Spitball Army

Someone walked by me yesterday and laughed aloud to herself, clearly amused at her own thought which she proceeded to share with me.

“Have you ever seen that movie Drop Dead Fred?” she asked, chuckling, so apparently proud of having made the connection between my name and a film of dubious quality.

“No” was my unsurprising reply.

She stopped her walk-by and made that gaping-hole face, the one where the chin is stretched to its lowest limit, mouth wide open, the head leaning forward to push the person’s face into another’s personal space, the eyeballs protruding from bulging sockets. My prior most memorable receipt of a gaping-hole face was around 2005, when I’d had a facial surgery to remove an invasive tumor and nearly the entire left side of my face was covered with a bandage. A customer came up to me at the Laser’s Edge counter, I greeted him, and he gave me a completely wordless gaping-hole face. And he was a doctor. Who had obviously failed Bedside Manner 101. So I gave him the gaping-hole face right back. And he kept it up. And so did I. But yesterday I just turned back to my work.

“Really? You really haven’t seen Drop Dead Fred?” she shrieked, as if it were a cinematic requirement for living.

I had recently spent parts of four days struggling to complete a viewing of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, which, I realized upon concluding it, had generated an urge in me to cuddle up to some Bugs Bunny cartoons to wash the five-hour high art marathon from my brain. Could it be that this low-brow film might be just the thing to nourish my soul? It was, after all, the source of my esteemed former co-worker Scott Findlay’s daily greeting to me: “Drop dead, Fred,” he’d say to me at our first encounter each day, and we’d laugh and go about our business.

“No,” I said to her, “I really haven’t.”

“Well,” she replied, closing and retracting her gaping-hole face, and raising her shoulders as if in victory, “You should. It’s really funny.” And she walked away.

And last night, as if in defiance of her suggestion (but not really), I went home and watched a subtitled documentary about a Brazilian Formula One race car driver who dies in a crash.

John Ford’s epic, stretched so three-hours thin that Alex North’s bombastic score bludgeons holes right through it.

The letter A could – and does – stand for so many things. Perhaps this is because its position at the head of the alphabet lends to its overuse by the lazy and unadventurous. In the greater Birmingham area, this denominating slothfulness is on horrifying display in the Yellow Pages, where the clumping of A’s at the front of one’s business name may get you at the top of the list, but at what expense to your credibility? Scrutinize these:

• AAA AAA Branch Offices (NOT the American Automobile Association)
• Aaa-A Abama Departments
• A Alcohaaaaal A&A Abuse 24 Hour AAAA Able (easily my favorite)

When I purchased my little home over twenty years ago and needed the wood floors repaired and refinished, I hired a company called “A Beautiful Flooring.” (Cheesy name but, hey, they were recommended by a neighbor!) I recall asking the owner of the company for his card and being told: “You don’t need a card, just open the phonebook and we’re the first entry under flooring!” That’s likely no longer true, as “A AAA Flooring” (not their real name) has possibly knocked them from that perch.

Furthermore, the number of businesses seeming to feel that they are the chosen business of their kind in the state of Alabama has mushroomed, if the use of the prefix “Ala” is any indication. We have

• Alagasco (who are, indeed, everywhere and, thus, “chosen” by thousands)
• AlaData Mobile Computer Repair
• AlaMedicare Plans
• AlaLawn Landscape Design
• AlaTemp Corporation
• AlaTrust Credit Union
• AlaScribe Transcription Services

That list could go on for pages.

Even the name of this state suffers from an overuse of A’s: four of the seven letters in “Alabama” are the same. A shortening to simply “Albm” would free up a countless supply of “A” triplets that could lead to a restoration of the state’s sorely-depleted ink supply and provide a letter trove to restore the ubiquitous

to its former glory as the chant of Alabama football: “Roll Tide Roll.”

But who am I kidding? No one around here wants to write that many characters.

Aims to portray poetry in death and succeeds. Javier Bardem fascinating, as always. Perfect companion to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Everything about this L.A. noir is so over the top, it nearly exists in its own genre universe. Let’s call it “camp noir.”

A femme fatale with a stately British accent; a character named Jojo; a mystery drug that revives gassed convicts to life.

Nurse: Why don’t you talk to me anymore? Aren’t you listening? / Doc: Huh? What’d you say? / Nurse: Nothing. [Walks out]

The mystery drug is called Methylene Blue, which kept me thinking of Breaking Bad, of course.

Frankie (on Death Row): Come here, baby, I wanna look at ya. New dress ya got, isn’t it? And gloves. And that silly little hat.

Man 1: Why don’t you stop reading that junk? / Man 2: What’s wrong with the dictionary? / Man 1: Not enough story in it.

Jojo (to Margo): Don’t let that face of yours go to your head.

Card is untitled on the front.

Printed on back of postcard:

SDZ.28

ANIMAL COLOR SERIES
From the San Diego Zoo
——————————-
Black Necked Swan, South America
Southern Brazil to Falkland Islands

No publishing information given.

Hard to believe that a normal woman like Joan Crawford would fall for such an obvious creep as Jack Palance. Oh. Right.

Nearly every band that played at our San Diego high school dances in the mid-’70s tried their hand at Steely Dan’s “My Old School.” Everyone would scream and holler when the song began because, well, it was about OUR school, of course (why not, right?), and we were either willfully ignoring the fact that one-half of the song’s oft-repeated chorus is “I’m never going back to my old school,” or we could hardly wait until we could truthfully sing those words about our own lives. Whichever, the gym floor would pack out while the band choogled through this song that, at its best, encouraged jerky hip-shakes in an unflattering white man’s overbite sort of way (on the record album, those odd movements are brought to life through the rhythmic farts of a baritone saxophone, but at dances, we had to propel our mid-sections by imagining them). Worse, it is a song that no band ever learned how to properly end, usually mocking a fade-out while the kids on the dance floor kept moving, leaving the lingering sounds of shoes shuffling on hardwoods as the last sound heard before a smattering of applause, one surfer dude’s wolf call, and a retreat to the bleachers, water fountains, and occasional punch bowls.

And then there was “Moondance.”

Director Richard Ayoade seems very fond of the films of Wes Anderson.