Tijuana — Toda La Tripa, Ninguna Gloria

"Tu primer fiesta de toros, tu primer viage a un protibulo y quiza tu primera borrachera, tu primer pelea en un bar, tu primer viaje a la carcel, tu primer soborno...."

Bart Bull, from Details, quoted in Tijuana la horrible; entre la historia y la mito by Humberto Felix Beruman

Saint Joan of Jett (from SPIN)

Some people really like Joan Jett. The Kerista Islanders of San Francisco, for example, are crazy about her. In fact, they have a pamphlet called "18 Reasons Why We're Crazy About Joan Jett."   They have another pamphlet entitled "The Moral Philosophy of Joan Jett."  They have another publication, "Utopia 2 — Blueprint for Heaven on Earth" that sort of sketches in the details of why a polyfidelitous Haight-Ashbury commune engaged in creative caffeination, junk food therapy, computer consultation, and Gestalt-O-Rama would declare Joan Jett a saint. Sort of.

Last summer, the Keristans actually spoke with Joan, putting her on the speakerphone so everyone could gather around. When it came time to let Joan know she was a saint, they were kind of nervous. "You see, " they told her, "we have this paranoia that you're going to think we're like Rastafarians and the way they felt about Haile Selassie." You can see how they'd be paranoid that way, right? But it's not like that at all, because even though Joan is a saint, the Keristans are totally into equality. "We've gone through this in our mind," they explained, "even before we became your fans. We know that all human beings are equal, even if they're astonishing artists like Leonardo. You're in the Leonardo category."

And who was Joan Jett to disagree? "You guys are very articulate, and I don't get that weirdo vibe at all," she said, practically the Patron Saint of Graciousness.

(more to follow...)

Steampunk Paris — Bohemians from Bohemia, et la Rue de la Not So Very Expensive Shoes

Ah, Paris! Then and Now, veritable site and verified Verne-ian source of Steampunk! Ancient metropolis whose looming symbol, Le Tour Eiffel, has magically transmogrified from Engineering Marvel Of The Modern Age into a quaint anachronistic key-chain fob. But Steampunk — Le Punk å Vapeur — seems to comprehend Le Tour Eiffel best: Plainly, obviously, apparently, definitely,  it's a hitching post for dirigibles, conveniently located for international airships to disembark the duded-up likes of distinguished Daguerreotypist Camillus S. Fly, dauntless dental surgeon Dr. Holliday, and a spare Earp or two, each and all disenchanted with the freshness of Tombstone, Arizona's oysters, to sample the glorious assortment of huitre et homard arriving at breakneck speeds on gleaming super-streamlined seafood locomotives, avec lobster-claw-inspired cow-catchers, les receveurs de vache a la homard.

The ultra-annoying putt-putt of one-cylinder petrol-powered guillotines encircling the Egyptian obelisk at Place de la Concorde is only somewhat alleviated by the inimitable trill of that latest and greatest of technologically-advanced instruments, the Accordion, sexily squeezed by bohemians emigrated direct from Bohemia.  Later, in the darkest districts — neon is being invented in ultra-moderne Paris even as we speak, but its glow can never illuminate the furtive back alleys — accordions will warble wickedly as the devilish demi-monde dares that forbidden dance, le Apache!  But now, in the gleaming day, no farther than a champagne cork can fly on its absurd invisible wings, tiny two-man pedal-powered submarines lurk in the Seine, periscopes erectly alert, peering and leering up at the schools of arm-in-arm fishnet-legged femmes clicking their heels down into the Metro — yet another absolute marvel of the modern age. (The Parisian woman, we mean.) Shall they get off their sleek Michelin-tired train at Arts et Metier? Emerge into its copper-clad-and-riveted station, handily equipped with portholes? Moderne et retro et tres, tres chic? Oui, bien sur!

Do these daring darling steam-powered girls set sail, heels clack-clicking the cobblestones, to la Rue of the Not So Very Expensive Shoes? Where exists even now, only just nearby, the original laboratory of Georges Melies, inventor of all cinema? Melies, he whose most famous film, A Trip To The Moon — perhaps Steampunk's central artifact, perhaps even its dream come true — is so cavalierly dismissed as a comedy and a science-fiction, when clearly, obviously, plainly it is a supremely accurate documentary, circa 1902, of the ill-fated French Expedition To The Moon? Wherein Le Academie Francais Of Long-Bearded Astro-Alchemists assembled — as ever, with lots of leggy girl assistants — to cannon-fire themselves smack into the eye of the grimacing Moon, and then, upon insulting assault from annoying Moonmen less congenial to Franco-colonization than proper etiquette might suggest, managed to fall all the way back to Earth (which is to say, France).  It is, indeed, a moving monument to Man's Deep Need To Dump Evian Bottles On Other Planets. In fact, in recognition of the film's powerful economic tidal pull, Thomas Edison, All-American Inventor Of Everything, managed to snake Melies out of the distribution rights, proving, even in the fin de siecle of the turn of that century's velo-spokes, the Internet is the New Supreme Court.

Bu, mais non, they're going, this gaggle of goggle-wearing gals, to giggle at the spectacle of the the bat-winged aeroplane at the Musee de Science et Industrie, pinned there, a butterfly on corkboard, a larval Lindbergh.  Oh, and also to glance winsomely — wantonly, if necessary — at the dreadlocked steampunk boys who wander the Musee studiously checking their gimcrack wrist-chronographs and consulting tiny miniature brass telephones. But there — wait!  Those two white-haired old men?  Isn't that Jules Verne strolling with Mark Twain? And this glowing, sizzling, beeping ray-gun Mr. Twain has pulled — can he truly be pointing it at Monsieur Verne?

(excerpt) Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house in the rusty corrugated iron ghetto graffiti non-valelt-parking exterior of LA

     "Anyway, it had all proved pretty thrilling to all kinds of ultra-upscale and high-end magazines,  and even to daily newspapers and other such slum-dwellers, this super-stimulating non-valet parking juxtaposition of Dennis Hopper and Frank Gehry and the ghetto and the graffiti and the corrugated iron exterior of Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house. Me, I could never ever really figure out which locution was correct, or at least more correct — was it Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house? Or Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house? I think it depended on what magazine you were working for, and how glossy the magazine's pages were."

Tom Waits; Boho Blues

Tom Waits saves cigarette coupons. Moths fly from his change purse. The keys fall off his piano. Welcome to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. . . it's showtime!
by Bart Bull
(published in Spin)

Tosca, Tuesday, late, Columbus near Broadway, San Francisco.

This is a fine bar, a lovely bar, loud but not too loud. The jukebox plays scratchy opera music. Francis Coppola is in back where the tables and booths are. He's listening to Lauren Hutton tell a story and when he laughs, so does everybody else. Sam Shepard stands up from his stool at the bar to pay his tab. His MasterCard falls to the floor, unnoticed except by the redhead standing nearby. She puts her foot on top of it and carries on her conversation. Shepard leaves. Lauren Hutton leaves. Coppola and his people leave. Almost everybody leaves. The bartender works a rag across the bar, and in the doorway behind him we see someone who looks just like Tom Waits. He peers in, squints, rubbing his head. A cigarette butt, stepped on but still glowing, trails smoke across the floor, left to right. He steps through the smoke and goes to the jukebox, searches. He finds a quarter in his pants, punches buttons. A tenor yelps. It's "Nessun dorma," from Puccini's "Turandot."

A pink paper cocktail umbrella, the kind that sprouts at the rims of colorful tropical drinks, blows across the floor at the foot of the stage, left to right, pushed by an invisible wind.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks, and railroad boots. A big barrel-bellied woman sits next to him, one leg draped over his knee. She's wearing a red flamenco dress and a black mantilla, and her name is Val Diamond. She has eyeballs painted on her eyelids. She can see you with her eyes open; she watches you with her eyes closed. Polaroids are scattered on the stage at their feet.

TOM: I don't understand golf.
VAL: (mutters sympathetically)
TOM: It needs to have more sex. (Gleaming lightbulb appears directly over
his head.) Night golf!
VAL: Somebody won a lot of money golfing recently.
TOM: They get more money than boxers.
VAL: That doesn't seem right.
TOM: It doesn't seem right. Somebody gets beat up for an hour and somebody else hits a ball into a hole. Doesn't seem right.

From the floor, the DIRECTOR watches them through a little black lens, through his director's viewfinder. He hands the viewfinder to his assistant and walks off. The assistant stares carefully through the lens. Tom's zipper is at half mast.

It's dawn. Bats are hurrying back to the belfry, and below, one hand on the rope that rings the bell, Ken Nordine waits. Nordine, the word-jazzed Voice Of God as heard on Levi's commercials, has something he wants to say. This time it's Tom Waits' words and Ken Nordine's voice; sometimes it's the other way around. Here's how to tell: Tom Waits' voice sounds like he gargles with gravel; Ken Nordine's sounds like he's selling three truckloads of soft margarine in handy re-usable plastic tubs. There is no Devil (for our purposes here, at least), just God when he's drunk. Ken Nordine, God as we understand Him (for our purposes here), is not inebriated in the least, but he's willing to act (for our purposes here). He has something he'd like to say.

KEN NORDINE: (gritty voice) It's like Jack Nicholson said to me one time - Continuity is for sissies.

We're in a nightclub, an empty nightclub. A nearly empty nightclub, with a camera crew setting up in the back. Ken Nordine's butter-flavored voice is the only light.

KEN NORDINE: For our purposes here, perhaps some explanation is in order. Perhaps not. Welcome, in any case, to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club.

We see the stage now, bulbs flashing in sequence across the proscenium.

KEN NORDINE: Proscenium. Butter-flavored proscenium.

We see Tom Waits in a tuxedo, slumped in a chair at the center of the stage.

KEN NORDINE: We have a purpose here. We are filming a video here, a video to accompany the tune "Blow Wind Blow," from Tom Waits' new album, Frank's Wild Years.As Nordine speaks, we see Waits rise from his slump (as it were) and sit stiffly upright. His lips move precisely in time with Nordine's words, and his arms deliver florid gestures.

KEN NORDINE: But Frank's Wild Years is not merely an album. Frank's Wild Years is also a play, a stage production. Frank's Wild Years is two...

Val and Tom are holding breath mints in front of them. They click the packages together carefully.

KEN NORDINE: ...two mints in one. And the video from "Blow Wind Blow" is not merely a scene from the play, but an all-new and improved production. Tom is Frank, as it were, or perhaps he isn't, but in any case, he's a ventriloquist. He casts his voice into the rest of the cast. And the rest of the cast is ably portrayed by Val Diamond and a prosthetic leg.

Waits reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a pack of those personal details that reveal so much about a character's character. He smokes pre-war Lucky Strikes in the Raymond Loewy-designed green pack. Or Chesterfields, named after W.C. Fields' favorite son. In truth, they're Raleighs, and he takes a dramatic drag off the cigarette, makes nonchalant expressions as he holds it in, then looks off in another direction as Val, the ventriloquist's dummy, exhales a white cloud. Waits takes the pack, crumples it, flicks it into the wastebasket hidden in the wings. A pause, another pause, and then he leaps up, dumping Val to the floor, and we see him bent over the wastebasket, digging around for the cigarette pack. He finds it, tears a square off the back.

TOM: (turns to the camera) I save the coupons.

He sits back down. His lips keep moving.

KEN NORDINE: In truth, he doesn't smoke anymore. That would be too much like the old Tom Waits. And the old Tom Waits is over, done with, defunct, finito. Aesthetically, at least. He made his bed and he slept in it until it was past checkout time. Writing songs about dead-end kids on dead-end streets became a dead-end street. Damon Runyon demanded royalties.

Waits is making nonchalant expressions up on the stage. Val is staring baleful and blue-eyed, her eyelids clamped shut.

KEN NORDINE: And yet here we are in a nightclub, a nearly empty nightclub. Have you noticed the postage-stamp cocktail tables? The chains of garter snaps that decorate the walls? The black Naugahyde banquette booths? Once upon a time, this was Ann's 440 Club, where Lenny Bruce got that illustrious start of his. Ah, but that was along ago, and for more than 20 years this has been Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. Welcome. Have you met Miss Keiko yet?

A yellow spotlight comes on in the back of the club, illuminating a black and white photo. A signature in black felt-tip pen reads, "Miss Keiko - 1969." She stands forever on the toes of one foot, gazing over her shoulder, lifting her long dark hair above her bare back. Her costume is brief, her breasts are tassel-tipped projectiles. Tom Waits stands nearby, appraising the photograph.

TOM: (gravel-voiced) If I was a girl, I'd want to look like that.

Francis Coppola's sergeant-at-arms drops by to let Waits know that Francis is dining next door at Enrico's. He's willing to wait until the video crew takes a lunch break if Tom would care to come over and talk. There's a part for him in an upcoming project. Waits is sitting at the Chi Chi Club bar with a guy called Biff, waiting for the crew to set up the shot. Miss Keiko gazes down at them from over her shoulder.

TOM: Vegas. She worked the big rooms in Vegas. You know, I saw a guy go down with a heart attack at a crap table, and his wife was pounding on his chest, and the pit boss said, "New shooter coming up." I swear to God.

KEN NORDINE: (sounding godlike) Search me. Sounds like it could be true.

TOM: New dice, new shooter, keep it moving. Cold. Cold-blooded.

BIFF: How far away were you?

TOM: I was the new shooter.

BIFF: Were you wealthy when you left the table?

TOM: Nah. I gamble with scared money. I'm a tightwad. Moths in my change purse.

He gets up to get some cigarettes from the machine, although he doesn't smoke anymore. Moths burst forth from his change purse. He buys Raleighs. Doesn't smoke any.

TOM: So what do you think is suitable for manly footgear, Biff?

BIFF: Roman sandals. And beads to go with 'em.

TOM: I've been asking everyone I, uh, come into contact with, because I'm doin' a little survey. I'd say we're in a crisis in terms of American footgear.

BIFF: Slip-on loafers.

TOM: Nah, can't go that route. You can't go down that road, for down that road danger lies.

BIFF: How come?

TOM: I don't like the name. Loafers. For a guy that works as hard as you do, it's just not right.

BIFF: You could call 'em slip-ons, but...

TOM: That's even worse. That's worse than loafers. You wouldn't want me to call you a slip-on.

BIFF: You got a point there.

TOM: Points. I always gravitate toward points. Things are getting better - ten years ago, you couldn't find any points. Things are getting better, in shoes and music both.

Lunch comes, lunch goes. Coppola waits impatiently at Enrico's; Waits tells Biff of movie roles he's been offered. Coppola's fingers tap the tabletop.

TOM: Satanist cult leaders. The Iceman. I could've been the Iceman in 'Iceman'.

BIFF: You turned that down?

TOM: Yep. Big mistake. Look where the guy that took it is today. I could've been the hitcher in 'The Hitcher', too.

BIFF: Jesus Christ! You turned that down? You could've had a career. You could be Boris Karloff by now.

TOM: Yep. Big mistake.

Coppola, alfresco at Enrico's, fumes silently. Fumes loudly. Fumes. Vows revenge. One week later, Waits wakes up in bed next to the oil-splattered head of a 350 Chevy. He shrieks.

A small pile of pink confetti blows across the floor in front of the stage, left to right, blown by a hand-held fan.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks, and railroad boots. His sideburns are going grey. Val Diamond wears a red flamenco dress. Her ginger hair is piled high in Spanish columns. Her left leg is draped over his right knee. Black fishnet stockings.

TOM: You know who Dick Shawn is? Was?

VAL: The World's Second-Greatest Entertainer? The guy who did that show called "The World's Second-Greatest Entertainer"?

Although he doesn't smoke, smoke rises from an invisible Raleigh between his fingers. He taps his ashes absentmindedly. They fall onto the brim of the top hat at his feet.

TOM: I did a little show with him, played the Wall Street Wino. It never aired. He had a dozen midgets on it. Thirteen.

A pause.

TOM: He died onstage. His son was in the audience. He was in the middle of a bit about death, and he threw himself to the stage in a simulated heart attack. And it was real. And everybody in the audience was laughing. Not a bad thing to hear in your last moment.

More ashes, real as life, fall into the hat; real smoke rises from the invisible Raleigh.

TOM: Good way to go, I guess. Maybe now they'll air the show.


The Chi Chi Club is empty, near empty. One chair is at the center of the stage, one chair is set in the center of the floor below. From the chair on the floor, we hear the voice of Ken Nordine.

KEN NORDINE: Curious as it is that Tom Waits abandoned his signature style of writing, it's every bit as intriguing that he jettisoned the very sound of his established style at the same time. Once known as something of a jazzed-down beat generation throwback, as the romantic street poet of the least romantic of un-poetic streets, as a narrative storyteller of the most talented sort, as a truly gifted liar, he suddenly and abruptly ceased spinning yarns. And as he did, his music itself came unraveled. Or if not unraveled, then...

A long pause. Long.

KEN NORDINE: Perhaps someone else would be better qualified to discuss what happened to the music of Tom Waits. Perhaps it would pay to introduce Harry Partch.

A small spotlight illuminates the chair onstage.

KEN NORDINE: Harry Partch, sadly deceased, was an American original. An eccentric, that is; a tinkerer, a free spirit, an inventor of instruments and of himself. A nut, in other words. A Californian, like Tom Waits, and like Tom Waits, a man who lived the hobo's life long before he captured it in music. He invented his remarkable 43-tone musical scale, and he invented gorgeous and monumental instruments specifically for playing his odd and glorious music. You may have to grant him a certain grandiosity, a certain tendency toward the making of Major Pronouncements, a certain self-centeredness, a certain extreme certainty. Harry Partch received so little recognition during life, and he required so much of it. He called his musical scale "just intonation," and he felt entirely justified in doing so.

The voice that comes from the chair onstage is deep and rugged and rigorously resonant. It sounds much like John Huston's acceptance speech upon his being unanimously voted God.

HARRY PARTCH: As I understand it, this young Tom Waits fellow has had some small contact with members of the ensemble that serves the noble purpose of preserving my music and my instruments, the Mazda Marimba, the Marimba Eroica, the Cloud Chamber Bowls, and all the rest. This contact, however limited, can't have hurt him, although it's impossible to say how much it has helped since what I've heard of his stuff is not more than a literal-minded bastardization of the eternal principles behind my system of just intonation. He'd be best served to study a little closer if he cares to attempt any further homage. Still, there is some small sense of my own music's grandeur in the young fellow's stuff. Like me, he's interested in the largest and the smallest of sounds, and like me, he's heard the music of the highway and the resonant clang of the beer bottle tapped with a church key. IMAGINE the sound of a hundred Chinamen beating spikes into the ground with nine-pound sledgehammers, laying the rails of the transcontinental railway! And the scream of the steam whistle as a locomotive flies over those same spikes. Imagine the snores of hobos sleeping in the open boxcars. Imagine the contrapuntal snores of the conductor comfortably bunked up in the caboose. IMAGINE THE THUNDER, the mighty prairie thunder that wakes them all from their slumbers! And imagine the raw COURAGE a composer would need to even ATTEMPT to create such sounds! I wish the young fellow a great deal of luck. I admire his theatricality.

At the back of the club, at the bar, a light glows. Tom Waits and the guy called Biff are back there, a beer bottle in front of each of them. Tom is not smoking, yet smoke rises from between two of his fingers.

TOM: I traveled with a gas pump for years.

He tosses back a little beer.

TOM: I still have nightmare where the whole crowd is moving toward me and then the keys are falling off the piano and the curtain rips and my shoe comes off and I'm crawling toward the wings and the crowd is moving toward me, hurling insults at me. And car parts. I played cow palaces, rodeos, sports facilities, hockey arenas with the ice beneath the cardboard. It cools off the place. It's alright in August, but it's a bitch in February. But if you can appreciate the rich pageantry of it...

Biff tosses back a little beer.

TOM: Never have your wallet with you onstage. It's bad luck. You shouldn't play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.

Tom tosses back a little beer.

TOM: I don't play the piano much anymore. I don't compose on it. It's hard. Because sometimes it feels like it's all made out of ice. It's cold. It's square, so much about it is square, you know, and music is round. And so sometimes I think it puts corners on your stuff.

Tom and Biff toss back a little beer. Behind them, we see a single chair and a single spotlight on the stage, and now we can hear that Harry Partch has never stopped talking.

HARRY PARTCH: (from afar) ...the wrongheadedness of the chromatic scale of the Western world and the deleterious effect it has had on untold generations of innocent ears...a gang of Irishmen headed due west with nine-pound sledgehammers of their own...

A pink balloon blows across the floor in front of the stage, left to right.

Tom Waits wears black tie and tails, red socks and railroad boots. Val Diamond wears a red dress and a black top hat. "Blow Wind Blow" is playing frantically in the background, sung by Alvin of the Chipmunks. When the soundman has re-cued it, the take begins.

A clapboard claps. A pink balloon blows across the floor, left to right.

TOM: Welcome to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club. It's showtime!

Two pump organs, an alto horn, a glockenspiel. A gravel voice grumbles, singing. The voice comes from Val's mouth, and her eyes, clamped closed, stare blue ahead. Tom Waits, ventriloquist, nonchalant, takes a deep, dramatic drag on his cigarette; a smoke puffs from Val's mouth. Her lips grumble his song. He unscrews her wooden leg, pulls a pint of liquor from within it, swigs. He caps the bottle, puts it back, screws her leg back on. His cigarette rests between her fingers, his song sings off her lips. He takes his hand out from behind her back to scratch his head, and she slumps, but he catches her before she falls. The song grumbles towards an end, and as it ends, she pulls a dry-cell battery out of his back. He slumps, slumps and flops. He twitches in rigor mortis. Confetti falls free from his hand, gathers in a little pile. A hand-held fan blows it, left to right.

Wrap. The crew ascends to the stage, leaves nothing behind but a steamer trunk and a sousaphone. Tom sits on the trunk; the sousaphone sits on its side. A member of the crew grabs it and leaves.

TOM: Aw, bring the sousaphone back.

It comes back. Waits climbs inside it, adjust the mouthpiece. It makes hideous bleats, like someone is forcing it to watch its mother being turned into a coffee table. Waits' cheeks puff out, his face turns red. He hoists it off like a weight lifter. He leaves the stage with it under his arm, his tuxedo tails flapping behind. He puts his little finger in his ear and wrings it vigorously.

TOM: What should I do with this thing?

No answer. "Nessun dorma," from Puccini's 'Turandot."

Henry Ford

from The New Vulgate:

Henry Ford was a nut, but he was an ungodly rich American nut, and when he got a bug up his butt, he had the resources to do something about it. He started his own newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and when that was insufficient for spreading the hot news about the Hebrew-haters preferred hoax, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” he distributed it through Ford dealerships and had it translated into German. When he decided he needed a dam, he hired forty Negroes to dig him one, specifying an all-colored crew to his contractor, then had them knock off work to sing him Stephen Foster songs — he was especially fond of “Old Black Joe” and “Old Kentucky Home.” Once he decided that the contemporary world had gone to hell in a handbasket, he set himself up with a Never-Never Land right there in Dearborn and named it Greenfield Village. It was a psychic twin to John D. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller's Colonial Williamsburg (and both places were kin to Walt Disney's seven-eighths scaled Main Street USA, with its banjo-spanking Dixieland band, striped coats and straw hats direct from the blackface minstrel walkaround.)

These were industrialist fantasies of pre-industrial feudal villages — once she'd presided over the founding of the Museum of Modern Art, Mrs. Rockefeller sent forth her minions, collectors who would shortly be dubbed "curators" and they worked New England and the Mid-Atlantic states the way maidenly New Englanders were working the mountains of the South, hunting for the pure and the purer. Her employees gathered up weather vanes and quilts, pried Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs off the front of barns, loaded trucks with cigar-store Indians and sewing baskets and duck decoys, each and every one of them by that celebrated and super-prolific folk artiste "Anonymous." Then she commissioned her curators to come up with a definition of "folk art" that would fit a collection that included no totem poles or kachinas or Navajo blankets or santos or bultos or bottle trees or wrought iron work or anything else made by anyone who wasn't rustic, white, and located on the eastern seaboard. Mary Black, the director of Abby's collection, declared, "The genesis, rise and disappearance of folk art is closely connected with the events of the 19th Century when the dissolution of the old ways left rural folk everywhere with an unused surplus of time and energy." It was a theory to warm the heart of any Rockefeller.

Henry Ford, on the other hand, was a nouveau riche buttinski who supplied his own damn theories, and plenty of 'em. He turned collectors of his own loose, hunting for backwoods fiddlers who could remember the words and melodies of the old tunes, the fiddle tunes that were American's true pure heritage. He set himself up a dance hall in his factory's Engineering Lab, with his fiddle-and-dulcimer orchestra on hand at all times. He hired a dance instructor and produced a book, Good Morning — After a Sleep of 25 Years Old-Fashioned Dancing Is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford, then distributed hundreds of thousands of copies, just as he did with the Protocols. The book's rules of etiquette were as rigid and unwavering as a manual for a mass-production line.

By now, Henry Ford had dance fever. He traveled the country preaching the gospel of his square-danced etiquette. At his factory, engineers were constantly being dragged onto the dance floor, and on his Georgia plantation, Negro children were taught the polka. He created his own record label for "Henry Ford's Old Time Dance Orchestra." When his collectors brought Stradivarius violins for his approval, he'd saw off a fiddle tune, then write a check. He purchased the cottage where Stephen Foster was born and had it moved to Greenfield Village. He bought a Cape Cod windmill, and English shepherd's cottage, the schoolhouse where the author of McGuffey's Reader swatted his first sleeping students, the Springfield courthouse where Abe Lincoln lost his first court case and the Ford's Theater chair Lincoln was sitting in when John Wilkes Booth shot him. He came within days and dimes of buying a pickled corpse alleged to be Booth. He tried to have Foster's Old Dog Tray exhumed and stuffed but the operation was a failure. He purchased a dozen railroad cars of research on the folkloric history of "Mary Had A Little Lamb." (The poem's author died at seventeen, the lamb was gored by a cow, and Mary herself ended up in an asylum.)

Henry Ford had hated farm life when he was a boy stuck on a farm, and he invented his way out of it — a couple of ways. Late on a night in 1936, one of the many family acts who were making it through the Depression off country music drove down a Michigan road trying to find a tourist court so they could sleep. It was the Rhodes Family — brother Speck Rhodes would play bass with Porter Wagoner for many years, all the while playing the Toby role, a black-toothed rube variant from the minstrel days, the white Jim Crow, the Arkansas Traveler's squatter. Exhausted, they found a country road — it sure seemed like a country road — so they pulled over and slept in the car. A guard woke them in the morning; they had spent the night in Henry Ford's driveway. He'd let them stay there because they drove a Ford. "Sure enough," says Speck's brother Dusty, "...here comes Henry Ford with two bodyguards. He was a real nice fellow and after we talked to him for a while he asked us to plays some music. He really did like country music." He asked Dusty Rhodes if he wanted to play one of his fiddles, then sent the servants to fetch it. "This is a genuine Stradivarius violin," Ford told him, "and is worth $150,000." He asked me if I would play 'Red Wing' for him because that was his favorite fiddle tune. So I played 'Red Wing' and several other tunes for him on that Stradivarius fiddle."

Ford sure did love country music. "Red Wing" had been written and published in 1907 by Tin Pan Alley's Kerry Mills, author of "Rastus On Parade" and of "At A Georgia Camp Meeting" as well, the biggest cakewalk hit of the whole coon song era. Mills had been head of the violin department of the University of Michigan School of Music; he'd snagged the melody, all too appropriately, from Schumann's "The Merry Peasant." To this day, "Red Wing" is known as an old fiddle tune. (My mom, Lawrence Welk's cousin, Francesca Schweitzer Bull, has always played it oom-pah accordion style on the organ, but that's pretty much how she plays everything.) It is an old fiddle tune, just as it was in 1937, maybe just as it was by 1908. The vogue for coon songs was cooling down, and a brief fad for frontier Indian romance numbers came and went. It was a coon song of a different sort, and Henry Ford was right. It was country music, just as his driveway was close enough to a country road to fool country folks in a country band. Henry Ford, the man who killed off the horse-and-buggy-era, once the fastest man in the world, died by the light of a coal lamp. And that $150,000 fiddle of his? "Well," says Dusty Rhodes, "I have to admit that I didn't like it any better than the one Daddy made for me."

Aphorisme Soixaante-Neuf; (One of a Series; Collect 'Em All)

Some times the best thing for your reputation is the person attacking it.
(Corollary: Not always, just sometimes. )

Bob Brozman — He Wrote The Book

So now we're short another screwball, and down a knucklehead too.  And completely missing a genius and a half.
Rest in peace, buddy.
But you probably won't do much resting, will you?
http://www.bobbrozman.com/

Less Popular Than Jesus.

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Messin' With The Hook; John Lee Hooker profile excerpts from SPIN

I got given carte blanche at SPIN to write whatever I wanted, really — really! —  but one time I got asked point blank:  Who do you most want to write about?  Who would you write about if you could write about anybody?

Three-word instant response:  John Lee Hooker.

And because it was SPIN.... well, hell —just go do it.  That easy.  Oh, and write as best you can. Period.

I'm'na post the whole thing eventually, maybe, but I guess I'll just cherry-pick some stuff.   There were one or two paragraphs edited out —great paragraphs, of course, deathless prose crucified, don't you know — but because it was SPIN,  I really got to tell a whole set of tales.   And then... well, there's another small set of tales to go with it, about what happened after, but really, the real tale is the story.  Which won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, for what that's worth.  SPIN's first, and I don't know, maybe only. (Journalists, those tough-minded cynics, offer each other more gilded bowling trophies than Hollywood would ever dare.)

Here's a couple of hunks.  (And I always kinda loved the subhead, the subtitle.  "Messin' With The Hook:  John Lee Hooker,  the living link between country blues and uptown R&B, answers the question that has baffled mankind throughout the ages: How Can I Impress The Ladies?"

(In retrospect, I wish we'd added another How or two or three in there, maybe.  How?  I don't know how.)

Some hunks:

"Elderly Bluesman interviewing Little Stevie Spielberg: 'So, tell me, man — what Is The Movies?'"

"Hooker may have been the toast of Detroit when he drifted in during the mid-'40s, but he supported his celebrity by sweeping factory floors and swabbing urinals."

"Hooker is saying:
'We got about ten [songs] there now.  Like I told you, don't take no three days for me to do no album, er um...'
Hite: We'll go for a triple album!
Hooker: 'You go for a triple album, you gonna go for triple money.' [Laughs}
Hite: 'We got lots of money.  This is a hit album — don't worry about that money, it'll come rollin' in.''  It's a carefree phrase that echoes through the ages, spoken who knows how many white times, etched into how many million black minds. 'Don't worry about that money...'
Hooker: [serious as death] 'You gotta worry about that now.  Nothin' but the best and later for the garbage.'
Hite: 'What's that?'
Hooker: 'Natural facts.'
The song that follows is 'Burnin' Hell,' and it's—"

And it's a masterpiece, one of the great frozen moments of the entire Twentieth Century.  Sometime I'll put up the rest of this, the whole thing.  Everything.  Nothin' but the best and later for the garbage.

The Neon Cowboy Liberation Front— Now It Can Be Told

In my experience, being a terrorist has a whole lot to do with falling asleep in front of the TV on the couch of your former girlfriend's parents' house on Friday night on the border of Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona.

Maybe it works out differently for other terrorists on other terrorist missions, but really, I wonder. I think there are certain similarities, somewhat.

Still, now the story can be told. The statute of limitations has expired, and everything sensible has been tossed into the dustbin of history. (That means you're stuck with me telling the tale.) And plus, that historical dumpster seems to have not been dumped out for a couple of decades or so, raising a small bit of a stink at first, and then dying down and drying up, and turning to dusty dust, and from there, at long last,  to lint. And since all my fellow Neon Cowboy Liberation Front comrades are so effectively on the lam, so successfully fugitives from the law one and all, so deeply underground that nobody gives half a good gotdamn . . . well, I guess I'd better cough up. And our ringleader, our Fidel, our Tania, our Ayatollah, has done so successful a job of losing her mind's marbles — and with it her scrupulously-kept scrapbook of our mass-media exploits — that it's left for me, clinging to this here handy floating coffin, to tell the tale. Call me . . . aw, hell, call me whatever you want to call me.

Same as ever, really.

Okay, so it's Friday night and I'm crashed out at my former girlfriend Mary's parents — Mister Excitement to the rescue. Where Mary was, I don't know, but let's all hope she was out horsing around with someone who wasn't snoozing away on her parents olive-green vinyl couch, who hadn't fallen asleep watching old movies on what was in those days considered a pretty dang big screen TV.

I'd let myself in, naturally. Here's the kind of household it was: If you knocked on the door, they knew you didn't belong there. Everybody just came over to Carol and Phil Wagner's house there on the border, on la frontera of Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona — "Super-rich Scottsdale," Carol invariably called it, barking her smoke-ringed laughter — parked the car, walked in the door, grabbed a beer or an ice tea out of the refrigerator, maybe lit a cigarette, and then sat down and started arguing about politics or sports or something. Carol was invariably always there, unless she'd gone off to the grocery store for more beer and cigarettes, and when Phil got home from the factory, he had to sort of work his way in through the crowd. It was pretty much agreed that he got the good couch, not the olive-green plaid Scotchgard one, but the fake-leather one, up close and personal to the TV, and that he was allowed to switch the TV over to the All-Sports Network — unless there was something pretty dang major going on with the hostages at the US embassy in Iran or something, in which case he and Carol would work it out. She'd win, if she wanted to, and Phil would win if it was Monday Night Football, because she wanted to watch too. Either way, everybody's conversation roared on.

Well, so there I am, crashed out on the couch, Saturday night, probably some old movie on TV, Mary's out horsing around, Phil and Carol are rather amazingly nowhere to be seen, the whole place is a ghost town. I walk in the door, grab a beer or two, turn to some dumb movie, and fall right asleep. Next thing I know, Carol's going "Bart, get your butt up!" She and Phil had been off at a party somewhere. I probably grabbed for the remote control and tossed it to Phil, just so he could put it back on sports, where it belonged, instead of some effete-ass black-and-white movie I'd probably been snoring it up over. It was the least I could do.

(more to follow, obviously...)

The Neon Cowboy Liberation Front

Stay tuned for new communiques from the N.C.L.F. — or me, anyway — over the next few days.
Learn the backstory on the grinning cowpoke held captive in the suburban backyard! Discover the never-before-told details of how a daring gang of desperados — or us, anyway — flaunted the law to rescue a Wild West icon! You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll call the cops.... or two out of three of those anyway....

Aphorism Sixty-Six: (One of a Series; Collect the Whole Set!)

Salt — so easy to add, so hard to remove.

Arizona: Copper, Cotton, Citrus, Cattle, and Crazy

(As a kid in Arizona, they used to make you memorize The Five C's, which included "Climate" but not "Communism" nor "Capitalism" nor "Corazon..."; but hey, hence the title for an Arizona-based magazine....) (and yes, dammit, there are such awkward asthmatic aardvarkian-esque things as magazines from Arizona... Dude, we can totally read — we're just not in the mood, so we look at the pictures.)

Arizona's first state governor wasn't a Pontiac dealer.

Instead, he was a Zoroastrian. It was the Pontiac dealer — the guy who came in after the one-eyed newspaper columnist and then, eventually, the Mexican-born ex-boxer — who officially outlawed Martin Luther King Day. Then there was that early governor who refused to approve the state flag. But the governor who saw UFOs over Phoenix came way after that. Then he founded a French cooking school. (There'll be a test on this later, so take notes.)

A white pyramid looms over the mountains where Phoenix and Scottsdale and Tempe crunch together, marking the tomb of that first Zoroastrian governor guy. But since nobody remembers him, or knows why there's a white pyramid parked against the red rocks and cactus, or can figure out just what a Zoroastrian is, it simply serves as a symbol of just exactly how Arizona has always been, and likely always will be. Arizona is intentionally weird, oddball squared, a place where bold eccentrics have historically stumbled in to see just how they stacked up against the nutjobs who were currently running the joint.

Some of those nutjobs, of course, were those dang Indians — like, for instance, the Apaches, who were said to be able to run 50 miles a day (and bear in mind that Arizona was hot as hell, even before they paved it). It's hard to understand why the US Cavalry didn't just turn their horses around and go pick on the Hopi, who were pushovers, and a lot slower too. Perhaps this is why even today our license plates say "The Grand Canyon State" rather than "Famous Frybread," or "Geronimo Lives."

Tombstone, "The Town Too Tough To Die," became "The Town Too Tourist-Dependent To Close Until 9:15 PM," but that was later. Scottsdale used to be "The West's Most Western Town," but that was before it became a golf course. Phoenix ("Park And Lock It; Not Responsible") was built right on top of a system of canals that had originally been constructed by the Hohokam Indians, who wisely disappeared, apparently annoyed by the sight of Apaches sprinting back and forth. Tucson (pronounced "Tuk-sin") has traditionally been distinguished by its lack of canals, and by the fact that it was never the West's Most anything, perhaps its saving grace. Still, it features Old Tucson, where all the Western films that weren't filmed in Hollywood occurred.

Arizona, a place that has been, among other things, part of Old Spain, New Spain, Mexico, New Mexico, Sonora, the official State of Deseret, the Gadsden Purchase, the Compromise of 1850, the glorious Confederacy, the glorious Union, the State of Nevada, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Seven Lost Cities of Cibola, and . . . well, those dang Indians were so lousy at writing names down. Anyway, Arizona has a proud right to a perpetual identity crisis.

Ok, so the Clantons and the Earps were genuine trouble, one and all imported from out of state —snowbirds, in Arizona terms. But during my own lifetime, the Devil's Disciples and Satan's Slaves and the Mongols and the Bandidos and the Hells Angels and the Vagos and all manner of other well-meaning darlings have been among the genuine outlaws. (I used to have a safety-card from one of those charming dance-clubs, until the Secretary-Treasurer needed it back, because it was the only one he had, and there were cute girls in the bar he wanted to impress.) Arizona is the proud state that first established the law that you couldn't wear your hogleg pistol into the topless club, a fine example of our state's firm, focused grasp on practical jurisprudence.

But 'twas ever thus. John C. Fremont, Arizona's first territorial governor, spent most of his career exploring California, for which you can hardly blame him. He was told he had to reside in Arizona, or resign. He resigned.

Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry House...in the Ghetto!

The last time I was in Dennis Hopper's house was — let's be fairly honest — the only time. This was a while ago. Things may have changed a bit since then in Hopper's house, in Dennis Hopper's life. Hell, in my own life too. There may have been some rearranging of the furniture.

Hopper's house is famous, in case you didn't know, for not only being the home of Dennis Hopper but being the house that Frank Gehry built for Dennis Hopper. It was in the ghetto. Or that was its rep, anyway — Frank Gehry had built Dennis Hopper a house in the ghetto, right there in Venice and everything. The LA Times was every bit as titillated as the New York Times and the London Sunday Times, though there was reason to believe the LA Times would have had a harder time finding the ghetto — any local ghetto — on a map.

Of course, Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house in Venice wasn't in a ghetto. Not actually, of course. It was Dogtown, and there was placa all over everywhere, naturally, all kinds of locals-only graffiti. If you took a look, it just said really mild stuff like "West Side Locos," and "Con Safos." Venice has always been nice and funky and sweet that way. But really, the verdant sub-tropical neighborhood where Dennis Hopper had commissioned a Frank Gehry house-clad-in--corrugated-iron could be called a barrio, perhaps, maybe, possibly, but then so could so many of the best parts of Los Angeles. Or at least the parts where great food doesn't come equipped with valet parking. That may well be the way that we can best determine the ghetto parts and the barrio parts of LA from the non-ghetto, non-barrio parts — the presence or, conversely, the absence of valet parking.

Anyway, it had all proved pretty thrilling to all kinds of ultra-upscale and high-end magazines and even daily newspapers and other such slum-dwellers, this super-stimulating non-valet parking juxtaposition of Dennis Hopper and Frank Gehry and the ghetto and the graffiti and the corrugated iron exterior of Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house. Me, I could never never really figure out which locution was correct, or at least more correct — was it Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house? Or Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house? I think it depended on what magazine you were working for, and how glossy the magazine's pages were.

In this case, let it be said, the magazine was HG. Formerly, until only very recently, House & Garden. Which Anna Wintour had only recently boarded, the salty sea-breezes between the UK and the the USA still fresh in her hair, knife clenched in comparatively tiny teeth, promptly prying off the logo, turning the venerable House & Garden, one of the jewels in Conde Nast's crown, into the all-new, all-exciting, much hipper HG. (Over the next year or two, practically all subscribers cancelled, newsstand sales died, and before long, the magazine, which had been around forever, folded. Instantaneously Anna got given Vogue, which had been her undeclared intention all the while. (Grace Mirabella, who had been considering herself Vogue's editor, was, well, notified. By a phone call from a reporter from the New York Post, as I remember.) Conde-Nast brought their former cash-spurting-cow "shelter magazine" back successfully maybe a decade or so later but this time they named it, for unfathomable un-chic reasons, House & Garden. Go figure.

But hey, wasn't me that was working for 'em at the time. It was my pal, my boy James Truman, later to be knighted no less than the Editorial Director of Conde-dang-Nast — arise! Sir Knight! — but at the time, only just the mere cuff-adjusting West Coast editor of HG, an underling, a simple salary-man really, uprooted outlandishly from Manhattan and outposted like a bemused but wary cavalry colonel, albeit one with a posh-ish British accent, dispatched to a frontier Fort Courage in order to keep a peeled eye on the unruly local Injuns. Truman was doing it in perfect style, precise Conde-Nast style, making certain he'd leased a hell of a house in the Hollywood Hills, and he and I were considering putting together a shared writing office above La Fonda, on Wilshire by the Otis Art Institute.... with a fax machine! Of our exclusive own! Which seemed like a big deal! That's how long ago all this was — oh, and the fax machine had a tiny little green-and-purple polka-dotted pterodactyl flying around inside to make it work.

Anyway, among the other LA lifestyle accoutrements essential to the West Coast Dude for HG, Truman could see the absolutely essential necessity of possessing the absolutely essentially right car. As a Brit, and a journalist, he'd long since done the duty required by some tea-stained Parliamentary statute; as with each and every other British journalist ever sent on a junket, he'd got off the plane and onto the shuttle, and immediately rented a red Mustang convertible. (Then, over the course of their two-or-three day stay, they are required by law to drive back and forth along Sunset and the Pacific Coast Highway, before refilling the tank, dropping the car off, and returning home to write a story that emphasizes how shallow and absurd LA is, a story that contains the requisite surreal swaying palm trees within the first paragraph. I've always wondered, given the depth of their research, how come they can't ever pronounce "Los Angeles" right — always with that hard G.)

Truman was much beyond that by now, much beyond. Now he desired, needed, required, a Mustang convertible of his very own. A groovy one, a vintage one, a '64 or '65 or '66 Mustang — in red. As his pal, as a Californian, and as a car guy — though, let's face it, his dad had, after all, been a Jaguar dealer — it was my solemn duty to advise him, and in all good conscience, I had to let him in on The Truth: those old Mustangs pretty much suck. They're just sad little Ford Fairlanes, the lame-o econo car that Ford slapped together to battle the Volkswagen Bug, with a sexier body pasted on top. There's not one of 'em, no matter how beautifully restored, that doesn't rattle like a rusted bucket of rusty bolts. Naturally, as old friends and comrades and confidants, he listened closely to my sage counsel, and didn't believe me. He went and drove a couple of fresh new old-ass Mustangs, and discovered that, lo and behold — who'd'a thunk it? — they pretty much sucked. The redder they were, the more they rattled. And they cornered like tanks — like water tanks. Like fish tanks.

So instead, we found him a mint perfect '68 Firebird with a 326, a convertible, with that really cool grey-olive metallic paint-job that Pontiac was doing in those days, and matching interior. It was so wicked, so quick, so cool. It looked amazing. Because it was amazing. And perfect, and pristine. Until, of a wet Saturday morning, first good rain of the season, streets all nice and slick and oily-wet, he banged it into the back of somebody beautiful and blonde. As I remember, he was looking at the girl when he ran into her Volkswagen Rabbit up near Hillhurst. Although I may be confusing it with the time I banged my Mom's '68 Camaro, driving underage without a license, while I was looking at a girl. Probably both, actually.

Anyway, I get this panicked call from him. He's late — he's supposed to be out at Dennis Hopper's house. Watching over, shepherding, facilitating a Matthew Ralston photo shoot. At Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house. And then sweeping up afterward by interviewing Dennis Hopper. But he'd just pranged his perfect Pontiac, and now, profound remorse, powerful panic, pitiful regret, with that sickening sense of a world turned upside down, with no taxis responding because of the rain, he needed me to run him out to Venice. And maybe stick around to be helpful. (Which, as everybody knows, I am. Helpful — that's me.) Plus, as a guy who'd personally spoiled at least one pristine, perfectly bitchin' '68 GM product myself (327, automatic, with that amazing cool console shifter; pristine white interior), I was only too glad to be of comfort on the way out to Venice. Hey, dude, man, things like this just happen — wet roads, fast cars, distracting girls. Distracting cars, fast roads, oily girls. It's a lot like life. It's lifelike. It's especially easy to be philosophical when it's not your broken Firebird.

So we rolled, in my major primary ride of that time, which was a black '68 Pontiac GTO with RamAir hood scoops and beefed-up sway-bars with urethane bushings and old-school Cragar mag wheels and that amazing 400 cubic-inch Pontiac big block. If you were worried about Dennis Hopper's neighborhood in Venice being the ghetto, you definitely didn't have to worry about it after you'd parallel-parked that bad boy. A lot of the semi-vatos and their cousins who came out to have a look once they heard the dual exhausts setting off their car alarms were in fact related to the guys who took it as a privilege when I used to downshift into the valet-parking districts of LA, the guys who shoulder-shoved the other valets away so they could snag the keys and cruise around the block a couple times before they had to park yet another silver-grey BMW. Somebody actually moved their Nissan into the driveway so Truman and I could honor 'em by parking the GTO in front of their house — these guys had excellent valet parking skills, which no doubt came from living in the ghetto there.

Anyway, in we went. I wish I could tell you what the doorbell of Frank Gehry's Dennis Hopper house sounded like, but I don't remember. Probably somewhat like rusty corrugated tin grinding away. Then again, maybe we knocked. Anyway, once we got inside, it was a horrific scene. It was horrifying. Remember that part in Apocalypse Now? Or the sort of somewhat end-thing of Easy Rider? Or all the various movies with Dennis Hopper in them like Colors or Speed or Blue Velvet where nobody could figure out how to end the thing and so there's a big climactic scene where everything bursts into flames? Well, it was a lot like that. A lot. Only you couldn't see the flames. But they were there, take it from me.

Poor Truman. He was already not having a super-great day. Me, I was at my helpful and conciliatory best, but let's face it — wasn't my gig. Hell, I wasn't even on the Conde-Nast payroll at the moment, so really, I was in ever so many ways the absolute best guy to have on hand, with undoubtedly the clearest vision of all concerned. Not my ass on the line whatsoever. Although I do, okay, tend, perhaps, to get a little philosophical under those types of circumstances.

The main room (I'm sure it had a proper name, that huge room with the raw undulating ceiling, but we were just waltzing in late, and it wasn't really my gig, so I didn't write it down or anything) was this big open space but it was divided by hanging wall-divider deals, hanging from the ceiling, but on these extraordinarily smooth-operating bearings, like Swiss skateboard bearings but no doubt done to aerospace industry tolerances. And on all these big sliding panels mounted on sleek sliding Swiss bearings, there was a lot of Art. It was, anyone could tell, actual art. Sliding away, yet set so they could be glimpsed, there were things that looked like Basquiat, and some sure-enough Rauschenbergs, and a silk-screen Rosenburg, I think. There was either a Franz Kline, or else a really amazing Franz Kline copy. And among them, scattered in on the silent Swiss bearings, shuffled into the deck, were some of the artworks of Dennis Hopper.

Okay, but everybody was avoiding that room like the plague. Dead silence. Tumbleweeds were blowing through. Where all the action — all the downstairs action anyways —was going on was in the (what do you suppose Frank and Dennis had titled it?) The Amphitheatre Room. Man, it was pretty ultra-mega-fraught in there. There was this room on the first floor of Dennis Hopper's Frank Gehry house that was like a little 99-seat theatre all unto itself. There was a stage, with a real lighting rig and a big sound rig, and against the opposite wall, there was a series of those over-sized steps, amphitheatre style, carpeted in some rigorously nubby industrial-grade charcoal-colored carpet. And on the steps and the stage, there were all kinds of dazzling suits and blouse-y Versace shirts and blinding ties and socks and shoes and suits and shirts spread out, each on its own hanger, except the socks, which were folded on hangers in pairs. And there were like three fashion-stylist assistants and two make-up stylist assistants and two photo assistants and an intern, and one guy who was there with the rental lighting, and there was a catering team. With espresso machine, which unquestionably wasn't helping matters. And that's to leave out the make-up stylist, and the fashion stylist, and the hair stylist, and maybe another stylist for something I'm forgetting. Maybe a socks stylist. In the absence of an Art Director, there was Truman, and, hey, me too. Oh and there was Matthew Ralston.

(Once, maybe a year or two later, I got a peek at The Secret Sheet. There was once this piece of paper — it was genuinely on paper back then — that told you the name of each photographer that Conde-Nast used, and what they got paid. As a writer, and even as a pampered one, it was kind of discouraging. I mean, I wrote a lengthy profile on one of the most famous actors in the history of Hollywood, and one of the guys on the sheet had gone to do the portraits, and because the guy was Old Hollywood, hey, they simply did it in his backyard, so it was like picking oranges right off the low branches of the tree or something. And he'd blown the shoot! Screwed it up completely. Unusuable. Nothing! We had to send yet another famous photographer to go do it over! And the first guy got fifty grand! And the second guy only got forty! And they were just about the cheapest guys on The Secret Sheet! You really didn't count until you were up there with the six-figure guys. But even there, even among the legends, like Irving Penn and Horst and Helmut Newton and Hiro, they weren't really pulling down the biggest of the big bucks. That was Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, and, naturally, Matthew Ralston.)

So, really, as important as Dennis Hopper and Frank Gehry might have seemed, if only especially to themselves, they really weren't. Not really. I mean, Dennis Hopper had only just made the biggest comeback in the history of Hollywood, and Frank Gehry was probably about the most controversial architect of the time, at a time where even daily newspapers were suddenly gabbling ever so knowingly about "design." But believe me, the important one here today wasn't Hopper or Gehry or even the fabled Hopper-Gehry/Gehry-Hopper house. It was the photographer. And while Truman would eventually acquire the kind of power that made the most mighty of Manhattanites tremble and dream to be seen lunching with him in the Conde-Nast cafeteria — does one order the yellow Jell-O as a post-modernist ironic gesture? Or will he maybe not get it? Maybe better wait and see what color he selects —he was currently a bit on the death-defying, career-destroying balance-bubble in a fairly fraught three-celeb pile-up. Me, I was the guy who owned the '68 GTO parked out front, so as far as Dennis Hopper's neighbors were concerned, probably I was the most important. With power comes responsibility; I believe humility is essential.

Anyway, Matthew — I like to call him Matthew — was upset. Upset but professional. Professional but pissed-off. Pissed-off but at least still on site. On site but having his folk make the grand gesture of packing up. Packing up, but slowly. Slowly so they didn't actually have to leave, because once he and his people had packed up and left, they were gonna look like prima donnas. Or Matthew was, anyway. And Matthew knew who the prima donna, the diva, was. And it wasn't him. It was not him. It was Dennis Hopper, who had stormed upstairs. Slamming all the doors while doing it. Though, given that it was a Frank Gehry design, not all the doors stayed slammed shut.

Truman didn't beg so much, or plead, as just do a lot of very apparent, very gestural, very empathetic listening. He didn't, for instance, go down on one knee or the other, or both. He did, however, put the hand of reassurance on Matthew's shoulder, and that was really something, because Truman's not that touchy, not so much of a toucher. He can be clever and funny and he can be warmer than you'd think, but he's not, say, a big ol' bear-hugger. He's British, even if he hasn't lived there since before Diana was a princess. Anyway, he did a fine job of mollifying in the moment, and then, and then . . . and then, it was time to go upstairs. And speak to Mr. Hopper. As a show of good faith, Matthew had his people cease their faux-packing-up process. There was a momentary moment of relief, a glimmer of hope. Truman was, I think we all felt, just the man for the mission. 

Mr. Hopper — may I call him Dennis? — was not pleased. He, like Matthew, was pissed-off. But his version of pissed-off was different, and called for a different style of expression. A more expressionist style. He was barricaded behind the door that led to his bedroom and bathroom. And he was outnumbered, as well, having just only merely the one assistant, a reedy woman in her late twenties. She and Truman huddled, consulted, considered, co-conspired. Finally, she gathered her courage, threw back her shoulders, then hunched them back into servile position again and knocked on the door.

"Dennis?"

No answer.

"Dennis?"

[muffled but beyond miffed] "What?"

"Dennis, James Truman is here. He had a car accident on the way here. He was hoping he could come inside and speak to you."

A long pause. Actors, as I understand it, have beats that they work with, beats that are a great deal like musical rhythms, beats they can count out and use to create dramatic effect. I mean, it's not like I hadn't already known that Dennis Hopper was an actor's actor's actor, and that he'd studied and studied with and worked with the greats, but still, sometimes you have to be in the presence of a great actor when they're displaying their craft to really gather it all in. This, this, was greatness. I started to wonder how Truman was possibly going to be able to convey all this greatness, all this greatness that was surrounding us, how he was going to get it into his story. I didn't envy him.

"Dennis?" It was Truman. Man, he really had the touch. And the timing! I mean, here he was, working, mano a mano, with a guy that I myself was now recognizing as one of the greatest actors of the day, and yet James' voice had just the right note of quivering question, with maybe just a slightish soupçon of querulousness to it. Well-played! It was like a tercio de varas, the first stage of a bullfight, with the matador merely flirting, feinting his cape to learn just how fierce the bull will prove to be. Ole!

"Wha-a-at?" Again, the work of a master craftsmen — no, Hopper was a consummate artist, an artist who'd learned his craft and then transcended it. It was awe-inspirational. It was three syllables; no more, no less.

"Dennis, do you think I might possibly come in and join you there? We could perhaps talk? I feel so personally responsible for this whole problem..."

Nice! Nice. Was that nicely done or what? I felt a swell of pride, perhaps even a lump in my throat. Yes, true, Truman was my dear friend, my boy, my buddy, but really, it was the kind of thing that made you just want to root, root, root for the home team. If Nottingham had a football team with a football song that I'd known, I probably would have burst out singing it right then. I think, we can all agree, it's just as well.

Anyway, Truman was admitted to the inner sanctum, while the assistant and I, both diplomatically and cordially, smiled at one another briefly, and then commenced to considering our shoes and, alternately, the curved-versus-straight aesthetics of the Brian Murphy-designed interior. Brian Murphy was one of Frank Gehry's under-apostles but more of an interior design-y dude, so he was the one whose publicist, in conjunction with Frank Gehry's publicist, and Dennis Hopper's publicists (his personal publicist, and his latest film's publicist team) had sort of helped to, as we might say, inspire this story.

Truman was in there a really long time. He was in there for more than a century. I grew old and gray and died and went first to Purgatory, then got the guided tour of Limbo, and then was escorted to the very edge of the Gates of Heaven — but just then, just as I was entering into an all-access-laminated-pass negotiation, there came a shout. Shouting! It was startling! It was Dennis Hopper, back behind the brilliantly-designed bedroom/bathroom door. He was at full voice! It was glorious!

"NOT IN MY HOUSE! NOT IN MY HOUSE I FUCKIN' DON'T! NOT IN MY OWN FUCKIN' HOUSE! NOT! IN! MY! OWN! FUCKING! HOUSE!"

I wasn't in there, perched on the edge of the bathtub while Dennis Hopper paced manically around the open-plan bathroom with its industrial-grade fixtures, but it was kind of obvious what stage of the negotiation they'd achieved. Dennis' wan assistant and I raised our eyebrows at one another and then smiled wanly. Truman had just moseyed around to the part where he was strong-arming Dennis Hopper into perhaps considering wearing a few of the lovely suits and ties and socks and things that Matthew Rolston's fashion-stylist had so graciously provided. Suits that would be truly becoming, and perhaps even genuinely very flattering—

"NOT IN MY OWN FUCKING HOUSE! NOBODY TELLS ME WHAT FUCKING CLOTHES TO WEAR IN MY OWN FUCKING HOUSE!"

I'm trying to remember just exactly when David Mamet wrote "Glengarry Glen Ross." Whether it would already have been a big hit then, or what. I mean, it's not that Dennis Hopper had necessarily been auditioning for it or anything, or just using Mamet's script for vocal tune-up practice downstairs in the Amphitheatre Room, where all the suits and socks were now spread around all the places where an audience would ordinarily sit. But Mamet's masterwork, had, I realize now, a certain resonance, a certain harmonic resonance. I think it must have already been a hit, and they were probably already starting to talk about making a movie of it. I'm guessing, though.

Anyway, that particular moment was probably the most highly-pitched moment of drama, volume-wise, if not necessarily the most truly dramatic. Theater buffs, fans of method acting, and hack screenwriters probably already guess that it necessarily lowered in intensity before long, that eventually Dennis and Matthew made an uneasy peace before parting as good friends and then going on to say incredibly bitchy things about one another once the whole ordeal was done, once they were at last out of earshot of one another and each others' assistants and all. And Truman? James had wrung peace and photography from a world where before there had only been dischord and blank film. But really, even though he got it fixed, I don't know that he ever felt so in love with that lovely Firebird ever after that day. I guess it was never really mint perfect again.