Archive for the ‘Reminiscing’ category

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My date with the Mitchell Brothers, revisited

July 13, 2009

The hot story around these parts today is the arrest of James Raphael Mitchell, who stands accused of beating his girlfriend to death and kidnapping their infant daughter over this past weekend. (The child was found unharmed and returned safely to her maternal grandmother. Thanks for asking.)

Mitchell is the son of the late Jim Mitchell, of the notorious Mitchell Brothers, once the Pornography Kings of San Francisco. (Marilyn Chambers, Behind the Green Door, the O’Farrell Theatre, Rated X… those Mitchell Brothers.)

You may recall that back in 1991, Jim killed his high-living sibling Artie — the junior half of the aforementioned Brothers — and ultimately served three years in prison for manslaughter. Post-incarceration, Jim died of a heart attack at his home right here in Sonoma County in 2007.

All of the above simply affords me the opportunity (or excuse — choose the word you prefer) to share with you again the once-told story of my now-legendary interview with Jim and Artie Mitchell, back in the day.

It’s okay… the link is SFW.

Trust me.

Categories: Aimless Riffing, Celebritiana, Cinemania, Dead People Got No Reason to Live, My Home Town, Reminiscing, Ripped From the Headlines, SwanStuff

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Comic Art Friday: Back to the egg

July 10, 2009

All right, already. I know that I took a few more than seven days off. But I’m back.

Just in time, in fact, to celebrate SSTOL’s fifth anniversary.

That’s right, friend reader — five years ago this weekend, your Uncle Swan first spread his mighty wings over the Internet. The cyberverse would never again be the same.

Although our signature tradition of Comic Art Fridays wouldn’t begin until several months after SSTOL’s debut, I thought that in honor of our quinquennial, we’d revisit the very first piece of comic art ever posted on these august Web pages. (Actually, if you want to get picky about it, the august pages at the old e-dress. But you know what I mean.)

WonderWoman_Adkins

This Mona Lisa-like portrait of Wonder Woman inaugurated my comic art gallery, and in particular my collection of pinups dedicated to the Amazing Amazon. Both the pencils and inks are the work of longtime comics stalwart Dan Adkins, considered by many one of the greatest inkers in the history of comics, but also a penciler of significant distinction. Adkins broke into the industry as the assistant of legendary comics artist Wally Wood, then went on to a stellar career on his own merits.

For whatever reason, Wonder Woman is one of Adkins’s favorite pinup subjects. Today I own three of Dan’s Dianas, but this was the first one I purchased. Ironically, I bought it less because it was a great Wonder Woman drawing than because it reminded me a little of my good friend Donna, another statuesque brunette with a remarkably similar first name. (I’ve never actually seen Donna sporting a bustier and tiara, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she did.)

Five years later, this piece is something of an anomaly in my gallery. I don’t usually collect closeups or medium shots — to borrow the cinematographer’s parlance — and these days, I rarely buy a new drawing that I didn’t commission personally. But even though this Adkins WW sticks out like a cowlick in my Temple of Diana, and even though I own better representations of the character by the same artist, I’ve hung onto this one because it’s the cornerstone upon which the entire rest of my collection was constructed.

Not to mention a continuing legacy of Comic Art Fridays.

Speaking of which…

This has been another one.

[View the back catalog of Comic Art Friday posts here.]

Categories: Blogosphere, Comic Art Friday, Reminiscing, SwanStuff

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The King is dead

June 25, 2009

The steam was still rising from my fresh-from-the-oven post about the long-anticipated passing of Farrah Fawcett when I received a bulletin about another celebrity — indeed, one of entertainment’s biggest names of the past half-century.

Michael Jackson, gone at age 50.

Whew.

It’s practically impossible to overestimate Michael’s impact on the music industry, and on the side business of celebrity. He practically defined the term “child star” as the lead vocalist of the Jackson Five. At the height of his adult solo career, he was the best-known, most beloved, and most highly revered individual performer in all of show business. It’s fair to say that he launched the music video industry into respectability. This was a guy who made so much money with his own music that he bought The Beatles’ catalog, too.

When Michael dubbed himself “The King of Pop,” he wasn’t just selling wolf tickets.

And then came the weirdness.

What always fascinated me about the latter-day Michael Jackson — you know, the cat-nosed, gray-complected, amusement-park-dwelling, germophobic, baby-dangling, accused-pedophile whack-job Michael Jackson — is that as bizarre a figure as he became, even people who despised the sight of the guy often felt just a touch sorry for him.

That’s a tough balancing act.

Nobody pities O.J. Simpson. Nobody feels sorry for Phil Spector. Michael Vick? Barry Bonds? Jose Canseco? Please.

But with rare exceptions — all of whom, I’m certain, will chime in here with comments — folks couldn’t help thinking that this charismatic, tremendously talented person must have experienced some horrific damage early in life to turn out the way that he did. For all of the crazy things he said and did — and that other people said that he did — Michael Jackson resonated tragedy. That didn’t excuse him. But it did make people wish his life had gone differently.

Although I never much idolized music figures even when I loved music the most, Michael Jackson was a favorite of mine when I was young. Michael was a few years older than I, but we were close enough in age to be peers, and for his life and career to be a fantasy to my juvenile self. I watched the Jackson Five cartoon religiously every Saturday morning. I played the Jackson Five card game zealously with my parents until the Tito cards started to fray around the edges. And I wore the grooves out on Michael’s first couple of solo albums.

The kid sang a love song to a rat, for crying out loud, and I was all over it.

Even as my musical tastes evolved — I was much more an arena rocker as a teen than a disco angel — I always kept an ear open to what Michael was up to. And more often than not, I enjoyed what I heard. When you rattle off his megahit singles from the ’80s — “Off the Wall,” “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Thriller,” “Bad,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Man in the Mirror,” “Smooth Criminal” — that’s a repertoire that includes some of the greatest pop music ever recorded, hands down, no questions asked. I can still conjure every one of those songs in my head all these years later, and they all still sound amazing.

Much will be written in the hours and days ahead about the dark and twisted path Michael’s life followed during its last two decades. Perhaps, at some juncture, I’ll write about some of that myself.

But right now, while news of his untimely death rings afresh, I just want to close my eyes, and hear those songs, and feel the boundless, effortless energy of those performances.

The King of Pop is dead.

Long live the King.

Categories: Celebritiana, Dead People Got No Reason to Live, Reminiscing, Soundtrack of My Life

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Look homeward, Angel

June 25, 2009

KCBS just Twittered confirmation of the death of Farrah Fawcett, at age 62.

I figured this was coming, given the news last evening that Farrah had been given last rites. Indeed, I fully expected to awaken this morning to reports of her passing.

Like any heterosexual American male who reached the full flower of adolescence during the 1970s, I remember Farrah Fawcett and the television series that made her famous, Charlie’s Angels, with fond regard. Being a more of a brunette fancier than a blonde connoisseur, and having a preference even at that early age for intelligent, slightly sardonic, husky-voiced women, I favored Kate Jackson‘s Sabrina over Farrah’s Jill and Jaclyn Smith’s Kelly among the three original Angels. Still, no one could deny Farrah’s presence.

Or those teeth.

Or that hair.

That hair was everywhere.

Farrah Fawcett

Not just on that ubiquitous poster of Farrah in the red swimsuit — how many millions of that bad boy were sold? — but atop the head of every female under 30 (and, sad to tell, on far too many over 30) who wanted to attract masculine attention, there was the Farrah-Do. That tousled and feathered mop that every girl wanted to emulate, but that precious few could truly pull off.

And that was the magic of Farrah. She was just close enough to reality to be accessible, and just far enough from reality to be untouchable.

In her Angel days, she was a dreadful actress — not unlike Marilyn Monroe, with whom she was frequently (albeit inappropriately) compared. To her credit, Farrah got better. By the time she’d left Charlie and the chicks in her rear-view mirror, and her famous looks had begun to fade — the blondes never age well, do they — Farrah had developed a genuine talent for drama.

Farrah starred on the New York stage in Extremities, a harrowing play about a woman fighting back against a home invader who attempted to rape her. (She later earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in the film version.) But the role that finally convinced the Angels-watching public that she had moved on to greater things came in the reality-based teleflick The Burning Bed, in which Farrah played a battered wife who immolates her abusive husband in his sleep.

A skein of equally impressive performances — many as real-life personalities — followed, ranging from Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld to socialite Barbara Hutton to photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. Over the course of her career, Farrah racked up a stunning six Golden Globe nominations (okay, so one of those was for the first season of Charlie’s Angels — the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is often bedazzled more by image than by actual talent) and three Emmy nods.

Perhaps my favorite of Farrah’s dramatic performances was one that gained relatively little notice. In The Apostle, she played the wife of Robert Duvall’s tormented evangelist, and the catalyst for the film’s pivotal event. It’s a subtle, finely etched (and highly unsympathetic) role in a powerful motion picture that more people should have seen.

Over the years, Farrah became as well-known for her long-running relationship with fellow actor Ryan O’Neal. The often-photographed couple were together for 15 years following Farrah’s much-publicized divorce from Six Million Dollar Man and Fall Guy star Lee Majors. (You remember the joke, right? “What do you call students of ancient Egyptian plumbing? Pharaoh Faucet Majors.”) Farrah and O’Neal separated in the late ’90s, then reconciled eight years ago after a four-year hiatus. Although they never married, their relationship ran for a veritable eternity in Hollywood years. Ironically, the legal and drug-related foibles of the couple’s son Redmond earlier this year briefly outstripped reports of his mother’s worsening illness.

Farrah was diagnosed with a rare form of anal cancer in 2006. With the aid of friends, she kept a filmed journal recording her battle with the disease. The effort culminated in Farrah’s Story, a two-hour documentary that aired widely on NBC and its cable affiliates last month.

Most of us who first encountered Farrah Fawcett as Jill Munroe, brassiere-disdaining private detective, would never have imagined that we would still be talking about her in a serious vein more than 30 years later. Perhaps her greatest monument is the fact that she grew beyond the pinup poster, where plenty of starlets would have been content to remain.

She really was more than just the teeth and hair.

Categories: Celebritiana, Cinemania, Dead People Got No Reason to Live, Reminiscing, Teleholics Anonymous

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Hawaiian I

June 11, 2009

Happy King Kamehameha Day to all of my Hawaiian friends. Save me a hunk of kalua pig, yeah? (I don’t have room in my backyard to dig an imu — that’s the underground oven used to roast a whole pig — so I’m throwing ribs on the grill instead.)

Whenever anyone asks me, “Where are you from originally?” my default answer as a former military brat is, “Everywhere.” If pinned down, however, I’ll say Hawaii.

Although I was born and adopted in Michigan, I spent the formative years of my childhood in the Aloha State. It’s from Hawaii that my earliest memories emanate, and thus it’s the locale I identify as my place of origin. There’s still a part of me that longs to reside there, even though the Golden State Warriors will win the NBA Finals before I’ll persuade my wife to do that.

Our home on Oahu was a little white house in the Honolulu suburb of Ewa Beach (pronounced “eh-vah,” as in, “You Ewa do dat again, brah, I going knock you on yo’ okole“). There was one other house between ours and a beautiful expanse of white sand beach, where I played in those days before parents thought overmuch about what might become of keikis (that’s “small children” to you haoles) left to play alone in public places. (Or perhaps my parents did think about it, and I should have taken that as a hint.) My best friend was a towheaded boy who lived next door, and who also had the same first name as I. We routinely referred to one another as “the other Michael” in a youthful accommodation to identity.

My most vivid recollections of those halcyon days include the time that my mother and I found and rescued a young dolphin beached on our neighborhood shore, and the time I was pinned under a driftwood log and nearly drowned. From the latter incident I acquired a fear of water that persisted for years, preventing me from learning to swim adequately until I was well into adolescence.

Decades later, Hawaiian influences continue to pervade my consciousness. Some of these are linguistic holdovers from my childhood pidgin: I still refer to my belly as my opu, address my friends as “brah,” say “all pau” when I’m finished with something, and shrug off responsibility with the phrase, “That’s not my kuleana.” Other influences are cultural: I’m convinced that my dogged casualness toward life is vestigial Hawaiian.

And, once or twice a month, I have to indulge my craving for Hawaiian food. Nothing says lovin’ like a loco moco (a gravy-covered hamburger topped with a fried egg, served with rice), a slice of Spam musubi (think sushi, only with Spam — yeah, I said Spam — instead of fish), and a steaming bowl of saimin (noodle soup).

I’ve been a Californian for three decades, but my heart remains in the Islands. And why not — we’ve got a Hawaiian in the White House now. You go, brah!

Think I’ll go put on my aloha shirt and sing a few choruses of “The Hukilau Song.” Or maybe “Pearly Shells.”

Aloha!

Categories: Aimless Riffing, Food Glorious Food, Hero of the Day, My Home Town, Reminiscing, SwanStuff

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Snatched: the final pebble

June 4, 2009

I awakened this morning to the sad news that actor David Carradine had been found dead in a Bangkok hotel suite, the victim of an apparent suicide.

For us children of the ’70s, Carradine was and always will be Kwai Chang Caine, the contemplative Shaolin master who wandered the American West in the classic TV series Kung Fu. To younger audiences, he’ll be remembered as the title character in Quentin Tarantino’s two-part assassins-gone-wild epic, Kill Bill.

As a teenage martial arts film fan — and more specifically, as a devotee of cinema’s greatest hand-fighting hero, Bruce Lee — I recall vividly the controversy engendered when Lee was passed over for the lead in Kung Fu (the concept for which Lee originated, according to his widow) in favor of the Caucasian Carradine. Looking back on the series as it evolved, though, it’s difficult to imagine that Lee would have been better suited for the role than was Carradine. Indeed, Lee’s natural intensity and charisma might have worked against the character — he consistently outshone his top-billed costar Van Williams during their days on The Green Hornet — whereas Carradine’s quieter, gentler approach made an effective match.

Unfortunately for Carradine, with the role of Caine so indelibly etched into the public consciousness, he found it difficult to land decent roles in major films for the next three decades. A rare exception: his Golden Globe-nominated turn as politically charged folksinger Woody Guthrie in the biopic Bound for Glory. In and around the infrequent big-studio production (Death Race 2000, The Long Riders), Carradine coasted along, making scads of execrable direct-to-video junk and hawking Asian health supplements and martial arts instructional tapes.

He even reprised Caine — sort of — in a tepid early-1990s syndicated series called Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, in which Carradine starred as the original Caine’s modern-day namesake grandson, who by sheer television coincidence is also a Shaolin priest and kung fu master.

A decade later, Tarantino came knocking. Which made sense, given QT’s passion for cheesy action epics and all things ’70s.

After the success of Kill Bill, Carradine became ubiquitous. He turned up in a couple dozen projects over the past five years, most recently the Jason Statham action sequel Crank: High Voltage.

Given Carradine’s serene public persona, the news of his suicide comes as a shock. Then again, who truly knows what darkness dwells in the heart of another human being?

Funny… I can imagine Caine saying that.

Categories: Celebritiana, Cinemania, Dead People Got No Reason to Live, Hero of the Day, Reminiscing, Teleholics Anonymous

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That’s a Stretch

June 3, 2009

Just when you thought it was impossible for Hollywood to scrape another layer of muck off the bottom of the creative barrel…

Universal Pictures announces that it’s going to make a movie based on the 1970s toy action figure Stretch Armstrong.

I kid (no pun intended) you not.

For the benefit of those of you born during the last quarter-century, Stretch Armstrong was a doll that resembled a blond wrestler wearing black swim trunks. Stretch’s soft plastic body could be stretched (hence the name) and contorted, thanks to the semi-liquid silicone gel encapsulated inside.

Think of the many elastic-powered comic book superheroes — Plastic Man, Mister Fantastic, the Elongated Man — and you’ll get the inspiration.

Stretch’s mortal enemy was the Stretch Monster, a similarly constructed green being that vaguely resembled the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

As most kids who owned a Stretch Armstrong soon discovered, a fair amount of overextension or indelicate handling would rupture Stretch’s skin, spilling the gel and ruining the toy. (I’ll wager that this unfortunate feature won’t play a role in the upcoming film.)

I know that nostalgia is big business. Doubtless, some executive at Universal saw the box office figures for Michael Bay’s Transformers movie and sent a flotilla of flunkies scampering for the archives to ferret out another long-ago toy hit to exploit.

But seriously… Stretch Armstrong? A toy that was pretty much a joke in its heyday… which was more than 30 years ago? Most of the people old enough to be nostalgic for Stretch Armstrong — assuming that anyone is — have aged out of the demographic for the potential film.

I’m sure that the special effects will be amazing, though. (Snicker.)

Categories: Aimless Riffing, Cinemania, Reminiscing, Wonderful World of Advertising

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