Grab Bag #2

“I like big bags and I cannot lie!” -Sir Mix-a-Lot of Bootieumbria

Hello Friends!

Hear that? It’s the sputtering rattle of another January headed for the scrap heap. [HOLD FOR APPLAUSE]. If you enjoy this month, love it, luxuriate in it like that one lone Cheerio left in the milky bowl, I am happy for you. You have probably been lobotomized, but clearly it’s all working out. I struggle with this month. It is too long (make January and February 15 days; give us 39 days of June and July please!); too cold; still too dark; not enough 3-day weekends; and this January America came down with a scorching case of fascism! Jinkies, Scoob!

Goodbye, January, you stank-ass-armpit of the calendar year! We are never, ever, ever getting back together (for another 11 months).

TO THE GRAB BAG!

The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic, Daniel de Vise

Every time I encounter something about John Belushi I get grumpier and grumpier with him. Belushi should have died 35 different times before the time he actually did die. Addiction had him by the short and curlies and it was not at all a good time to be an addict anyway. Not because there weren’t medical resources available, especially for someone who had reached the kind of celebrity status as Belushi. But because there was such ignorance and stupidity around the disease. John Landis, who directed The Blues Brothers movie, hired a bodyguard to babysit Belushi and keep him away from drugs. As you can imagine, this had mixed results. There was a lot enabling at the time. There was even more of a general attitude that a person just had to try a little bit to quit substance abuse. As if chemical dependence was like studying for the SATs–just apply yourself, just put in the effort; you’ll get there champ! Not great.

So reading this book about Belushi and Aykroyd making comedy together first on stage (The National Lampoon Radio Hour), then on SNL, and finally in The Blues Brothers movie reminded me just how much the world was short changed by Belushi’s ultimate demise. He really hadn’t even gotten around to seeing what he was truly capable of when he died. As a comedic performer, Belushi was kinetic, elastic, and full of energy like an unstable atom. Sadly, he never got the chance to discipline and hone those gifts, to channel and play with them like his friend, Robin Williams, was able to do. We never got to see Belushi grow up, which feels especially unfair when we still have Chevy Chase toddering around.

Regardless of where you come out on that whole generation of comedians, The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship is the first comprehensive look inside the making of this movie. And it is epic. John Landis should be studied in a lab. How he was ever able to get this movie made with its ridiculously elaborate location shots, action sequences that threatened public safety on more than one occasion, and at least one star zoinked out of his gourd for most of the filming (those black sunglasses were not just props) is maybe one of the greatest tricks since David Copperfield levitated over the Grand Canyon. The original budget was set for about 17 million, which was quite hefty in 1980. It ballooned to almost 30 million when all was said and done. Landis was given carte blanche to film in Chicago by its new mayor, Jane Byrne. She did not win reelection. The book unearths a lot of fascinating film techniques Landis used for what was essentially a 2-hour car chase with a bunch of musical numbers. And it also peels back the curtain on the bigger stars of the movie: the iconic soul and blues performers like Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and John Lee Hooker that Aykroyd and Belushi genuinely revered.

For anyone in office culture, the aughts were not your friend. This is my primary take-away from a rewatch of 24 (currently slogging through season 4 where there is a MOLE at the Counter Terrorism Unit aka CTU JUST LIKE LAST SEASON AND THE SEASON BEFORE THAT AND…).

24 premiered in November of 2001. It features a Jack Reacher-esque character named Jack BAUER (clever) played by Keifer Sutherland. If you read his name and immediately whispered “Michaaeell…Micchhhaaeeell…” you also know the thrill of standing in the back of your station wagon while your Mom purposely fishtailed out of the parking lot. Each season Jack and his colleagues at CTU, Los Angeles, must stop a terrorist threat of some kind–a biological attack, a nuclear power plant attack, but sadly never a Big Mac attack–in the span of 24 hours. Each episode covers one hour of the day. It was a super inventive way to tell a story and allowed for the perfect cliffhanging moments to end on from week to week. When the series came out I watched it on OG Netflix: on individual discs that arrived in joyful red envelopes in your mailbox (that bin outside your house where Amazon crams its soft packages).

The show is formulaic and not designed to tax your brain, which makes it ideal for these draggy winter months. You could make a drinking game or bingo card out of Jack’s stock phrases: “Damn it!” “Drop your weapon!” “Do it, NOW!” “You have to trust me on this.” “There’s not enough time.” And even though the action clicks along, the plot twists and turns and twists again, and there really isn’t enough time, you know that as long as Jack is on it, things are basically going to work out. I think that’s why on this rewatch I started picking up on the terrible office culture.

The CTU offices are in some kind of subterranean lair–all metal and open workstations and corridors with sallow lighting punctuated by metal doors with keypads on the outside. It looks like a piece of the “Rhythm Nation” video set. The atmosphere is heavy with co-worker paranoia and competition; everyone seems to want to get ahead, get noticed. This is not a place for the “share circle.” The supervisors are annoyed and exasperated from having to, um, supervise. “Do your job or I’ll find someone who will,” is another drinking bingo phrase that gets repeated. In the first three seasons the directors are men who are colossal douche canoes with a cap “D” and “C,” and a triple underscore. It’s hard to tell if they hate themselves, the job, that they don’t have a better job higher up the food chain, or that they have to actually deal with the other human beings around them. And there’s Chloe O’Brian.

Chloe shows up in Season 3. I remember loving her when the series aired and I heart her even more this time around. She is a highly-intelligent senior analyst who “lacks social graces.” To some in the office Chloe comes off as unlikeable, always irritated, and annoying. She says things to her peers like “I’m better at it than you, anyway” and “If it was easy you wouldn’t have me doing it.” She’s not bragging, she’s dropping facts. Chloe makes no apologies for keeping it real. At one point another character says to her, “I’m getting really sick of your terrible personality, Chloe.” I almost spit my drink laughing so hard because that is code for the early aughts did not really know what to do with a clearly neurospicy character. At least they got one thing right: they made her as powerful with a computer as Jack Bauer Reacher Bond McGuyver is with his gun and bladder control. WHEN ARE THE PEE BREAKS? DAMN IT! BINGO!

Lens Zen!

I think the Heron is onto something. Maybe standing still for a while is the key to everything. I’ll report back.

“Damn paparazzo.” ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography