notice to subscribers

As thrilled as I am to see my hit counter jump a decade, I should bare a few of the bones of this operation for you. While I draft in Word to avoid a particular snafu which in 'Blogger' has channeled many hours work into the nether, I must still faff around with 'Publish' to detect errors in link addresses (a comma where a period should be, etc.- and occasionally supply an after-thought or revision). If that is a matter of cut and paste, I haven't figured it out. [I beg your indulgence with inconsistant spacing between the last punctuation mark and the next capital letter]. Each untuned 'publish' goes out to you as I sort my way through it. Though I am greatly humbled for even having subscribers, I must confess that the anxiety attached with annoying the very ones I hope to impress with redundant postings is causing me no small amount of stress. I suggest doing what I do as I wait for the morning paper to be delivered. Smoke cigarettes and gulp coffee while pacing back and forth, cursing my name. Go repeatedly to 'Smack Dab' and slam down on the little x when 'no animals were harmed during the filming of this production' again tops the posts, and spend another day brewing over Smack Dab's sloppy work ethic- promising never to read him again. When the full import of Life Without Smack Dab has had time to settle, pick up on some older postings- maybe there was something that you missed. You suddenly realize, "where else will I go for endless prattling on". You turn to your Magic 8 ball and ask; Will Smack Dab Publish Today?. 'Reply Hazy'. But keep faith. I'll be here, waiting for your moment of desperation- it will be intuitive. Two or five days with those smarmy phrase-makers with the potty mouths over on the Huffington Post and you'll be running back for more of his caustic wit, embedded in liltingly Victorian run-on sentences. It will finally appear; 'notice to subscibers'. The trademark uncapitalized title, the cavalier dismissal of paragraphed form, descriptions phrased in threes. Puntuation that does everything but smile. I've rarely thought twice about "growing up in public with my pants down" but confess my uneasiness with an eager readership. In short, stop subscribing. It makes [all three of ] you look needy.

no animals were harmed during filming of this production

How is that possible? We're keeping close tabs on a bird's nest in the rafters of our make-shift paint shop in the barn. Mama is being a lot more cautious about bringing bugs around as long as we're there. While she is away, the two fledglings threaten to push each other out of the nest for both portions... I make a regular early morning assault on wasp nests around our work areas, few survive... I didn't have the heart to look behind us as the transport van took us back to our allocated parking area at the end of the day, rolling over a stone-still bunny in the middle of the drive, (they might have more presence of mind than squirrels, who always choose the wrong time to make a sudden move). We've disrupted hundreds of feeding paths and obstructed the entrance to hundreds of nests and safe places. I couldn't say what the 'greens' department are out there doing for a few seconds of fuzzily filmed foliage over someones shoulder, but they come back stinking! I try to give spiders a moment to observe the path of my brush before mowing right through them and their webs, they seem faster emergency responders than say, sleepy moths. Typically I shout, "WHO WANTS TO DIE FOR ART!!" when I paint an acre of shrubby ground to match the season called for in the script with an airless sprayer which delivers about three gallons a minute. (I try to speak slowly and enunciate, I know they don't speak English) . Oh?, what's that? PETA only cares about furry animal actors with eyelashes? Never mind.

film magic

I’m working as a scenic artist now on a film about lord-knows-what. I signed an agreement promising not to tell even if I find out, but they needn’t worry- I’m probably the least inquisitive employee on the books. I’ve been in the business long enough to know that the final release bears little resemblance to the film we all thought we might be working on. On ‘Unbreakable’ (2000) with Bruce Willis for instance, a crew of five or six of us spent several days carefully stuccoing a facade from scaffolding, under the blistering sun. A few feet away they had installed a built-in swimming pool, which of course we were banned from using. We were advised that this was for a climactic scene- all measure of vigilance should be taken with our trowel work, weathered age applied with studied care. You may know the scene from the film. The villain pushes Bruce off a balcony into the pool. You do see the back of the house- for a second, at night, during a thunderstorm, from underwater. Eh!, so long as the checks clear. I’m usually working on a set a few weeks before it's filmed. Only occasionally do I get a chance to see the Hollywood luminaries in person. They seem like regular people, only shorter. I saw Jean-Claude VanDamme throw a star fit because the snack table was out of peanut butter. Had a playful chat with a bath-robed Bryce Dallas (Ron Howard’s daughter) between takes of her ‘huddled in the shower’ scene in ‘Lady In The Water’ (2006). She was sick of showering and I really wanted one. Remember all the fantastic $250./roll wallpaper in that film?... all me. Again; blazing sun, dirty work, un-useable swimming pool yards off. There are just never enough reasons to make me regret my career choice. I did get to create a ‘star’ piece of scenery for ‘Fallen’ (1998) with Denzel Washington and Donald Sutherland. Denzel descends into a creepy, forgotten basement. Wiping away the [tempera paint] with a rag he uncovers the word "azazel", (rendered in my very best ‘culture-neutral, sans serif’ scrawl). I completely forget the significance of it, but it was probably an important enough scene to survive being cut from the television version. "And the Oscar goes to.." Film work is often like a lucid dream. Typically, after the last twelve hour day I show up in the morning feeling like I’ve been gone from the shop for all of twenty minutes. From there I might go out to paint walls in a convent or a penitentiary, eat lobster and clams in a tent in a parking lot for forty-five minutes, and spend the rest of the day in a [fictitious] twelve-year-old boys’[fake] bedroom, painting dust under his radiators and taking the just-out-of-the-package shine off of all his action figures. After five hours of sleep, the REM never really seems to stop. The trees, (sawed off and mounted to wagons, their leaves pulled off and replaced with silk replicas); a gentle breeze, (pushed through a fan the size of my first apartment); the rolling lawns, ( painted green); bracingly fresh drifts of snow, (a product resembling whipped lard, squirted from fire hoses and carefully raked into place). Nature doesn’t always get it quite right. That’s why we band of talented artisans stand at the ready to take the gloss off of ice or to paint rocks to look more like rocks. (I say 'paint' when I could mean floor wax, lye, or roof tar). I am reminded of the Hugo award winning sci-fi tingler ‘A Boy And His Dog’ (1975) starring a fresh-faced (and predictably shirt-less) Don Johnson who, wandering bomb-razed planet Earth with his matted and telepathic (yeah) Bearded Collie, stumble upon the entrance to an underground world of displaced Mid-Westerners. [Footnote: the role of the dog is supplied by the same actor who played 'Tiger' in the hit TV series "The Brady Bunch]'. Underground a cheezily costumed and made-up tribe of hayseeds (maybe robots or zombies, I forget), whose menfolk have lost the ability to procreate (that’s what they need Don Johnson for), live (and die) on what appears to be the set of ‘Picnic’(1955). I accept this world and these people as completely plausible. For months at a time I spend my days in a blacked-out warehouse painting ‘soot’ on the insides of fireplaces and hurricane lamps and eating my lunch next to a guy with a gigantic right arm who looks a lot like an embalmer I used to know... or saw on TV. 'Hardball with Chris Matthews' is my 'surreal'. I’m out of the shop next week, on location at a farmhouse where presumably I’ll be painting green weeds brown and making a hundred-year-old brown barn look like a hundred-year-old yellow barn. "I'll need twenty gallons of root killer and as much 'Aquanet' as you can find!" Enjoy the show, whatever it turns out to be, sorry about the harming of trees- it wasn't my call, and (if it wouldn't be giving too much away) keep an eye out for Mrs. Jones’ rain spouts, (they're plastic!).

organized

...Speaking of Grandma's recipes (see Grandma's Borscht)- hers for '[hk]oo-lyp-see' [stuffed cabbage] has seduced me with the phrase: roll them loosely, pack them tight. I've adopted the broader concept of 'general programs in apple-pie-order' into nearly every avenue of life. In terms of household organization it is an ever-changing system that requires above all else a careful eye to functional surfaces- what is likely to pile up? and how can one whip the ugliness into a picturesque conformity. Like a pile of books- within reason even newspapers- can lend an aire of voracious minds at play, if not too prissily aligned. Topped with the 'Magic 8-ball' the impression widens to suggest an appetite beyond things knowable. One must be careful when the height or sheer number of these piles threaten to obscure one's path from the door. The goal is to appear to be inquisitive while not quite bookish (which might leave visitors wary of sitting down on half-eaten candy bars). Be warned that family pets are not always respectful of what you're trying to accomplish- especially our dog, who is capable of rearranging entire furniture groupings. It is acceptable to have a kitchen full of dirty dishes provided that the are scraped and stacked restaurant-style beside the sink- not in it. Despite the number of days they may have sat there, it is the suggestion of a professional work ethic that buys forgiveness. Also, your stemware will fare much better. Plates should be kept on a lower shelf over the stove to stay warm, displacing herbs. I'll admit that spices and dried herbs require a better system than the one I presently employ where most frequently used items are to the front of an eye-level shelf holding a very busy collection of bottles, jars, and baggies. I won't brag about the convenience but it's a good place to hide things from the children. I keep glassware on a higher shelf than plastic vessels to discourage climbing youngsters, but it doesn't always work. Coffee, tea, Macaroni N' Cheese, oatmeal, rice and powdered drinks should occupy the "just add water' cabinet over the sink along with a shelf of the required mugs, pitchers, and bowls. Pots should be stored with their lids, not nested, unless you enjoy cacophonous struggles. Speaking of which, short of replacing your aluminum bake ware with the new-fangled silicone (which I mistrust because it still requires the support of what?, a metal cookie sheet), my only suggestion is to keep the Pyrex somewhere else. It's depressing enough to learn that mice are using your bunt pan as a toilet, limiting the frequency of having to open the cabinet at all is the best option. [I give you my word as a former professional dishwashist {dishwasher operator}, these items are sanitized before I use them]. Of course I assume someone will be peeking in my junk drawer which is why I am careful to assign actual junk to a box in the basement (especially corded electronic accessories, enemies of containment in drawers). What should remain are flashlights, batteries, screwdrivers, mousetraps, sewing kits (unless broad enough to warrant inclusion in a 'sewing basket'), IKEA wrenches, and for a touch of whimsy, the flattened out souvenir pennies from those cranking machines. These suggest, and let's admit junk drawers betray the order of our brains, a 'can-do' personality. Before hyper-organizing fasteners into dozens of baby food jars, consider the frame of mind one is in when one is stuck on fastening. If we knew what we needed and we knew what it was called, we could certainly appreciate going to an aptly labeled jar for hundreds of them. But in practice we need no more than five of them, and a quick rifle through four trays titled nails w/ heads, nails w/o heads, screws w/ points, screws w/o points (and with the designation of a box titled 'tape and glue') what couldn't be fastened. I'll tell you what- if you're that crafty. Go to an automotive center and buy a roll of the goo (in tape form) that sets windshields in place (butyl). I won't guarantee you can hang your bowling pin collection from your popcorn ceiling with it, but in the world of non-porous connectors it has no equal, and the one roll will last you your entire life. Communities located on active fault lines know I speak the truth. Mementos could be gathered into a Rubbermaid container labeled 'Cherished Crap' (for good-but-not-frame-able postcards, expensive personalized gifts you can't use, decks of naughty playing cards, etc.), but the mindful (appearing careless) display of old photos chronicling period hair choices, I.O.U.s from drunk friends, or anything to do with a deceased Pope should be allowed to pop up as a bookmark or stuck to the refrigerator. Clothes storage is a matter of personal choice, but consider devoting a large drawer for socks. It's a lot of space to devote to what most men would relegate to one of those small drawers up top but 1- can you own enough socks (and conversely, flip-flops?) and 2- the square footage (area) of a large drawer makes absolute sense for bleary-eyed groping. I accidentally wore two different socks to school one day in 1966- I won't make that mistake again! A seasonal change of short and long pants in the bottom drawer will afford the extra room. By the way, the Kurt Vonnegut rule for writing- "ruin your own jokes" takes seed in the fashion world as- "throw out the things you bought on vacation". Closets- see; William Sledd on You-tube. He didn't invent color grouping, (I think thrift stores did), but why not choose your tie first and hold it up to an array of shirts to find the right match. It's the jump-start to 'meticulous'. I do group by color but I am no William Sledd. Our closet is tragically disordered. Where it should be eight or nine 'stuffed cabbages' it's just the one. I have a few boxes of shoes on a shelf but since moving day over a year ago I haven't quite figured out what to do with the three or four gigantic boxes of them at the bottom of the closet. Maybe if my oldest son moves out in six years I can re-purpose his bunk beds as a shoe rack, but that's a shaky prospect to pin my dreams on. I've already outlined my frustration with junk mail (two Sierra Trading Post catalogs ago). My new plan is to buy one of those coastal homes with a ground floor basement and the actual living space starting one flight up. Happily, I don't care what my basement looks like as long as I can get to the fuse box. Somehow I only received the Obsessive half of Compulsive/ Obsessive Disorder, I own no such compulsion to make or follow hard-fast systems. But in this house that's enough to make me the Felix Unger. This is something my mother should find deservedly ironic. I located her last nerve thirty years ago when I left the bag of bread unclosed for probably the three hundredth time, an occasion which left me picking breadcrumbs out of my shag. "Wrong damn shelf.." I mutter first thing in the morning (after Michael has unloaded the dishwasher), swapping plastic cups for glasses when my eyes are open barely enough to recognize my Alf coffee mug. "What's this doing here" I say, picking my blanket up off of the dining room floor on my way up to bed at night. Finding out if anything will make this house run smoother will probably cost me my stomach lining- but I'll keep at it. Presently I'm trying to wrap my mind around the sixteen or so 'tote bags' (emblazoned with slick graphics for various medications) that litter the floor of every room. They might contain anything from unwashed athletic gear to May 16th's uneaten lunch, something I am happy not knowing as long as I am able to resist unzippering them. They constitute enough of a 'stuffed cabbage' for me, I'm thinking I'll drive a few nails into all the load bearing walls in the house, hang them up, and call it a day.

last will and testament

I usually take a moment out of every ten years or so to put something on paper. It's occurred to me that I'm due and a blog seems a happier venue for it than being buried in the junk drawer- so here goes;

I, Smack Dab, being of sound mind and body do hereby bequeath all monies, royalties, dividends, and worldly possessions to my partner of now twenty-eight years, Michael. For reasons known well to him the following exceptions shall apply;
1-My only surviving 'Alf' coffee mug shall be buried with me, along with a well charged cell phone with all speed dial locations programed to my home number- with the specific instruction that someone be at home and awake for at least three days following said interment.
2-"Selected Short Stories, Franz Kafka" should be returned to my father (but I promise I don't have your 'Yodeling Cossacks' LP, or whatever it was you think I have). Jan, you leave a book here every time you babysit- I've tried not to lose your page but they're all around here somewhere. Oh, and if anyone has my "Mozart's Requiem" please see that it is returned, I wouldn't be buried to anything else!
3- Capital One will probably want their car back.

The following provisos are not legally binding, but only encouraged;
1- An essay contest should be held; "My Thoughts On Big Narrow Feet", the winner to receive 40+ pair of assorted 'gently used' size 12 footwear.
2- My youngest son should inherit my opera collection on CD- he might as well find out early on that people with deep voices are out to get him.
3- My oldest son should inherit my "Miss Manners" library, his future first wife would thank me.

As to the actual interment; honestly, wrapped in burlap (if it comes in red or orange), no box, and on (where legal) government land- first choice, in the middle of a traffic circle. I envision a 'drive-by' funeral. Second choice, the ocean- not terribly practical because I would still want to be buried (and 'drive -by' now requires some sort of sea craft). Third choice is a median strip somewhere, but not Florida.

The greatest likelihood is that my marker would be a homemade wooden cross at the I-95/495 split just north of Wilmington, DE. It has been on my 'to do' list for quite some time, but I'd much rather have something cast in concrete with my name, Smack Dab, spelled out in embedded broken green glass - I saw it in the floor of a food court and really loved it. If it's not my gravestone first, it'll be my kitchen counter-top.

Finally, No 'in lieu of...', I want flowers- the less ordinary they are, the more everyone else will know how much you loved me! Save the roses for Valentines Day. I do love (orange) glads so don't feel like you have to spend too much. My favorite are poppies, burn the stems so they'll keep. ( I hate' baby's breath', go with dill weed or tarragon if you're looking for a filler).

Thanks everyone, I had a good run. I hope I live long enough to see them grow fruit with the SKU# already genetically tattooed in the skin, but if not, don't cry for me. My time has not yet come.

punk rock

Though I've touched on the fashion of the era (see; 'clothes horse'), there is much, much more to my 'punk' story. Popular music leading up to this time was fuzzily divided into two camps, both bloated legacies of the British Invasion (which was essentially repackaged American Blues). Half the kids in suburbia who took music seriously were having 'listening experiences' on their head-phones with groups like Jethro Tull and Yes- dreamy, poetic lyrics punctuated by slickly synthesized instrumentals and ten minute drum solos. The other half, as drawn to shiny objects as they were to outrageous personalities, were having a more direct experience with the music of Roxy Music and David Bowie, dressing and behaving like their idols. Participation in any of it generally required going to see them in sports venues, with the tallest people in the world in front of you, the scariest people in the world behind you, and flaming projectiles passing overhead. An American rebellion against this out-of-touch super-band stadium thing had already started with bands like the Velvet Underground and Iggy and the Stooges, long enough before this time that their records were starting to show up in the bargain bins at Woolworth's, has-beens before they ever were. Lou Reed and John Cale survived the Velvets to become personalities in their own right, their early solo efforts drearily esoteric yet still, enough to tide us over until something more user-friendly came along. This limping deconstruction from polished and over-produced to gutsy and raw is most brilliantly narrated by the artists themselves and their satellite of hangers-on in the book "Please Kill Me- The Uncencored Oral History Of Punk" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. The scene which I am qualified to narrate, called by some the beginning of this new music and by others the end of it, reached a creative climax in 1976/1977 on the Bowery in New York at a club called CBGB's (the possessive form having no reasonable explaination). This was about a year after the wildly outrageous New York Dolls were tragically re-themed and mis-managed into oblivion by smarmy London boutique owner Malcolm McLaren and less than a year before he again pressed style way beyond substance with the calamitously imported debut (and simultaneous demise) of the Sex Pistols. If there is a Harold Hecuba in the story of Rock and Roll (see; "Here On Gilligans Island" by Russell Johnson with Steve Cox, pp220), it is he. After the Dolls, it was the Ramones who snatched new music from the jaws of mediocrity (witness- the meteoric rise of Peter Frampton) and focused it into deeply satisfying bursts of noise and frantic motion lasting barely over two minutes at a pop. History dutifully records the New York bands like Television and Blondie, and they were the catalyst for every bored scene-ster in the country to climb into an ugly car and drive to New York City to see what it was all about, but exciting music was coming from all over. A typical weekend at CB..'s would almost certainly feature the Ramones- notorious for stopping in the middle of a song to argue with each other; probably The Cramps, with an original line-up featuring Brian Gregory who cleverly butched-up his on-stage persona by spitting in several directions at once (dryer seating toward house right) and an absolute lunatic drummer named Muriel; and the Talking Heads, irreconcilable to the backdrop, with their Hush-Puppies, expensive band gear, and methodically organized set-list. I usually traveled in the company of girls with enough make-up in their purses for me to forge the hand-stamp of that evening, which enabled us free entrance. Girls like Nancy Spungen were there to bag a musician boyfriend, most of them hanging outside to maximize the likelihood of meeting guys like David Johansen and Johnny Thunders (too famous to endure the press of another band's fans inside), to avoid being tipped off their stilettos, and presumably to keep their outfits dry. And if the band was any good, you could hear them just as well from out front. Concepts of personal space dramatically disentegrated upon entrance. (My own tactic for managing the humidity was just to stay wet, periodically baptizing myself from the sink). Though the Sex Pistols tour of the southern U.S. was tracked like a storm on the nightly news, it fizzled out before they ever made it intact to N.Y.C. A couple of their singles which trumpeted the release of 'Never Mind The Bullocks' were on the jukebox and the photo spreads of mohawked English fans were enough to usher the look and the attitude from across the Atlantic. Television co-founder Richard Hell was the American arch-type for the original look which owed more to a lack of laundry skills than it did to anarchist leanings. A week of Voidiods' gigs saw the same striped shirt on the cover of 'Blank Generation' pass from one to the other of them. And I can state with no fear of exaggerating that the Voidiods smelled as loudly as they played. My own look was marginally Hellish with one foot in David Bowie's 'Thin White Duke', though the combined effect was neither, but instead something we callously referred to as 'bag-man chic'. My roommate at the time, Chuck, leaned more heavily toward the safety pinned, dog-collared aesthetic. He mixed it up a bit with fish nets and stilettos which proved a remarkable advance for him in the sport of boy-baiting. Acts like Elvis Costello (whose ass received the tip of my army boot the night he pushed me out of his way to get to the bar), The Damned, Magazine, and Ultravox were among the first Brits to actually play here. Though punk in America has come to be most strongly brand-identified with it's angrier British step-child, musically they barely caused a ripple. It actually wasn't until some time later when the Psychedelic Furs had pared away all the socio-political posturing and delivered some honest tunes that the UK became relevant to the American club scene. But I digress into the subjective. To list a few of the bands who lacked the mass-appeal of the Ramones and Blondie yet have managed to pierce through the fog of beer and quaaludes which has compromised my memory of so many others; Lance Loud of PBS's "An American Family" fame toured with an adorable band called The Mumps; Paul Zone's The Fast, a show that was perhaps too New Jersey for my taste yet preceded a memorable evening backstage hanging out with the Cramps; The Marbles; (Jim) Skafish who wowed us all with "Disgracing The Family Name" (which he demonstrated in a silk babushka with red lipstick smeared into his cheeks); and The Dead Boys, who, along with most of their fans, were almost too idiotic to suffer, though I did- (and was that Chuck I saw gnawing on the other end of a piece of raw liver with Stiv Bator?). Two albums with Bowie had sort of homogenized Iggy Pop into something finally marketable. With seemingly no evidence that the clock had ever stopped on his path of notoriety, he took back to the stage in small clubs to rightly displace Lou Reed as the true Godfather of Punk. In 1980, I think, Michael and I went to see him at the Hot Club in Philadelphia, causing a stir of our own- we wore leather jackets and jockstraps, checking our pants at the door. We both might have predicted that Iggy would wear just that outfit to perform the following night in N.Y.C. We spent the next four years taking our first stab at being grown-ups with a real job- an ironic twist landing us in the unlikely role of housekeepers for Deborah Spungen, mother of freshly-murdered Nancy. Soon enough Michael began singing for a band which ushered in the next chapter of punk-inspired mystagoguery for us. I don't recall that the mid-eighties ever found a snappy designation like 'punk'. Too many artists where on their way up, out, or back again to be assigned a cohesive motive- though ours was just to postpone for as long as possible assimilation into Ronald Reagan's strange new world. Michael earned his mark on now worthless slabs of vinyl as yet another 'Also Rocked', though the mere fact that he out-lived three of his band's managers is success enough. (I'll save musings on that sometimes remarkable post-punk era for later). I have to say that it worries me a bit listening to our son pound away on his drum kit, and at the same moment wondering what gutter Muriel is likely to have ended up in. I met the Cramps again backstage at a theater where I used to work, at over a decade later- I forgot to ask them.

cover letter

Dear [undecipherable from your e-mail address],
I am an energetic and highly-motivated individual [with all the time in the world to sift through blind leads] for challenging work [with the next company who will suck that last bit of energy from me]. From my start in this business [when you were busy pooping in diapers] I have been able to distinguish myself [hand-holding for a bunch of nervous nellies] and have proven my ability to deliver an un-compromised product [despite tragically misguided budget cuts]. My vast experience with [hopelessly misinformed] clients and [their delusional time-lines] uniquely qualifies me to [point out what you should have told them to begin with]. I have a wide range of [obsolete] skills and a great desire to mentor [my eventual replacement]. My particular strength for [being one of the few people on your staff to give a damn] and for [routinely saving all your asses] has never failed to [pit your immediate subordinate against me]. I am confident that I can provide your company with [credit to steal] and [a scape-goat for your worst blunders]. If you are looking for a [magic pixie] who will [work for less than what you pay your dry cleaner] then please consider me for this [wildly over-reaching job description]. I look forward to an opportunity to demonstrate [how far I will ingratiate myself for the vaguest job offering] and sincerely hope that you [have the slightest understanding of the position you seek to fill]. Please do not hesitate to [treat this inquiry as if it were wholly unsolicited] or to [provide a clue that you have even read my resume].
Yours [with ever-lowering expectations], [You, one day]