Different Slants

First, Happy Birthday to my partner in this blog and friend for 47 years (although at 58,  he still remains older than I am) Rick Munden!!

Back to fantasy…

Let’s say you want to dream up a movie that features, say…. the Amish; Wild Indians led by an Italian chief; a sexy postcard depicting a photograph of a less than virginal-appearing Jewish girl; robbing, thieving, drunken, murderous Anglo-Saxons (yes, difficult though it may be to believe, but the movie’s actually fiction!); a cuddling, affectionate cowboy in a bone-chilling and deadly Western blizzard and a remorseful bank robber attempting to learn Yiddish from a previously seen ice-skating Polish Rabbi.  

Then, add scenes featuring a wise-cracking chief Rabbi in an Eastern European Yeshiva with a shaky view of democracy or perhaps just Chicago-type voting mathematics and brutal bar fight in a whorehouse between the earlier imagined (and depicted) nebbishy Rabbi and a beer-barrel threatening assassin.  

Throw in a rough-hewn guardian angel-type Western figure who is determined, come-hell-or-high-water determined, to find himself a whore with “really big tits” (that’s an actual quote and not wishful thinking from this saintly reviewer) who repeatedly saves the trouble-prone young Rabbi’s life while escorting him from the Midwest to a newly built San Francisco synagogue by any means possible; a Rabbi, post-nebbishness, who deftly and courageously steps into the middle of a high noon Western style showdown in the middle of the street between two deadly gunman that hate each other in order to prove that:

        “I’m not a Rabbi for nothing, you know…”

My only question would be:

        Who the hell would you market it to?  The Amish?  Italian Indians?  Bars with brothels?

Well, whoever thought up this lovingly cliche-ridden, culture clashing movie that displays every emotion from two points of view, impressive cleavage (no pun there) and friendship so real it spills off the screen?  

Who decided people wanted to see serious religious devotion, even unto death to save a sacred, flameable, irreplaceable Torah; skilled peyote-using Native Americans who decide getting a true-believing Rabbi high is hysterical; and slyly trying to pass off the world famous actor from Star Wars and Indiana Jones as a sure-enough cowboy Goy when in reality, Harrison Ford has a whole lot more in common with the superb Gene Wilder (on or off the screen) than any average movie-loving person would believe…is such a genius!

           Oy Veyismere!! Such a Genius!! Gott im Himmel!!! 

I highly recommend that anyone: cowboy, Amish or Star Wars addict rent this wonderfully written, charmingly depicted and most likely forgotten movie of many admirable qualities.

Oh, yes!  The name of the movie is: The Frisco Kid (1979)

By the way, if you should know a nice, single, Jewish boy, that actress Penny Peyser is one hot catch!  Just a thought………….

See you, under the Sabbath Lights…

Robert M. Katzman 

This brief moment in my life lingers on in my memory, because it reminds me that a little compassion can make all the difference–when the world is crashing down on a guy.

I know that is so, because at different times in my life, I was that guy.   Because when your luck turns, or everything you’ve tried to do goes south, suddenly, no one has any time to bother with you, as if bad luck rubs off, or something like that.

What follows is true, and this is exactly how it happened:

On a merciless July scorcher of a day, in 1969, so hot that the very air shimmered, I was working the lunch shift in my kosher delicatessen in Hyde Park, which is part of Chicago, on the South Side of the city.

I was looking out of my big glass windows, over the round pale green paper sign that advertised:

                                 Lunch Special!!  

          Hot Dog–Chips–And a Cold Coke!!

                             $2.50!!!

when I saw this young black kid get forcefully tossed out of the drugstore next to me, where he lost his balance and fell to the ground, scraping both hands on the hot concrete walkway.  And there he sat, looking morose, rubbing his sore hands together, and occasionally, wiping tears off his face.  People walked around him.  No one stopped.   

He was this neighborhood punk, then about sixteen, whom I’d known about for years.  When I was running my corner newsstand, he’d run up and try to swipe a comic book off the display rack and then run away.  Sometimes I would catch him, and sometimes he was too fast for me, and then he’d run off laughing.

I was only a few years older than he was, still a teenager, and pretty fast myself, except he knew I couldn’t leave my newsstand so, that gave him an advantage to exploit, which…he did.  He was a little, local, pain in the ass, and not just to me.

                                                                                                                                                  (Read on …)

Warning: The following post meets the definition of infomercial.

For many of us, email has become part of our daily lives. It has become an essential tool for communications with others around the world. The things we discuss through email are often the same things we might otherwise discuss through postal mail or on the telephone. Email has also become a source of irritation because some people has chosen to abuse it by sending mountains of spam. (Many more people are unwitting accomplices and don’t even know it.)

What most people do not realize is that sending an email message is like sending a postcard. It can be easily read by any number of people who can access it by way of it passing through their equipment or, who just happen to be connected to the same “wires” it travels along on its path from sender to recipient. Most people who could read others’ emails don’t but the few who do, are likely to do so for the worst reasons.

You are probably saying to yourself, “I don’t care if somebody reads my email. I have nothing to hide.” But just because you are not doing anything illegal, immoral, or shameful, does not mean you would be comfortable if you found your messages copied on the walls of a public restroom. (Read on …)

Now, here’s a perfect reason for me to wish I had a world-wide readership of hundreds of millions of movie lovers who shared my taste in great films:

Along comes a truly superb new movie, “Honeydrippers”, a new John Sayles film that is playing in probably twelve art theaters, total, across America and it’ll probably disappear beneath the radar without making barely a ripple.  What a travesty!!

To me, power is the ability to do good on a large scale, not just to savor one’s invincibility.

If I had power like that, I’d compel writers all across America to command movie theater-goers to rush down to their local movie houses, buy lots of tickets and to support Sayles’ wonderful new movie.  Or maybe people would go just because I told them to, because they trusted my taste and judgment.  I’m pretty sure I’m not there yet, in terms of my powers of persuasion.  But…that could change.  Persistence helps, and this is my column # 5.

I met Sayles once, years ago, at the Javits Center in New York City where they held the National Stationary Show every May.  I had a bookstore at the time and we sold tons of postcards and movie posters and other items you could only find at a giant showplace like the Javits Center.  I was addicted to independent cinema since I was a teen, so even though indie movie director/writer/producer John Sayles was not a face you’d ever see on the cover of any magazine, like say, Alfred Hitchcock was, years ago, or Martin Scorsese might be today,  I knew immediately who he was. 

(Read on …)

   So, I was thinking about America’s nineteen century two-term President Andrew Jackson—whom I sure wish was president of the USA right now, because even dead, he’d be far better than our current disaster—and that led me to thinking about the actor Yul Brynner.  Brynner’s greatest fame came from playing The King and I (1956) and as Chris, in The Magnificent Seven (1960) one of the most revered Westerns of all time, even though based on the earlier Japanese Seven Samurai (1954)  

People who know me won’t be very surprised at this arc of connection, because I find that thinking about time is very fluid and a person’s conscious memories and subconscious memories can make lightening fast connections on the slightest thread-like basis. 

That must be the case in this instance, because the distance between Andrew Jackson (died 1862) and Yul Brynner (died 1985) is a lot more than six degrees of separation, because Jackson, the 8th U.S. President, was born in South Carolina 148 years before Brynner, born (some people speculate) on Sakhalin Island (east of Siberia and north of Japan)  in 1915.

So, here’s the thought process that connects those historic people to this movie, The Buccaneer (1958) I saw as a child, and really liked: 

Many years ago, I read this story about Andrew Jackson, born in March, 1767.  He was the son of Irish immigrants and orphaned at the age of fourteen.  At thirteen, he enlisted in the Revolutionary War as a mounted orderly, at a time in 1780 when the rebelling American Colonial forces under General George Washington were experiencing heavy losses against the British General Sir William Cornwallis.

(Read on …)

On Christmas Day, I always close my back-issue magazine store, Magazine Memories, just north of Chicago, and I try do something else more spiritually stimulating.

This year, my son David, then 29, and I decided to spend the day together, going to movies and also have dinner. He is a filmmaker and had just returned from eighteen days in Asia after being hired to record the daily activities and performances of a DJ called Jazzy Jeff.  He went all over, including Hong Kong; Jakarta, Indonesia;  Taipei, Dubai; and Bangkok. He especially liked Bangkok.

So, after hearing that, I suggested we go to an intimate Thai restaurant I knew about for dinner, because that’s one of my favorite Asian cuisines, as well.  We had green tea, mild tom-yum soup with shrimp, bamboo and lemon-grass, mini toasted egg rolls, spicy crispy chicken wings with sweet and sour sauce, and then roasted duck. Great food and great conversation, too.

For Dave’s 12th birthday in 1990, my wife Joy and I gave him a video camera, and it must have been the right thing to do, because now he’s traveling the world, filming it.

After dinner, I went to pay our very cute and slender Thai waitress, who was also the cashier. After handing me my change, she wished me a “Merry Christmas” as people had endlessly said to me that day and other recent days. Then she looked uncertain, her lovely black eyes looking into my dark brown ones and she said, quietly: (Read on …)