"Hello Ball"

That's right, I'm old enough to remember the HONEYMOONERS on television in the 50's. Not that it was a favorite show. I didn't like the fat guy with the bad manners or his oaken wife--too much the prick for me. However, I did like his friend Norton who lived upstairs with his wife Trixie. Working class, no pretensions, guileless, and always dressed in a dingy t-shirt beneath an unbuttoned best, Norton's part was played with exceptional detail by Art Carney. In fact, whenever I see Art Carney in other movies--HARRY AND TONTO (1974) comes to mind, or the so-so sleuth vehicle, THE LATE SHOW (1977), I always think of him as Norton--The kind of guy who personifies "friend," if a somewhat goofy friend. He had no great depth of emotion tattooed to his characters, but more the loyalties and "can-count-on-me" attributes of a good dog. Let's face it, interesting people are far too complex and self-involved to make good friends or mates. Wanna be happy, get a beagle. Don't try it with a Yale graduate in Architecture who writes porn on the side and plays in a band.

So what's any of this to do with introducing my first entry on this brand spanking new blog? Very little probably. It's just that the verb "address" pops into my mind. It seems in some large way a blog is one directional, like a journal but different. There's nothing private about it, it's a very public journal which brings me to addressing the reader--that be you. Now, if I think of the verb "address" odd memories pass before my mental capture screen: Bernadette Devlin addressing the throngs of Belfast; JFK addressing the citizens of Berlin with his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech; or perhaps more recently the screenwriter for the film MILK, Dustin Lance Black, having just received his Academy Award and addressing the world on the importance of gay rights. Now these are all memorable moments, but they don't spring to mind first when I confront the word "address." No, it's Art Carney in an episode of the Honeymooners trying to give his domineering pal Kramden a crash course in how to play golf. There was something about the way our boobish, nebbish Norton read from a golf manual andswooshed his driver and wiggled his butt that instantly became endearing. He also had a way of turning any action into ritual, and so by placing the golf ball on the kitchen floor and wagging his club over and over and over, he made the anxious prick Kramden go crazy with impatience, but he made me laugh. "Laugh you pint-sized motherfucker," he told my properly attuned funny-bone and I did. When he looked down over the ball and was told to "address" the ball by his foul-mooded compatriot, he saluted the Titleist and said "hello ball." It still makes me laugh, 50 years later sitting at this half-broken laptop, trying to reach out to whoever might read this blog and tell you the same, "hello Marsha. . . hello Felix . . . hello Guru Dutt." You are all welcome here. And though I'm no Art Carney, I can try to be as humane.

Hopefully, the blog will be ideas on stuff. Some images. Some rants. Some insights into the odd and unhinged brain of an unemployed malcontent. What I'd really enjoy is to take the music, books, friends, good times, bad times, movies, philosophers, porn stars, junkies, spiritualists, poets, drunks, bdsm freaks, angels, pricks and . . . well, you get the picture--we take all that stuff called my modern life and use it as a filter through which to strain love. Big fuckin' order. Let's see if it works. If it proves too daunting, I'll fall back on films. Like so many people in the last 100 years, movies inform everything I think. Movies and psychology. I'm sick of psychology and wonder at its place in the pharmacological pantheon of modern voodoo. Don't take me for a Scientologist or anything--any group that has its own navy is too weird for me, I just wonder at the medical practices that have been jettisoned through the ages and imagine that psychology may become just another form of phrenology, or leaching blood, or reading the entrails of sacrificed doves. Sure, it's cool. Dreams, sex, mania, abuse, aberrational behavior--the whole Woody Allen spectrum. There's no denying how important analysis and psychological treatment have been since Freud and his friends began brainstorming, but maybe its time for a new grey area in medicine. Somewhere I read that Michel Foucault found LSD to be great fun. He also had a habit of wearing barbed wire around his chest and his sexual investigations are the stuff of academic tabloids. He was critical of psychology, but he was critical of most everything; though there's no denying that in some international circles he has been very influential. Now what I want to know is . . . what were his favorite movies? Did he have a crush on Jean Marais? Did Robert Bresson interest him, disgust him, leave him cold? Perhaps we could mix movies like the pharmacist mixes potions. For depression go see one Ealing comedy and one musical with Gwen Verdon, followed the next day with a short story by William Trevor and an uninterrupted listening of 80's songs by The Smiths. Then on the third day a screening of Psycho and the first 2 chapters of John Rechy's CITY OF THE NIGHT. A specialist could fine-tune the cultural indulgences to tweak one's brain and wouldn't it be more fun than gulping Wellbutrin and Depakote?

But I ramble.