Whistling Dixie

The Psychotic Pooch comedy troupe, which numbers myself among its cast of known miscreants, was prepping a sketch about the late and dishonorable Strom Thurmond’s bout with jungle fever.

For the record, I don’t believe Strom’s benign despot routine regarding his born-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-blanket baby girl redeems him in any way. On the other hand, and to use a term the great man would have approved of, his "high yellow" offspring does not prove that Strom was any more a hypocrite than his segregationist peers. Indeed, Southern slavers have a long tradition of preaching anti-miscegenation while dipping freely into the mixed gene pool.

The skit in question, well scripted by a fellow Pooch cast member, concerned reactions at Strom’s funeral when his progeny popped out of the woodwork. For our purposes, Trent Lott was in attendance, primarily because we wanted a straight man to do a classic slow burn.

The sketch ends with a rousing rendition of the theme song from “Diff’rent Strokes.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, I assure you. The troupe hit a speed bump when some members wanted that extra something to put the final number over.

I suggested a chorus of happy Ku Klux Klansmen coming out on stage to join in the joyous faux-gospel song. Sure, the gag is simply twisting the knife into the body of a dead guy who can’t defend himself. In my defense I should say that the entire point of kicking Strom while he’s down is to make sure that he or anyone like him never gets up again. That said, other Pooch members had problems with the KKK shuck and jive routine.

Since the comedy group is more concerned with earning laughs than stepping up on a soapbox, we amicably agreed to kill the joke. The sketch played fine without it.

I honestly think a KKK chorus in such a silly contest would not give people the willies up in Chicago, where I was raised. I can’t say if the be-robed image would be funny or just plain stupid up north, but I doubt that it would raise a chill. Simply put, the hooded specter of the KKK still evokes horror, fear and shame in North Carolina. I’ve lived below the Mason Dixon line most of my life, but I’m still out of synch with the Southern Psyche.

I guess I’ll never get the hang of the whole genteel gentleman gig. From where I stand, Southern courtliness consists of turning a blind eye to perceived peccadilloes – but it is a mighty selective blind eye. They’re quick to rally round Trent Lott, for instance, saying the former Senate Majority leader is no racist, even though in the 60’s “he fought tooth and nail and tooth and claw not to have James Meredith integrate Ole Miss.”

But at the same time the Supreme Court decision to overturn antiquated sodomy laws will still not stay the course of the Charlotte police department, as they waste funds and manpower trolling for gay men to entrap in city parks.

This is the way of things in these here parts. Racism is a minor, albeit embarrassing faux pas, homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. It behooves one to bear this Southern selectivity in mind when a neighbor steps forward to defend Southern culture. Chances are, they’re ranting about the Confederate flag (somehow conflated with Elvis Presley who’s taken on the stature of a Civil War General) and not extolling the virtues of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, or racially tainted art forms like jazz and blues.

Similarly, folks round here say opposing President Bush and his policies is tantamount to treason, but they readily excuse possible treason on the part of the president’s men. My neighbors supported our troops in the Iraqi War, but now are quite willing to watch those same troops die for the president’s ill-conceived imperialist folly.

Make no mistake, despite a fleeting bump in morale, Bush’s Middle East policy is failing spectacularly. How many more dead soldiers, I wonder, before the scales fall from my neighbor’s eyes?

I confess I feel a stranger in a strange land, here in the heart of Dixie. That said, I love the south precisely for its jarring contradictions and air of repressed perversity. I revel in the creepiness lurking beneath the genteel surface of my adopted home. It’s a land of the partially aware, the half alive. And in many ways the New South of today is not very far from the Spanish moss festooned swamps of EC Comics lore, a moonlit bayou crawling with Kudzu and confederate zombies:

(OPENING TO DUELING BANJOS PLAYS THEN FADES. THEN TO THE TUNE OF DIXIE…)

DON’T STOP YOUR CAR IN THE LAND OF COTTON
PEOPLE THERE ARE DEAD AND ROTTEN
RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY
IT’S TOO LATE, THEY’LL GET YOU
THEY CAN CREEP UP ON YOU BEFORE YOU SMELL ‘EM
THEY’RE DECAYED AND ANTIBELLUM
RUN REAL FAST, FROM THE PAST
SAVE YOUR ASS, THEY’LL EAT YOU

(CHORUS)
REDNECK CANNIBAL ZOMBIES
WITH FORKS, AND KNIVES
THOUGH THEY CAN’T PICK UP THEIR TWO FEET
WE’RE RUNNING FOR OUR LIVES
THEY’RE HISSIN’, THEY’RE SPITTIN’
THEY’LL WHACK YOU SURE AS SHITTIN’

YOU AIN’T DEALING HERE WITH AUNT BEE OR ANDY
BETTER HAVE A SHOTGUN HANDY
EVEN THOUGH, THEY MOVE SLOW
YOU JUST KNOW, THEY’LL CATCH YOU
THEY’LL STRING THEIR BANJOS WITH YOUR INTESTINE
YER PURTY MOUTH WON’T IMPRESS ‘EM
JUST A HUNCH, YOUR WHOLE BUNCH
WILL BE LUNCH, OR A STEW.

(CHORUS)
REPULSIVE PECKERWOOD ZOMBIES
THEY’RE SCUM, THEY’RE SHITS
YOU KNOW THEY HATE TO WASTE A THING
THEY’LL FRY YOU UP WITH GRITS
AND IF, YOU’RE PERKY
THEY’LL STRIP YOU INTO JERKY

(CHORUS)
FLESH EATING REDNECK ZOMBIES
THEY SCREAM, THEY SHOUT
THEY DRESS UP IN THEIR VICTIM’S SKIN
AND WAVE CHAINSAWS ABOUT
THEY’RE PICKIN’, THEY’RE GRINNIN’
THEY THINK WE TASTE LIKE CHICKEN

THEY’RE PICKIN’, THEY’RE GRINNIN’
THEY SAY WE’RE FINGER LICKIN’
THEY THINK WE TASTE LIKE CHICKEN!
 
¶ 7/23/2003 :: E-mail Pat

 

The Unsung Genre

I am here to sing the praises of the weird hippy shit movie, a genre more easily recognized than defined. We’re talking late 60’s to mid 70’s movies with solid roots in exploitation that, perhaps wrong-headedly, targeted the mainstream.

Unlike classic exploitation, weird hippy shit movies (or WHSMs) had big studio firepower behind them. This lead to the incongruities that can only result from balding middle aged hacks trying to tap into youth culture and barely missing the mark. So a classic WHSM plays a bit like a Mr Magoo musical version of "Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Assss Song", or an underground comic drawn by Peanut’s Charles Schultz instead of Robert Crumb.

I don’t blame the big studio purveyors of WHSMs for trying to bring poorly understood acid dreams to the masses; they couldn’t keep churning out bloated money-losing crap like "Dr. Dolittle."

And bear in mind that mainstream movie going public shifted in the late 60's. They were younger, in some cases druggier, and more openly receptive to a "Fuck You" to authority (at least within the safe confines of a movie theater). Indeed, as a youngster in the 70’s, I saw the early part of that decade as the golden age of "Fuck You" in entertainment. I blame it all on the Marx Brothers.

It may be hard for anyone who came of age in the 80's or later to understand, but the early 70’s were fraught with movie mania. Pop culture was pretty much music and movies; TV was way too lame. And movie culture was old movie culture.

Nowadays, fame has accelerated and pop culture memory has decayed like a case of Alzheimer’s. Kids today don’t know movie stars for 20 or 30 years ago. Recently, I mentioned Robert Mitchum to a high school media class and drew a blank.

But in the 70’s, all the kids I knew were familiar with screen icons from the 40’s, 30’s, and even 20’s. Just look at the cover of Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits. This was music marketed at the teenage record buying public, issued in 1974. A gangland tableau is graced with the portraits of Bogart, Gable, Jean Harlow, Peter Lorre and Groucho Marx. Ah, the Marx Brothers.

Minnie’s boys saw their greatest resurgence of fame in the 70’s. Indeed, Groucho’s name was dropped by everybody from Bill Cosby to Dick Cavett, and it was the ubiquitous brother’s anarchic “Fuck You” to everybody and everything attitude that permeated the best of mainstream WHSMs.

Groucho himself appears as gangland enforcer God in Otto Preminger’s Hollywood-Has-Beens-On-Acid WHSM epic "Skidoo," a film supposedly inspired by the director’s experiments with LSD. It’s hard to pick a highlight from a film that includes a totally dispirited looking Groucho firing up a spliff or a truly frightening Carol Channing stripping for John Phillip Law (who looks like he’d rather go back to being ravished by Jane Fonda’s "Barbarella").

But the film’s strange fixation on trash cans and the inspiring sight of Frank “The Riddler” Gorshin sprouting wings and flying away really resonated with this eighth grader when I caught “Skidoo” on late night TV circa 1973. Chicago’s CBS affiliate must have scored one hell of a late movie package in the 70’s, because in addition to “Skidoo”, they also aired "Candy" This sex satire plays like “Casino Royale” filtered through the desperately striving to be “with it “ sensibility of “Laugh-In.”

So naturally at age 13, I thought it was hilarious. My favorite bit: the perpetual wind machine on Richard Burton, playing a continuously soused Brendan Behan-esque poet. Although the early 70’s Hollywood graveyard is littered with Weird Hippy Shit Westerns like "Kid Blue" (a little pokey, but surprisingly likable) and the virtually unwatchable "Zachariah" (despite the participation of Weird Hippy Shit comic icons the Firesign Theater), the genre really kicked off with “Easy Rider.”

I don’t have much to say about this cinematic icon, except that who’d have thought that cast member Toni Basil would have gone on to foist “Mickey” on an unsuspecting public?

Instead of cataloging WHSMs, I’m going to focus on two films that define the genre for me. Needless to say, both films are best viewed under the influence of controlled substances.

I didn’t catch up with Robert Altman’s “Brewster McCloud” until the very end of the 70’s – a 16mm print at the Southern Illinois University student union, If I remember correctly.

Although I was slightly stoned, I remember this movie in frightening detail – and in this film, the devil is in the details. Among its subversive delights: Owlish Bud Cort (looking very Harry Potteresque) launching his mechanical flying contraption in the Houston Astrodome; guardian angel Sally Kellerman displaying the scars where her wings were removed; Brewster’s tormentors being spattered with bird shit before being taken out by mysterious accidents devised by Kellerman; heroine Shelly Duvall vomiting at the sight of a corpse then demanding that Cort kiss her; and perhaps best of all, cut-ins from avian expert Rene Auberjonois who grows progressively more birdlike as the film progresses.

This, along with “The Long Goodbye” is one of my favorite Altman films. Hell, I’d even see it perfectly straight. According to Psychotronic’s Michael Weldon, “Brewster” had its world premiere at the Astrodome, “where a record 23,900 saw a special 70-mm print.”

As a WHSM side note, the film’s star Bud Cort actually ingested a bit of Groucho. In an interview Cort admitted that after the comic icon died, a mutual friend, knowing Cort was a big Marx Brothers fan, gave Cort the gift of Groucho’s tooth. (No word on how said friend had acquired the fallen funnyman’s tooth.) Sometime later, Cort was taking some cold pills and he inadvertently swallowed the valuable tooth. Talk about an actor internalizing his shit!

As for Sydney Pollack’s “Castle Keep”, I doubt the film would play well for a viewer in an unaltered state. Although the plot revolves around one eyed army Major Burt Lancaster’s conflict with Captain Patrick O’Neil over the safety of priceless objects d’art, the best moments revolve around an American Pfc.’s fascination with a Volkswagen.

Describing the air-cooled engine to Lancaster in an awe-struck voice, the Private points out that the car would still run millions of years from now after all the earth’s water has boiled away. After the bug has been dumped in the castle moat and pumped full of ammunition, it miraculously floats to the surface, and the appreciative owner drives it to safety.

Show me another movie that can rival that for effective product placement. And that's not all. You also get Peter Falk’s Sgt. Rossi, moving in on the village baker’s wife and his business, blithely baking bread as Nazi tanks roll into town. And speaking of tanks, the scene where GI’s commandeer a German tank and futilely try to drive it out of a church before succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning is priceless. It all plays like “Catch 22” with a Eurotrash sheen. I thought it was brilliant when I saw it on TV in the 70’s.

Plus, I smoked a joint, finished a pint of whiskey, and polished off a bag of Chips Ahoy while I was watching, so it all made perfect sense to me.
 
¶ 7/1/2003 :: E-mail Pat