Jeffrey’s Gallimaufry 01.19.24
When Arnold Schwarzenegger knocked Tony Randall out a second-story window
The opportunity to walk into a theater and watch an old movie you know next to nothing about is a privilege we don’t take lightly. It is prominent among the reasons we continue to stick it out in NYC - not many other places boast multiple locations where you can catch rarely screened repertory pictures on pretty much any day of the week.
When Hope spotted that Metrograph was playing a 1979 comedy film named Scavenger Hunt - as part of a James Coco retrospective, of all things - we thought it looked like a goof. We had no idea that it would change our lives.
Yes, of course I’m exaggerating. The film is a dumb ensemble comedy, a disco-era remake of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with a somewhat less legendary cast. Basically, Vincent Price dies at the beginning, and his will sends a bunch of weirdos out on - you guessed it - a scavenger hunt, the winner of which will inherit his $200 million fortune.
This is the type of schlock that, for members of my microgeneration, aired on a Saturday afternoon on our third-tier local TV station when you were eight. You sort of recognized the actors from other things, but you didn’t care, because you were laughing at all the dumb humor. The pratfalls, the mugging, the ridiculous mugging and set pieces all passed safely under the radar of your parents, who had no taste for jackassery. It was blissfully, temporarily, yours.
There were maybe 10 people tops in the small Metrograph theater last Sunday afternoon, but, for two magical hours, we were all that eight-year-old. The movie - with all the accomplished thespians peopling its broad, fascinating cast - is dumb. So, so, so dumb. Dumber than a dishwasher filled with pet rocks. Sublimely dumb. Our small group of strangers shrieked in helpless merriment, dousing the floor with joyful tears. We had no idea what hit us. Hope, Dash, and I left the theater elated, spending a long walk home over the Williamsburg Bridge recounting our favorite bits; then we stayed awake late repeating it all over again, crying with laughter into the wee hours. Maybe this is how religions start.
I do think there’s a certain genius to this ridiculous flick. It feels amazingly democratic - every featured character has some sort of wonderful, unique bit. Putting aside a few regrettable bits, it also has a weirdly generous spirit - everyone starts out as grasping and greedy, but over the course of the picture the villains separate themselves from the common doofuses, and everyone learns a valuable lesson in shared resources. Manufactured scarcity is eschewed, thwarting the winner-takes-all ethos of capitalism, if only for a minute.
I was fascinated to learn that the director, Michael Schultz (Cooley High, The Last Dragon), is one of the few Black directors of his generation to have a consistently successful Hollywood career. He’s still plugging away at age 85! I can’t help but wonder if Schultz’s unconventional ascent may have contributed to the film’s generally inclusive perspective, ensemble spirit, and unlikely goodwill. (Its utterly bone-deep stupidity, on the other hand, seems to be a product of sui generis brilliance.)
The movie isn’t currently streaming anywhere, so I bought the blu-ray to share with friends. I’m a little nervous to watch it again - without the unexpected catharsis it provided us with, and lacking the steady surprise of how low it was willing to go, will it no longer ring foolishly holy? Time will tell. But whatever happens, it’ll never erase my memories of an unexpectedly wonderful - and deeply idiotic - day at the movies, just a few months before the complete collapse of civilization as we know it.
I’m still churning away at graphic novels to thin out some of my collection - though most of the ones here came from the library. Whoops! Everything in this selection is worth reading, though - nothing out there is quite like any of these books. Here are some capsule reviews, clockwise from upper left:
Shubeik Lubeik, by Deena Mohamed: From Egypt, this one has the depth and breadth of a traditional novel. Wishes are real in this world, and subject to the same sort regulation and misuse as any other controlled substance. The story follows the varying fates of three first-class wishes sold through a small newsstand in Cairo.
The Chromatic Fantasy, by H.A.: A comedy/adventure/bildungsroman/romance (bildungsromance?) about two medieval trans men fighting their way in a world of curses and cruelty. It’s funny, charming, and, true to the title, delightfully colorful, down to its gorgeous gilt-edged pages. Also incredibly horny!
Life on the Moon, by Robert Grossman: This posthumous graphic novel by a well-regarded illustrator (he did the Airplane! poster) starts off as a fictionalization of the famous 1835 newspaper hoax claiming winged people lived on the moon, but slowly turns into a panoramic who’s-who of early 19th-century New York City before morphing yet again into an absurdist fable about progress.
Social Fiction, by Chantal Montellier: Three dystopian parables by one of the only women artists to publish in the ‘70s-’80s heyday of the legendary French comix magazine Metal Hurlant. These stylish, eerily prescient stories were either never published in English or botched in their first outings, making this work a major discovery for American readers.
Demon 1-4, by Jason Shiga: This is a four-book series best read in as close to a single pop as possible. Attempting suicide after a botched robbery, Jimmy discovers that he’s a demon whose soul possesses the nearest body whenever he dies. As he seeks revenge against those who wronged him, this simple concept is taken to absurd, gleefully bloody lengths whose complexity is belied by the deceptively childish artwork.
Okay, so before you read about this video you should just go ahead and watch it, because nothing I say about it can beat the sweet insanity of seeong it unfold before your eyes.
While nothing about this makes sense, there’s at least a context for it. Scopitones were a kind of video jukebox invented in France circa 1960, which used 16mm film clips to promote popular songs at bars and cafes. Though they remained a primarily European phenomenon (think Serge Gainsbourg, Johnny Hallyday), they made inroads into the U.S. in the mid-’60s. Some well-known names participated in the trend (Nancy Sinatra, Dionne Warwick, Procul Harum) before it ultimately fizzled out, and scopitones are very much considered the precursors of the MTV explosion of the early ‘80s.
Since these machines primarily existed in places like cocktail lounges, there was a tendency to lean into T&A spectacle as a lure to lascivious patrons. As this example shows, any connection between the visuals and the spirit of the song - or even the goddamn rhythm of the song - was strictly optional. I hadn’t been been familiar with Brook Benton before this, and his smooth soul crooning is not a natural inspiration for the scopitone treatment. But everyone involved is giving it their all, which is both too much and not enough at the same time - and therefore absolutely perfect.
Hope and I first learned about scopitones about a quarter century ago, during our first year in NYC. One of our regular hangouts in those days was the Pink Pony, a Lower East Side bar/cafe that closed up about 10 years ago. It was one of those shaggy, uncategorizable, anything-goes kind of places that used to mark the more bohemian districts of our fair city, at least before they all went extinct.
It was also the sort of place that would totally have sported a scopitone machine if they weren’t breathtakingly rare - both relics of different long-gone pasts. The Pink Pony did the next best thing, though, and held screenings of some of the original film reels. As we sat there in the dark watching the gaudy colors and go-go gyrations, we thought, this right here is the life we want to live. Now that life is gone, but we’re still here. What happened? Thank god we still have places like Metrograph to waste our time in.
But of course, our number one method of wasting our time is our phones. Hard to believe these things have been stealing our souls for 17 years now.
I got a new one this week! I don’t know why I’ve decided this is news. But I’d had the old one since early 2019, which translates to about 10% of my life. Somehow having the same phone for 10% of my life - especially THIS 10% of my life, in all its middle-aged, apocalyptic rottenness - seems significant.
The first week I got that old phone, before the case arrived, it slipped off my desk onto a concrete floor, cracking its back into shards. This was an apt harbinger. Within months, my work situation took a serious turn for the worse, and within a year we descended into a global pandemic. Since then, I’ve been in the weird situation - as the most fortunate among us have - of having a decent, occasionally delightful day-to-day life while the world collapses around us. There have been rough personal patches, to be sure - this past year, especially the earlier part, was not great - but we’ve weathered it so far.
My old phone was still functional, if a little slow and temperamental - for instance, it couldn’t take a photo and play music at the same time. But it was the way I interfaced with much of the world, and now I’ll be interfacing on something newer and sleeker - something that hopefully won’t crack within a few days of delivery. Could this be a harbinger of better times ahead? Not bloody likely.
In any event, here’s the hand-painted case I designed for my old phone. The bright color underpainting was done on the inside of the case, but the outer painting wore off within a few weeks and I never painted it back on.
But I suppose after a certain point I didn’t need the reminder, because I’d already absorbed its lesson: We are all phone.
Phone is dead. Long live phone.
Arnold is numero uno.
What’s going to happen in a few months to collapse human civilization?