Ted Burke
Monday near San Diego, CAI AM TIRED OF DRYING THE CAT BY HANDBarry Alfonso In Santee, "drying the cat by hand" means taking a single woman out to dinner, saying flattering things to her, picking up the check and then giving her the phone number of your brother-in-law, I understand.
Ted Burke It has been said that "drying the cat" means mispronouncing the names of jazz musicians like Theolonious Monk and Ornette Coleman in an Telegraph Avenue methadone clinic. "Drying the Cat By Hand" is a variation heard in the Tenderloin and up to North Beach, meaning that you announce to Amiri Baraka that Boots Randolph played better sax than Coltrane or Shorter.Barry Alfonso I've also heard that it is a derivation of the old blues expression "shave 'em dry," meaning to cut off the head of a glass of beer with a straight razor before attacking someone in the solar plexus over a Stetson hat.- Ted Burke I've heard tell of that as well and it makes me wonder if that is related to the practice of ordering a shot and beer and dry towel twisted into a rat tail and snapped cruelly to the back of the drinker's bare neck by everyone in the bar named either "Earl" or "Ondine".
- Ted Burke There was the habit among dairy farmers of rubbing their bovines with mewing kittens for no real reason; "drying the cow" became "drying the cat" over time, an understandable conflation, and the implication of the phrase is that one is standing around irritating another living creature for no good reason. But since when does anyone need a good reason to irritate someone?
Barry Alfonso That's right! Now I remember. Will Rogers did a bit about this and in fact got arrested in Tulsa for demonstrating how it was done. There's a famous photo of Junior Samples from Hee Haw "drying the cat by hand" behind Stringbean's back when he thought the cameras were off.- Ted Burke *Absolutely! This in turn inspired Pynchon's famous opening line of his magnum opus 'The Crying of Litter Box 29". "A dry cat came screamng across the sky..."
- Barry Alfonso Right, that was a literary in-joke for many years standing. Hemingway took a swing at Frank Yerby after he wrote that Papa had been drying the cat with both hands for years...
- Ted Burke On a related note, Norman Mailer misunderstood Russell Kirk when he announced that what really wanted was a "cat dried by hand". Mailer took this to be a translation of Parsian street slang used among working girls meaning that the person who uttered the phrase was in desperate need of being buggered, but that lacked the needed ticket for admission.Mailer told Kirk that he had his ticket "right here" and demanded Kirk "give up the cat." William Buckley was amused by the whole thing and had Mailer on his tv show several times.
- Barry Alfonso Well, I do remember Gore Vidal giving Buckley the hairy eyeball on TV during the '68 Democratic convention and saying, "You really are drying the cat by hand a little hard tonight, old boy" while Buckley let something moist and shiny collect above his upper lip.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
DRYING THE CAT BY HAND: an exchange
Monday, March 18, 2013
Easter Dinner
"Your lips are too loud and make me want to lick the crust of a rusty file". Stevie Hokum jabbed his best pal MarkDanger!!! in the ribs with a hard elbow. MarkDanger,who was playing a guitar solo he learned note for note from an old CornMeal Country anthology of shaving jingles, bashed Hokum in the side of the head.
Steve Hokum fell to the floor from his chair. MarkDanger!!! tossed a rusty file down to him.
"I told you to play nice or get whumped by a whammy bar" was what MarkDanger!!! said.
"What???" was what Lucy??? asked , coming into the living room with a gray full of icecubes and cupcakes.
"Shut up Lucy???" said MarkDanger,"Steve Hokum is about to get busy"
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Barber Shop
Somewhere south of University Avenue and east of 30th
Street is a mysterious barber shop in a white stucco box-shaped storefront with a dirty window and
a striped pole that doesn’t turn. There’s an old barber sitting in a wooden
chair along the wall facing the big barber chair which has never been occupied
since I first noticed the place 19 years ago. The old barber wasn’t as old
then, but he wasn’t young, either – his skin has always been a dull orange,
creased by long wrinkle-lines, giving him a basketball look. He wore then and
wears now a neat black moustache, making his constant frown look even more
hangdog and severe. His hair is perpetually neat, which has always made me
think he somehow cuts it himself, probably every day. The barber doesn’t look
dexterous enough to do that, which is one reason I consider him and his shop to
be mysterious.
Another point of mystery is how he keeps his shop in
business. I may have seen one customer in there over the past 19 years, but he
wasn’t sitting in the barber chair, so he was probably a bill collector or an
election canvasser.
Many times, I’ve thought about going into the barber shop
and getting a haircut. It gives me a weird feeling to consider doing this – it would
be like going to a strange church and taking part in the ritual of a faith I know
nothing about. But who would do a thing like that, for no good reason? So I
stand on the other side of the street and I stare into the barber shop for a
half-minute or so. Nothing ever changes
as time goes by. Of course, I have and still do, which makes the barber shop
more and more mysterious.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Conan the Barbituate
And then there was the other night when I had the dubious honor of watching the remake of "Conan The Barbarian", an experience from which there is no recollection of the names of actors , directors or the gaggle of scribes who cobbled together the flimsy, inferior script. If there is such a thing, the film is a species of inept mediocrity, as there are examples of unstellar film making that at least have a level of technical acumen on display; "American Gangster" , directed by Ridely Scott and starring the quizzically droning Denzel Washington in a portrayal of an African American mobster, had at least a good look and was paced to the degree that one stayed in their seat, kept their eyes on the screen, curious to see how the other wise melodramatic tangle of film cliches turned out.Plus, New York City was used well in this movie. Lovers of architecture got an eyeful of vintage skyscrapers; "American Gangster" was mediocre drama, but it was a first rate postcard. "Conan", on the other hand, achieves only the least likely outcome, making you sing the praises of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in the original film. Arnie's Conan was a lumbering force of a nature, a hulking mass of perpetually raging masculinity that slayed, raped and pillaged with the singular emphasis for hurt and destruction that the new Conan, by an actor who's name I cannot (or refuse to)remember, does not. The new Conan looks like a beef fed River Phoenix, with a face that is inward looking mass of narcissism; his two expressions are a smug leer and a grunting face that resembles nothing so much than a five year old boy's impersonation of The Hulk roaring "SMASH PUNY HUMANS". The violence, if one were to advance a theory as to how on screen dust ups, slashings and unrestricted carnage are a needed purgative for an audience's pent up aggressions, is piecemeal , weak, knock-kneed and , really, stupid. I felt stupid for watching it. I still feel stupid. That admission, of course, only confirms what some of you think of me and the long sentences I fill these posts with, but so be it. Alas, this time I am the fool for thinking that once, just once, I could appreciate this kind of movie as though I were still ten years old watching the after school action movie on Channel 7, wedged between dialing for dollars and the 5 o' clock local newscast. It's way past 5 o'clock.
Monday, March 12, 2012
On the Golden Days of Rock Criticism
There was a vast and intimidating pile of rusted bed springs crammed into a cold cement room in the basement of my frightening apartment building that I was told to get rid of in order to satisfy some delinquent rent hanging over my head from six months ago; to help me do the job I decided to contact J.R. Young, a former writer for Rolling Stone who had been living in total obscurity in a town in Oregon whose name cannot be divulged due to profound lack of interest.
Young responded immediately and promised to come right down. My call had been the first he’d received since Walker Hickel had resigned from Nixon’s cabinet. “You called at the right time,” he said. “I’ve been trying to write about the new Leonard Cohen album and it’s been driving me insane for about four decades. Can you send bus fare?”
I was standing like an extra from The Road in torn blue work gloves, a filthy pair of industrial overalls and goggles in front of the room full of bed springs when Young arrived. We stared at the red flaking coils in endless rows before us – they extended outwards like teats on the belly an enormous metallic sow. Our slightest movement forward sent greasy dust motes dancing in the air – motes like notes from a fuzztone guitar played by some stoner nobody who got to make an album for Warner Bros. in 1971 because his manager also had a piece of Edison Lighthouse’s publishing, we both thought simultaneously.
We both lifted a set of bed springs out of pool of slimy standing water, producing a piercing shriek from the shivering coils. “So…what about Leonard Cohen,” I said, picking up the thread of an ancient conversation that, in fact, we had never actually had.
“Cohen is a serious writer,” Young began after a slight and rather formal throat-clearing. “His lyric exhibits the discipline and economy of academic poetry, which is both a hindrance and a virtue to his work in the folk-pop music idiom. A lot of people place what he does in opposition to Dylan, which I think is something of a mistake. When Elena Dilbaum finished her master’s thesis on the latter works of Swinburne, she thought of calling up her ex-boyfriend Seamus so she could listen to his copy of Songs of Love and Hate again, but she knew it would only throw her into a spasm of existential self-dissection…”
I knew Young had fallen into his zone of rock criticism-as-fiction, that discursive, absurd yet unmistakably sweet place where the early school of Rolling Stone writers sometime lingered to shake off the confining effects of commenting on the aesthetics of guitar solos and drum fills – a development I expected and in fact thought would aid us in clearing out the filthy, tentanus-infused bed springs by virtue of the wry, tongue-clicking humor they would bring to this fundamentally unpleasant activity. I realized that mulling over these unsolvable critical issues involving criteria of a hopelessly insular nature would slow down our efforts to clear out all the junk in the cellar but quickly reminded myself that I would have probably done nothing to remove it at all without the ability to simultaneously follow Young down the labyrinthine twists of his mind in pursuit of that micro-inch which separates brilliant insight from utterly useless grad-student mind-wanking dross. That’s just how it was.
“Seamus cracked open a bottle of Boone’s Farm and poured two shots into juice glasses he’d "borrowed"’ from a McCarthy for President fundraiser at some professor’s house a couple of years ago,'" Young continued as if reading from an invisible sheet of paper held in front of him."‘I don’t think we are quite ready for Leonard Cohen today,’ he told Elena with the serious mien of a Pulitzer Prize committee member or a dog show judge. ‘Each line in every song is the wrung of a ladder taking us down into the Uber-Canadian angst of Cohen’s soul, informed by the Franco-Anglo tensions of his upbringing not to mention the Hebraic cantorial tradition of perpetual expiation…’
“’…Can’t we just dance by the light of the cracked Philco like we used to?’ said Elena in a voice pitched somewhere between a plea and a grumble. “Aren’t I still your Sister of Mercy and aren’t you still the Stranger with the hand full of the Holy Game of Poker?’
“’Outside Seamus’ window, a hysterical sneer poured out of a dented AMC Javelin. They both recognized Dylan’s “I Want You”: “…your dancing child with his Chinese suit, he spoke to me, I took his flute…”’
“‘Dylan kills everything!’ Seamus erupted. ‘He’s a punk playing a man’s game! He’ll have to live ten thousand years to be able to find the garbage OR the flowers in Cohen’s back yard…’”
Young continued on in this vein for a long time, enough time for the Earth to revolve around the sun and the sun to spin in the galaxy and the universe to reach some sort of reset point in the great wheel of cosmic existence. God was slamming the typewriter keys and whacking the return bar hard; we were a footnote in an endless review that was in fact Existence Itself.
We piled the rusted bed springs in a dumpster and watched the car styles and hemlines changed around us. The Soviet Bloc fell and the Republican Party developed paresis. And still Young went on, skating on blissful shoals of parable…
“’Dylan went country, got domestic, raised a litter of kids and still couldn’t give back that Chinese flute,’ said Elena, sitting on the side of Seamus’ bed at 5 in the morning as he slumbered like wet laundry on laudinum. “’I’m gonna put on some Cohen and put on some coffee and burn some toast as black as the heart of pure hopeless martyrdom…’”
Thursday, July 7, 2011
AuH2O
Mrs. Haws works in the garden and the wind brings her voices. She cocks her head to the right like a sparrow, eyes darting upwards, trying to catch the sibilant mumblings of the breeze through the palm fronds and eucalyptus branches. She stands there in her floppy beige hat and her smudged yellow sun dress for a full minute, as stock-still as the array of little plaster trolls, fawns and sleeping Mexicans arranged in a semi-circle in front of her. Sometimes she thinks the voices are addressing the assembly of backyard idols and she is only standing in the way. The shadow of a palm frond falls across her sandaled feet, spiky as the wing of a great ragged vulture. There are terrible flying things in this lovely corner of San Diego but there are also angels just out of sight, in the rank overgrown spaces in the alley, where the bougainvillea spills over the sagging plank fences as if dropped from heaven.
The voices are only part of the atmosphere on these sweet days of exaggerated sun, so different from the Cleveland dreariness Mrs. Haws knew when Henry was still alive and the kids were small. That was before the war and the peace that never was peaceful and the rape of Korea and the crucifixion of Joe McCarthy, poor man. Mrs. Haws’ mind savors this last thought like a tongue flicking at a sore tooth; it makes her turn away from the trolls, put down her watering can and go check the glass jars full of water lying on her front lawn. These jars are supposed to catch sunlight and reflect it painfully into the eyes of stray dogs. There is no firm evidence that this method of dog control works but it ought to work and there have been fewer piles of dog waste on her lawn lately so there is no good reason to stop using the jars. Mrs. Haws wonders if the fluoride in the city tap water might make the reflected light more painful; even though she doesn’t really hate dogs, just mess and chaos, the thought gives her a small pinprick of guilty enjoyment.
Light and water – they are as real and solid as the cement and stucco around her. The wind is firm and capable of carrying a million million chattering voices. It has been years since Mrs. Haws has attended the Swedenborgian church down the street, but the doctrines of the great Christian teacher still shift and recombine in her mind kaleidoscopically. They confirm her certainty that the ethereal is material, solid things are not what they seem and that angels are at war with the creatures that poison our food and water and slip across our lawns at night to leave little calling-cards of corruption.
Mrs. Haws catches herself ruminating, which takes her over the line from vigilance into excess speculation, and she has no time for THAT. She agreed to visit at least five neighbors this afternoon and spread the word about Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president. Joe McCarthy was murdered but Barry is alive and leading the fight with his handsome granite chin set square, a solid man in a dissolving world. She walks over to the blue and white AuH2O sign in her yard and pushes its spikes a little deeper into the dry soil.
The wind is picking up again from the North, scooping up fragments of sound from Mission Valley and blowing them past Mrs. Haws’ good right ear. The glint of one of the water-filled jars catches her eye – it feels like a paper cut, sharp and quick. She catches a string of words blowing by:”howcanyoustandforallthisnonsenssssssse?” The question passes through her and melts back into the air in the heat of the pure, sweet sunshine.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Annointed Ones Convene
"I love tropical fish" was the last thing McMagnet thought before a cross eyed mackerel crashed through the store window and slammed into his face, effectively rendering him stupid. In the window, offset by a confused population of city folks who though that this was their day to enjoy the splendor of dying of chill in the freezing vapors of Skyscraper Canyon, stood You Said It Man. He had on leotards, blue and green, some name brand bun-hugger underwear on the outside, a big belt he stole from his sister's walk in closet , a sweatshirt that said "Zag nuts" on, and an old bath towel tied around his neck in an idiot's desperation grab for a cape. ''Have no fear, You Said It Man is here" was what You Said It Man said . You Can Say that Again Man came from the store's back room and said " I'm hungry like Wolfman Jack" ; be peeled off his form fitting shirt and revealed tattoos that did their best to make the best of rather raggedy looking skin.
McMagnet crawled to the backroom , stood up and left the store through the alley entrance. He'd just past the dumpster when he saw a spinning galaxy of birdies and stars burst around his skull. He spun around and made note of Stenchman climbing from the dumpster.
"You idiot" yelled McMagnet, "Jesus in Jack's Pants, that hurt."
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