Another That Guy

Mayhaps your remember a post from days past about "that guy". I'm not only a fan of old movies, but an inveterate credits reader. Because of that, I know the names of a plethora of character actors. Few know know their names, but most know their faces.

Last night, I channel surfed onto Lawrence Tierney's first starring role in the movie, Dillinger. He went on to be a film noir stalwart in movies like, Born to Kill, Shakedown, The Hoodlum and the homicidal hitchhiker in The Devil Thumbs a Ride.  I wonder if John Waters would have written his latest book, Carsick, if he had seen this before sticking his thumb out in Baltimore heading to San Francisco.

 Normally, catching a movie with one of my "that guys" would not be impetus for a musing. But in the intro to the movie, Robert Osborne mentioned that Tierney got himself into as much trouble off-the-screen as his characters did on-the-screen.

The tough son of an Irish-American New York cop, Tierney enjoyed his libations, frequented seedy bars and didn't take any guff.  In the 40s and 50s, he was arrested numerous times for brawls. So much so, that his career suffered because studios didn't want the bad publicity that hounded him. This behavior continued well into his 50s, after his career had waned. In 1973 at 54, he was stabbed during a fight in a Manhattan bar. Two years later he was questioned by the New York police after a 24-year-old woman's apparent suicide. He told the cops he..."had just got there, and she just went out the window."

Intrigued, I began some research of my own. Amazingly, I found out that his career continued later in life. His look had changed with age. Despite being listed as Lawrence Tierney in the credits,  I never make the connection with the film noir actor. For the Tarantino fans, he is the master mind, Joe, who put the gang together in Reservoir Dogs. For Sienfeld fans, he played Elaine's father.

That is the kind of trivia that become encoded into my cerebral matter. As ever - BB

"All right ramblers, let's get rambling!" - Lawrence Tierney as Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs

Garage Sale

 My last blog entry was mid-March. This hiatus is due to a myriad of factors: some personal, some
family, some societal and some mental coalescing into a block of Brobdingnagian proportions. Left behind is a aggregation of snippets that never came to fruition.

I have collected them here, a literary garage sale so to speak. Okay, not an original idea, Ken Kesey

did the same thing in the early 70s with a collection of pieces he had previously written. As C.S. Lewis said, "...no man who worries about originality will ever by original..." Hopefully cleaning out the recesses of my mind's attic will allow for a complete thought to emanate into a complete blog.

So here is a collection of the starts and stops formed over the last few months.

Friends - over the years I have noticed that I put my friends in circles bounded by geography, time and circumstances: work friends, friends from childhood, college(s) there were several, fellow musicians, drinking buddies, etc. Like a Venn diagram some cross into other groups. What amazed me most about this realization was that I remembered what a Venn diagram was.

Music - reviewing my collection of music, I realize that I prefer the early works of most of the bands/musicians I enjoy. There's something about their music before they become popular that separates the early stuff from later work. I don't know if it's a rawness, a feeling of exploration, a naivete, but usually the initial stuff is my favorite.

 Contrarianism - I have always heard the different drummer ala Thoreau. In my family everyone hated the black jelly beans. They became my favorite. When arena rock bands ruled the airways, I listened exclusively to Chicago blues and be-bop jazz. Most guys' first date place is the movies. I'd take the mademoiselle du jour to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Invariably, they'd want to see the Impressionists. I'd feign confusion about where to go, though I knew the museum like the back of my hand, end up at the Abstract and Dada collections.

When I moved in with Kristin, she was curious about my music collection. I played for here my Sun Ra CDs. Her reaction was blunt. Weeks later, I turned her on to Booker T. & the MGs (who she was not familiar with - that's what you get for growing up in the 80s), Allen Toussaint and Professor Longhair.  Her look was priceless! "You had music like this and played that other stuff?" She's still
with me, so the antithetical attitude works...sometimes. - as ever BB

"Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic." - Lewis Carroll ( Dashiell Hammett quoted this bit by Tweedle-Dee when asked to name communists in Hollywood by the U.S. Senate)