IdyllopusPress Presents

Barry Mahon’s oeuvre consists primarily of 60s sex flicks/exploitation films, though his bio at IMDB focuses on his having been Errol Flynn’s manager. At the end of his production career he did a few children’s films, showcasing his son, which are supposed to be…bizarre.

The question? How can I rationalize spending $30 on a DVD of two of these kiddie films? They’re not available at Netflix. MST3K is reported to have said they never fooled with Mahon’s children’s films as mocking them would have just been sad and made them look like bullies.

I came across Mahon via catching a few of TCM’s Latino films this month, one last night having been produced, directed and shot by Rick Carrier, whose other credits seem to consist of exploitation films done with Mahon. TCM gives “Strangers in the City” a favorable review and it seemed well-intentioned enough. Still, from the beginning it was confusing, the gritty urban cinema-verite was nipped at the heels by exploitation and finally wheeled and flew headlong into its arms at the end. The film was, however, curious enough that afterward I looked up Rick Carrier and thus came aross Mahon’s “The Wonderful Land of Oz” and “Jack and the Beanstalk”.

A really good incentive to immediately wash your dishes after dinner and take out the trash is because you never know when the police are going to be trekking through your apartment to get to the back courtyard. At least the place was tidy otherwise.

Watching a piece on Las Vegas in which “no notice” evictions are taking place. The renter has been paying on their rent while the owner of the property has been going through foreclosure proceedings and not notified the renter. Then the bank sends out the police to kick out the tenants with no notice whatsoever, and they have only a brief period of time, while the police are there, to move out their belongings.

“If we could give them two hours we’d give them two hours, but obviously I have 16 lock-outs that I have to do today and I couldn’t give someone an hour a say or I’d be out 16 hours. We usually give more time on a foreclosure than a straight eviction where they have 24 hour notice. These guys had no notice. We do have to give them access to a change of clothes, their medication and stuff like that. I can give them 5 to 10 minutes but I’m not going to let them take advantage of me or the other deputy by letting them move everything out.”

And, snap, these people lose everything. All the locks are changed by a locksmith while the tenants scramble to deposit on the front lawn what they can salvage. Computer. Some clothes. One can be vaguely thankful it’s not raining. Then the door is shut and sealed with red tape. A few comments on the video cynically expound on how downsizing is good and they didn’t need all their stuff, that we all have too much stuff. Someone else says the universe is in balance and there is balance even in this. An individual from another country says what in the world is this, that in their country the bank must take on the contract with the tenant and honor it.

Management of eviction of tenants, under these circumstances, is different from state to state and there are those which allow even several months for the tenant to vacate. From what I read, Nevada seems to be one of the particularly nasty ones when it comes to renter’s rights, there not being any. I’ve no idea why the bank should not be obligated to honor the contract with a paying tenant or why they would be adverse to doing so. That they can throw the tenants out in this way and take possession of their belongings is criminal.

If I was a law enforcement officer and my job was to manage evictions of this type, giving 16 families a day only enough time to deposit some clothes and toys on the front lawn, I’d be unable to live with myself.

We too have a rug that kinda tied the room together…and it is suddenly deteriorating over the past couple of months. And I didn’t think it was moths. But what was causing it?

For anyone who’s interested in learning a little bit about hand-knotted Orientals that aren’t what they seem to be, the in-laws gave us ten years ago a rug they’d purchased that they were told was new except for one woman who’d owned it for a month or so then returned it as she decided she couldn’t pay for it and so it was being sold at a reduced price. The past couple of months the pile has started coming away in a spot and didn’t look like moth damage, then accelerated and underneath had the feeling of hard concretized glue. I realized there was a 4 by 2 in area which was now much stiffer than the remainder of the rug and more pile was coming away in another spot in that area showing crumbled glue underneath. I took photos and sent them to an expert and he wrote back saying that my suspicions were correct, that it was a latex repair job, he’d seen quite a bit of it as it used to be common to do.

The expert says that a latex repair job renders the rug worthless as you can’t reweave it because of the hardened latex…which I’d already realized last night as I tried sticking a pin through the concretized area and it was so hard that the pin wouldn’t go through. I also discovered, with my intense scrutiny of the underside, a barely noticeable one inch darning job elsewhere on the rug.

Anyway, it was an interesting and educational experience researching all of this before I determined it was possibly latex and contacted the expert to see what he thought.