Swimsuit Edition

Death and little black dresses

There's a funeral today. Another non-smoker, younger than I am, who died of cancer. (And, no, it wasn't from any "secondhand smoke.") Anyway, I'm not going. I don't like funerals. I went to a visitation at the funeral home last night. Visitations are good. Funerals suck. It's a Catholic funeral. And, as we've said before, I'm not Catholic. I once went to a Catholic wedding, where the groom had to become a Catholic in a ceremony just before the wedding, and the whole thing took forever. I once went to a funeral home visitation, and a priest stood up and said, "Let us pray." I bowed my head, and everyone around me started reciting Hail Marys over and over and over and over again, until I finally just got up and left. Catholicism is apparently very time-consuming and somewhat repetitive.
Another friend of mine was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, so I'll be going to his visitation sometime soon, too. Death surrounds me this year. I haven't lost any family members. Just a few friends and acquaintances. And, of course, the world's many careless losers. Death is not scary to me, but it's spooky sometimes. Like when people say that Death comes in threes. Like when there are a bunch of celebrity deaths, such as we had this summer. Like when Teddy Roosevelt's wife and mother died on the same day. Like when someone dies in an automobile accident on their way to a funeral. That sort of thing. It makes you look around you and wonder Whose Next? Spooky Old Death.
No, so, anyway, I'm standing in line at the funeral home visitation, right? And I'm wondering if I should perhaps feel some twinge of guilt or something over the fact that I'm noticing a whole lot of little black dresses in the crowd. And I remember the deceased and his sense of humor. And I know he'd be laughing out loud.

For example...

Kitchenettes

She's a Saint

Eva Marie Saint

Learning Curves

NY Lady Cops Trap Mashers

Thank God!




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Little Debbie Alert

Watch for Debra "Little Debbie Snack Cakes" Paget
in Les miserables (1952) tonight at 8 PM EDT on
Turner Classic Movies, the best dad-blame channel
on television.

With Friends Like That. . .

Last night I watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) on the new DVD from the Criterion Collection. I watched it once straight through and then again with the commentary track from director Peter Yates. Yates explains that the whole film was shot on location in and around Boston with no studio scenes whatsoever. It is one of his three favorite films of all the pictures he's made (and Bullitt is not one of the other two). Yates says it was Robert Mitchum's favorite role. He says that everything said on the screen was already in George V. Higgins' wonderful novel. What Yates doesn't say is that Higgins once worked for the U.S. Attorney's office in Massachusetts, worked organized crime cases, and was a journalist for the Boston Globe and Boston Herald-American. This would be about the time that Whitey Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang were busy in Boston. And Bulger was hijacking trucks and whacking guys on Friday nights and serving as an informant to FBI Special Agent John Connolly on Mondays, a lot like Peter Boyle's character, Dillon, does in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. You might remember that Whitey Bulger (who is still a fugitive, incidentally) was the model for Jack Nicholson's character, Frank Costello, in Martin Scorsese's 2006 film The Departed.
So, anyway, author George V. Higgins is dead now, but he knew whereof the phuck he spake. And he wrote great dialogue. And The Friends of Eddie Coyle is filled with it.
"This life is hard, but it's harder if you're stupid."