LATEST FAVORITE INTERNET MEME

 

ME AND MY KIDS WHEN THEY WERE LITTTLE

Caitlin and me in the DC communal house we lived in with her mother and brother and others until I left after it became a lesbian feminist commune for several years (c. 1974).

Me and Miles somewhere I don't recognize we must have been visiting. as we lived in Manhattan at the time where his sister would join us in a few years (c. 1977)

Me and Flynn in the new townhouse we rented in Jersey for a few years (c.2003)

CHUCK CLOSE and JACK HIRSHMAN R.I.P.

 

When I lived in lower Manhattan with my little boy, Miles, in the 1970s, I would pick him up after work from his after school program and we'd tour the downtown galleries before eating somewhere that had hamburgers, his favorite dinner. I remember seeing a show of Chuck Close's giant photo-realist portraits and both Miles and I digging it.

Early in this century I took part in a Hollywood themed benefit poetry reading at the Bowery Poetry Club that included a few movie and TV stars and after it an assistant to Chuck Close came to say the artist wanted to meet me. Close was in his customized wheel chair and very gracious in his praise of my work and I had the feeling was studying my face, I  hoped for a portrait.

The assistant got my number and said I'd be called, but never was. I figured that Close had more important things on his schedule. Condolences to his family, friends, and fans.

I ran into poet Jack Hirshman in the 1960s, but didn't get to know him until the 1980s when he sent me a letter out of the blue and we had a brief correspondence that included him sending piles of handwritten poems, which I later learned he was prone to do. Then, as abruptly as it began, he stopped sending me poems.

Though we didn't agree on everything, we were poets who shared a deep need (some would say compulsion) to write, no matter what, and did it our way, no matter what. Jack was an original in more than just his poetry, and though he had a long life, longer than many expected, he will still be missed by many, including me. Rest In Poetry, Jack.

JOHNNY

Woke up this morning with another list in my head inspired probably by catching the last few scenes on TCM of the film noir JOHNNY EAGER yesterday. There were a lot of Jimmys in my clan (my father and one of my brothers e.g.) but no Johnnys (just Johns). So here's the Johnnies, real and fictional, that came to my mind:

Johnny Eager

Johnny Dollar

Johnny Weissmuller

Johnny Appleseed

Johnny Belinda

Johnny Angel

Johnny Guitar

Johnny One-Note

Johnny Ray

Johnny Ace

Johnny B. Goode

Johnny Mathis

Johnny Crawford

Johnny Cash

Johnny Griffen

Johnny Rivers

Johnny Nash

Johnny Carson

Johnny Unitas

Johnny Winters

Johnny Thunders

Johnny Ramone

Johnny Depp

TBT

My sister Irene and me in front of our father's home repair shop c. 1952 when I was 10 and she was 15, the only two of seven kids now still alive. John, the brother between her and me died as an infant. I was always playing catch up. In this photo she's just visiting, I was working, which meant answering the phone and fixing small appliances like irons and toasters and lamps et al. This was just a couple of years before corporations started sealing the innards of these things and more so we couldn't repair them for a couple of bucks so folks just had to buy news ones. Built-in obsolescence. 

I worked every day after school and Saturdays either in the shop (a space no bigger then a walk-in closet) or on people's homes, for "room and board" (which means no pay) so eventually picked up other jobs on weeknights and Sundays. Had a resentment about that up until my 60s. But in this past decade that's faded away, among many others, thankfully.

GLORIA GRAHAME

 
Today was (still is) Gloria Grahame day on TCM, which makes me very happy. I fell in love with her as a boy in the 1940s as Vi in IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and every movie I saw her in that followed, in which her unique screen presence and energy made those movies better. And then was lucky enough to meet her and work with her (held her hand in the scene) in her last movie (THE NESTING) (aka MASSACRE MANSION) in which neither of us was at our best. But I can watch her in anything, especially from the '40s and '50s, anytime and be swept away by her performance.

AN OLDIE BUT GOODIE

 

JOAN

 
Joan, another of the loves of my life, and me, in someone else's home. We lived together in Santa Monica for several years in the 1980s. I was a regular on the TV show "Berrenger's" when we met and she worked for a small film studio. Her mother was Brazilian, a poor teenager when she met Joan's father, a French Canadian seaman, who brought her to the USA and was mostly gone. Joan had a tough childhood and adolescence unlike anyone I ever knew, but she transcended the tragic through her own unique magic and was so easy to live with (which I think this photo inadvertently reveals in the casual ways her left hand rests on my shoulder and my right around her waist).

I had been raising my children mostly as a single parent for most of my adult life and they were teens when Joan and I got together. Joan never tried to be a stepmother but instead just a friend to them and declared she never wanted children of her own. But after a few years changed her mind. I resisted that idea and we eventually separated and she met and married a really decent kind guy and immediately got pregnant. Then found out she had an incurable cancer.

She passed when her child was still an infant, her life ending tragically, as it had started. But in between, she lived life on her terms and achieved almost all she had set out to, a happy warrior for love's transcendent power.

(C) 2021 Michael Lally

WHITE LOTUS

 
From the first episode of this limited HBO series about mostly rich white characters, I thought they were already "jumping the shark"—but—I loved the cast full of some of my favorite actors so I decided to stick with it and then my old LA friend the always extraordinary John Gries showed up full of surprises and I was hooked and now can't wait for next week's finale. 

ALWAYS QUOTABLE

 

KIM

 
Another one of the loves of my life, Kim, and me in "my" booth at Cafe Largo, "the hippest club in LA" after mine and Eve Brandstein's Poetry In Motion weekly poetry gathering was asked to relocate there when it opened to help draw the crowds, and it did.

I'm around fifty in this shot (c. 1992) where Kim is helping me select some of my poems to read (I always brought piles of poems so I could make last minute choices and changes), some written to her. We were living together at the time and I referred to her after we met as "my last wife" which I believed she would be. But life happens and it didn't work out the way I thought it would. Which life (at least my life) had and still has a way of doing. 

MY FRIEND THE GENIUS MINDY SEEGER (AND BOB THEILE)

 Here.

THE BIRD! (GOTTA STICK AROUND FOR THE SLIDE)

 Click here.