Head Cold A Go Go

I got home from work yesterday shivering. My head was feeling congested and I was feverish. I stayed around the house today trying to read a little 'Old Man's War' and catching up on DVDs, Generation Kill series end, Jules Dassins 'Brute Force ', Charlie Bronson in 'The Mechanic', and 'They Lived by Night' (sorry if I got any of those wrong chalk it up to fever fingers and hot tears). 

Any way, tonight is the Oscars (Sigh!). I have kinda a love hate thing with them. Last year was so strong, No Country and Juno being at opposite sides of the spectrum, but both being flicks that I really liked. This year... aside from Wall-E and The Wrestler (liked them both) I haven't seen many of the big flicks... oh, I saw The Dark Nut and thought that Ledger was great, just for  the line "I am an Agent of Chaos" (I try to be as well... thank you Norman Spinrad)... any whooo, I just couldn't get the energy up to watch, so I watched the previously mentioned Brute Force, while my siblings took in a showing of Let the Right One In (DVD at the start of March!)..... the one thing that the morbid noir hound me really likes every year is the memorial montage. I just wish the Academy would post it on their sight after the show....

I think my fever dream story telling is running out, to bad last night I dreamed of Donald Westlake after watching The Hot Rock (So So flick from '72) which was memorable enough that I failed to note it above. After Brute Force it was a paralyzed half away half hour of Hard Case Crime type set up for a Roller Derby noir..... part of which I did get down, and which might see the light of day sometime.

Stray thought: Has anyone seen DVDs packaged with the book they are based on? Westlakes Hot Rock, Thieves Market and the Film Thieves Highway by A. I. Bezzerides are both films that I have seen recently and read the books they are based on as well (and there is the fever confusion seeping to it's fullest) 

Oscars? Ann Savage? Richard Widmark? Ron Asheton (not likely, ditto Lux)?, Betty Page? Bo Diddly? anyone, anyone, Buller?

Update: I am feeling better, and I did get to see the In Memoriam video via youtube

Now I could have done with out the song, it's a nice thought, but really let's give these people who have us so much joy a couple of moments of attention with out the big distraction. I also, like a lot of others will note those missing from this list..... Patrick McGoohan (how cool would it have been if it had started off with that closing image from the Prisoner and the sound clip, 'I'm not a number I am a free man' and then went into clips of his film work. I am glad to see that the video it's self was posted, and want to challenge the powers to be to post a longer more full one next year.

I was glad to see a lot of behind the scenes people remembered

More on Ron Asheton

I think I met Ron Asheton once, in passing really, I think it was at the old performance network, he was practicing with Powertraine, Denis Tek of Radio Birdman was there, along with Scott Morgan of course, and as I recall Ron was leaving as I was coming in with my brother. I do remember the first time I saw Ron and knew who he was, it was in 1997 or so when his band Dark Carnival was playing the State theater in Detroit (I refuse to call it by that SF club name) and recall clearly Chris “Box” from Mazinga giving Ron a copy of the first Mazinga single we'd put out on Reanimator. I don't know that Chris would ever have thought that he was going to get to play with Ron someday, not to mention live around the corner from him.

Around the corner, that's maybe why his passing sent a chill though my body, because he was a local guy. The last time I saw him, was when my brother and I were coming home from the local grocery story a couple of months back, and Ron was driving in the lane next to us. It really wasn't a shock, because our local grocery store was his local grocery store. He lived, at least a chunk of his life, about three city blocks from us, interrupted only by a swath of I-94, a swath that I could hear from my bedroom window when I was a teen and a young adult, and that I assume he should have been able to hear as well..... of course I didn't know who he was when I was a teen or when I was in my early 20s. It was only when I was in my mid to late 20 that I discovered The Stooges and the fact that they were local boys, a pair of brothers and their buddies from school. A couple of kids that had started something and when they were young and wild not had much commercial success... just like us.... and lived (well most of them) to see their legacy (that's a shout out for the Mazinga guys for those not in the know) legitimized.

Ron lived to see his art heralded, lived to see it spawn, well punk rock and much of what has flowed from it since. I am sure in the next couple of days we are going to see tributes and comments and biographies of Ron Asheton, but I just want to say, thanks for all you helped to build, and prove about how a couple of kids from Ann Arbor Michigan could over come their second class citizen status as Townies and set the world on fire...

RIP Ron Asheton,

RIP Ron Asheton,
By Jim DeRogatison January 6, 2009 4from http://blogs.suntimes.com/derogatis/2009/01/ron_asheton_rip.html
The term "godfather of punk" is one that's too often abused: The genre can't possibly have had 189,958 progenitors, could it? And bandying it about too lightly only cheapens it when referring to a musician for whom that really was the case.
As reported by the Detroit Free Press, Ron Asheton, who founded the Stooges with singer Iggy Pop and was one of a half-dozen players who defined what punk-rock guitar could and should be, was found dead in his home in Ann Arbor, MI, Tuesday morning. He was 60 years old.
I last spoke to Asheton circa the Stooges reunion in 2007, but we first connected in the late '90s when I was researching the roots of punk in Detroit for Let It Blurt, my biography of rock critic Lester Bangs. The two were friends and mutual admirers, and it seems fitting to give Lester the last word on Asheton's enduring contribution to music, to culture and most of all to punk. From "Roots of Punk (Part One)" in New Wave magazine, 1978:
"'1969'" featured the only use of wah-wah that I had ever liked on any record (mainly because Ron Asheton didn't do anything with it, no flash bulls---, he just blanged out a chord and let the technology play its own self), and most importantly of all, THAT HE AND IGGY DIDN'T GIVE A S--- ABOUT ANYTHING AND NEITHER DID WE. We knew that over in Michigan his lifestyle was identical to ours, just getting f---ed up all the time and trying to find the girls who'd f--- us and usually failing. F--- the establishment, f--- the counterculture, f--- the Beatles after that white atrocity, f--- rock 'n' roll for that matter, everybody being so goddam protective about it like it was some sickly child or something, f--- the government and f--- the war and f--- the college and f--- the hippies and f--- everything. F--- you. I'm f---ed up already. Listen, when one of your best friends is slumped in your room stoned just this side of death on Seconals, drooling on himself and mumbling "I dunno, man, lately I think I been turnin' into a vegetable..." you really don't want to listen to Abbey Road, much less "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," a title I can't even type without sneering.Thanks, Ron, for giving us an alternative.