I’m at poolside now, late into dusk. In the distance an immense cloud is above the Catalinas. It’s as if a big fist gave a shiner to the sky. A covey of birds, new to me, strut linearly about the pool, mother and chicks. Offbeat bird sounds punctuate the lambent air, now warmly cool. It is quiet now, a stillness, except for outdoor compressors kicking in to cool the interiors — machine hum. A bird spits across the sky like a thrown lance. Swallows are above, or are they bats? In any case, this Jew is out of here.
Safely ensconced, I’ll continue. I can’t wait to meet up with my first scorpion. Woody Allen, I am not. But why is that Jewish stars never ward off vampire bats, and why did a Hungarian Jew, Bela Lugosi, become the bloodsucker par excellence. What I love about the movies are often unintended subtexts. The bi-sexuality of Garbo and Dietrich, Randolph Scott and Cary Grant, and Tallulah Bankhead are delights. Only in America can a gorilla climb the Empire State Building in search of cross-species sex and have his cock and balls airbrushed out. No wonder he was furious with those bi-planes. And I don’t want to get started on Pinocchio’s nose. Aladdin warming up his lamp, and a tranvestite wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. See Betteleheims’ The Uses of Enchantment to get the low-down.
Most of all, most of everything, reduced to barest essentials are openings, portals, holes or entries — from Alice in Wonderland to Italian arias, to Martin Luther’s thunderous constipation. Shit or sing, that’s what I say. We are primitives, animals –never forget that, and that is all right, just get it! It is reductive, I agree, but so endlessly interesting to contemplate, so on target. Leave it to American science to label the creation of the universe as the Big Bang. Oh, the market economy lives. We even hype creation, tacky, tacky.
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