Innocent Bystander

North by Northwest (1959)

I don't ever really plan to be stuck on a desert island and if I am, the presence of a DVD player, a widescreen TV and an unlimited--not to mention FREE--power source are probably going to be imaginary at best, but if I was, and I was limited to ONE film (or one DVD) and not the usual ten, I do believe I'd pick North by Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 classic which is the quintessential Hitchcock film.

NxNW (as we shall mercifully shorten it to at this point) is now out in a new 50th anniversary edition, available on both regular, old-fashioned DVD and Blu-ray. The latter edition comes in Warner Bros. fancy-schmancy "cinebook" edition, which means you get a free little book bound into the box. I love this format, and I wish every film came this way. Well, maybe not The Ugly Truth. Or anything else with Katherine Heigl.

NxNW looks amazing on Blu-ray and it certainly adds to the enjoyment of this classic flick. For those of you who don't know it, the movie features Cary Grant as a Madison Ave. ad-man (Mad Man!) who gets caught up in a mistaken identity plot that has him chasing across the country after the imaginary man he's supposed to be, George Kaplan. It's implausible, impossible, and thoroughly enjoyable. Built around a couple of Hitchcockian set piece ideas (he wanted to see a man out in the open chased by an airplane and a man being chased across the faces of Mt. Rushmore), Ernest Lehman's script takes both those tentpole ideas and strings an elaborate gold-laced Taj Mahal of a tent around them. Grant--or shall we say Roger O. Thornhill--finds himself sucked deeper and deeper in the plot, which involves a femme fatale (the great Eva Marie Saint) a menacing villain (the wonderful James Mason) and his sinister henchmen (including an early role for Martin Landau). Leo G. Carroll and Jessie Royce Landis complete the cast as the G-man mastermind and Thornhill's mother. It's fast, funny, and furious and the biplane scene is as much a classic bit of cinema as the shower scene from Hitchcock's next film, Psycho.

Grant though is the real star in a role that's tailor-made for him. Jimmy Stewart was the original choice, but after the relative failure of Vertigo at the box office, Hitchcock thought Stewart played too old. Ironically Grant was a few years older in real life, but he looks and acts like a man in his late 30s/early 40s in this, active, virile and a total alpha male. His scenes with Saint, who plays the 26-year-old Eve Kendall are super hot (watch for the train scene where they have dinner in the dining car) and went as far as they could with the censors of the time.

The disc is topped off with two new documentaries, one on the "Hitchcock Touch," the other on "NxNW: One for the Ages." Both feature new interviews with directors, including William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, Curtis Hanson, Francis Lawrence, and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, all extolling the virtues of both Hitchcock and the film. Two other older docs are also featured, including one on the making of the film and one on Cary Grant ("A Class Apart," from 2004--which is excellent...it doesn't get any better than his ex-wife, Betsy Drake, saying she and Grant were too busy fucking to worry about the rumors about him being gay).

Soon after watching NxNW, I watched the second James Bond movie, From Russia With Love, and realized what a huge debt that film--and Sean Connery's portrayal of James Bond, in general--owed to Cary Grant. Grant might have always been playing himself--or rather, the "himself" he created when he went from being Archie Leach to Cary Grant--but many people have tried to be him, too. Too bad he wasn't ten years younger when Bond made it to the big screen.

But beyond all that musing of what if's and who shoulda, I think I finally have the answer to the age-old question as to what is my all-time favorite movie. North by Northwest has it all: a magnetic star at the top of his game, a director doing the best film of his career, a sexy female spy, one of the best villains in movies, and a musical score by Bernard Herrmann that his among his personal best. I could watch this movie again and again...in fact, I think I might just go do that right now.

Tamaqua Then and Now by R Thomas Berner

One of the great things about blogging is the people you "meet." Every once in a while, someone writes me out of the blue about something I wrote on this here blog. About a week or so ago, a gentleman by the name of R Thomas Berner wrote me about a mention I made of the Tamaqua Evening Courier--my hometown newspaper when I was growing up--and included a link to his own blog (which you can visit by clicking here). While exploring that blog, I found out that Mr. Berner had self-published his own book on my old hometown, titled Tamaqua Then and Now.

The book is exactly what the title says. Berner takes an historical photo, often an old postcard, or a shot from a personal collection, and lays it side-by-side with his own photo of the same building or site as it is now. It's a fascinating juxtapositioning of images, showing how much--or at times, how little--things have changed. I haven't been back to Tamaqua in over a decade (I know...shame on me), so this is more than a trip down memory lane for me...it's--at times--a revelation. The old train station, for example. I knew it was now restored and had a restaurant, but I didn't realize how absolutely lovely it looked, how pristine and beautiful the landscaping is around it. While I'm disappointed that the book didn't include my grandfather's building on Broad Street (you can see a tiny sliver of it on page 53, about three doors down on the left; you can also see the Beard Insurance Agency building there, the second building in, where I worked for a few years as the art director of The Tamaqua Paper), it does include so many buildings I recognize from my 25 or so years of living there.

Berner does a wonderful job of capturing the correct angle and matching the shot of his original source material. The Elks Building and St. Jerome's Church shots on pages 56-57 and 60-61, respectively, are great examples of his attention to detail (and two buildings that--thankfully--appear to have not changed one bit). There's a little bit of history thrown in with some of the photos, but Berner is the first to admit he's not an historian (although his next project, The Illustrated History of Tamaqua, shows promise in that area). Not a lot has been written about my hometown (although there's a ton of history here). There was the slim volume Tamaqua Tales, written by the Rev. Milton Detterline, back in the late '60s, and that's about it. When I worked for the above-mentioned Tamaqua Paper, we had the voluminous articles by a local history buff--who is mentioned prominently in Berner's book--Paul Scherer. Scherer's weekly columns were one of the most eagerly-awaited parts of the paper and certainly deserve to be collected.

Berner's book made me both happy and a little sad. So much has changed in my hometown. It really started to change the most in my formative decade, the 1960s, when the trains slowed to a crawl and the coal industry started to die. In one way, it's gratifying to see these photos of the town I grew up in. The blight of strip mining seems to be gone, the literal holes in the ground covered up and it's green and lovely again. But there's so much missing. The Victoria Theatre is a particular heart ache. I spent many a weekend there growing up (my first James Bond movie--Goldfinger; the night my friend and I went to see The Guns of Navarone and got caught for a curfew violation because the movie ran so long). Even then it was rundown (I remember the lower section of the main seating area being closed off for many years, because of rats...or at least that's what the rumor was). Now it's just plain gone. But for every missing theater, there's the train station, a triumphant story of restoration. Berner's book celebrates this town, then and now, and is a wonderful collection of images and memories. You're not going to find it at your local Borders or Barnes or Noble or even on Amazon.com. The only place you can get your very own copy is at Lulu.com (click here to go directly to the Tamaqua Then and Now page). For all you fellow Tamaquains who might have come here while Googling...this is the perfect holiday gift, whether you still live there or are like me, an ex-pat (or Tam) living 3,000 miles away. Go home with this book.

Like father, like son, I guess...

Last night I woke up around 1:30am and had to get up. As I put my legs on the floor and started to will my body to get up and start moving, I was reminded of all the times I watched my father wrest himself from our living room couch to...get up and go to bed.

My dad was a milkman, the guy who delivered fresh bottles of milk--and ice cream, orange drink, butter, and various and other dairy-related sundries--to your door. I'm not even sure if they still do that, but back when I was a kid, there was not only a milkman, but a soda man, a bread man, and in the summer, the farmer came. The latter drove up with a dark green pick-up truck with produce in the back, fresh from the farm. They made some kind of noise as they drove down the street, alerting possible customers of their impending arrival. I know this, because my mom would often buy fresh string beans and corn on the cob from them. But I digress...

My dad spent most of his working years getting up at an ungodly hour and going out in the worst weather possible, all to do his appointed rounds. Many days he was out the door at 1:30 or 2:00am, only to return around 3 or so in the afternoon. My childhood was one of constant shushing: "SHHH!!! Your father is sleeping!" He'd come home, head for bed for a nap, get up for dinner, and then promptly fall asleep on the couch in front of the TV each night, until it was time to get up and go to bed. Seriously. One of my not-so-fondest memories of childhood was my mom waking my dad up with this phrase: "Lutes (his name was Luther, believe it or not)...wake up and go to bed."

As a kid, the whole thing was annoying as hell. We couldn't play in the big yard out back or the cool side porch in the front (which had a whole spooky underneath the porch thing going on), because they both were on or near my parents' upstairs bedroom. (In reality, my father could have probably slept through an atomic bomb blast.) And the sleeping on the couch thing? Well, he snored like a buzzsaw, so TV watching was an exercise of what could be louder: the show we were trying to hear or dad snoring.

In retrospect, of course, I appreciate what he had to do to go out and make a living to provide for us. I wouldn't wish those hours on my worst enemy (you know who you are, you rotten bastard). The weather took a toll on him physically, driving around a largely rural route where he had to go to the dairy, load his truck and then deliver everything. He was also the guy who was the "route man," the person who had to know all the other drivers' routes. He filled in for each of them when they were on vacation. And he did all of this for the princely sum of about $125.00 a week.

So last night when I woke up and had to make my nightly trip to the facilities, I caught myself thinking of him when I careened like a drunken sailor through my tiny apartment on my way to and from the bathroom. It wasn't exactly a fond memory, to start off with, but the more I think of it this morning as I type this...it kind of is.

Friday Foto #105...

Fall in Central Park. To see more of my photos, Friday or otherwise, click here!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope this Turkey Day finds you exactly where you want to be, with family and friends. And if you don't want to be with family or friends, that's okay, too.

And remember...when you get sick of being with that family and/or those friends, go to the movies! Nothing says warm, holiday, family sentiment like Ninja Assassin. In theaters now. It's the perfect Thanksgiving Day movie!

Give the gift of wish...

Folks, as Black Friday looms after Turkey Day tomorrow and you prepare to hit the highways and byways in search of the perfect Christmas gifts, we'd like to take the time to remind you of all those poor unfortunate bloggers out there who have Amazon wish lists just sitting idly by, doing nothing. Yes, it's that time of year again, time for our annual "Give the Gift of Wish" drive.

If you enjoy this blog on a daily basis or at least pretend to, or if you'd like to see some young blogger's eyes light up on Christmas morning (or whenever a package arrives in the mail), here's your chance to do some good. Click here to give some poor blogger (um, that would be ME) a pleasant little giftie that shows you really care. Yes, I know this is obnoxious (I'm talking directly to you, tall, beautiful one down the hall), but let's face it: I don't run ads here. I don't ask for "tip the blogger" PayPal donations on a regular basis. And this is also a perfect time to remind all my friends (both of you, or at least the one who can read) that if you're stumped, stymied, or snookered into "what the hell can I get Gary for Christmas," here's your opportunity to solve that problem right now. Don't you want a worry-free Thanksgiving? Don't you want that turkey-induced coma to be filled with visions of sugar plums dancing in your head?  

This is the only time this obnoxious reminder will appear on this blog. Until next year.

An Education (2009)

I saw a couple of movies on my vacation a month or so ago. (You remember my vacation; I promised to blog about it and never did.) One of them was An Education, the British movie where a precocious and rebellious 16-year-old girl fights a nation full of Zombies as she and a rag-tag band of survivors drive around the country looking for peace.

No, wait. That's Zombieland. I saw that, too. That wasn't British.

We kid. An Education is the polar opposite of Z-land, a lovely, slow-moving character study. It has the 16 year-old-girl, the wonderful Carey Mullligan who meets an older man (Peter Sarsgaard) who takes a fancy to her, as the Brits are wont to say. Jenny (Mulligan) falls for this sophisticated, attentive man who has the wherewithal to even charm her parents, too, including her obstinate father (played by the always excellent Alfred Molina).

But David (Sargaard), for all his charm, isn't what he appears to be. He and his chum--in typical postwar, pre-Beatles London--act out and Jenny soon learns they've a bit of the con artist in them. Jenny gets sucked in further and further until she finally learns the bitter truth about David...

Which isn't quite what we're led to believe throughout the film. I thought the revealing moment was going to be something inevitable (especially when it came to repressed Great Britain in the early 60s), the stuff that many British government scandals were made of, but it--surprisingly wasn't. I'll leave it to you to see this wonderful little movie to experience it for yourself without giving anything else away. Let's just say I enjoyed it thoroughly, especially the beguiling Mulligan, who is a major star in the making.

Happy blog-iversary!

Five years ago this week--November 27, 2004, to be exact--I started blogging. I'm mentioning it now because it's on my mind and because Nov. 27, 2009 is a Friday. And I already have a Friday Foto planned for that day.

Such is the meaning of blogging for me these days. Having that one day a week that I don't have to worry about writing something...because I run a photo instead.

But back then--2,774 posts ago--blogging was new and exciting for me. It was a way of scratching that creative itch that I seem to have always had. A long time ago (almost 20 years now), I started drawing my own comics. I had been drawing since I was 15 or so, a late bloomer, to be sure. It took me 2 years of art school and 13 years of a career in graphic design to finally escape the boundaries I had when it came to drawing comics and telling stories. I finally got to a place where I could accept my art for what it was. It never quite became what I wanted it to be. I long ago gave up on that. I wanted to have the sharp, smooth line of Leonard Starr, the graphic sense of Steranko, the wit and whimsy of Rick Geary. I occasionally was able to tell a story, and after 6 issues of my self-published comic, Innocent Bystander, and 10 issues of Geeksville, I finally gave up the ghost. I don't draw anymore. I don't know why. I used to love it. I still love creating things. I have boxes of sketchbooks, drawers of drawing pens, a drawing table in the center of my small studio apartment. But I never draw.

I had a teacher in art school who made us keep a sketchbook/journal. Each week we had to hand it in, and the more personal and probing it was, the more she liked it. I guess I had a crush on her. She was smart and funny and artistic and I wanted to impress her. Each week, she would put a grade in the back of the book and leave a little note. One week shee wrote that I was a better writer than I was an artist.

And she was right. This blog opened that up to me, thirty years after the fact. I wish I could find her and tell her that. I wish I hadn't pissed away so much time trying to be something I couldn't be: the next great comics artist. I wish I had concentrated on writing.

So five years down the line I'm still here. I told myself then if the blog became a chore, I'd quit. Some days--truth be told--it IS a chore, another thing staring me in the face, reminding me it has to be fed and paid attention to. I don't quite have it my heart to pull the plug just yet. I still have things to say, but I'm not the writer I was 2 or 3 years ago. I don't have the energy or the thought process for it anymore. I think the slide of my writing over the past year or two shows that. I know the number of people who read this blog on a daily basis has slid, too. Diminishing returns all around.

I do know how this blog ends...with someone else's words, ironically enough. Someday I'll post that entry. It's nice having the knowledge that it's waiting out there.

In the meantime, thank you all for finding me over the past 5 years. Thanks especially to those that found me and hung around. Here's that very first post, just in case you're curious. Just one day later, I wrote this post, which is still one of my most favorite things I've ever written. Boy, whatever happened to that guy?

Oh, to be a young blogger once again.

Friday Foto #104...

My neighbor. To see more of my photos, Friday or otherwise, click here!

Steel Pier by Steve Liebowitz

There was a time, dear readers, long ago and far away when the one thing I lived for was summer vacation. My family and I would take the last week of August each summer--as close to my mom's August 24th birthday as possible--and go to Atlantic City, New Jersey for a week, Sunday to Sunday. We started in 1964 and I believe my last time there with my parents was in 1976 or so, right around the time casino gambling came in and changed the ocean resort town forever.

We weren't aware of it at the time, but Atlantic City was dying. Throughout the sixties and into the seventies, the town was deteriorating fast. You can argue whether or not gambling saved it or ruined it. I know the last time I was there in 1998, it was only a short walk from the gaudy opulence of the Boardwalk casinos to streets that resembled Berlin after World War II. The motel we used to stay in--the Crown, at the corner of Pennsylvania and Pacific Avenues--was still there, boasting a nightly rate CHEAPER than what we paid in the sixties, and with it's desk clerk encased behind bullet-proof glass. The Atlantic City of my youth, that eagerly-awaited vacation destination, no longer exists.

Except...except every once in a while, something rolls around to take me back, to remind me. For a while it was postcards. Recently it was other long-lost paper--guidebooks, brochures, etc--from that bygone era. And right now it's the new wonderful book Steel Pier, by author Steve Liebowitz, and published by Down the Shore Publishing.

This beautiful 264-page book (presented landscape style) is full of archival-quality photos, graphics (such as the covers of Steel Pier's yearly guidebooks), advertising, and much more. It's a thick, dense book, a slow read to be savored if you ever spent even a moment on the giant Pier, that reached out a half-mile over the Atlantic Ocean. It's chapters cover everything about the Pier, from its beginnings (along with a history of amusement piers in A. C.), through its rise to prominence, and looks at the men who guided the Pier through its glory years--Frank Gravatt and George Hamid--plus the world famous diving horse. Additional chapters include the big band era, the wacky stunts, movies and Hollywood on the Pier, and the time I'm most familiar with: the rock 'n roll era. It's all wrapped up in a sumptuously designed package that's the perfect holiday gift for any Atlantic City of yore lover.

During our trips, Steel Pier was always a destination. We usually tried to save it for a rainy day, since you could literally spend the entire day there. If that rainy day didn't come by Thursday or so, we caved in and spent a day on the Pier. I saw a number of musical acts there, including Herman's Hermits (twice!), Peter and Gordon, The Four Seasons (with Frankie Valli), Brenda Lee, and an up and coming band named Chicago. I know I first experienced a Woody Allen movie there, with Take the Money and Run, and I also saw the The Andromeda Strain on the Pier. I also saw the world famous diving horse for myself, numerous times. The horse didn't really dive...it just kind of slid off a ramp into a pool below, but the thrill circus of which it was part was on the ocean end of the Pier. It seemed like it took forever to walk out there, and it probably did, what with all the attractions in between the Boardwalk and the end of Steel Pier. I loved to stand on the southern side of the Pier and look in at the city, at Haddon Hall and the Boardwalk and Steeplechase Pier next to it.

Steel Pier as a kind of theme park died in the 1970s. It's been replaced with some kind of amusement park pier, that barely scratches its original footprint over the ocean. These days, the only real analogy to the kind of experience Steel Pier was in its heyday--and what I experienced in the '60s was barely that--is Disneyland, an all-encompassing experience that can keep you occupied for the entire day. That Steel Pier--the one of my fond memories and my youth--is gone, but it lives on in this wonderful new book.