TWENTY-11 CHOICE CUTS: The Year Collected @ hnywork

* True love is a myth. I am prepared to offer you semi- indifferent like.                                           -- CHAZZ



* -- Blacky knew someone had come looking for him before he ever got to his place; he followed tire-tracks past the junkyard, past Willie's, past the Finch place; that left only his trailer another mile down, and these new tracks went on that way carving up the mud.  When he came to the turn-in to his trailer, the tracks went beyond to the house-high loam piles that signaled the end of the road: kids parked at the loam all the time, (beers, doobies, trying to get past third base - and not just on weekends!), but these tracks had come and gone at least four times since Dooley Black, (Blacky to his friends), had left at sunset for the bowling alley, and his weekly cribbage tournament.
-- As Blacky pulled the GMC into the yard he thought: Someone is looking for me.
-- As he staggered from the truck to the front stoop he thought: It's the kid.
-- As he reached his key to the Schlage deadbolt he installed three years ago when he moved down here from up Aroostook way his flaky pompadour took a whack from the ass-end of a pistol.

                                          (HACKWORK: Blacky On The Mountain)

*  Greetings fat ones.  Enjoy your snack cakes while the infancy of your empire ages like an Indiana Jones villian who hath chosen the wrong cup!                -- Alexei Vladimirovich

*The black car is Lee Hunnewell who once had such a girl that the burned CD he found between the seats has him hunting the wharf for drugs.  The songs are about her, to him; to us, without some translation, they have no more meaning than corn flakes, or the planet Neptune.  In this a foolish song holds secret depth: if the music playing on the inside of the car could play outside it, over God's speakers as it would were this the introduction of a movie's hero, you'd hear happy songs pumped dry of meaning; with Treat Me Nice, or Satisfaction, you don't register a man not smoking the same cigarettes as you, nor how Elvis wants not soft, not loving, but pretty fingers run through his hair as if he's watching in a mirror the performance; but in these songs, so emptied out, is great space for little science fictions; cauldrons of secret depth, as when corn flakes equal the kitchen of the home you lived in when your parents were married; as when the planet Neptune is the cluster of baby desks you sat at in third grade when your imagination with all the new facts given it, fluttered and stayed aloft, or shut itself away from the vastness of life for awhile or forever.(Its All True)

Shakey's Daddy was a glover,
He'd hump all day tanning hide.
He'd say: ein Viertel Unze will make you hover!;
Regale goons  with tales of infanticide
He'd chant a sing-song dirge of violet rain
While squaring cow-gut skin to wrist
And talk bad old days of powder cane
And note us of his naming lists:
Of sexy ladies mulberry praying
To teach us, recusants in town,
While up close his hanged gloves fraying,
He had touched their nightinggowns
Center town, remember, they dragged him sweating
He swore these were these what done as him,
Yet they kenneled him for betting
The crows pecked his limbs

I lost out on the Chaucer role in a Knight's Tale because I asked Heath Ledger why all Australians look like rats.                                            -- Ace Milton

*I told the young barber I wanted a fade, but not some metro slick fade that includes a free eyebrow wax; no, I told him, "Give me  a fade that looks like they just plucked me out of Kansas to go kill Krauts; I want a fade that looks good with a forty-five not a glock.  I want the kind of fade that orders t-bone not tuna; the kind of hard luck fade that could be seen in a Dodge on a back road on a summer night in 1965 while Eve of Destruction plays on the radio.  The kind of fade they gave Elvis before shipping him to Germany.  The kind of fade that drinks bottles of Pepsi while polishing a shotgun.                                   (THE ROAD: How To Order A Haircut)


"Butter.  Buttered bread.  Dern it." says Hoff.
  "Butter.  God's Wounds -- to bring it up!" says Alec.
  Dead goat.  Dragging it for a day in the Outfit's tool harness.  Dead goats don't milk.   No milk, no butter.
  Down in the valley are leafless trees like leaf rakes stuck handle in the dirt.   Like scarecrows.  No crops.  No birds.  No butter.
  "No bread, Ass.  Your mouth is an ass.  That's what hole that one is." says Alec.
  Dawning over the valley, the boys get to changing out the batteries on their saws. 
  "We have to eat the goat." says Hoff. "Gone as bad as we can let him."
  "Rechain." says Alec.
  "How did I end up here?" says Hoff.
  Now Alec is on him, grabbing Hoff by the coat, and pulling him up, and steering him roughly, until they face the rising light of sun like a dollop of butter at the cleft of the two hills.
"Because of there.  Look there."
  As Alec growls it the tell-tale cube of Old Ragsnarolk, the fortress, burrows out some blackberry blackness under the ascent of the sun. 
  "There, there, and there.  The complex.  No one told you to come.  No one drafted you, butter-eater.  You've been subcontracted, and when they came to you, you licked your lips!  We promised them a safe road.  And they promised us a cut of the loot.  Now chain your saw.  We're cutting to there.  Soldiery to make such a place, think.."
  Alec rubs Hoff's neck.
  "Butter?" Hoff says, and he laughs.
  "Butter.  All this valley's butter, and up there is the pot!  Fort Rags." says Alec.  "A good week, and we'll be on the doorstep.  Re-chain.  The Outfit are days behind.  We can get inside, and have a good long look.  Get lean to get fat."
  "Get mean, get far." Hoff says. "But, Alec.."
  "What?"
  "I want to eat this goat."                    (FLASH: Old Ragsnarolk)

*One dog is a person.  You see him, and he sees you.  He cares for you as you would like.  Two dogs are dogs.  Don't expect two dogs together when they smell another dog peeing a mile away to care as little for it as a human would.  Now here is your lesson, girl: Three dogs are wolves.  Never forget it.  Three dogs together will never get the smell of meat out of their noses when you are around them.             (FLASH: Dog Math)

Yo Girl, my beer bottles are redemptive, but I'm not!    -- CHAZZ

-- And what he finds is strange.  A painting.  A tacky painting the kind poor folk who come into money might like; a religious painting: the scene of Christ's birth had it been done by the local amateur artist.. But there's something strange in this painting.. There seems to be twin Christ children at it's center..
-- Spooky.  The Star rouses his flunkies to find out where the hell this painting came from, and why he doesn't remember having seen it before.  It comes to this: it was his mother who brought the painting into the house.
-- It becomes now double painful, this painting in the house, as a reminder of his mother's recent death, and as some kind of sentry on the wall, recording all the activities hidden up here in the house -- it's as if her ghost is there, and what poor God-fearing country boy wants his Ma to see him like this.
-- He's resolved: they, all of them, must rid the house of this painting, and he means right now, middle of the night -- a quest to find the painting a new home, (after all, they can't rightly throw it away).
-- Here's the film's takeoff: into the night they go, the painting wrapped up in the car trunk like a corpse needing safe disposal.. 
-- Now ninety minutes of strange people, places, and moments.  A Mystery Train of new Cadillacs on old roads -- into the country, as you like it -- a two-day Tennessee black magic pastoral.                       (MOVIE PITCH: An Elvis Movie)

* A man made paper, lost heart

* SHE LIVED on West 38th, State Residence, well-protected by cops and military, GuvHaus, the helipad kids in her building called it, (as did Roger) -- these whiz kids, who worked the State landing site at the park, stopped inviting her to the roof to smoke hash after Roger came around; they'd wine and dope, and watch humvees, and put bets on how long the lights would stay on, and on the nights the neighborhood power went down, they would lay against the rough tar of the roof, and wait for the stars to color in as light realigned to old bearings, and they would chant as if they were Indians out of the island's biography corresponding to visible stars.                      (Bridge, Tunnel Chapter Two)

The Blue Moon of Limtucky is very romantic, except that half the town tries to shoot it with hunting rifles.
                                                                                  -- CHAZZ

*The story goes Tolkien read Macbeth as a boy, (as an English boy, at the turn of the century, they all did I would guess), and he was taken: his imagination sparked by the Weyard Sisters' prediction that until Birnam Wood comes up high Dunsinane Hill, Macbeth is safe.  Tolkien was sorely disappointed at it's fruition: ten thousand camouflaged men moving through the forest and up the hill to the castle, appeared to Macbeth's servants as a moving forest.  It's a killer visual, a real showman's move; I'm not sure Brian DePalma meant consciously to use it in Scarface, but there they are, on Tony Montana's security feeds, the boys come to finally do in a thug climbed too high; certainly Macbeth could have been subtitled, The World Is Yours.      ROAD JOURNAL: Something Wicked This Way Comers)

*I MET HENNY NEWTON the day he married my daughter.  It was on a beach in Boothbay.  It was the middle of January with all the hangers-on dressed like Eskimos.  He had invited me, Worcester too close to Maine I guess.  Therese was kind to me.  The old bullshit forgotten.  And Mr. Henny offered me a job with the circus.  Security detail.  In those days Henny Newton traveled with a lot of shitheads, all kinds of phoney intellectuals, drug dealers, poets, porno actresses -- feasters.  There was this Count Olof who would brag to me about one million acres in Romania, then borrow five dollars to buy a Cola Roba.  It was a big tour; all after-party, no show.  But see, with Henny, I'll give the kid credit for vision: he was biding his time, he knew something was coming.  Because here was this other count, or duke, or something, but importantly he was Russian, not Romanian, and with him Russian money cloudied Henny's way.  They wanted Afghan pictures.  A trilogy, with the first to take place on the Silk Road, the second to resume the story with the Russians fighting the Taliban, and of this second movie Henny should really do it Gunga Din style, because the third movie would be a tragedy on Marines stomping towels, not nearly as fun-loving as the Spetsnaz.  Because these Russians were looking to get PMC contracts for Afganistan -- Maggie, these oil barons wanted to be poppy barons -- they wanted the USA to sell them back the right to waste ordinance in Toar, Boar, and Loar, and Henny would be their sonneteer and heavyweight enunciator.  They wanted to burn bullets, and pick poppies.(BRIDGE, TUNNEL Chapter FOUR)

*The old man's head looked like an abandoned hornet nest rotting in the cranny of a barn. He was grey and papery as if his skin might flake and crumble like fish overcooked in a skillet. He was given to the porch in the mornings where from his wheelchair he played sentinel over the farmlands, until the house staff, judging the zenith of that day's heat, dispatched, and pushed him back inside the house to the road-facing windows, where he would resume the watch, looking there against the blaze like an elder planet waiting on a dying sun. (STORY: Lake Geneva)

*BLACK on BLACK.  Darkest Darkness.  Ginnungagap is what: the vast, primordial void prior to the universe manifest.

Illogical steam presses through the fissures of the dark backdrop, and some minor line of demarcation is made by this breath between earth and space, a grey strand between black and blacker.

Then the contours of some massive animal rise out of the void.  A cow.  A cow the size of a universe.  A cow that is the universe.  A cow made out of space-ice.

And then another form.  The tail of a snake crests out from under the cow, and slithers up the side, and from over the neck of the cow the head of the snake appears -- a monstrous thing.

Both ends of the snake coil around the cow until they meet in the middle, and their the snake head bites the snake tail!

                                    (Cousin Chazz In Love 2: Hillbilly Speedball)

*"You have drempt this since you were a little boy, Tom. But as I am old you thinks I am ripe. I am not so ripe. I am as sour and tough as an old cock o'the yard. Heed me, I will crow soon enough, and when I do, you will, in the auditory, relinquish your other senses to me: I will have you smell the fecal waters of the Nile; I will have you spy the trees of a Gaulic winter closing in on you; I will have you taste your own cold panic as it sweats inward and condensates on the roof of your mouth. You will feel your liver for the first time with this poison I have for you. Know this: I will name thee, Boy! You ladies loan, you wizard fart, you tankard of peppermilk; I name thee Tomcat Foldpants, for in this is the parallel of such a voracious nature as thou hath! Your appetite hath made you womanly, and all around are you merited for a folder of other men's garments!"

                           (Divine Knickers: The Norman Clature Story)

*This is the truth: I had a role in the now classic Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams -- I met the Chris Columbus at his house for lunch.  Everything was going beautifully until Chris asked me if I had any questions for him on the project.  I said, "One.  Is James Horner doing the score for you?"  Columbus said, "He is."  I said, "No fucking way; I will NEVER be in a picture scored by James Fucking Horner, that trash-bag of jingles."  I stood up, threw the Pinot in his face, and walked out of there. - Ace Milton

* Hill People sit in the hills, waiting for the fisherman to take pity, and walk up from the river with a couple extra trout.  As the fisherman are leaving, as the Hill People gnaw madly at the fish, guts squirting out, (they don't know how to make a campfire, and cook the fish, let alone gut and clean them), as those fisherman walk on down the hill, the Hill People remark on how there are probably better fish if those jerks just knew where to look.                                                                    (ESSAY: Hillbilly, Hick, Hill Person)

Wishing you a Happy New Year!
                                            -- Cousin Chazz