He leadeth me beside the still waters and changeth my oil.

Seen today on the road home from the pandemic-grocery run:

Craig Audidriver: "What? You're kidding! I've only got forty thousand miles on this car!"

The Lord God: "Well, that may be, but the rotors are shot and the front pads have about two millimeters left on them, so maybe someone is telling you not to ride the fucking brake so much, K? Up to you, chief, but I'd recommend doing the front brakes before the next time you drive over to your side piece's place."

Craig: "My side...WHAT? How..?"

The Lord God:

Craig:

The Lord God: "You want I should rotate the tires while I'm at it?"

April Foolin'

The best "April Fool's" joke I ever heard wasn't on April 1. It was back in the day at my first geotech outfit, on a typical morning in a typical staff meeting when one of the guys - a very "engineer" sort of person in that he was always very quiet and serious - started telling us about his recent hiking weekend.

Turns out that he had been alone on a backcountry trail in the Blue Mountains when he came across a cougar. Did everything you're supposed to - shouted, made himself big, waved his arms - but the cat didn't back off and, instead, kept trailing him, getting nearer and nearer.

We're all appalled by this, as he tells us that he got increasingly worried and finally started trying to outpace the cat that just keeps on after him, getting closer and closer.

At last he bolts, tears off up the hill with the big cat right behind. He realizes he can't outrun the animal so he dives into a deadfall pile but before he can crawl under the cat seizes his boot in it's mouth.

Everyone there is dead silent, transfixed, as he goes on in his quiet voice; "So I'm holding on to the tree and the cat is pulling my leg...pulling my leg..." and he doesn't change expression or tone as he concludes "...just like I'm pulling yours right now."

Like I said; great April Fool's prank. Just not in April and not on All Fools Day.

Friday Jukebox: Coolin' Love Edition

Very cool Ray Bryant work - Blue Scimitar - for Valentine's Friday. To which I should note that this:

...was the Bride's card from me this morning.

She laughed out loud.

And for the record, Kay Jewelers, fuck diamonds; more kisses begin with a laugh than they do with a sparkly piece of compressed carbon. Thr original was from this Buzzfeed post about "weird and creepy" Valentines. Worth a look for another laugh or two, I suspect.

Hope you and yours are feeling as tender and twining as young pea plants today.

Father-Daughter Bonding: How Not To Do It

I have NO idea why the hell this popped into my mind, but it did, and now I can't get it out of my head until I tell you the story. Feel free to blame me afterwards, then.

Ok - first - let's get this out of the way.

There's some pictures of naked people in this one. If you don't like naked people, don't read it.

Are we good?

Okay, then.

So. When I lived in southeastern Pennsylvania right after I got off active service my then-girlfriend-soon-to-be-bride-quondam-wife-now-ex had a very sweet friend let's call Gina. Gina was a nice Italian-American girl with a nice Italian-American family that lived in a nice little Italian-American community in someplace like Coatesville, I think.

She was a terrific gal; hell of a hard worker, friendly, smart, loved her friends and family, had just about everything going for her in her life you can think of except for one teensy little thing.

Gina was a lesbian. Probably still is, for that matter.

Anyway, that was a huuuuge big fat hairy deal for her Papa. Let's call him Gino, and Papa Gino was everything you'd expect a traditional Italian-American Papa born in south Philly the early 1930's to be; this swarthy sort of lumpy guy with a thick Philadelphia accent, a "diamond in the rough" kind of papa with big hands and a big heart that was filled with love for his family, his community, the Iggles, spaghetti bolognese, and cold Budweiser.

But not for lesbian daughters who weren't going to get married in Church and produce a dozen adorable grandkids for him.

Apparently Papa Gino and Gina had fought like hell about that when she came out - and, trust me, in 1985 this was something families would fight about and fight hard. Especially if you were an Italian-American kid in a small town in southeastern Pennsylvania. There was lots of stereotypical Italian-American drama involved, and it took a while for things to settle into a sort of armed truce. Gina didn't bring her girlfriends home or dress real butch and Papa Gino didn't rag on her about her sexuality. They stuck to neutral topics and kept up a tough veneer of civility.

But things were definitely tense.

So, anyway, here one Friday Gina is coming home after work and she's had a tough week, so has Papa Gino, and she wants to make nice to him so that she can have, just for a little while, the uncomplicated love for and from her daddy like when she was little.

So - she buys a half-rack of Budweiser and the fixin's for spaghetti bolognese and she figures she'll rent a movie and they can have a nice father-daughter dinner and watch a movie on the VCR together.

Well, you can imagine Gina's Papa Gino's taste in movies, right? Godfather films, Westerns, and war movies...that was pretty much the A to Z in movies for Gino Zepporelli.

Now Gina hates "Italian" films and can't stand Westerns, but war flicks? She can deal.

She wanders down the "Action" movie aisle of the local video rental store and finds a flick that looks kind of World War Two-ish. GIs fighting Nazis? That's a Papa Gino Slam-dunk.

So off she goes with the meat sauce and the videotape and Gina and Papa Gino had a nice dinner and some Buds and settled on the couch to watch the film she rented, a Seventies flick titled:

"Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS"

Ilsa who? I hear you ask.

That Ilsa:

The Ilsa with the big jahoobs in this half-assed WW2 story is supposedly based on this Ilsa: Ilse Koch, Die Hexe von Buchenwald, the Witch of Buchenwald, a real-life Nazi who seems to have been a very twisted sister, indeed but this is what the real Ilsa looked like:

Which, as you can see, is not anything what the Ilsa of the movie looks like. But you knew that already, right.

According to Gina the VCR tape box had "...a picture of Ilsa kinda bustin' out of her SS-outfit and some people shootin' and barbed wire an' stuff..." so not surprisingly she figured it was some sort of WW2 prison picture, The Great Escape only with tits.

She liked tits, and her dad liked The Great Escape so win-win, right?

At any rate, here's Papa Gino settled into his comfy Barcalounger with his fourth Bud with the opening credits rolling all prepared to enjoy a good Axis-and-Allies shoot-'em-up movie, a comfy Combat-episode sort of flick where the Nazis are all hissing and evil and the GIs all ingenious and heroic and the Good Guys win in the end...when he's suddenly confronted with this;

Yeah. It's a soft-core porn film.

So you have to picture the scene; here's Papa Gino frozen in his chair watching this Hogan's-Heroes-gone-horribly-wrong skin flick trying desperately not to go ballistic on his daughter who is sitting on the couch next to him completely mortified but at the same time possessed by the horrible compulsion to burst out laughing hysterically at the whole awful predicament.

So nobody says anything; both of them stare fixated at the awful film rolling past on-screen.

She says that this went on for what seemed like forever, the two of them too stunned to do or say anything, until the famous "electric dildo scene"...

...at which point Papa Gino bolted out of his lounge chair spewing Budweiser all over the knick-knacks on the coffee table and roaring "Whadda fuggin' hell is dis, some sorta fuggin' fug film!", and Gina collapsed on the couch snorting with laughter and wailing "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I had no idea! I had no idea!" until the tears ran down her cheeks.

As they did ours as she told us afterward.

I guess things were kind of touchy around the Zepporelli household for a couple of weeks after that. Gina camped out on our couch for a night or two while her girlfriend was out of town and then with her girlfriend for the rest of the time.

Papa Gino eventually calmed down, although according to Gina it took several months for him to be able to watch any sort of video or television with his family without referring to his middle daughter as "Fuggin' Ilsa de Fuggin' Queen of Da Fug Film Business"

And that was pretty much that.

I never did find out much more about the story of Gino, Gina, and Ilsa. Shortly afterwards my ex got hired at the Catholic hospital out here in Portland and we moved out West. We weren't good enough friend for Gina and my ex to say in touch, so we never heard from them again. All that remains is my memory of this one disastrous dad-daughter evening.

I guess the one last bit about this story I wanted to pass on was culled from the one of the websites I linked to (you guys know I am sleepless in acquiring this sort of fascinating trivia, right) well, here's the most bizarre bit of information I found about this goofy war-porn film. Remember how I called it "Hogan's Heroes Gone Horribly Wrong"?

Well...Ilsa was filmed on the original set of the Hogan's Heroes TV show.

Supposedly at the end of Ilsa a whole bunch of the set got blown up during the big prison break scene (which I think we can assume that Papa Gino didn't keep on going to see).

So not only did his crazy lesbo daughter rent a sadistic WW2 porno film for their dad-daughter evening, it was a sadistic WW2 porno film that blew the hell out of the set of one of his beloved Sixties sitcoms.

I'll bet Papa Gino would have really had a kitten fit if he'd known that

Funeral Blues

Wanted to post this simply because I love the popular version of this W.H. Auden poem. You've heard it, probably, certainly if you watched that gawdawful Andie McDowell chestnut Four Weddings and a Funeral.

It's this one:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.



Public grief is an odd thing; you are choked to silence while all around you life continues, demanding somehow that you put your sorrow into words.

Many of us, most of us, can't do that. Sorrow often comes in silent tears, in inarticulate cries that always seem a sadly inadequate way of mourning the lost beloved.



So, it has always seemed to me, that Auden has done the rest of us a great mercy by doing it so well. To me these four short verses have always expressed the vast deeps of mourning in the way I would always want to. I don't have to grope for words; they are there, already written, and say everything I need to say.

But...

Do you know that this wasn't the original version of the poem?

Not only that - did you know that the first appearance of this was as a rather peculiar little satire, a parody - I believe - of the sort of mawkish verse eulogies that were common in Auden's time whenever some public figure bit the dust?

The original version is difficult to find on the internet and I don't have a copy of the play but here it is; the original two verses are identical to the ones we know and then it veers...a trifle off-camber, let's just say. Here's what comes after verse two - the traffic policemen in black cotton gloves - in the original:

Hold up your umbrellas to keep off the rain
From Doctor Williams while he opens a vein;
Life, he announces, is finally extinct.
Sergeant, arrest that man who said he winked!

Shawcross will say a few words sad and kind
To the weeping crowds about the Master-Mind,
While Lamp, with a powerful microscope
Searches their faces for a sign of hope.

And Gunn, of course, will drive the motor-hearse:
None could drive it better, most would drive it worse.
He'll open up the throttle to its fullest power
And drive him to the grave at ninety miles an hour.

Well.

Not quite the same thing, is it..?

What interests me about this is how these two versions play with the way we perceive this poem, and how it speaks to the larger hiatus between every speaker and listener, between every writer and reader, between the person forming the idea and the one receiving it.

Did Auden ever even intend the final version of this poem as any sort of momento mori at all? Read the line "I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong." and you can't help but feel the certainty of loss; all our stories end in a death, don't they? Love, light, lasting...they will all come down to cold silence at the end. I have always felt that Auden had some iron-bound sorrow in mind when he wrote that line.

Or did he?

Was he still joshing when he revised this poem for its final appearance? Did Auden still intend a sort of snide comment on public mourning? Is this not about grief, but a nasty joke about extravagant grieving?



And how should that matter to us? Does the author's or the original speaker's intent matter when we read or repeat something in our own voice? Should it make a different, make us back away from using this as an expression of grief, or is our own reading - if that reading is a straightforward one without the original twist - the one that matters? Does a cynical joke become a genuine coronach if you cry it slowly and sadly enough?

I have to admit; I'm not sure.

I've always treated this poem as Auden's meditation on sorrow. But what if he was laughing at sorrow, and how should that change - if it does change - the way I read his words?

Henri encore

If you hate cats or hate French existentialism I apologize. But I love these little Henri videos; they make me laugh so hard the coffee goes up my nose.

Take me, Mandingo!

Back in the day my ex-wife and I belonged to the local rec center gym.

It wasn't such of a muchness, but it had a decent weight room, some stationary bikes, rowing machines and that, a sauna and steam room, and was close enough to our then-apartment to be a pleasant walk on a nice day.

Anyway, one Saturday afternoon we'd walked over to the gym for our workout. I remember it was a pleasant autumn day and the paths through the riverside park were crisp with harvest-colored leaves and a faint smell of distant smoke. We enjoyed a chaste kiss in the foyer and went to our respective lockers to change.

After my workout I showered and stopped off at the sauna to bake out the chill. I spread my towel on a corner spot and leaned back to melt in the heat.

A couple of other guys came and went, each time carefully ignoring each other or exchanging greetings with a studiedly heterosexual grunt or nod.

Until The Black Guy entered.

Now let me be clear; this was Wilmington, Delaware, not Portland, so this guy wasn't the only black guy there that day.

But he was...well, let's just say that in one respect he was THE Black Guy. He was, well, kind like THIS Black Guy.

We all grunted heterosexually. He spread out his towel, sat down, and casually flicked his penis over his thigh like Hercules tossing a stray boulder out of his path.

We all studiously looked at the cedar ceiling. Or pretended to close our eyes and absorb the heat.

But not one of us said a word.

We all sat there for fifteen minutes or so, casually sweating in an ostentatiously heterosexual way and carefully not staring at anyone's inhumanly enormous junk.

Then The Black Guy stood up, picked up his towel, casually swung his enormous tool out of his way, and walked out.

We all just looked at each other for a stunned moment and left the sauna in awed, and somewhat shamed, silence.

On the way home my ex and I chatted about the day, and the weather, and plans for the weekend. And I told her about The Black Guy's penis.

And we went on home to dinner.

Later that evening we were lounging about on the sofa. Lounging became kissing, and kissing became fondling, and pretty soon we were in the middle of some pretty serious conjugal business. And just when the temperature was about as high as it could be short of breaking out the top of the thermometer like in one of those Warner Brothers cartoons, my paramour placed her soft, wet lips against my ear and murmured in the frenzied breathlessness of lust;

"Tell me about The Black Man's penis again..."

And I can now tell you from hard experience it's damned deadly difficult to perform the Capital Act when you're both rolling around on the floor giggling helplessly.

Le Chat: Politique et Pensif

Henri the cat shares his political, and then his medical, anomie with us. Alas, poor moggie, the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. As he knows so, so well.

Viens sur mon coeur, âme cruelle et sourde,
Tigre adoré, monstre au airs indolents;

~ Baudelaire, Le Lethe

(h/t to Icanhazcheeseburger, where I first came across these delightful little oddities)

Save the date

Barbie and Ken's wedding album.Perfect.

Worth a moment or two to enjoy the absurdity.And, Jesus, Ken, what? You can't wait for the wedding night at the Dream House? The least you could do is keep your hand off the poor woman's ass in public. You horndog; if I didn't know you weren't anatomically correct...

(h/t to Glamour mag for the sense of humor...)

Orange Alert

This is courtesy my friend Brent, "The World's New Security Levels", written by John Cleese.I repost without further comment just because, frankly, I need a bit of a laugh this Friday. So:

The World's New Security Levels

Great Britain: The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved." Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out.Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.The Scots have raised their threat level from "Pissed Off" to "Let's get the Bastards." They don't have any other levels. This is the reason they have been used on the front line of the British army for the last 300 years.

France: The French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from "Run" to "Hide." The only two higher levels in France are "Collaborate" and "Surrender."The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France's white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country's military capability.

Italy: has increased the alert level from "Shout Loudly and Excitedly" to "Elaborate Military Posturing."Two more levels remain: "Ineffective Combat Operations" and "Change Sides."

Germany: The Germans have increased their alert state from "Disdainful Arrogance" to "Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs."They also have two higher levels: "Invade a Neighbor" and "Lose."

Belgium: Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual;the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

Australia: meanwhile, has raised its security level from "No worries" to "She'll be alright, Mate." Two more escalation levels remain: "Crikey! I think we'll need to cancel the barbie this weekend!" and "The barbie is canceled."So far no situation has ever warranted use of the final escalation level.So wherever you're travelling this weekend, remember: be afraid - be VERY afraid!

It is a truth generally acknowledged that a hard left to the earhole...

No moral here, just funny. (h/t to digby)

Steiner ist REALLY nicht fucking angekommen

I came across this over at Armchair Generalist; it seems that some pissant outfit named "Constantin Film AG" has been harassing YouTube into taking down parodies of the now-viral "bunker rant" scene from their movie "Downfall" ("Der Untergang").

Here's a parody of that, courtesy of Zaquery Green, on the much-less well known Vimeo website.

This is actually pretty infuriating. The Copyright Act of 1976 (17 U.S.C. § 107) and subsequent decisions such as Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., Mattel v. Walking Mountain Productions, and Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin clearly lay out parody as a "fair use" of copyrighted material. Not to mention that the damn flick would be scarcely known outside the German-speaking world without these parodies.

My world is a little darker knowing that driftglass' brilliant "Little Richie Daley Reacts to Losing The Olympics" parody can no longer be viewed through his, or my, blog. I know that we're all wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate media and their whores. I know that our modern media culture has no integrity and will bend over for the bemonied, belawyered interests that run the house. But it's nice to forget that for a moment and just have a laugh. Until you're reminded of Who Owns You.

So curse you, snippy and humorless little Constantin Film AG. Curse you, testicle-free YouTube. You are helping to ensure that we are truly living in a debased time.

a common penchant for the scenic view

In the midst of the ire of the preceding post I recalled an entertaining little blog I had wandered across several years ago and had nearly forgotten.If you have a spare moment or two, stop by the Dark Lord of the Sith's blog "The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster". Scroll through the musings of the evil henchman of the vile Emperor Darth Sidious. You may find something like the following:

"I was meditating on this new information when a call sounded at the door. It was Moff Jerjerrod stopping by to tell me the Emperor commanded my presence. I made a mental note to crush his trachea with my mind at the first politically reasonable opportunity, and made my way to my master's tower with the snaggle-toothed idiot loping at my heels.

We rode the elevator with a junior lieutenant whose skin prickled at the sound of my respirator. He seemed on the verge of passing out for most of the ride, his adam's apple working in his throat. Just as the door slipped back with a hiss and I moved to leave he managed to call, "Lord Vader," in a pitiable squeak.

I paused, and turned back to him.

He took a deep breath. "I just wanted to say, sir, my Lord -- well, that I've always looked up to you. I don't know if people ever take the time to say...thanks. Thank you, Lord Vader. You're an inspiration to us all."

I hesitated, uncertain what to say, and in that moment of silence the young lieutenant began to stammer an apology. I stopped him by holding up one gloved, open hand. "Thank you, Lieutenant," I said evenly. "I hope to see you one day commanding the fleet."

"Yes, my Lord!" he grinned, saluting smartly. The elevator sighed closed and he disappeared. How charming!

"Shameless sycophancy," grunted Jerjerrod with that little smirk of his pulled tight over his mouth. "Let's not dawdle now, Lord Vader."

Using every ounce of self-control I barely avoided simultaneously breaking every bone in the Moff's body with a spasm of pointed thought. He continued to make light banter as we walked, endangering his life. We paused at the threshold of Palpatine's tower. "Recognize this, Jerjerrod," I said, pointing my index finger menacingly in his face. "Had the Emperor not specifically requested that your life be spared for the time being, you would even now be holding your own quivering giblets in your hands."

Jerjerrod wet himself mutely."

Indeed.I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the diverting musings of the Dark Lord of the Galaxy.

And if not, there's always the REAL Dark Lord - Dick Cheney's forthcoming memoir: "How I Did It"...

Oh, the humanity...

Possibly one of the funniest Thanksgiving bits ever filmed:Be patient; the editing is lame, and you have to wade through the opening credits to get to the funny. But h/t anyway to someone called "Pinnacle Productions" for posting this to YouTube; if you want the credit, you should work on your product a little more, guy.

But whatever. With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

Happy Thanksgiving from the folks at the Fire Direction Center: Chief, Mojo, The Peeper and Little Missy!

Why I'm Not an Engineer

Because this is how I felt in calculus.

Is there something you feel this way about?

What is it?

I dread the moment when a high-school-age Peeper or Missy comes to me with a textbook and asks: "Daddy, can you help me with this math problem..?" It's not that I can't do the math, it's just that I don't have a "feel" for the science and I tend to make foolish mistakes. I used to have a sharp BCS operator that I relied on to recheck my checks of firing data before I sent them on to the line of steel. I'm just not a natural math-type guy.

While we're talking about stuff we didn't do well in school, here's a couple of science test bolos who at least tried to go with imagination when actual knowledge failed them. Hey, it's worth a try, right?Okay. Not the answer I was looking for but shows a fine degree of common sense.Nature hates a vacuum. And a smartass.And there's always one out there that looks for a seamy underside to everything. Jathin is unlikely to make the grade as a marine engineer, but he looks to have promise as a Fox News anchor. Except he needs to find a way to tie the whole thing to Bill Clinton's penis. Keep on after it, Jathin. The Lure of the Clenis has GOT to be involved in that problem somewhere. Everything wrong with Man and Nature is connected in some way to the Clenis.

Hey, kids, Jesus loves you. No, I mean really, really...LOVES...you.

I'm not sure if the makers of this bit of religious kitch are sly or just really, really innocent.

h/t to Slacktivist for his explanation of how this sort of thing fits into the life of a certain type of Christian fundamentalist.

The type that comes to mind when I see stuff like this is the "Jesus wants you to come sit on my lap and wriggle around a bit, little girl..." type.

Excuse me, but I need to go wash my hands now.

Gaaah.

Horizon Air 3471 PDX-Medford

I've flown this flight!Kidding aside; one seriously jacked commercial. Love it.

h/t to the Blue Gal - you're still the Meanest Obama Mama, girlfriend.

We Are Amused

Hey...enough of the political gloom. Don't go away mad! Here's a Friday treat to sweeten the dour mood:Check out the "New Adventures of Queen Victoria" both at the linked website and at "goComics.com".

You may loofah my stretchmarks, Albert.

You're So Next...

Perhaps the greatest seven minute opera ever filmed: Chuck Jones' "The Rabbit of Seville".Hard to list all the great bits in the 7:31 running time of this classic. Is it the samurai frenzy of Elmer's first shave? The repeated gag that puts poor Fudd back in the barber's chair over and over again? The climactic "can-you-top-this" exchange that begins with Elmer chasing Bugs with a fire ax and culminates with Groom Bugs dropping Bride Elmer two stories into the "Marriage of Figaro" wedding cake?

Interestingly - and this may have something to do with my own thinning thatch - I think my personal favorite begins about 5:14 as Bugs waltzes his hapless opponent into the stage barber chair for the, what, fifth time? The inspired tonsorial mayhem goes on for over a minute until Bugs applies the hair tonic and the "Figaro Fertilizer" and the astounded Fudd sits up to watch his head sprout hair.

Or so he thinks.

Jones - who was probably the Warner's director most responsible for the "look" we who grew up with the Looney Tunes characters associate with the wascally wabbit (although Bugs' personality has always owed more to Tex Avery, the director who more than anyone defined what a "Bugs Bunny cartoon" was and is) - was at the height of his craft in 1949. The Warner Bros. animators were at the top of their game. For proof, look no further than the terrific interplay of expressions at the very end of this scene: Fudd first excstatic and then, as the flowers sprout atop the new "hair", furious. Bugs watching his work with a sort of smug satisfaction until the punch line, when he reacts to Elmer's rage with a typically exaggerated Tex Avery/Warner's "take" - here's Tex's Wolf reacting to the appearance of Red Hot Riding Hood:The Peeper loves this cartoon, but not as much as he enjoys "Bully for Bugs" - I think it's the graphic violence of the latter.Enjoy.

Chocolat

After Missy was in bed last night, Mojo and I snuggled in with the Peeper to introduce him to one of the world's truly offbeat pleasures: "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"It's been some years since I watched this film last, and I had honestly forgotten:

1) What an appalling drip the part of Charlie Bucket is. He's the saintly Little Princess who loves his mom, gives all his money to charity, does his homework and exactly what the teacher says. He's the kid at school who always made you want to rub snot in his hair. The child actor, Peter Ostrum, who plays him in the movie, isn't bad, exactly, but the part is so diabetic-coma-inducing that you can't help wanting to strangle the angelic little Bubbles.

2) The number of truly awful songs, hitting rock bottom with "Cheer Up, Charlie", where the curly-headed little Snoogums' Mom reminds him that no matter how much his life sucks which, in this case, it does like a gigantic industrial shopvac, it's still terrific to be YOU!. Eeegah. That said, there are also several treats, but most of them related to the real heart of the flick.

Which is, simply stated, Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka.

Frankly, it's a tossup whether it's worth watching the first third of the film at all. You miss the setup where you're shoved to stand in the "Charlie the Great" corner, but you also miss the craptacular songs and all the nobility of the ingratiating little fellow Charlie. The movie begins for me when Gene totters out of the factory door, does his forward roll and comes up as, well, Gene-as-Willy-Wonka.
The wonderful thing about the performance is that you're never quite sure if the enigmatic candymaker is really quite mad or just playful and eccentric. My personal take, BTW, has been for mad and bad - perhaps one of the most delightfully sinister sequences in moviedom is the "Pure Imagination" scene, where Gene leads the greedy little group of visitors into his magic kingdom singing about how your imagination can lead you to paradise (while the Bad Children race about filling their pieholes knowing that they're going to shop Wonka's imagination to his rival Slugworth - except for Noble Charlie, of course). Everything about the scene is a fight between the innocent words of the song and the candyland set and Wilder's interpretation of them, from the curious minor key he sings to the herky-jerky dance down the stairsteps, where he puzzles and disconcerts the group with his odd stop-and-start and the sudden slashing of his cane. It's maaahvelous.

Wilder is simply a joy throughout, a completely unrestrained id in kinetic motion, a force of Nature, quoting Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Keats and Shakespeare while his inventions dispose of the Nasty Children in cleverly appropriate ways (at one point, Wilder turns to the survivors and coos: "Two greedy, bad little children gone, three sweet, good children left..."). He gives you the combinaton of delight and frightening power that comes from pure creative intelligence. He IS the movie, and while he's center stage it's a hell of a lot of fun.

It's far from a perfect flick: it does violence to the Dahl book, which is a worthy kid's classic; Wilder is WAY too young for the part, and both the dreary first portion and the odd little ending, where the whole adventure turns out to be a setup for making Charlie the Next Willy Wonka (am I the only person who thought this the most impossible thing in a movie full of flying elevators and chocolate-colored dwarves? Noble Charlie succeeding Mad Scientist Willy? Never happen...) are drags.

But - ignore all that and you can concentrate on enjoying one of the great performances in Western acting - Gene Wilder as the Greatest Madboy Evah.