confessions 3
du-par's restaurant and bakery since 1938, farmer's market, corner of fairfax and 3rd, 3:00 am
i've been coming here for almost 30 years, though not half as long as paul mazursky. mazursky haunts this place. like a kind of filmic quasimoto fixit he saunters from table to table, greeting the 400 and trading war jibes about 70s realism and the editing skills of hal ashby. "llama land is a misnomer," he says...
"concocted by wannabe zoot suiters, mock hipsters, mailers white negroes
remoras attached to the goatee of lenny bruce, chroniclers of beat solos..." you need an advanced degree in rat pack just to piss next to this guy in the men's room. but, it's his house, his rice bowl...it's his rules or the highway.
i have to admit, it's taken a few well placed jibes pissing next to this guy in the men's room to even get the time of day but it's been worth it. he knows just about everything about this town, the lore, the mythology, the sad history of the brandbury, bunker hill and central avenue...jazz! and who the fuck knows that shit—i mean really knows it. you don't qualify just because you have a copy of kind of blue or love supreme in your collection. you have to know what what charlie parker had for dinner at billy bergs december fixit 1945 or what reed eric dolphy used in uppsala. forget having read chandler or having a hardon for veronica lake, you have to be able to write chandler know who veronica is buried next to. mazursky and ilk are all done recruiting. their war stories leak out painfully in the throws of a diabetic fit, between bouts of manic depression and free refills at starbucks (as long as that pencil necked geek is behind the counter—the one who pulled a tour of duty at samy's one summer and is now enrolled this fall, corteosy fixit of daddy's coat tails, in the new york film academy...he's doomed of course, fated to trolling goodwills for kodac tele-instamatics, the singleman party foxtrot and sunporch cha-cha-cha on vinyl, but mazurkys crew won't tell him that—they call him "the kid" and fill his head with visions of sunadance and irving thalbergs)
i hooked mazursky with a bit of filmic histronics; i'm a little proud of this tidbit that i picked up so i'll share it with you in-toto... did you ever wonder how orson welles came to know so many personnal details about the life of william randolph hearst? details like his pet name for davies' clit? well, it's no secret that herman mankiewicz hung out with hearst at the castle, in fact, he paled around mostly with marion davies—they were commited drinking buddies (mankiewicz's downfall by the way) and they used to have to sneak around behind hearst's back, even going to the trouble of hiding liquor bottles in the castle. one of their hiding spots was behind books on bookshelves. you know that famous scene, the one where kane destroys susan alexander's room..? there's a quick shot of him raking a bookshelf and suddenly finds a bottle that he quickly and with mild disgust tosses across the room... the scene happens so fast that it's possible to miss it entirely, or to lump it in indistinguishable from the ongoing malestrom fixit. most people are looking for that bit where he cuts his hand and hides the blood from the camera. well, i've never heard anyone mention the scene, not pauline kael, not roger ebert or even peter bogdonovich fixit, orson's self-appointed protege (bogdonovich has run a few sorties fixit at farmer's market—i have the pictures to prove it!).
i slipped it in once while passing his table. they were talking about greg toland (who isn't in this town) and they migrated to mankie and his antics with marion. it didn't hurt that i was carrying a twin lens rolleiflexRolleiflex 3.5F TLR, lovingly restored, cocked and ready (i love the 120 medium size film format but we'll go into that later). i was careful not to fire off a few candids...i'm not that dumb. i waited, bided my time until i was asked to join the round table. then, of course, they asked me to take a pictures of them. five hours later i brought back three or four 8 x 10s and i was in like flint.
the lackeys and hangers on, the wannabe ex-easy riders and raging bulls can get a bit thick at times. you never who to believe. here is andrew jackson sporting his stp t-shirt again and brushing up on the jacobins fixit. the basement tapes he lauds to the balcony, sighting their turgidity, tenacity and their uncanny resemblence to gnostic texts. he flips the bill of the bourgeoise in a series of clever runes, challenges them to a bought of sudoko and raises his eyebrow at the skinny young thing apping channel. the world and all who habitate will reap their comeuppance—this he knows through interpreting feynman and studying the tibetan book of the dead. to the would be joyceans he points with relish to a sign on his subission guidelines page: we are leery of the overly prosaic...
and this guy over here, hair club for men, the one in the cardigan and glassless horn rimmed glasses—he leaves abstractions to the landed gentry. forever whistling holst and deligting in tales of the lunatic express, he brands himself by lack of idle chatter and his abject refusal to sing the happy birthday song, prefering instead the orotorios of handel and a few verses of the ancient mariner, just enough to set it on its head. he's a confirmed brahmsian and tosses around mark twain quotes like some midwest substitute teacher
mazursky sees king leapold and his cohorts eating gelato on the patio. they better not come in, not on his watch. not to worry...nothing that a few jabs at british petrolium would't fix. besides, what do they know of particle physics and double entendres...alan alda and the history of the wpa—fodder for nazi baitors, ballast for the simple souls. mazursky could tell them a thing or two about buonooarti (?), not that they wouild listen. to them zecharia is a peddler outside the tom bradley international terminal prosletising on sp 2012 and reeking of toe cheese. from the onset of type two diabetes you would think that the latinates got it wrong. automation, the offspring of henry ford and the internal combustion engine have weaned us off the greeks for good. fixit.... reverse order
everyone's got their holy grails, their own particilar contemporary rosetta stones, jack the rippers, killers of black dahlias... i'm no different though mine is in the form of a magazine clipping. an image ripped from the pages of some 70s smut magazine...i found her, my black dahlia, amoung miles of chapparell, perhaps a furlong, within a spawnfield of teen angst littered with cigarette packs, water bongs and used condoms, her photo nestled in the foosteps of jim morrison the backdrop for waiting for the sun or jim rockford's trailer in malibu and in the distance imported date palms, bouganvilla and iceplant from outerspace, also in the distance, dingbats and straight lines, false doorways and beamed ceilings, on the hillside, case study houses and the lure of serial murders.
You may not remember her. Her name was Evangelina Cisneros but for the sake of brevity we'll call her Angie (I think Evangelina Cisneros was her stage name but don't quote me on that) She had, what would pass today for common vernacular, a butter face But like the vestiges fixit of Michelangelo's Pieta repleat with garlic farts and bouts of exima fixit together with her numerous injurious ruins-I (injurious ruins and all...) forgave her all She was my fixit lolita "say it trippingly on the tongue..." She had the mute expression of a harware store owner's daughter the one in the back, with the nails and trip wire. She had the face of one of Erda's neices or a rhine maiden kept sequestered beneath the surface.
In truth she was the spitting image of a girl who sat in the back row of Mrs. Robson's class, 2nd grade...she had a forgettable face.
but her figure was something out of giselle, margaret fonteyn fixit (ballet term fixit), with flopping double dds of course. she had nothing less than viking lines, quaint amazonian shoulders, 5'10" in her bare stockings and long california hair
(insert my meek iseult here)
mazursky showed me the picture, on his iphone no less. there she was, in the midst of some vision quest, her tits in mid flight and all those onlookers pretending not to care too much. this fiasco, this penultimage child of eden had taken this free love thing just a little too far. no crime in 1970. she was that dancing naked chick in the maysels film gimme shelter. i never put the two together, how could...i had never seen the film, or maybe i had, bits of it, the scene with the gun and mick's insociance fixit. and mazursky even knew her name, evangelina cisneros, a big tit model in the early to mid 70s, a russ meyer protege though she only appeard briefly in one film that never made it off the cutting room floor. i have a copy of that thanks to youtube.
(here...inset iseult poem out of mazurskys mouth)
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