Whittling Away

2 Hot 2 Trot

Even More Of My Life In Baseball (Beisbol Been Berry Good To Me, Numero Quatro)

*Connie Mack- Cornelius McGillicuddy, Sr. (December 22, 1862 – February 8, 1956), better known as Connie Mack, was an American professional baseball player, manager, and team owner. The longest-serving manager in Major League Baseball history, he holds records for wins (3,731), losses (3,948), and games managed (7,755), with his victory total being almost 1,000 more than any other manager.
Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics for the club’s first 50 seasons of play, starting in 1901, before retiring at age 87 following the 1950 season, and was at least part-owner from 1901 to 1954. He was the first manager to win the World Series three times, and is the only manager to win consecutive Series on separate occasions (1910–11, 1929–30); his five Series titles remain the third most by any manager, and his nine American League pennants rank second in league history. However, constant financial struggles forced repeated rebuilding of the roster, and Mack’s teams also finished in last place 17 times. Mack was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937.

Connie Mack Field- Connie Mack Field was a ballpark in West Palm Beach, Florida and was the long-time spring training home of the Philadelphia Athletics. The stadium was built in 1924 and named Municipal Athletic Field. Athletic Stadium hosted its first event, a football game, in October 1924. The first baseball game was played in December. It was renamed Wright Field in 1927 for West Palm Beach City Manager George C. Wright. It was renamed Connie Mack Field in 1952 in honor of long-time Philadelphia Athletics manager and owner Connie Mack. It was replaced in 1962 by West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium but the grandstand remained until 1973. Thereafter, The ball field itself remained and was used regularly by neighboring Twin Lakes High School. In 1992 it was bulldozed for a garage for the new Kravis Center. The grandstands held about 2,000; black fans watched from a small section in the right-field corner. Total capacity was about 3,500.[3] Record attendance for baseball was on March 20, 1949 when 6,988 fans saw the A’s defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers in a spring training game featuring Jackie Robinson on the field and then-Secretary of State General George Marshall in attendance.

Hulk, Lou Ferrigno

It’s not easy being green.

Today is Lou Ferrigno’s birthday. You may remember him as the Hulk on TV. But here is a personal Halloween memory that this birthday conjured up for me:

Many years ago I was a bartender at the Village Inn in Monte Rio. During that era the Highland Dell and The Village Inn had a friendly competition going on. We would play softball games for a case of wine or champagne (usually won by the VI), try to outdo each other with entertainment offerings (usually won by the Dell) and compete with gala parties on holiday occasions (a tie).
One crazy Halloween I was manning the bar dressed as the Hulk. With shredded shorts and shirt, exposed green chest and bulging biceps (I was much younger and bulkier then) I dashed about on the boards, shaking martinis and blending pina coladas till I worked up quite a sweat. The place was packed. It was difficult to navigate your way up and down the stairs. Wild costumes everywhere. My head was spinning.
To recreate the Hulk visage as accurately as possible I had used spirit gum and putty to build up my brow into a formidable supra-orbital protrusion. I spoke only in guttural growls and grunts. To my credit, I even managed to stay in character when most of my forehead came unglued and ended up in some unlucky patrons pina colada. “Hulk head go splash, hah, hah. RRRRRRR!”

This whole experience, the hectic mixological pace, the Fellini-esque swirling mass of costumed bodies, my makeup decomposition, added up to trigger an asthma attack. But it was near the end of my shift, I was young and possessed with great recuperative powers, so it was not long before I was bouncing down River Blvd. with reconstructed brow, to see what marvels the Highland Dell had to offer.

A Partial History of A Rural Movie House

The Rio Theater. Survivor. So far.

This theater was, and continues to be, different, quite a bit different than your more mainstream movie venues. For one thing it is housed in what I‘ve heard referred to as a Quonset hut. You know, the corrugated metal, half-cylindrical structures you often see on military bases. The theater is aptly named “The Rio Theater” because it is a little too close to the Russian River. On more than one occasion, since I’ve been in the area, it has risen, like some sort of watery Phoenix, from the silty river waters, to assume its rightful place in the community as a temple of culture. But if you insist on your Phoenixes rising from ashes, well this theater has survived a fire that consumed every other building on the property. As the audience was evacuated that night, they were given “Fire Check” coupons to attend a future screening when flames would no longer be a factor.

When I first arrived on the scene, and it was a “scene”of sorts, the theater was owned and operated by a home-grown guru/psychiatrist named Bob Newport. He ran the theatre as if he were a psychedelic Captain Steubing on a Hippie Love Boat. He was surrounded by a talented, organic crew of alternate society folks who insisted on healthy snacks and the very best cinematic offerings.

He had wisely assumed that a theater in the boondocks should strive to fill a niche, unlike those provided for by the downtown theaters upstream. In the early seventies there were no multiplexes in Santa Rosa or Sebastopol, the areas of highest population concentration nearby. Three or four theaters and a couple of drive-ins were about it for most of Sonoma County then. All of these screened almost exclusively the first or second run big box office Hollywood hits.

So the Rio offered classic cinema, foreign films, animation festivals, freaky live performances by groups like the “Angels of Light” (a spin off from the legendary “Cockettes”); at least till Dr. Bob ran out of money or the inclination to provide culture to us savages.

Being a cartoonist/graphic artist fresh from some experience gleaned during a stint as number one ad producer for “The San Jose Red Eye” hippie rag, I was able to insinuate my way into this elite assemblage, and hang on for dear life as new owner-operators came and went over the years. I would do the layout for the calendar/schedule flyer, and distribute it all over Sonoma County from Cotati to Healdsburg and every other little burg in between. The hope was that dedicated cinephiles would think nothing of driving twenty plus miles for their fix of Fellini or Bergmann.

To promote community support, one night a week was “Fifty Cent Night”, where movie-goers could see an old family favorite, preceded by a cartoon cavalcade, all for half a buck. On the other side of the river, the same family might partake of a “Peasant Dinner” offered by the folks at the Village Inn Restaurant (eg. Eggplant Parmesan with a side of veggies and rice for two bucks, including apple brown betty for dessert.) This homey, economic atmosphere existed throughout the seventies (the dawn of civilization, pre-video, pre-computer, pre-MP3) and into the early eighties.

At first I circulated in the dark fringes of the operation, doing my graphic schtick, and for a time, cleaning up the melted Eskimo Pies, wads of gum, Jujubees, the ocasional stinky diaper, roaches (smokable), even cash and food stamps that I would find on the sticky floor. In later years I advanced from ticket window duties to actually being involved in the booking of the films and making frequent drives to San Francisco based distributors to pick them up.

I joined the ranks of the nick-named. I became “Movie Michael”, the guy that legend has it, would accept a sensemilla joint in lieu of cash for admission. The Furry Freak Brothers were right,”Times of Pot will get you through times of no money”, way better than the corollary. And being the manager of such a theatre, serving such a clientele, and being a scant seven miles from the Occidental Vortex, as you might imagine, I dealt with a reality unimaginable to today’s multiplex manager.

At the heart of this mansion of movie magic were a pair of projectors that looked like they could have been cosmic ray weaponry hi-jacked from a Flash Gordon era space ship. The white-hot light needed to shoot the images to the screen was provided by the ignition of carbon arc rods. The whole process depended on constant vigilance and impeccable timing, qualities that were rare in those days, especially among the projectionists who found there way to our booth in the high old seventies. My intercom calls to and from the projection booth were reminiscent of Star Trek dialog,”We’re down to our last dilithium rod, I dunna ken if we can make it through the next reel, Jim!”

The projection room was a museum in more ways than one. Besides sporting the antique projectors mentioned above, the walls were adorned with “one sheet” posters and hand-written lines from the thousands of movies we’d screened over the years. From, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges”, to Jack Nicholson’s “Chicken Salad Sandwich” routine from Five Easy Pieces, til hardly a square inch of wall space was untagged.

As you may be aware, most theaters survive financially on the popcorn, sodas, and candy they sell, rather than the ticket admission take. Ticket income is mostly eaten up by the hefty percentages the distributors take for the privilege of displaying their big box office films. We always prided ourselves on the quality of the items available in our snack bar: freshly ground French Roast coffee, popcorn with real butter, fresh baked pastries from “Just Desserts” (a gourmet SF bakery of the day), It’s Its and other ice cream treats.

For me it was like giving a party every night. And like some parties, things would occasionally get out of hand. During one screening of Ken Russells’s frenetic take on the Who’s rock opera, “Tommy”, the flashing lights during Tina Turner’s turn as “The Acid Queen” provoked a seizure from one epileptic member of the audience. Fortunately there was a practicing RN in the next row whos first responder skills got things back under control after a short intermission.

Then there was the difficult removal of a 350 pound drunk who had passed out and became wedged into one of the toilet stalls. Then there was the tiny, sleeping seven-year-old, who’d been left by his parents, curled up on his seat, unnoticed by the usher and locked in the theater after closing time. When he awoke, he resourcefully used a shoe to break out the semicircular window in the theater front door and escaped into the night.

The theater has seen Cinemascope, black and white, color, 3D, porno, 3D porno (“The Stewardesses”) and “Smellovision”. I have watched sensitive viewers bolt and barf from “The Exorcist”, scream to “Jaws” and “Wow” to “Star Wars”.

As I mentioned, it exists to this day, thanks to the efforts of Don and Susie Schaffert, who’ve added their own special loving touches. During their tour of operations they’ve aded a multitude of attractions, not the least of which are “Don’s Dogs” , specialty hot dogs, brats and hot links which started out as concession stand offerings and ended up as a restaurant with the same name at the rear of the theater building. They also employ youth in the community, supply an enclosed dog run area on the property, and sponsor a wonderful vintage car show every Summer.

One of my son’s friends, Jason Long, has brushed on a distinctive mural on the building’s exterior that has caught the eyes of tourists headed for the coast for several years now. But sadly, I have noticed “For Sale” signs recently which would seem to herald the end of another era.

My sweetest memory of the theater came when we decided to go ahead with a matinee screening of Ingmar Bergmann’s filmic version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” despite the fact that there was only one person in the audience, a little old lady who’d driven all the way from Healdsburg to see it. One little, teary-eyed old lady, sitting all by herself watching opera in a little theater in the boondocks by a big river, which brings us full circle and back again to the “Fitzcarralldo” metaphor.

*NYTBS (New York Times Best Seller) my unfinished masterpiece.

Coming Home (Pg. 2) and RANGER RICK Instantly Immortal Iconic Individual (4th I Society Inductee #1)

What will happen next in the Land of the Land of the Lost Gringos? Wait for the next fairly mundane installment.

About Ranger Rick’s Rumored Demise:

While I was writing and drawing this comic late last night I noticed a new comment on my Ranger Rick blog from a couple years back, he was one of the early “Those Amazing Humans”, number 17 as I recall. Right away I got an unpleasant tingle in the Force. The comment was from “Sam” and said “RIP Ranger Rick. You will be missed.” First thing this AM, I called Lunapillar Jeff and Lisa to have them verify or deny this internet obituary. I don’t believe everything I read on facebook or anywhere else in cyberspace. They were unaware of this contention of Ranger discorporeality, and said they would sound out their connections in Occidental to see if Rick had left us for good this time. He means a lot to his fans, just like Whitney Houston does to hers. My usually placid blog pond was hopping from late last night, till the early afternoon today, 90 percent of the traffic was directed to the Ranger Rick tribute I referred to above. That amounts to about 400 Ranger readers in the last 24 hours. Unheard of! I hope the flags over Howard’s Station and the PO in Occidental are flying at half mast. The death of an icon. Yes, I am very sorry to have to say “It’s true, the Ranger is having an out of the body experience as we speak, and where it stops no one knows”. That shouldn’t stop an Occidental artist from erecting a statue of The Ranger in town. It should have been done a long time ago.

 

House of Dreams

 

I took a walk today with Rhiannon, my daughter, and Opal, my granddaughter. It might as well have been a walk down memory lane. We took the high road up the hill above the little Catholic church where a small group of us who had been evacuated from our homes, had looked down on an underwater Monte Rio, back in 1986. We went past the Rio Theater, where I spent most of the Seventies, on our way to the Russian River to feed the ducks. It is now for sale.

The Dream House

 

 

Back in the Fall of 2009 I wrote a blog about this place and how much it means to our little community. Since a lot of you are newcomer to my little part of the blogosphere, I thought I would reprint it here.

 

Portrait of the Artist As Movie Guy

 

Prefatory Statement: I wrote this at the end of Summer ’09 at the behest of my writing guru, poet Pat Nolan. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to manage a small movie house, here’s one guy’s memories.

The long, lovely days of this, the best Summer in recent memory (weather-wise) are yielding to the shorter, but still quite lovely days of Fall. It has begun to get a bit nippy in the morning, taking a little longer to get to eighty degrees, and it begins to cool down earlier in the evening. Still, each day offers an industrious author plenty of working hours to chip away at his word sculpture. Unfortunately I am more of a slothful author and the seasonal down-sizing of daylight is just another excuse to procrastinate.

Right now though, I am being a good little writer and doing everything I can to get the job done. For instance, I just got off the phone to my friendly neighborhood mentor. I wanted to drop off a few new pages which showed just how slavishly I am willing to follow his advice and muted admonitions. I thought by bringing up the topic of his own recently printed “Intellectual Pretensions” Prose Poems, a copy of which he’d recently gifted me and which I’d recently finished, that I might accumulate enough brownie points to earn some more free mentoring. But, though the conversation is lively, it is brief. Today he is Tiger Woods, teeing off on his own drive to greatness and unwilling to encourage the participation of the gallery and its throng of well-wishers and emulators.

But, like the greatest mentors, he is able to sling a casual suggestion effortlessly my way that will keep my Uni-Ball rolling for a few more hours this windy Fall afternoon. He hearkened me back to my days as a theater manager, which I’ve only briefly mentioned so far in the NYTBS*. This, he suggested, might prove to be fertile ground for developing a more complex picture of me, the most important character in this book, and others who fell under the sway of the transformational cinematic offerings screened in “my”little hippie theater by the river (or in the river, on several occasions).

Pehaps he’s right. Perhaps even then I was a bit of a “Fitzcarralldo”, using the Rio Theatre as a “riverboat” to bring culture to the unwilling natives of the lower Russian River. Along with the other cinephiles who have booked films for this unassuming movie house , I was entrusted with the task of bringing big box- office entertainment to the redwoods to help finance the screening of films that would appeal to more discriminating cinema palates.

This theater was, and continues to be, different, quite a bit different than your more mainstream movie venues. For one thing it is housed in what I‘ve heard referred to as a Quonset hut. You know, the corrugated metal, half-cylindrical structures you often see on military bases. The theater is aptly named “The Rio Theatre” because it is a little too close to the Russian River. On more than one occasion, since I’ve been in the area, it has risen, like some sort of watery Phoenix, from the silty river waters, to assume its rightful place in the community as a temple of culture. But if you insist on your Phoenixes rising from ashes, well this theater has survived a fire that consumed every other building on the property. As the audience was evacuated that night, they were given “Fire Check” coupons to attend a future screening when flames would no longer be a factor.

When I first arrived on the scene, and it was a “scene”of sorts, the theater was owned and operated by a home-grown guru/psychiatrist named Bob Newport. He ran the theatre as if he were a psychedelic Captain Steubing on a Hippie Love Boat. He was surrounded by a talented, organic crew of alternate society folks who insisted on healthy snacks and the very best cinematic offerings.

He had wisely assumed that a theater in the boondocks should strive to fill a niche, unlike those provided for by the downtown theaters upstream. In the early seventies there were no multiplexes in Santa Rosa or Sebastopol, the areas of highest population concentration nearby. Three or four theaters and a couple of drive-ins were about it for most of Sonoma County then. All of these screened almost exclusively the first or second run big box office Hollywood hits.

So the Rio offered classic cinema, foreign films, animation festivals, freaky live performances by groups like the “Angels of Light” (a spin off from the legendary “Cockettes”); at least till Dr. Bob ran out of money or the inclination to provide culture to us savages.

Being a cartoonist/graphic artist fresh from some experience gleaned during a stint as number one ad producer for “The San Jose Red Eye” hippie rag, I was able to insinuate my way into this elite assemblage, and hang on for dear life as new owner-operators came and went over the years. I would do the layout for the calendar/schedule flyer, and distribute it all over Sonoma County from Cotati to Healdsburg and every other little burg in between. The hope was that dedicated cinephiles would think nothing of driving twenty plus miles for their fix of Fellini or Bergmann.

To promote community support, one night a week was “Fifty Cent Night”, where movie-goers could see an old family favorite, preceded by a cartoon cavalcade, all for half a buck. On the other side of the river, the same family might partake of a “Peasant Dinner” offered by the folks at the Village Inn Restaurant (eg. Eggplant Parmesan with a side of veggies and rice for two bucks, including apple brown betty for dessert.) This homey, economic atmosphere existed throughout the seventies (the dawn of civilization, pre-video, pre-computer, pre-MP3) and into the early eighties.

At first I circulated in the dark fringes of the operation, doing my graphic schtick, and for a time, cleaning up the melted Eskimo Pies, wads of gum, Jujubees, the ocasional stinky diaper, roaches (smokable), even cash and food stamps that I would find on the sticky floor. In later years I advanced from ticket window duties to actually being involved in the booking of the films and making frequent drives to San Francisco based distributors to pick them up.

I joined the ranks of the nick-named. I became “Movie Michael”, the guy that legend has it, would accept a sensemilla joint in lieu of cash for admission. The Furry Freak Brothers were right,”Times of Pot will get you through times of no money”, way better than the corollary. And being the manager of such a theatre, serving such a clientele, and being a scant seven miles from the Occidental Vortex, as you might imagine, I dealt with a reality unimaginable to today’s multiplex manager.

At the heart of this mansion of movie magic were a pair of projectors that looked like they could have been cosmic ray weaponry hi-jacked from a Flash Gordon era space ship. The white-hot light needed to shoot the images to the screen was provided by the ignition of carbon arc rods. The whole process depended on constant vigilance and impeccable timing, qualities that were rare in those days, especially among the projectionists who found there way to our booth in the high old seventies. My intercom calls to and from the projection booth were reminiscent of Star Trek dialog,”We’re down to our last dilithium rod, I dunna ken if we can make it through the next reel, Jim!”

The projection room was a museum in more ways than one. Besides sporting the antique projectors mentioned above, the walls were adorned with “one sheet” posters and hand-written lines from the thousands of movies we’d screened over the years. From, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges”, to Jack Nicholson’s “Chicken Salad Sandwich” routine from Five Easy Pieces, til hardly a square inch of wall space was untagged.

As you may be aware, most theaters survive financially on the popcorn, sodas, and candy they sell, rather than the ticket admission take. Ticket income is mostly eaten up by the hefty percentages the distributors take for the privilege of displaying their big box office films. We always prided ourselves on the quality of the items available in our snack bar: freshly ground French Roast coffee, popcorn with real butter, fresh baked pastries from “Just Desserts” (a gourmet SF bakery of the day), It’s Its and other ice cream treats.

For me it was like giving a party every night. And like some parties, things would occasionally get out of hand. During one screening of Ken Russells’s frenetic take on the Who’s rock opera, “Tommy”, the flashing lights during Tina Turner’s turn as “The Acid Queen” provoked a seizure from one epileptic member of the audience. Fortunately there was a practicing RN in the next row whos first responder skills got things back under control after a short intermission.

Then there was the difficult removal of a 350 pound drunk who had passed out and became wedged into one of the toilet stalls. Then there was the tiny, sleeping seven-year-old, who’d been left by his parents, curled up on his seat, unnoticed by the usher and locked in the theater after closing time. When he awoke, he resourcefully used a shoe to break out the semicircular window in the theater front door and escaped into the night.

The theater has seen Cinemascope, black and white, color, 3D, porno, 3D porno (“The Stewardesses”) and “Smellovision”. I have watched sensitive viewers bolt and barf from “The Exorcist”, scream to “Jaws” and “Wow” to “Star Wars”.

As I mentioned, it exists to this day, thanks to the efforts of Don and Susie Schaffert, who’ve added their own special loving touches. During their tour of operations they’ve aded a multitude of attractions, not the least of which are “Don’s Dogs” , specialty hot dogs, brats and hot links which started out as concession stand offerings and ended up as a restaurant with the same name at the rear of the theater building. They also employ youth in the community, supply an enclosed dog run area on the property, and sponsor a wonderful vintage car show every Summer.

One of my son’s friends, Jason Long, has brushed on a distinctive mural on the building’s exterior that has caught the eyes of tourists headed for the coast for several years now. But sadly, I have noticed “For Sale” signs recently which would seem to herald the end of another era.

My sweetest memory of the theater came when we decided to go ahead with a matinee screening of Ingmar Bergmann’s filmic version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” despite the fact that there was only one person in the audience, a little old lady who’d driven all the way from Healdsburg to see it. One little, teary-eyed old lady, sitting all by herself watching opera in a little theater in the boondocks by a big river, which brings us full circle and back again to the “Fitzcarralldo” metaphor.

*NYTBS (New York Times Best Seller) my unfinished masterpiece.

 

 

 

The Great Flood of ’86 Memorial

Valentine’s Day was the 25th anniversary of The Big Flood of 1986. This was a day that changed a lot of folks’ lifestyles in short order, mine included. I blogged about this last year on another site, but thought I would run it by again for the occasion.

Hey, Sonny, have I ever told you about The Great Flood of 1986? We just might have time for this wet and woolly tale before the chill starts to get uncomfortable and the sun drops behind the hills.

By the time the great flood arrived I had spent a decade and a half near the Russian River. I was no stranger to the inconveniences of the minor floods which swamped low-lying roads and homes, brought power and water outages, and thousands of phoney insurance claims, with almost every rainy season.

I lived in a bottom floor apartment facing the river for a year or two. It had two huge picture windows offering an excellent view of the river. You could see and hear the steady approach of the brown river when it breeched its banks and swept eddying currents of swift-moving Santa Rosa effluent closer and closer. The house was on stilts, but still the water threatened, till the old wood stove we fed to keep out the damp chill, began to feel as though we were stoking it like the furnace of a big riverboat. Looking out the oversized windows I got the distinct impression of moving upstream against the current. We could stick a ruler through a crack in the floor to see exactly how far the water had to rise before it flowed through our apartment. On these occasions the rain stopped, the river crested before flooding our apartment, and we resumed the sandpiper-like life style of those who choose to live on the banks of a river.

But, in 1986 things were different. I lived with my relatively new family, in a shady neighborhood which seldom sustained serious flooding. The house was a two-story redwood affair with fifteen stairs to climb before you reached our living quarters and we were feeling secure and happy. We had a nice Sears swing set and sand box for the kids to play in the back yard. Gail was doing well with her family child care business, and I had been working for River Child Care Services for a few years

The day before Valentine’s Day a natural disaster was the last thing on our minds. There were hints of things to come as we met Rhiannon’s grandparents, The Smiths, to dine at Pat’s in Guerneville before they were to take her to their place in Pleasant Hill for a couple of weeks. The wind began to build quickly, pennants and hanging signs were blown horizontal as we watched the Smith’s van roll East on River Road toward Highway 101. But there was no heavy rain yet.

Later that evening my band, “The Gray Cats” was scheduled to play at a widely advertised Valentine’s Ball at the River Theater in Guerneville. The band’s name on the marquee looms above the rising flood waters in photos which made it to the mainstream media and were later seen by friends and family in Florida.

But the evenings plans were scrapped first because of pervasive power outages due to the high winds. We had some thoughts about securing a generator and staging the show anyway, but after the rains began in earnest and the saturated ground would afford no more drainage possibilities, the water began to rise fast and we gave up on the idea.

We decided to observe the time-honored tradition of having the apres le gig party, even though the gig itself had been cancelled. All the bandmates and significant others partied at my house and another mate’s house next door, till we were unable to realize that we were in the midst of something completely different in scale than the trickling inconveniences of years past.

We snored in drug-addled, alcoholic dreamland while the waters rose, and awoke the next morning to a third world reality. Only one end of our road was above water. We were able to drive the vehicles to higher ground, but none of the major roads were open to through traffic.

Later that morning I watched a panicked couple of seniors try to drive through a flooded dip in the road to quickly find themselves with water up to their windows and rising. We were able to use a row boat to help get them and their belongings out of the car, and in an hour the car was invisible beneath the surface.

The water had risen to within four or five steps to the entrance of our living quarters and completely submerged my neighbor’s house when we loaded our son, Jesse, a German shepherd mix dog, Buckwheat, a bunny rabbit, and Elvis the cat into the rowboat with two suitcases of clothes and some food. We could see the swing set just below the murky waters as we rowed off into the unknown. We had no idea if we’d have a house or belongings when we returned. We had no idea when we’d be able to return or where we’d stay, though we did have plenty of friends who lived on higher ground.

The constant din of the huge, low-flying military helicopters evacuating residents from their flooded homes, the explosion of propane tanks ripped from their moorings riding like torpedoes on the raging rapids, gave the proceedings an “Apocalypse Now” kind of feeling.

We were given refuge by generous neighbors, Leslie and Chris Lushington, where the incessant drumming of the heavy raindrops on the roof of their small trailer, and the confinement of too many sodden people under stress, gave us all a good dose of “Das Boot”. (When you’ve seen as many movies as I have, reaity almost seems like deja vu, dude.)

I feel guilty about that third world reference I made a while back. I couldn’t survive for long under the conditions we faced during the next few days. To get fresh water Chris and I hiked on heavily wooded, steep-ass hillsides, high above the swollen river, to get to a pure stream for drinking water. We both carried Alhambra jugs to fill with fresh drinking water for our families.

I am a former athlete, even then gone to seed, and truth be told, a sedentary kind of guy. In short, I was way out of shape. This travel over slanted, difficult terrain, had me gasping, staggering, sliding and cursing. And that was before we loaded up our jugs and headed back.

Chris, on the other hand, is like a wiry mucking fountain goat, and shames me greatly by being exuberantly healthy. He kindly waited for me at a prominent vantage point where we had a wide-angle view of the rambunctious river. The crazy whiplash noise we’d heard at intervals during the climb proved to be coming from a power line which spanned the river. The water had risen high enough to carry the cable downstream for a while before it would snap back like a colossal sling shot. We gaped at the sight of this repeating process and the inevitable result: poles on either side of the river which were connected to the stretched cable began to topple, sparks began to fly. A tumbling domino effect added more toppling poles, more sparks and smoke and horrible odors. PCB’s? Run for it, with your 65 pounds of water on a steep, skittering hillside.

A nice old widow lady named Della gave us shelter for a couple of days. Our house was still inaccessible, the rains continued, the water was receding slightly but the media wetherfolk droned on, “No end in sight.”

Next we moved to much higher ground with my boss at the time, Margie Corcoran. From her house we could walk to the back of the Catholic Church where a sort of balcony afforded us a spectacular view of the bridge, the theater, the road and the river. Usually you would share the view with others who had evacuated homes for refuge on higher ground, all in various stages of shock and awe.

Margie and her husband, Bob, had a nice home. Bob was a contractor and had given the place nice custom touches. I felt guilty as we shared their hot tub, steaming in comfort, looking up at the clouds scudding across the full moon, illuminating the light sprinkle of rain still falling, knowing that so many others were packed into shelters at the Guerneville Vets Building or local schools, probably gritting their teeth with anxiety.

Then the dreadful return home. We were surprised to discover that the river had reached our deck, but apparently stopped just before entering our living quarters. Downstairs was a different story (no pun intended). The flood waters had done a pretty good impression of the aftermath of a tornado in our laundry and storage rooms. A picnic table lodged above a gaping door, swollen collectible magazines jamming bookshelves with sodden pulp, ink bleeding on sheets of original art, and vast quantities of slimy malodorous mud.

We were among the lucky ones and after a few weeks of back-breaking work were able to move back in and provide temporary housing for our neighbors who lost virtually everything. As the LSL says “Everything happens for a reason.” A year later we moved into a house that had had about nine inches of water during the great flood the year before. This would allow us to be eligible for FEMA funding, which enabled us to have our house lifted high above possible flood level (and paid for other subsequent improvements as well).

 

Those Amazing Humans, #219, Alejandro Jodorowsky

Gets my vote for the Most Interesting Man, 2011.

Senor Jodorowsky harkens me back to the good old days when I was managing a small movie theater in a small town called Monte Rio, on (occasionally in) the Russian River in Northern California. We would struggle to pay the high guarantees for hot box office properties in order to make enough money to be able to screen the films we really liked. One of the films I really liked was Jodorowsky’s “El Topo”. A cult favorite at the time, it has been unavailable for several decades due to contractual disagreements between the film maker and the distributor/producer. The film, along with another of my favorites, Robert Downey’s “Greaser’s Palace”, could be described as a psychedelic western. My life at that time also could have been described as a psychedelic western, thus my affinity for Jodorowsky.

Alejandro is a very interesting man. His quest for spirituality and artistic truth has led him on some some strange paths indeed. If you have seen the Dos XX’s advertising campaign centered around “The Most Interesting Man”, you may understand why Senor Jodorowsky gets my vote for the title in 2011. I will give you just a taste from Wikipedia to make my point.

Alejandro Jodorowsky (Spanish pronunciation: [aleˈxandɾo xodoˈrovski]) (born 7 February 1929) is a Chilean-Jewish filmmaker, playwright, composer and writer. Best known for his avant-garde films, he has been “venerated by cult cinema enthusiasts” for his work which “is filled with violently surreal images and a hybrid blend of mysticism and religious provocation.” ^[1] His most notable works include El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973) and Santa Sangre (1989), all of which have had limited release but achieved popularity amongst various countercultural groups.^[1] He has cited the filmmaker Federico Fellini as his primary cinematic influence,^[2] and has been described as an influence on such figures as Marilyn Manson^[3] and David Lynch. After a failed attempt to return to filmmaking with a film entitled King Shot starring Marylin Manson and produced by David Lynch, Alejandro is set to return to cinema with the sequel to El Topo entitled Abel Cain sometime in late 2011 or 2012.

Jodorowsky is also a playwright and play director, having produced over one hundred plays, primarily in Mexico where he lived for much of his life. Alongside this he is also a writer, particularly of comic books – his The Incal even has been noted as having a claim to be “the best comic book” ever written^[4] – as well as books on his own theories about spirituality. Jodorowsky has been involved in the occult and various spiritual and religious groups, including Zen Buddhism and forms of Mexican shamanism, and has formulated his own spiritual system, which he has called “psychomagic” and “psychoshamanism”.

It was whilst in Paris that Jodorowsky began studying mime with Etienne Decroux and joined the troupe of one of Decroux’s students, Marcel Marceau. It was with Marceau’s troupe that he went on a world tour, and he wrote several routines for the group, including ‘The Cage’ and ‘The Mask Maker’. After this, he returned to theatre directing, working on the music hall comeback of Maurice Chevalier in Paris.^[1] In 1957, Jodorowsky turned his hand to film making, creating Les têtes interverties (The Severed Heads), a 20-minute adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novella. It consisted almost entirely of mime, and told the surreal story of a head-swapping merchant who helps a young man find courtship success. Jodorowsky himself played the lead role. The director Jean Cocteau admired the film, and wrote an introduction for it. It was considered lost, until a print was discovered in 2006.

A scene from Jodorowsky’s Fando y Lis.

In 1960, Jodorowsky moved to Mexico, where he settled down in Mexico City. Nonetheless, he continued to return occasionally to France, on one occasion visiting the surrealist artist André Breton, but he was disillusioned in that felt that he had become somewhat conservative in his old age.^[1] Continuing his interest in surrealism, in 1962 he founded the Panic Movement along with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor. The movement aimed to go beyond the conventional surrealist ideas by embracing absurdism, and its members refused to take themselves seriously, whilst laughing at those critics who did.^[1] In 1966 he produced his first comic strip, Anibal 5, which was related to the Panic Movement. The following year he created a new feature film, Fando y Lis,^[10] loosely based on a play written by Fernando Arrabal, who was working with Jodorowsky on performance art at the time. Fando y Lis premiered at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival, where it instigated a riot amongst those objecting to the film’s content^[11] and it was subsequently banned in Mexico.^[12]

It was in Mexico City that he encountered Ejo Takata (1928–1997), a Zen Buddhist monk who had studied at the Horyuji and Shofukuji monasteries in Japan before traveling to Mexico via the United States in 1967 to spread Zen. Jodorowsky became a disciple of Takata, and offered his own house to be turned into a zendo. Subsequently Takata attracted other disciples around him, who spent their time in meditation and the study of koans.^[13] Eventually, Takata instructed Jodorowsky that he had to learn more about his feminine side, and so he went and befriended the English surrealist Leonora Carrington who had recently moved to Mexico.^[14]

In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune and asked Jodorowsky to direct a film version. Agreeing, he planned to cast the surrealist artist Salvador Dali as the Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, who requested a fee of $100,000 per hour. He also planned to cast Orson Welles as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who only agreed when Jodorowsky offered to get his favourite gourmet chef to prepare his meals for him throughout the filming.^[22] The book’s protagonist, Paul Atreides, was to be played by Jodorowsky’s own son, Brontis Jodorowsky. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd, Magma, Henry Cow and Karlheinz Stockhausen.^{[citation needed]} Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris consisting of Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers for science fiction publications, Jean Giraud (Moebius), a French illustrator who created and also wrote and drew for Metal Hurlant magazine, and H. R. Giger.^{[citation needed]} Frank Herbert travelled to Europe in 1976 to find that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky’s script would result in a 14-hour movie (“It was the size of a phonebook”, Herbert later recalled).^{[citation needed]} Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship. The production for the film collapsed, and the rights for filming were sold once more, this time to Dino de Laurentiis, who employed the American filmmaker David Lynch to direct, creating the film Dune in 1984.

After the collapse of the Dune project, Jodorowsky completely changed course and, in 1980, premiered his children’s fable “Tusk“, shot in India. Taken from Reginald Campbell‘s novel “Poo Lorn of the Elephants,” the film explores the soul-mate relationship between a young British woman living in India and a highly prized elephant. The film exhibited little of the director’s outlandish visual style and was never given wide release. Jodorowsky has since disowned the film.^{[citation needed]}

Grandpa’s Ten Bestest Toys Of All Time, Number 10

Marx Moon Base, circa 1950’s.

There was a time not so long ago, before I became as spiritually evolved as I am now, that I actually tried to recapture the purity of my youth by finding and purchasing things on ebay. But I’ve put away childish things. Put so many of them away that I don’t have room for any more.

This moon base was an early manifestation of my obsession with all things Alien and otherwordly. This lunar outpost was surrounded by walls of tin and equipped with futuristic weaponry and spacecraft from representative cultures spanning the galaxy. The real stars of this production were the aliens and earthlings, space-suited or au naturel in scales, plates or amoebic extrusions. There was an astonishing variety of nicely detailed entities in plastic. Somewhere there are three or four black and white photos I took of my 8 year old self socializing at ground zero with these aliens and space honkies. If I ever find them I’ll be sure to post them.

Guess how much the starting bid for this item is. Two hundred seventy-five USD, that’s what. Still want to recapture your youth?