Interesting evening with our financial advisor. He dropped by for the annual chat. He’s also family, so it’s a social occasion. Somehow he had ginned the books to make it look like we didn’t lose everything in the Crash, which is nice. Had some interesting recommendations for investment strategies, and I was a bit surprised when he said “precious metals.” But I realized I’d misunderstood when he got out an attractive mahogany case, and showed us these lovely medals – not the real thing, but collectibles struck by the Franklin Mint, with certificates of authenticity that said they were authentic reproductions. I guess they’re only making 500,000 of them, and then the molds will be destroyed. We need to act soon.
I said I’d think about it. Otherwise, it was the usual tweaking and rejiggering, shifting money from one blobby bucket to another. Fie to this sector! We are reducing our position in Emerging Markets by 1.2%, and shifting it to Moonwalking Markets (they look like they’re going forward but they’re actually retreating; it’s a short-sell position) and we are moving cash into something called “fire,” which promises to consume 100% of our contributions. Usually you need to be in a bear market for a long time to achieve that rate, but he knows a guy.
In all seriousness – hah, I’ve been kidding, in my inimitable way – we got the Reassuring Brochure, which they give you when things have really headed into the crapper at Mach 2. It reassures you that stocks, like shingles and Elton John, always come back over time, and you can’t time the market. Correction: you shouldn’t time the market. Because it might be just a correction. Actually, I think I can time the market. I have an internal Froth Detector that aahh-oooh-gaaah when I sense the peak of the boom. When someone somewhere builds the world’s tallest building, it’s time to cash out. (This does not include proposed buildings – if you’d quit the market when they announced the Larkin Tower, you would have missed half the boom of the 20s.) When retail hits the point where 80% of the stores are operating on the assumption that you have hundreds of dollars to spend on things like organic dog food treats and saffron-scented candles, you might want to eye the exits.
It helps to be contrary, I guess. Things are never as bad as they seem. Things are never as good as they seem. Except for the times when they are – but those are either wonderful moments in your own life or horrible macro-scale moments. Even so: someone fell in love on 9/11. Maybe even more than usual.
I’ve been watching “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” over the last few nights. Stupid title for a movie. I don’t know, do they? How should I emphasize the words? There are several possibilities:
THEY shoot horses, which suggests there are evil anti-horse forces abroad in the land
They SHOOT horses, which means horses really get the business, unlike other animals, which are slapped or kicked or given a Dutch rub
They shoot HORSES, which would either reassure you, because you’re not a horse or have a horse or exist anyplace in that “first they came for the X demographic, but I said nothing” moral construction
THEY SHOOT HORSES, which suggests you’re a soldier in an army that has been attacked by forces wielding enormous cannons that hurl dead horses vast distances
And then there’s the Don’t They? It’s either flat and sarcastic, or nervous and questioning. It only takes about half an hour to realize that the title will probably end up in the mouth of the hard-headed, bitter, cynical, nasty, unfriendly biatch played by Jane Fonda; if someone says something nice about horses, she will respond, well, they shoot horses, don’t they. Because she’s just that kind of gal. The Depression did it to her.
If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a dance marathon: couples drag each other around the floor for days, hoping to be the last ones standing. I’m half-way through the movie, and since it’s a product of the late sixties – a period that would stretch well into the seventies, really – it drapes the tale with the heavy musty caul of Metaphor. Not sure you could do it differently, really; Pollack was an excellent director, and it’s an almost faultless film. You just suspect that the same story told straight would be just as good. Perhaps even better in its own way.
Later today: Comic Sins. Busy-as-hellacious-hell today. But whaddyagonna do. Sit home? Polish your medals?
All the talk about horses and the mention of Richard Harris
prompted me to go a list of “Nonviolent Westerns” by Theodore
Koutz at mcsweeneys.net that I found “printer worthy” a few
years ago. The list of Nonviolent Westerns goes like this:
“A Man Called My Little Pony”
“A Fist Full of Arthritis”
“High Plains Skee-Ball”
“The Metaphorical Gunfighter”
“The Aggressive Panhandler of Malt Liquor Junction”
“The Affordable Tract Housing of Sheetrock Flats”
“El Doritos”
I love the reworking of “A Man Called Horse”.
@John
Maribor: Strelnim ranam je v bolnišnici podlegla tudi 31-letna natakarica =
Maribor: bullet wounds in the hospital, succumbing to a 31-year-old waitress
per the Google’s Translator on iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en&referrer=ign_n
(Slovenian to English)- perhaps the cat belonged to the 31-year old waitress, and it is going out to seek revenge? (For all that Corporatism that is rampant in Yugosloavia?)
Meanwhile, back in the thread: Dern’s career actually jumped the shark during Silent Running when he taught the robots how to play poker…
@Dick Hassing
hee hee
Loved that film as a kid so, I forgave Bruce Dern for shooting the Duke.
Talk about jumping the shark, I did not realize that the site “JumptheShark.com” had been bought by TV Guide which itself “jumped the shark” long before it changed the size of the publication.
Also jumping the shark is TV shows that make self aware references to jumping the shark.
How do you say….. The Big Red One? Years and years ago I heard a local TV reporter giving a blurb on this movie, but he inflected ‘Red’ instead of ‘One’
so it came out ‘the big RED one’. Apparently he had no clue as to what the basis of the movie was.
I am picturing giving assorted animals a dutch rub….ha!
I glanced at this and read bear as bar. “Usually you need to be in a bear market for a long time to achieve that rate”
So a bar market is what we are in now, invest in cocktails. He knows a guy’s sister’s second cousin who made a killing.
@Al Federber
Or, as Mussolini famously put it:
“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing opposed to the State.” See also, e.g., North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, single-payer health care systems. Don’t think you can make a fair case that the United States as a whole is an example, though the General Motors bailout is a step in the corporatist direction.
But don’t dog Silent Running. I kinda liked that one, back in the day.
“and he gave us Laura to boot.”
She never booted me, darn it.
Didn’t he die in True Grit?
No. In True Grit, U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) is last seen in a freeze frame jumping a horse over a fence on his ranch. Not only did he survive the freeze frame, he was very much alive for the sequel six years later, “Rooster Cogburn” which co-starred Katherine Hepburn.
Speaking of Silent Running, as much as I enjoyed that movie in ‘72, I’d like to have seen it made according to the original script:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
(scroll down to the paragraph under “Production”.
The original script sounds awesome. The filmed version: sigh.
First, I just knew there be Bruce McCall fans amonst the Bleatniks(my favorite collection is “Zany Afternoons”: ‘Where Quality Is A Slogan’).
Second, what _is_ all this nonsense about Dern’s career being over? The man has worked pretty much non-stop for 50 years. That’s a career, whether you or I watch that actor’s work or not. The people doing the casting know he’s a master character actor. I think the confusion comes from the fact that one of Wayne’s policies(once he had Batjack up & making movies) was to always have an up-and-coming male actor(or a popular young celeb trying to be an actor) in the cast, usually as the juvenile lead(Ricky Nelson, James Caan, Christopher George, Roman Gabriel–even Dennis Hopper, the one he regretted hiring). That’s kinda where Dern was when he accepted the role in “The Cowboys”; that he stayed the same craftsman he always was & didn’t become the next Redford or DeNiro is irrelevant.
I offer two fairly-recent examples of Dern’s supposedly dead career: a fine turn as the perfect antagonist-you-love-to-hate in “Down Periscope” and a nice job as a TX cop in a police procedural from a couple years ago with David keith & Kelly McGillis, “Perfect Prey”(a movie I find almost uncomfortable watching, given the plot and McGillis’ harrowing personal history).
Maybe it’s because he’s just really good at playing moody-psycho-losers, as is his latter day spiritual brethren Sean Penn, but I just don’t even like to even look at the guy (Dern or Penn). I still smile when I think of his character in The Cowboys” dragged behind a horse down a stony river bed. Revenge is a dish best served cold after all.
Long before “The Cowboys,” I saw “The King of Marvin Gardens” with Dern and Jack Nicholson. Terrific little movie, bit I remember walking home from the theater that night thinking, “That guy Bruce Dern really gives me the creeps.” Perhaps that’s the very reason why Dern was cast as the heavy in “The Cowboys,” because the producer or casting director or Duke himself recognized Dern could deliver the requisite amount of moody-psycho-loser mojo, a very necessary quality in an actor who will portray the sadistic murder of a screen legend.
Whether he has 50 years of a brilliant craftsman’s career or not, it’s a preference thing. I do not care for what he brings to the table (or the screen). As far as I’m concerned, as well as another Bleater or two in this thread, Bruce Dern’s career ended when he blasted John Wayne to pieces. It was already on short notice with me after “The King of Marvin Gardens.” Watch him all you want. You are as free to do that as I am to avoid his work. To paraphrase Zappa, “I, for one, care less for [him].”