Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—The SI
was a martinet. And a brownnose.
The
PI had a pop-up camper, he towed behind the Land Rover. He bought it with a grant, when he bought the
Land Rover. It was pretentious, and
stupid, like a trailer for the star on a movie set, on location. The PI and the SI slept in it.
They
talked about the loneliness of command.
The
caste system.
It
isn’t easy being green.
On
the way in to the site, the crew would whistle the theme from the Mickey Mouse
Club.
A-R-C,
H-A-E, O-L-O-G-Y.
The
PI didn’t know they were being ironic.
He
didn’t know what they were whistling. As
they carried the shovel box, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Like Walt Disney and a Disney Animation
Contract.
Many of the employees had given Disney large
quantities of free overtime during the drive to complete the 1937 Snow White, and despite the fact that Snow White was an enormous success,
"instead of getting the bonuses they had been vaguely promised, they were
faced with a string of layoffs.... The
salary structure remained crazy-quilt, and the only general wage increase
Disney granted in those years was self-serving:
he brought a number of workers up over the forty-hour-a-week level, at
which point, under the Wagner Labor Relations Act, they ceased being entitled to time-and-a-half for overtime.
Richard Schickel, The Disney Version.
Sometimes they whistled, “Who’s Afraid of
the Big Bad Wolf.”
During the day, the crew ran
themselves. The PI and the SI would go
off in the Land Rover to eat bear claws in a diner and drink coffee with the
deputy sheriffs and flirt with the waitresses and lady realtors, in their
designer scarfs. Their polyester pants suits,
wrapping their big wide housewife asses.
The
Stepford Wives.
Who’s minding the children?
Mama, don’t let your daughters grow up to
be archeologists. They end up
grit-tempered.
Now, when I read something like The Hunter, it seems mannered, like Point Blank did, but that may be because of the influence it had on writers who came later.
I always liked Lee Marvin.
I thought he did a better job, as Hickey, in The Iceman Cometh, than Jason Robards, Jr. did.
And I thought he stole The Wild One out from under Marlon Brando. No mean feat.
Jim Jarmush belongs to a club called The Sons of Lee Marvin.
I liked Dead
Based on The Drop Edge of Yonder.
I liked The Drop Edge of Yonder.
When Marvin won an Oscar for Cat Ballou, he said his horse deserved half of it.
When I read in
I had seen the future and it sucked.
Actually, Scrib should have seen his future in academia in his dealings with the SI and the PI on the mound and at the Firetower site, or at the Firetower site, and, later, on the mound.
And his future in belles-lettres, when marketplace censorship would find him, like drought driving a fish upstream.
Scrib was to the Mall Builder culture as Solzhenitsyn was to the Russian state.
Scrib’s future in academia was just a tune-up for his future in belles-lettres. A rehearsal.
Nothing good happens overnight.
Things take time.
They have to develop, to season, it’s all seasoning, it’s all road-time.
If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.
Scrib hadn’t started writing yet.
He was finishing his college education, and finding a soul-mate.
Then he would get married and start a family.
Brenda was his soul-mate
He and Brenda were an item.