Dylan Goes Electric... Again... (Part 1)

March 18th? Really? Is that the last time that I posted anything on any of my blogs? More as a note to myself than anything intended for the eyes of others -- what the hell happened? Those in Alaska know of my recent appearance in that icy burg, so certainly the trip up to sit at my mother's side following her operation (and the late night carousing with numerous, wonderful friends) played a definite part in my lack of online writing lately.

But it's not the real reason at all. It's part of the reason, but I could have easily written something late at night or early in the morning and put it up here during that time. No, the problem rests with the fact that, exactly three weeks ago, I made a decision that for most people is just another purchase in their lives as professional consumers of popular goods. It was something that I wrestled with for several years now -- for what seems like eons, really -- and the time had come, with the impending trip to Alaska looming above me, to finally make my move.

I bought an iPod. And not one of those dinky stick ones, or the puny don't-make-me-laugh 30gig version, or even the double-the-size-but-still (seriously) you've-got-to-be-kidding 60gig former heavyweight cham-peen of da woild that had taunted me with its shiny lustre for several years to this point. I bought the big guy: the 80gig MONSTER. With video, nonetheless. Why this was such a tough decision to me is due to the size of my music collection, and I was waiting for the right moment, and the right machine, to jump into the fray with the rest of the earbud-wearing moron-squad that normally I rail at for being disconnected. You see, it isn't that I wish to be different; I just want to be a moron on my own terms.

And the music collection was the chief delineator of these terms. You see, I own almost 2000 cd's. 1974, to be exact. I also own another 1200 albums on the outmoded LPs and cassettes that I can't quite seem to get rid of to this day. If I were rich, this would be nothing. If I were rich, I would probably go out and buy that many CD's in one shot, just because I could. But I am just a schmoe with a normal cash flow, and because I am constantly purchasing new albums and DVDs, I don't really have the wherewithal to get funds together for the means with which to play them. Moving to California found me getting rid of a lot of old stereo equipment, and planning to set myself up anew once I established myself in the job market. So, I've been playing music on my Mac (I have a swell surround system set up for my baby) since I arrived, but the problem is: I don't have enough space on my computer to store all the music that I want to have immediately at my fingertips. Loading the machine up even partially to the point where I wish it to be leaves me with little room (or memory) to do anything else on the computer.

And so, after years of not being happy with the size of the 60gig (a not-particularly-scientific investigation of what it would take to store all of my CD collection on iPods fell into the 2-1/2 to 3 60gig iPod range), I just up and went to the Apple Store. (Yes, Mattman -- I have one just a couple miles from my home, and it is sheer torture...) I didn't even tell Jen I was going, nor did I ever mention to her in the week preceding this decision that I was thinking of getting one. I just went to the store, looked at it, left the store, caught a bus to downtown Brea, watched The Host at the theatre, caught the bus back to the Apple Store, asked for one, handed them my credit card with a very unsteady hand, retrieved my card, took my iPod out the door, caught the bus home, and never once looked in the bag until I got home. I put it on the bed (where Jen was just rising for the day) and said "Guess what?" She replied, with a sing-songy voice, "What did you get?" I showed her the Apple on the bag, and she said, "Did you get your iPod?" I nodded my head in a Lou Costello "I've been a bad boy, Abbott"-manner, and answered, "I'll see you in about a week..." and left the room to start jamming songs onto my new precious baby. More precious than gold...

After about nine days of dropping songs from the majority of my collection (90% full albums, by the way - I am not a singles guy at all), I had put over 16,000 songs on my new toy. The box says it will hold 20,000 songs, but they tend to work with 3-minute averages and not include 18-minute long Zappa sound collages or Pink Floyd jams, which exist in great proliferation in my collection. The other thing I discovered, in my rush to cram as much as I could onto the thing, is that 80gig only means "74.4gig", meaning that a certain amount of its capacity goes to storing the software that runs the thing. I think this is bullshit, and that when they say "80", they should give you that full 80 for storing music. (I am all about truth in advertising...) So, as I watched the available space dwindle song-by-song on the control screen in iTunes, I lamented the fact that I would have to stop at some point. 16,301 songs -- or rather, tracks, since a certain portion of them were actually comedy bits -- 16,301. I could have jammed on a couple more -- I had about 47mb left at that point -- but, really... when is enough enough?

(To be continued tomorrow...)

Psychotronic Ketchup: Motorcycle Mamas Don't Allow No-- Oh, Maybe They Do...

So, after watching three 70's biker flicks back-to-back-to-back, I am led to one conclusion: bikers, apparently, love gang rape.

Or at the very least, Hollywood thought the type of people who loved to watch biker flicks loved gang rape, and so they used the sordid subject in film after film. One of the problems with surging through the wide variety of films in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film is having to watch genres of which I have little interest in viewing. Outside of Easy Rider and The Wild One, I don't really care much for the genre, and outside of one despicable person in particular, neither do the relative handful of people I know that I consider true "bikers". I don't mean my close friends who have taken to the two-wheeled highway, and who are what I would call "motorcycle enthusiasts". Those that I know who have delved even partially into the true biker lifestyle -- and we are talking only specifically here of about four people -- three of them expressed to me how most of what happened in these movies was bullshit, and the fourth one would tell me how it was even crazier and more dangerous in real life -- and he was the only one who loved these movies!

The strangest thing about watching these films in a row is seeing the variants, not so much on the biker film genre, but on the subject of gang rape, pile up on each other in a -- well, a variant orgy. The Cycle Savages from 1969 probably takes the more traditional approach, by using the premise that in order for a chick to become a member of the gang she has to let the guys in the club line up on her. Thankfully, this is only a minor but creepy threatened point late in the film, and the rest of the film is really intent on tripping over itself and falling into a pit of unintentional comedy. The hero, who is most decidedly not a biker, is an artist who spends his time drawing pictures of the local biker gang as they commit various misdeeds. There is much more going on, including a white-slavery subplot, but what it comes down to is this: the leader of the gang, Keeg, portrayed in great "crazy" fashion by the inimitable Bruce Dern, wants to stop the artist from identifying them not by killing him, like they would nearly anyone else that got in their way, but by, in Dern's words, "hurting his hands." "We're gonna hurt his hands!", Dern blurts out after nearly an hour of deliberation on the puzzle, and the way he finally decides to do it is by using a table vise. Of course, they then have to devise a way to get his hands in that vise, and they also don't count on the fact that the artist is an ex-Marine and expert with a katana sword. Every line that drops out of Dern's mouth is precious -- not because the lines are written well or funny, but because Dern puts an ironic twist on everything, and he is funny -- but it can't override such an overall terrible movie, even if I actually did have accidental fun watching it. (And keep your eyes peeled for none other than DJ Casey Kasem as Keeg's equally evil brother. Kasem, along with Mike Curb, executive produced this film, so if anyone can be take some of the blame for sensationalizing biker-gang rape for the moviegoing public, it's the guy who voiced Shaggy on Scooby-Doo and hosted America's Top 40 and another guy who produced The Osmonds, Debby Boone and Christian-oriented music and was the former Lt. Governor of California.)

Angel Unchained takes the gang rape onus away from the bikers, because here, for the most part, they are the heroes. Well, some of the bikers are heroes, mainly the one named Angel (played by a not-bad ex-surfer Don Stroud), who tires of his life of homoerotic leathery brotherhood and decides to really hit the open road. He finds a hippie commune who are more than happy to help him out, but they have problems of their own. They are being tormented by the local cowboys, who have also already given our hero a hard time, and so Angel calls in his biker buddies to come in and teach the hippies to defend their commune Seven Samurai-style. But lest you be led into believing that this film is loaded with scenes of horses facing off against motorcycles, let me drop this into the equation: the cowboys drive dune buggies! Oh, yes, dear readers, this one is precious indeed. So, now you get scenes of bikers and hippies banding together to dig traps into which the dune buggies will crash, and yes, things will go bad when drugs, booze and women are brought into the mix. One of these women, and the object of Angel's eye, is played by a young and rather cute Tyne Daly. What's that you say? Tyne Daly! The rather tough, butch one from Cagney and Lacey? Yup, she used to be cute and here she is not-quite disrobing in a biker film. And there is the aforementioned gang rape scene, in which the ironic twist is that it is the townsfolk, and not the bikers, who are responsible for the crime. At the very least, despite the much-borrowed plot device, the film should be given some points for mixing things up that much, even if they still had to include a gang rape scene.

If you want to mix things up even further, you could look to Angels' Wild Women, released a couple years later in 1972. You could look there, but you really don't want to. This is one where we are supposed to be given a break from the largely male-oriented pillaging and partying of other biker films, and let the girls do all the dirty work. The poster itself boasts: "Hot, hard and mean! Too tough for any man! They'll beat 'em, treat 'em, and eat 'em alive!" This is fine -- I'm all for a little genre cross-casting any day, and one thing that the exploitation film racket is good at is doing reverse spins on tired material -- but this film does not back up what it claims. Oh, sure... the gang rape scene has the girls taking an innocent farm-boy's assumed virginity at gunpoint, and the girls talk tough for a while -- but after about 15 minutes, this one is business as usual. The rest of this horribly acted, written and, well, everything epic from the reliably klutzy hands of Al Adamson (who, I should note, I would rather give the Worst Director of All Time title to rather than the overly-abused Ed Wood) gets its focus back to the boys, and the fact turns out to be that, ultimately, these "independent" ladies need their men to straighten things out for them. These ladies not only count on their men to save the day, but, presumably, will allow them to line up and take a shot at each of the honeys when the weapons are laid down and the partying begins. So much for edgy feminist statements, but what can you expect from the director of Naughty Stewardesses?

You can talk about freedom all you want. I'm hittin' the open road, and riding away from biker films for a while. Don't worry, though, because I'm sure when I return to them again, there will be at least one gang rape scene per film through which I will have to squirm. Sadly...

The Cycle Savages
Director: Bill Brame // 1969 [DVD]
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

Angel Unchained
Director: Lee Madden // 1970 [DVD]
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

Angels' Wild Women
Director: Al Adamson // 1972 [DVD]
Cinema 4 Rating: 2

Rixflix A to Z: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Director: Alfred L. Werker // 20th Century Fox; 1:25; b/w
Crew Notables: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (characters)
Cast Notables: Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes), Nigel Bruce (Dr. Watson), Ida Lupino (Ann Brandon), George Zucco (Professor Moriarty), Alan Marshal, Terry Kliburn, Henry Stephenson, E.E. Clive, Arthur Hohl, Holmes Herbert
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

As the steel of Sir Guy of Gisbourne’s sword was matched blow for slashing blow by the equally adept blade of Sir Robin of Locksley, my 10-year old brain could scarcely believe the good fortune I had stumbled upon. I had seen the actors playing these parts, Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn, pair off against each other originally on Christmas Eve a couple months before in Captain Blood, and now I was watching an even better fight between them in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Caught up in the action, I was, even in my hero-worshipping youth, saddened greatly at Robin’s killing thrust into the ribcage of the evil Sir Guy, for it meant not only that the end of the film was closing in, but that no longer would the sneering tones of Rathbone's voice add that extra dash of dastardly insult to his supremely villainous role.

At 10, I was already a fan of the great Basil Rathbone, and this only from seeing but a pair of the swashbucklers in which he thrived as a villain for much of his career. (The next Rathbone sword-flick to capture my attention, The Court Jester starring Danny Kaye, would arrive into my life not long after this one.) I did not know anything about him, just that he was a fantastic villain, but even at this early stage of my movie-watching existence, I was beginning to recognize that the villains got to have all the real fun in the flickers. And it seemed that Rathbone truly relished the opportunity for malevolence; even if he didn’t truly relish it, it still appeared that way onscreen.

But then my mother, just after the movie ended, said something to me that opened another door: “You should see him play Sherlock Holmes.” She said “Sherlock Holmes” in her mock-English accent, which was usually Cockney-laced (which she may have picked up from My Fair Lady) no matter how the character actually talked or where they hailed from, and she said it in the same endearing manner in which she would invoke the names of Monty Python, Mary Poppins and Doctor Dolittle throughout my life, and the way that she currently speaks the name “Harry Potter”. And she was right: I did need to see him play Sherlock Holmes. The problem for me: Who was Sherlock Holmes?

At that point in my life, Sherlock Holmes only existed to me as the answer that I would get when I would ask where Sherlock Hemlock got his name. You know, the silly Muppet detective on Sesame Street who would spat out "Egad!" every time that he discovered a clue, and which usually led him ever closer towards solving a crime that he himself had committed, such as eating half of Ernie's peanut butter sandwich? (He would then abscond with the second half -- the brute...) I had heard the name referenced throughout my young life to that point, of course, usually in other mystery books like the Encyclopedia Brown series. But I had yet to read the Holmes books at that age, so I really had no idea who he really was, nor had I the compulsion to find out. Until Basil Rathbone showed up...

It then became crucial that I see one of his Holmes films right away (for my mother assured me that he had made many – there are actually fourteen, so she was right). Lucky for me, my first opportunity turned out to be the first film in the long series that he made starting in the late 30s and on through the 40s: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. By the time I saw the film, I had already read through one of his casebooks, and was starting on another. And it really wasn’t important to me that Rathbone be the perfect embodiment of Holmes; he was, quite simply, Sherlock Holmes.

These days, there are people who debate which actor was the best Holmes: Rathbone, Jeremy Brett (of the quite excellent television series, which covered rather faithfully the entire series of stories, long and short), or any number of one-shot actors who have filled the role in over a century of moviemaking. That Rathbone was not the first Holmes comes as a surprise to many people, as does the fact is he was not the first to play the character in a regular series. But he was the one who made the part his own, and burned his image indelibly onto the role forever more. Whether it is his face that we see on Holmes now, or the other way around is truly hard to say, so wrapped together are the two in Hollywood history. The Brett camp, amongst whom Jen considers herself an ally, consider him to be the closest to the literary character, but I truly couldn't care less.

Brett may be the closest portrayal, and the more I watch his show, the more I tend to agree with this opinion. But Holmes for me has never been one where the written version is a necessary element in enjoying the films. On film, perhaps because of its reliance on visual rather than mental stimulation, Holmes tends to work best handled as a superhero, let alone a thinking person's superhero. And once the Rathbone series left Fox after the initial two films and made the leap to series-conscious Universal, Holmes basically turned into a detective version of the Frankenstein Monster, appearing in film after film in increasingly desperate plots pitting him against outrageous villains never dreamed of in Doyle's stories, and, in the weirdest twist, picking up and resetting the characters of Holmes and Watson forty years into the future so that they may aid in a war-effort battle against Nazi agents.

And, of course, as a kid, I loved all of this folderol. It didn't matter; even though I was by then knee-deep in reading Doyle (and had started reading Agatha Christie, in addition to my burgeoning love for science-fiction), the fictional Holmes and the movie Holmes remained separate entities. Soon, I would see a variety of actors play the part (I am partial to Peter Cushing and Christopher Plummer, but mainly because I like them in general), and would eventually see Brett when he first hit American television. But no matter how many people I saw play the character, and no matter how many performances I might think were closer to the character, it was always Rathbone to me. And that's the way it shall always be.

Now, if only someone had thought to double-cast Rathbone as both Holmes and a sword-wielding Professor Moriarty in the same film, capturing both sides of Basil's onscreen split personality, then we would have had one for the ages. And then let's see the mighty Jeremy Brett pull that one off. I know Rathbone could...

Rixflix A to Z: Amazon Women on the Moon (1987)

Director: Joe Dante, John Landis, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Horton & Robert K. Weiss // Universal; 1:25; color
Cast Notables: Arsenio Hall, B.B. King, David Allan Grier, Michelle Pfeiffer, Peter Horton, Lou Jacobi, Griffin Dunne, Joe Pantoliano, Monique Gabrielle, Steve Forrest, Joey Travolta, Forrest J. Ackerman, Sybil Danning, Lana Clarkson, Roxie Roker, Rosanna Arquette, Steve Guttenberg, Henry Silva, Archie Hahn, T.K. Carter, Phil Proctor, Robert Picardo, Rip Taylor, Bryan Cranston, Slappy White, Steve Allen, Jackie Vernon, Charlie Callas, Henny Youngman, William Marshall, Donald Gibb, Ed Begley Jr., Kelly Preston, Howard Hesseman, Ralph Bellamy, Steve Cropper, Marc McClure, Russ Meyer, Corinee Wahl, Andrew Dice Clay, Paul Bartel, Carrie Fisher, Mike Mazurki, Dick Miller, Jenny Agutter, Phil Hartman (voice), Corey Burton (voice), Bernie Casey, Ronny Cox, Huey Lewis (himself), Robert Loggia.
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

While Amazon Women ultimately exists as a less successful follow-up to the entirely sophomoric but bellylaugh-filled ZAZ & Landis goof-fest of a decade earlier, The Kentucky Fried Movie, there are many moments in it that people are always bringing up whenever they hear mention of this film. David Allan Grier's still amusing Don "No-Soul" Simmons, who belts out Tie a Yellow Ribbon while blues great B.B. King pleads with the audience for donations to help save a brother who sings and dances like he is completely white, is the chief item amongst the more fondly remembered bits. Ed Begley Jr.'s fantastic take on The Invisible Man, filmed in an almost dead-on approximation of the 1932 James Whale original, and where Begley roams about completely naked, moving objects through the air while the denizens of the inn pretend to be amazed by his "invisible" feats, is my personal favorite in the bunch, though Joe Dante's take on public health scare films in the 30s also approaches a twisted sort of brilliance here.

But for me, one of the more minor gags sticks in my head, not out of that same form of twisted genius (though it is also directed by Dante, it is less successful in its execution), but rather due to the knotted up wiring in my own skull. Henry Silva hosts a spoof of Ripley's Believe... or Not-type shows called "Bullshit... or Not?", where he narrates over a reenactment of the wildest juxtaposition of facts and myth possible. In this case, his "bullshit" story involves the marriage of the Jack the Ripper murders with one of the United Kingdom's most beloved legends, the Loch Ness Monster, asking us to imagine that the horrific splatter murders of five London prostitutes was indeed committed by a 40-foot sea monster. The traditional Ripper murder scenario is set up: crude hooker out for action on dark and foggy alley, gentlemen arrives to give her company, they set off into the darkness, and then we hear a horrible scream. Now add to this the image of a giant plesiosaur dressed like a London dandy out for a stroll, who just leers at the prostitute eerily while she carries on the conversation on the way to her doom... there you go. Ridiculous, isn't it. How can anyone find such a loony bit of business scary at all?

Well... I can. Add Dante's Nessie to the obvious men in Sasquatch suits, people in sheep costumes in advertisements, Star Trek's Gorn and Saturday Night Live's Land-Shark and Killer Trees onto the "List of Mock-Scary Things that Frighten Me Far More Than the Things that Normally Frighten People." I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe I am not receiving the translation right in my brain. After all the far better-executed monsters created for movies and television over the years, somehow it is the cheapjack and ironic versions of these icons that leave me shaking and cold with fear. I will go into the others as I reach the films and shows in which they appeared, but let's deal with this Nessie thing here and now.

I love the myth of the Loch Ness Monster; I just don't believe in it. I require physical proof. I require a body, or the identifiable remnants of said body, to be produced before I sign up for the Nessie myth. All the same, the Loch Ness Monster exists in my head, and millions of other, simply by dint of cultural immersion. I want to believe that there is a relic of prehistory lounging about in a Scottish lake, and for all intents and purposes, Nessie does. When I make it to Scotland eventually, there is no doubt that I will join the throngs of other Nessie hunters at the loch, and this is simply out of fun. I will eye the lake warily, hoping to catch a corner's glimpse of bumps on the water, and I am pretty sure if I see even the slightest ripple on its surface, my mind will be absolutely convinced that I saw Nessie. Because I love the myth.

That said, I am obviously preconditioned to think that such a thing as Nessie is slightly possible, and in that outside realm of possibility, should a lake monster truly show itself to be a reality, I would be charmed, as much of the world would be, at the prospect. So, why am I so ready to get creeped out by the notion of Nessie as a scheming, sadistic multiple murderer? The staging is too campy to be taken seriously, and while the puppet construct of the creature is well-done if simple, it's a basic plesiosaur and nothing to strike fear in even the faintest of hearts (though Nessie's eye movements are a tad creepy). And Henry Silva mocks everything along the way, so you can't possibly be frightened of it. Right? And yet, every time that I see this scene, a chill goes up my spine, just like when the Jaws music (which doesn't affect me this way in its real place) plays in a Land Shark skit. I could watch a half dozen Ripper films and never once get the same feeling of dread that I do when I see this silly fake creature go to work as the famous serial killer.

It's surely something about the suit of the Shark, or the puppet-Nessie, that causes me to react in this way, and for someone with as much puppeteering experience as I do, it's a little weird. Or maybe, because of that experience in bringing inanimate things to life, I ascribe more life (and therefore, deeper emotion) to animal suits or puppets or animated characters than I do to real people.

And look at it this way: if I wasn't so scared of these suits and puppets, I'd probably be a Furry. Now that's scary...

Deadpan Joy...

"Somehow everything will be a little different than you thought." - The Posies "Somehow Everything"

I am a victim of my own need to always have an enemy. For the entirety of my existence, I have flailed (mostly unsuccessfully) against this Great Unseen Nemesis: some would call it a product of my own social ineptitude; and others would believe I am instantly antagonistic against our entire civilization, relishing my own form of untargeted misanthropy. Still, others would believe that I am merely battling my Villain of the Moment, whether it be a government whose record of deception in all matters I cannot reconcile in my own mind; bosses whom I feel are lucky they wear slip-ons because they would never be able to handle this whole "shoe-tying" fad; or even railing against the ridiculous higher beings of others' belief systems. I am battling Brando's "Whattya got?"; I am shoulder to shoulder with Groucho against "It", whatever "It" is; and with apologies to Sir Edmund, I rail against things, because they are there. I grouch, therefore I am...

If something goes wrong, or even has the slightest whiff of wrongness about it, I am not shy about screaming about it. (Someday I will go on about this weird confluence of things going right just after I have thrown something across the room and cursed profanely about somebody's mother, to the point where I now manufacture instant personal anger to get things tilting immediately back onto their axis. But this is not the time...) But, I am often so busy tilting at windmills that I really don't know what to do when something does go right.

Recently, amongst other things, I grouched about an online company that sold invisible goods through Amazon.com. I put up a series of posts regarding my anger at this issue, received a response from a person who has encountered similar problems (time and again, it turns out), and posted their emails regarding a call to arms. My anger abated with this display of online aggressiveness, and things turned out, ultimately, fine. I did get my money back, and recognized that this is not really Amazon's fault (though I suppose their lax user placement rules did lead to the problem in the first place). I yelled, I cursed, and I did battle with what weapons I had at hand. The world righted itself again, and I was waiting for the next battle.

A couple of weeks back, I was made the recipient of a reward from the board of my company for a job well done. They were happy with my work on a huge project in which I had a major role, and they rewarded me with a sizable donation to the Cinema 4 Pylon DVD Fund -- namely, they gave me a fairly large gift certificate to Amazon.com. Money, shmoney... nothing says "thank you" to me faster than the open ability to order whatever the hell I want on a site where I have about a hundred DVDs lined up for future purchase. After spending several hours figuring out on which combination of things I wished to blow my admittedly hard-earned prize, I ran into an item that had edged further and further back on my list, mainly due to my reluctance to spend that much cash on a big ticket DVD item. It was an eleven-disc box set from Kino Video called The Art of Buster Keaton, comprising all 11 of his silent features and over 20 of his silent short films.

The sort of friends that are reading this blog to begin with don't need to be reminded of my love for silent comedy, and especially for that of Mr. Keaton. My cat of some twenty years is named after him. Case closed. Part of my reluctance in purchasing it is the fact that I already owned about 90% of this material on VHS, either prerecorded tapes or taken off PBS, AMC and TCM over the years. I had wanted to start collecting Keaton on DVD, but didn't want to go disc by disc, preferring to save money by getting the set. But I had been putting off getting the set for a couple of years, and here was the perfect opportunity. And so I ordered it (along with the big Harold Lloyd set, as well), and because Amazon generally operates in a timely fashion, I didn't have to wait very long to receive.

This past Monday it arrived, and after I retrieved it from our manager's office, I ran back to our apartment. I danced, I did -- I danced about the place, a huge smile beaming from my normally placid face as I cut open the box to remove the Secret Toy Surprise inside. Jen watched me, not really knowing how to react when I act like this, but not remarking on it either, letting me have my moment. The set now sat in my lap as I removed the plastic, noting instantly that the set looked a little worse for wear, like it had sat on a shelf for a while and had gotten jostled here and there. One of the cases was a little chewed up, it seemed, and the box was had taken some slight squishing. But I was ready to forgive all that: I just wanted to open up the disc containing The General and his short masterpiece Cops (the first Keaton that I ever saw at the age of 10 or so), and pop them in the DVD player.

The problem was, there was no disc in that case. No disc. A nearly $200 set, and there is no fucking disc in the case! Forgive me for getting all Penn Jillette here, but WHAT THE FUCK?! I couldn't handle it. I would have yelled and screamed like Cheetah at a chimp orgy, but my energy, due to my initial burst of unrestrained joy, was sapped.
I sat there stunned, and then told Jen what happened. I made plans to get online and contact Amazon, but I put it off for a couple hours, so wiped was I from the letdown. Not my normal way of doing business, but this was an uncommon situation. My joy had been fucked with, and I lost it to the point where I lost my ability to lose it.

I finally contacted Amazon late that evening, and they said they would have someone pick up the damaged goods, and that another set would be sent out straight away, no charge to me either way. At best, I figured that I would see my new set in a week's time. Three days, people. Three tiny little days. So swift was Amazon's response that I scarcely had time to even think about it. Early the next morning, UPS picked up the bad, and 48 hours later, I came home to find a new, complete set of Buster Keaton's greatest waiting for me on our table. Jen didn't even tell me about it when we spoke on the phone that day. I'm guessing she wanted me to have another moment when I got home. And I did -- I danced about again, and sang to some very confused dogs about my joy, and then sat down a while later to rip into that disc that had previously gone missing. I went to bed with visions of The General and Cops freshly played in my head.

And, still, I recognize that I didn't know how to react -- in either situation. When something like this goes wrong for me, I usually yell, but all I could do was moan and pout. And yes, when three days later, a clear resolution was reached in a most satisfactory fashion, even though I danced and sang about the place, I still didn't know how to react to Amazon's timeliness. I suppose I should send a thank you Amazon, but it would likely only go to some phantom department in a major corporation, and I doubt it will reach anyone's eyes or ears. I would go onto their site and actually post a positive reaction, but I am far too lazy to do that, so the best they will probably get it is my sincere thanks here on my own blog. Besides, I am horrible with gratitude. Not that I am ungracious; I am just bad at getting about to thanking someone, or wishing someone well.

But, I am terrific about yelling about something not going right for me.

And that Harold Lloyd set still hasn't arrived. Hmmm...