Navajo White desert appeal. She wondered if maybe she painted some of the white doors in turquoise blues and reds and oranges or greens if that would make the Navajo White walls less unappealing. Or maybe those big paintings of hers would distract from the Navajo White.
All the apartments were named based on who the longest tenants have been.
The apartment the woman was living in was the “old nurse’s” apartment. A nurse had lived there for decades. After she retired, she started drinking and had a lot of problems from never doing anything but drinking, but then she started back to work again and worked for a while and then returned to her home town to die.
The larger apartment was the “Cuban refugee” apartment. The long term tenants had been a family who had fled Castro.
A lawyer had lived in the apartment the last six years. Six years was not long enough to be long term.
The woman ignored the fact of the lawyer and considered that residual Cuban spirits were a tinge more romantic than the spirit of a nurse who drank herself into liver disease then returned to her home town to die.
The woman guessed the paper on the shelves in the pantry and in the kitchen cupboard had been there since the time of the Cuban refugees.
She wondered how long it might take to make the larger apartment feel like “home”. Probably not until there was money for paint and rugs.
The woman looked again at the walls as the landlord pointed out to her the signs of termite damage (apart from the gaping holes in the wall that had been made for inspection). The walls in the room with the termite damage had yet to be repaired. The landlord pointed out the cracks that looked like they’d been thinly lined with mud.
“I think we have termites,” the woman said.
“No, you don’t have termites,” the landlord said.
“Come take a look,” the woman said, having just realized that she did.
On the way out the door to the building she noticed the awning over the door was half gone. She wondered if she could ever convince the landlord that replacing it would be a good idea as it would spruce up the facade a good bit.
The landlord went to the woman’s apartment. He took a look at a crack in the living room wall above the bathroom door, which was there when the woman and her family moved in, but now had two weird little brown things sticking out of the crack about the size of a pin head. The woman had only noticed these the past month.
“Oh, you have termites again,” the landlord said, sounding very depressed.
“Again?” the woman said.
Seemed the apartment had termite problems before the woman and her small family had moved in. They had gotten into the walls “here and there and there and there”, the landlord said.
The woman’s son excitedly showed the landlord all his recent toy sculptures. The landlord still looked rather depressed and not all that interested.
The woman was feeling kind of depressed too, because now she had termites and she hadn’t even moved yet.
“I don’t really understand all these new toys,” the landlord said. “What’s the story? What characters are these?”
“He made them,” the woman said, “but some of them are based on characters he’s seen in games or cartoons.”
“He made these?!” the landlord said. “I thought they were toys he got from a store! He made these?!!”
Now the landlord listened with interest to the boy describing all his sculptures.
“How do you do it?” the landlord asked.
The woman went back up to look briefly at the bigger apartment and thought about the cost of moving and the lousy economy and all the economists she’d recently listened to who talked about waking up in the middle of the night worrying the world was entering an economic collapse worse than the Great Depression, and she thought about the cost of moving and the lousy floors and the two pairs of old french doors with leaded glass panes and the bigger rooms and the awful Navajo White and the termite damage and the larger rooms and the cost of moving and the beautiful lights of the buses and cars on the wet streets and the lovely activity of that busy street as compared to the garbage cans and then she thought again about the lousy economy and the fact she too now had termites and she hadn’t even moved an inch.
In the front room of the larger apartment was her old living room rug. She had tossed it the previous spring, replacing it with a new, cheap but better looking rug from Ikea. The landlord had retrieved the rug from the trash then let it lie over a fire escape railing throughout the summer then had cleaned it off some but was unable to get rid of faded line running down the middle of the rug from where it had been lain over the fire escape railing. Not liking to see anything thrown out, he had placed the rug in the front room of the empty larger apartment. And so there it was. Her old living room rug in the apartment she was thinking about moving into.
“The floors are bouncy,” her son said. “That’s scary.”
“We’ve been living on concrete the past five years. You’re used to wood over concrete,” the woman said. “These floors aren’t on concrete.”
“The floors are bouncy.”
“We’ll cover them as best we can with Ikea rugs. They’ll feel less bouncy with rugs on them.”
“You’re sure it’s not because of termites? We won’t fall through will we?” the son asked. “Let’s go home. These bouncy floors scare me. I’m scared of termites.”
“We have termites.”
“But we don’t have bouncy floors.”
The woman called her husband and said, “I looked at the other apartment. I like it that it’s bigger and has a more fun view and a pantry but I worry about the wood floors being possibly impossible to take care of and getting splinters in everyone’s feet. And I worry about the persistent problem with termites despite treatments.”
“I know. I don’t know either,” said the husband.
“But then we have termites as well,” the woman said.
“No, we don’t have termites,” the husband said.
Sigh.
“Yes…we…do,” the woman said.
She continued her slow sprint toward Thanksgiving, deep cleaning her apartment for guests, putting out new pillows on the futon sofas, corralling clutter into new baskets.
She stared at her perpetually clogged kitchen sink and wondered if the kitchen sink in the larger apartment had better drainage.
The woman cleaned the steadily piling up black mass of dead ants by the kitchen door, an influx begun two days before, due to the rain, which she’d dealt with by spraying orange oil on the floor. The orange oil had trapped all but a few who were wandering around the counter in front of the microwave.
She looked at the goldfish tank, still bubbling air. But with no goldfish. The last one had died that morning.
“I don’t want to move into the other apartment,” her son said. “It has bouncy floors. And termites.”
“We have termites.”
“We don’t have bouncy floors.”
“It is bigger. You’d have room for your toys and all your art projects.”
“I don’t care that much about extra room any more.”
“It has a better view.”
“From here I can see dad walking up the street from the car. I wouldn’t be able to there. And it has termites.”
“We have termites.”
“I bet we don’t have many. It has holes in the floor and walls from the termites.”
“They’re going to have the exterminator in again. And they’re going to fix the walls and the floor.”
“I’m scared of termites eating the floors.”
“If you’d never heard the apartment had termites, would you want to live there?”
“Yes.”
The woman looked up termites on the internet. She was hoping to find out whether she would be moving into an apartment which she could reasonably expect, with further treatment, not to fling hoards of swarming termites at her in the Spring. But then, she considered, she now had her own termite problem and come Spring she just may be faced with hoards of swarming termites anyway.
The woman happened onto a web page which had a weird story that read like those email spam stories that show up on Snopes as bogus but are emailed around like crazy by people who…well, y’know, think it’s a courtesy to email around hysteria-inducing spam of stories guaranteed to best tantalize frantic thirteen-year-olds. It was a story about a young woman who went dancing at a club, who met some great guy with whom she danced all night, who ended up taking him home and having great sex with the guy with whom she thought she was madly in love and who had told her he loved her. She woke up in the morning to find he was not in bed and thought surely he was making breakfast for her as he was the perfect man. She found instead the man was gone and had left her a wooden flower with a note saying the flower symbolized all the thousands of termites he’d released into her apartment, which would eat all of it and all her furniture and destroy her life! All because of a one night stand!
“Don’t let this happen to you!” the story warned.
The end.
P.S. The woman wondered how in the world a wooden flower could conceivably symbolize termites.
I read It’s Lovely! I’ll Take it! and look at what happiness it brought me today.
DLN Advocacy Coalition Heating & Winter Survival Assistance Project
November 22nd, 2008 |Posted In: General
Stacey Low Dog has created a fund specific to helping those out in Pine Ridge and RoseBud who have had problems resulting from the blizzard and who will require heating assistance this winter. The DLN Advocacy Coalition is hosting the Heating and Winter Survival Assistance Project.
DLN Advocacy Coalition is implementing a temporary emergency heating and winter survival assistance project to supplement what the tribes or state are not able to assist with. It is up to us to use our grass roots efforts to help our people with this type of emergency heating assistance with these much needed Winter survival supplies before another major blizzard devastates our areas.
The DLN Advocacy Coalition website is one that I’ve managed for a long while, having gone out to Rosebud some eight years ago to meet Alfred Bone Shirt. He, with the ACLU, had brought suit against the state concerning violation of voting rights against Native Americans, and the Coalition thought it would be a good idea to have a web site for keeping people informed. Someone suggested me and, having been suggested, I volunteered, which meant a trip to Rosebud to meet Alfred and collect stacks of material for the website, including the beautiful drawing (it’s on the left of the webpage) which I would scan and make into a t-shirt that could be sold.
That suit resulted two years ago in a final federal appeals court decision affirming the redrawing of legislative district lines in South Dakota to ensure there would be no discrimination against Native American voters.
I made a donation to the heating fund as soon as I created the web page for it. Believe me, if you’re not familiar with the area, it gets bitter cold out on these reservations where individuals already suffer harsh deprivation.
Heston, today, on the Michael Baisden show.
Heston is the artist Marty recorded who recently released his CD Storyteller. It’s also available on iTunes.
Update: After a couple of brief interviews with Heston, and a few callers speaking to Heston, they’re playing “No Way”. A nice, gentle choice. Sounds really good broadcast.
Update: Heston’s page at iseecolor.com. And Heston’s Myspace page.
Update: Oh, I didn’t know this. Heston’s playing Jan 31st at the Blue Note in New York.
Marty recorded this carnival samba today for the percussion group, Bratuke. They’re a new group, just starting to perform more frequently and are working on getting a website up. If you’re in Little Five Points (here in Atlanta) they practice every Sunday afternoon at the community center.
The names of the players: Colin Agnew, Rafael Pereira, Chris Befille, Justin Chesarek, Greg Hammontree and Angelica Buono.
Click above for five minutes of pure joy.
And I hope you do enjoy it.
About 9 years ago I did an interview with an individual who was in Daniel Boyd’s Strangest Dreams: Invasion of the Space Preachers!
I was reminded of it because I was going through the Big Sofa site this past weekend, giving it a minor face lift (one that would let people know this was a dinosaur classic of a site dating from when the internet was young and innocent).
So, above is the link to that interview.
I love doing interviews. I’m not good at them but I love doing them. If you want me to interview you about your work, or your kitchen, your favorite pair of shoes or some interesting incident, just shoot me an email and we’ll arrange a chat time.
Because I love doing interviews.
Update: I wrote Daniel Boyd and he responded with news of his current project, an illustrated novel, Death Falcon Zero vs. the Zombie Slug Lords. The premise is pretty amusing.
From the website:
Death Falcon Zero, a disgraced former masked wrestler is released from prison by the governor of West Virginia (WWE Hall of Fame member, Johnny Valiant) and promised a pardon if he can put an end to the problem of zombies plaguing Charleston’s West Side. DFZ soon realizes the zombies are being created by a highly addictive new form of crystal meth, funded by Senator Joe E. Legend, himself a former wrestler, and his backers, a loose consortium of wrestlers-gone-bad (Samu Anoa’i, Bobby Blaze, Sol de Oriente and other stars of the ring), drug dealers, yuppie elite, slum lords, and corrupt local officials. When it becomes apparent that Legend’s plan is to “infect locally, plague globally,” DFZ is forced to reunite his former tag team, the Grapes of Wrath, to assist him in bringing down the slug lords. The only problem now is Raw Talent’s a destitute crack head, and Professor Danger, once believed dead, is being hidden by the witness protection program – and has no interest in being found. That, and the fact that the three of them now hate one another.
(Originally placed online in 2000. Am migrating it over from another section of the website.)
His pathetic apartment’s window looks directly onto the window of her dismal apartment and vice versa. Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) is a boxer with a glass jaw who’d go cross-eyed at the complexity of a clerk counting back his change (as do I often enough). Gloria Price (Irene Kane) is the girl next door as a pay-per-dance hostess at Pleasureland. Irene and Jamie probably thought they were brilliant actors. After every take, he likely enthused, “Man, I can’t believe how you really pegged it. I completely forgot you weren’t Gloria and had to remind myself we were acting.” She would have replied, “It’s because you’re so amazing you make it easy for me.” They probably talked at length about the complex ambiguities of Gloria Price, and the attraction between Gordon and Price. They likely believed they really made those characters come alive. They probably spoke in hushed tones to each other about how Kubrick didn’t respect actors or understand the actor’s art with the way he cluttered up the film with obscure symbolism only he could appreciate.
Or maybe not.
Killer’s Kiss is no great film. The acting is as dismal as the settings. The music is lackluster pointlessness and–with the exception of the more percussive pieces, in particular the one which accompanies the fight scene in the mannequin factory/warehouse toward the end of the film–would have been better left out. There are obvious editing problems which are glaringly obvious because Kubrick’s editing style already displays itself a breed apart. In other words (or nevertheless) Killer’s Kiss is a film Kubrick devotees should have with, looking for early hints at Kubrick themes, comparing shots, picking out this thing which was also in that other film, and this other thing which he did again in this and that. For instance, there’s dancing as the gate to a secret underworld. Music and a lazy, meandering foxtrot are the open sesame to the unruly forbidden in both Killer’s Kiss and Eyes Wide Shut.
Film Noir often has the primary action having already occurred when the film opens, the story then related via flashbacks. Employing this stylistic device, Killer’s Kiss begins with Davey Gordon standing in Penn Station reflecting on how maybe he’s taken life too seriously, maybe that’s why these things have happened, whatever it was that began to happen to him three days beforehand, the day of his fight in the arena with Kid Rodriguez. October 25th.
We find ourselves, three days prior, viewing Davey and Gloria in their respective one room apartments as they get ready for work. Funny isn’t it how much their apartments look alike. What can we learn about them there? Davey, the way he feeds his goldfish, he’s a guy with heart, isn’t he? His face magnified by the fish bowl’s glass, he peers at the inmates like a benevolent, giant god. Along with Washland (Washland?) customer tickets, he’s got photos of what must be rural home away from home stuck up all over the mirror in which he examines his face like he quite can’t get used to it. Those photos say there is more to Davey than what’s on the surface. He’s not just a New York boxer living in a cheap room dangerous to the soul in its lack of personality. He came from somewhere. Everybody’s gotta come from somewhere. The photos are artifacts stuck on the glass so you keep a clue. The photos are part of the mirror.
Gloria, through her window, watches Davey finish dressing and leave. Time for her to go to work too. So we watch them both go down the stairs, go down the stairs, go down the stairs, and go down the stairs, to some of the lamest incidental music imaginable. Outside, the way they walk toward the street they look like they’re together. Even Vincent Rapallo, the Pleasureland boss (Frank Silvera), waiting for Gloria in his convertible, remarks on this, that she’s doing good for herself. Nah, they just live in the same building, she says. But we know different, because Kubrick has told us so, that psychologically and fate-wise she and Davey are already intimate. All that’s wanting is the crucial incident that will smack them together like a bad car wreck.
In Eyes Wide Shut a musician at the Christmas dance is from Seattle. He wishes he could be home with the wife and kids instead of in New York, but you have to be where the work is. He is pivotal to Tom Cruise’s entrance into the underworld, the one who offers the password. Killer’s Kiss also offers a connection between New York and Seattle. While Davey rides the subway to the arena, he reads a letter we saw him take from his mailbox. Dated October 10th, it’s from Uncle George and Aunt Grace who live on a ranch just outside Seattle. They are worried because they haven’t heard from him yet this month. Grace’s arthritis is better; she can even ride Jumper. Other news is the purchase of a chestnut Arabian stallion from the Hendersons. In a few hours, Davey will be getting a call from Uncle George inviting him on a vacation, after which…well, let me not jump the gun. Davey’s sentimental smile hints these are the folks of the earth who make life meaningful, whereas big bad, impersonal New York sucks your sap to feed the apple of its eye.
Davey’s subway ride reminds me of the shuttle flight to the orbiting station in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Come to think of it, during the subsequent flight to the moon, wasn’t there briefly seen a televised karate exhibition?
A peculiar sequence of shots–what appears to be a toy Santa licking candied apples, hotdogs, ice cream sundaes, a photorapher’s studio, a small child doll swimming in a bowl of water–precedes our arrival at Pleasureland. Kubrick fans are starting to get high already; nothing is incidental in one of Stanley’s films, those wind-up toy automatons must mean something. Indeed, the sequence is so artlessly obvious that one is likely to dismiss it as frivolous. Guy with camera gets to record some peculiarities of the street. Neat, crappy stuff, huh? Look at that baby paddle! If Davey had the imagination, or the money, he’d buy that swimming baby doll and plop her in the goldfish bowl, except Davey’s a nice, simple guy. He’d probably only do that if he was drunk.
Through a series of back and forth shots we watch Gloria’s actions that night alongside Davey’s. Gloria stripping down to the armor of a big black strapless bra parallels Davey’s chest being massaged. Kubrick offers a comparison of the boxer’s preparations for his fight with Gloria’s profession as a dancer. Dancing is fighting and fighting is dancing. The arena is surrounded by ropes. The dance floor at Pleasureland is caged by a mock fence, palm trees painted on the walls. Are we locked out of Eden or earthenware newbies waiting for the snake to proffer a juicy Red Delicious? If Eden’s so righteous great then why will Gloria later be so eager to slip away from the oasis and the stalking obsession her boss has with her? Vinnie, familiar with Davey’s career, is anxious for Gloria to see him fight. He goes down to the hall, almost begins a brawl with the military dude who’s dancing with her, then while his thugs escort the dude in uniform to the door, Vinnie escorts Gloria up to his office to watch the fight, the walls of that office lined with “Blue Jeans” posters illustrating violent scenes–a brawl in a pool hall, some unlucky fellow pinned down vulnerable as a sacrificial lamb on a pool table’s green.
Kid Rodriguez is no physical Goliath, yet down goes glass-jaw Davey in a fight scene the tone and lighting of which will be later recalled in the war room of Dr. Strangelove. The veteran whose career never quite takes off, which looks like it’s always waiting for something to happen, is flattened by this new competitor who did have 22 straight wins and now 23. Cut to Gloria’s boss making the moves on her and her responding in kind, if initially distracted by Davey, who she possibly thinks looks like Burt Lancaster. Cut to Gloria walking home through the jungle of city streets in an apparently troubled, discombobulated state of mind. She looks lost. But so does the actress often enough.
Davey is on his way to good and drunk when Gloria gets home. He watches her undress and when Uncle George calls to invite him to Washington, he can barely concentrate, can barely speak, his eyes are that full of Gloria in her slip. Uncle George wonders what’s wrong and Davey pleads he’s just a little dopey. When Gloria goes to bed, the floor show over, so does Davey.
As earlier mentioned, in Eyes Wide Shut the piano player from Seattle gives Tom Cruise the password to the scene behind the scenes. After Uncle George’s call inviting Davey out for a needed vacation (hey, you, here’s respite or a not-so-subtle reminder you’re a failure in the great out there and need to get back to the basics) Davey has a dream. He’s in negative, everything reversed, Alice go Wonderland speeding down empty city streets, voices we heard at the arena yelling he’s no good, to go home, go home, and then a scream which causes him to wake and the scream is still going on. It’s Gloria struggling with the Pleasureland boss.
This is the awaited car wreck. Washed-up boxer, taking up a second career as hero, rushes to Gloria’s defense. But the boss is gone by the time he gets there, for via Gloria’s looking-glass window he saw Davey charge out like a knight looking for a fight and booked it. What’s the story, Davey wants to know. What happened? A flashback in a flashback. We’re pointedly not told exactly what Gloria’s boss is sorry for but he had shown up at her place to apologize. She spurned him. Even laughed and told him he was an old man who smelled bad. They fought. She screamed.
While Gloria sleeps, her hero looks about her apartment. There’s this weird sad baby doll with short blond hair like Gloria’s hanging on the head of her bed. She’s got, wow, all these feminine undergarments drying on a clothesline stretched across her room, which fascinate Mr. Masculine. Davey touches her nylons. He examines the feminine trappings on her dresser. Hey, doesn’t that guy in the photo on the dresser look like her boss? I thought so. If she despises her boss and thinks he’s an old man who smells bad, why does she have a photo of him on the dresser.
Because it’s not him. In the morning, Gloria tells all about the guy in the photo, who now we realize only resembles her boss. And we see there’s a picture of a stately brunette neighboring his. Not his wife. It’s Gloria’s father and her sister, Iris. She’s going to tell a story that’s really Iris’ story, not her own. We’re going to have to watch Iris (Ruth Sobotka, Kubrick’s then wife) dance on the stage, solo, the entire time. Watching her dance, we hear how Iris was eight when Gloria was born, when their mother died. Watching Iris dance solo, we hear she was a dancer. She danced with the Ballet Russe. A man proposed to Iris on Gloria’s 13th birthday and Iris turned him down because he wanted her to give up dancing and be a wife and mother. Dad laughed and laughed. Watching Iris dance, we hear how dad then got sick and Iris married in order to take care of dad. Then dad died and Iris showed no emotion and Gloria accused her of only ever acting like she cared when she didn’t at all. Still watching Iris dance, we hear how Iris put on the music she and dad liked best, their song, one she used to dance to, and slit her wrists. Gloria went to town and got a job dancing at Pleasureland and thanked God Iris never had to dance in a depraved human zoo like that. But then, Gloria kind of got to like it.
Bad girl.
Iris, the brunette, the graceful, high-class ballerina–whose dancing is perhaps not unintentionally depicted as uninspired and flat. Iris, the rainbow goddess. Kubrick and rainbows. In Eyes Wide Shut Cruise is approached by two women at the dance who say they will take him to where the rainbow ends, and he gets his costume for the secret party at Rainbow Fashions, the owner of which appears queerly ready to prostitute his randy daughter after an odd scene in which he goes ballistic after he discovers her in a compromising situation. But Iris who commits suicide after her father’s death? What’s up with Kubrick’s rainbowm his fans might ask? What is this with the likeness between the so-stated old and smelly Pleasureland boss and dear old dad anyway. And why does the rainbow goddess off herself? If there’s no rainbow, where’s the protection against the next flood.
Doesn’t it rain a lot in Seattle?
Needless to say, Gloria’s got self-esteem issues. Probably some abandonment issues to boot. No wonder she gets depressed when, after ice cream, Davey reveals he’s leaving for Washington the next day. Voila, suddenly they’re in love and they’re going to go off together. She’s going to pick up her money from the dance hall and his manager is going to bring him his money at the dance hall at 8:15 sharp. With that money they will run off to Seattle and live happily ever after.
The acting, which has been consistently rank, never gets any better. It has been rank up to this point and shall continue to be rank.
That evening, there’s more fun for Kubrick fans at the dance hall. Davey stands outside and we’re treated to shots of the surrounding neon. There’s “Grand Union” just across the street from where lonely men come to dance with vixens. “Childs” down a block. “The Queen of Sheba.” “Hilarious–Down Memory Lane.” Signs are everywhere, just as in Eyes Wide Shut. As Gloria ascends the tiled stairway to the dance hall, classic Kubrick viewpoint, we see above her the sign “Watch your step.” Waiting for her is the boss, who already knows she’s leaving. When he heard the news he wandered by two old photos of what must be his folks, his past (everybody’s got a past frozen in still life) then busted his glass against a daffy, grotesque painting of two men grinning at him, caricatures, almost like clowns. Meanwhile, outside two guys in fezzes are dancing, playing “Ol’ Suzanna” on the harmonica, clowning it up. Knights of Columbus conventioneers on the loose? The Fraternal order of Red Felt? They approache Davey. For some reason one of them has a paintbrush and he brushes Davey’s jacket with it. They grab his scarf and he chases them down the street, for which reason Davey’s not there when his manager arrives early, at 7:30, with the money. In the meantime, Gloria is upstairs with the boss and those “Blue Jeans” illustrations, and the illustration of the man laid out on the pool table. When the boss refuses to pay her what she’s owed, what she’s earned, she goes back down and from high on the stairway landing we see her standing outside the door, beside Davey’s manager, she not knowing who he is, and both of them looking very much like mannequins, Gloria modeling light colored clothing on the left, the manager in dark colored clothing on the right. Then the boss calls her back up and sends down two gangsters who end up in an alley with the manager (a “No Toilet” sign is observed) where they’ll bash in his head off-screen. Davey returning with his scarf, we see a sign that says “angels” (those fez guys, yeah, must have been) and Kubrick fans will also note the “I” of Childs is now burned out. Davy’s been saved by angelic, clownish intervention. But, the poor manager.
Gloria is given an extra hundred by her boss which I suppose kind of makes up for the money Davey didn’t get from the dead manager. Giddy with their standing on the threshold of a new life, she and Davey eat ham and eggs and say “goodbye to the bright lights.” Back in his room, Davey packs and leaves a note on the envelope from Uncle George’s letter of 10/10 that the fish are to be fed daily. He goes to get Gloria and finds she’s gone. He hears noises. The police are in his apartment. Davey is in bad trouble. Looks like the law thinks he killed his manager. Davey takes a gun to go find the boss who, it turns out, is having Gloria held against her will at a loft on 24th street. We’ve seen the hustle-bustle of Manhattan night life. Come daylight, it’s nothing but empty streets and sprawling brick warehouses, the neon burned out by the sun and everyone who isn’t personally involved with Davey’s plight vampire-vaporized.
I’m not going to go into what follows, except for mentioning that Kubrick’s camera focuses several times on an Ace of Spades, and there’s a one-eyed Jack of Spades in the story mirroring Davey flattened again on another floor with single Cyclopean eye agape, after which Davey crashes through a glass window. But mainly I thought I’d mention what is a pretty neat fight that happens in a place filled with nude mannequins, most without arms or hands, all these mannequin heads and hands sitting, hanging about, a head here and there looking just about lifelike. Kubrick fans will perhaps be reminded of the “Rainbow Fashions” costume shop and its mannequins in Eyes Wide Shut.
And Gloria’s weird, sad little doll that was hanging from the head of her bed.
Death to the robot? Long live the free man?
The story’s a limp one. Feeble. When all’s said and done, one’s left to ruminate on the title, Kubrick ensures it.
Iris left her dancing for a dying dad who died and she committed suicide. When Gloria tries to leave her dancing it’s instead for a beau, and the daddy boss goes after her. He says he could kill her. He really could, he says. Is his the kiss of the killer? Or what about the kiss at film’s end that takes place right under credits that remind us this is a film about the killer’s kiss? Is the killer’s kiss akin to a Judas kiss, and if so who is the Judas? Do we even see the real killer’s kiss or has that fatal action occurred off screen? What about Iris playing “their song” before she leeches her blood life out all over her marital bed. Kubrick jumble-mumble wandering the Freudian Oedipal trap doesn’t work any more than it worked for Freud.
The way Gloria eyes the fighter Davey when she sees him on television, aware that he lives across from her, I have wondered if her budding love affair with the boxer isn’t the killer’s kiss, she looking for the hero who is going to save her from her situation. A boxer just might do the trick.
With Killer’s Kiss one isn’t (or I’m not) too inclined to probe the film stock for questions and answers which have yet to be made artistically coherent. The film is young Kubrick, beyond baby steps, but with its own busted glass chin impossible to piece together, even though once the violence explodes out of its neat containing ring into the streets we have the boxer coming into his own, now that he really has something for which to fight off stage. If Killers’ Kiss is interesting viewing it’s for two reasons. The film establishes Kubrick’s attitude toward script and images, images acting themselves as script, as words, suggested by a repeated return to the neon sign “scripto” in the collage of signs and neon which assails the viewer while Davey waits in front of the dance hall for Gloria. The film is also critical regarding Kubrick’s transition from still photographer to moving pics, highlighting broadly what he will bring to them from his early career as a still photographer, a fascination which his father initially fostered. Kubrick’s first short, a documentary, had to do with a boxer of whom he’d done some stills for a “Look” assignment. Perhaps Kubrick had to do Killer’s Kiss, his fiction about boxing, before moving on, though never leaving the stuff of Killer’s Kiss behind, as in it he’s busily constructing metaphors which will have the good grace to flow more subtly in the future, all the way down to Eyes Wide Shut which returns us to seedy Manhattan nights and several days of confronting the spirits.
* * * * * *
Killer’s Kiss
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Story by Stanley Kubrick
Frank Silvera–Vincent Rapallo
Jamie SMith–Davey Gordon
Irene Kane–Gloria Price
Jerry Jarret–Albert the Fight Manager
Released 1955
