SLAP! Guy on the B train wearing suspenders … in July … in New York.
First of all Tennessee Williams, is there a Country Time lemonade convention at the Javits Center this week or do you always shop at the community theater props department? You don’t think I see you eyeing that one-foot gap between me and the nice Mexican lady on the bench, wearing that giant question mark across your face? Guess what Foghorn Leghorn, your minds made up.
But this is New York and I’ve had worse bench companions on the subway then this, mostly on the L train. Ole’ suspenders squeezes in right next to me — tight fit — and now he’s peeking over every five seconds like he wants my permission or something. Nothing gets me more mad than when someone assumes that I’m mad — call it Travis Bickle disease. What this idiot doesn’t realize is I have the peripheral vision of a young Joe Montana. I can tell he’s looking at my iPod, but just maybe I don’t want to include him in on which MC5 album I’m going to play (High Time). This keeps up for the rest of the train ride; he’s sooo afraid that I’m still annoyed by his choice of seat, not getting that I’ve moved on to whole other reasons why he annoys me, for instance the Roberto Benigni impersonation he leapt into as soon as he claimed the seat: sit up, bend down, suspenders off, hands on knees, hands in pockets, brush back hair. It was like being trapped in Down By Law. Someone recast the B train as a Louisiana jail cell and didn’t make a service announcement, but at least instead of a harmonica I’ve got the Marijuana Cigarette Five. Which nicely leads me into …
CLAP! The MC5.
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” is one of the angriest before rap music intro’s I’ve ever heard: “If ya ask me, this is a high society! This is a high society!“
Then for some reason it just turns into this slow, plodding blues number that goes on for way too long and has no energy, but like my specious grandpappy used to say ‘even if a song is 6 minutes you have the choice of making it 20 seconds.’ Grandpappy never said that of course; no one would ever say something like that.
I know, again with the lemonade, right? But I can’t help it. What am I supposed to talk about lemonade in December? It’s summer. I have a talking about lemonade window and I’m going to use it, especially having watched the magic of those early Country Time commercials (above). It reminded me of how much I hate these new ones. Why is it marketers want every product to be extreme? The very idea of lemonade is refreshment + comfort, not whatever the message is in these commercials — drink hard, don’t think too much I guess?
In the commercials an overgrown kid named Joey, who may or may not have a learning disability, tries to peddle his lemonade ideas to camera but two muscle necks barge in and shoot him down — but shoot him down in a way that’s also physically intimidating, like Jake LaMotta hearing his wife call Marcel Cedan cute. The kicker is the tone in these things as if we’re expected to cheer on the two gorillas in the office; like they’re the heart and soul of Mike’s Hard who have to put up with this underdog loser of a kid who maybe is stepping out of his weight class to try and contribute to the team. Boo you stupid kid! Know your place. Don’t you know that having ideas is dumb? What the good people over at Mike’s Hard Lemonade want us all to understand is that their product is not just refreshing but also unthoughtful and violent. Two-fisted SLAP!
CLAP! Gene Hackman in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.
Why is it this never gets mentioned as one of the great performances of the 1970’s? You spend half the movie trying to guess what surveillance expert Harry Caul is thinking, and when Coppola or Hackman clue you in it’s either a surprise or you’re scared s#@tless. The film was made the same year as Coppola’s second Godfather; it’s a good movie — not great. There are plenty of names in it including Harrison Ford and Robert Duvall but Hackman is in rare form. Only Allen Garfield in the role of Caul’s arch-nemisis “Bernie” Moran can keep up the pace.
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