And of course they lost my luggage.

So it’s the worst of both worlds:  Not only am I in Cleveland for 5 days, I’m there with no luggage.

I’m writing this while waiting in yet another long line in an airport this morning.

First there was the line at baggage check-in at Burbank Airport. Why? Because some of my toiletries were larger than 3 oz. and I refused to throw them away because they were expensive creams and lotions, so I had to check my luggage. I’m unclear on how terrorists might blow up the plane with my anti-razor-burn lotion, but I guess we’ll never get to find out.

Then there was the line for boarding. Of course.

Now I’m in line at a different airport (Phoenix) for my connection. They’re trying to board two different aircraft from this same gate, and mine was just announced as delayed 20 minutes. When was the last time I traveled somewhere by air and the plane was on time? I think… in 2000?

And now I’m looking forward to baggage claim in Cleveland, whenever I ultimately arrive.

All across our consumer society, customer service is ironically shrinking to invisibility. This is the one area in which airlines are at the forefront.

The other directors who interest me, by the way, are:

• Fritz Lang, as anyone who followed the Mabuse thread (here and here) could see
• Buster Keaton

and the only living and working director on the list other than Werner Herzog:

• Paul Schrader (“American Gigolo,” “The Comfort of Strangers,” “Affliction” and “Auto Focus” put Schrader at the pinnacle of American dramatic film. Scorsese who?)

You may note that each of them is the writer of their films as well.

Last week the LA Times had a good piece on my favorite working film director, Werner Herzog. Click here to read it.

I’m not sure precisely what compels me to go back over and over again to Herzog’s films, as I do. They’re simultaneously spellbinding and somewhat inept: While he continually dwells too long in scenes that don’t matter, or elides important parts of the narrative flow, or provides you with what seems like exactly the wrong shot, his films nevertheless have a raw immediacy — a power — that is almost entirely lacking elsewhere. Most movies just don’t interest me; all of Herzog’s do. Including especially:

• “Aguirre, Wrath of God,” which I keep returning to even as I’m “improving” its storytelling with my own director’s cut in my mind;
• “Fitzcarraldo,” also starring his frequent co-conspirator, the maniacal Klaus Kinski; in some ways this is the prototypical Herzog drama, about a fantastical and impractical pursuit (in this case, dragging a steamboat up and over a mountain in the Amazon to get it to another river);
• The documentary “My Best Fiend,” about Kinski, who was either seriously disturbed or flat-out the most convincing portrayer ever of mania — on-screen and in real life;
• The documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” (imminently to be released in a fictionalized version called “Rescue Dawn” and starring Christian Bale). The ending has an unexpected majesty that I still don’t understand;
• And finally, “Grizzly Man,” which while Herzog says reminds him that life is about chaos, renews my faith in order because the nice naive man who views grizzly bears as his friends finally gets eaten by one.

All of these films are in some way a mess. But that chaos is what gives them life, and what makes every scene flawed and astonishing.

This was sent to me by good friend Doug Hackney (he of “Doug’s Reading List” fame).

Before we get to the actual email — and I hope you’ll click through to take a look at the astonishing images — let me say this:
Circa 1980-1983 when I was managing Parts for Imports, we had a demolished early Jag back in the weeds by the bay behind the building — a car that originally had a wood frame that had now rotted away — and people often came by and offered thousands and thousands of dollars for what was left of it. (Which was very little.) One of the owners, Tom, told me he was holding out for real value. At the time, I thought he was nuts. Now I know better. There was a big piece in the LA Times magazine a few weeks ago about restorers of rare cars; many of the models shown in these photos are worth hundreds of thousands each, no matter any decay or disrepair.

On Jul 3, 2007, at 10:12 AM, Douglas Hackney wrote:

I did some searching on this. I couldn’t find anything on scopes.com, so that was promising. I finally found a blog with an entry from a guy who claims to have: “Read about this in the Portuguese newspapers the other day. It belonged to a wealthy doctor here in Portugal and he passed away and nobody knew about his collection.” The blog post was from March 2007. So, no evidence of an urban legend and at least a tenuous thread that it may be legit.

If legit, it’s the ultimate dream of every car guy who ever lived, at least the ones who grew up reading Road & Track.

The collection looks more like that of a wealthy, mildly eccentric doctor than a mob hot car transfer/storage facility or even a speculator’s investment portfolio who was betting on rising prices for specific examples. I think it’s too eclectic, with too much duplication and too many oddball, low value cars peppered into the mass of rare models to be the work of a professional collector.

But whatever it is, the link below is worth checking out.

Be well,

Doug

————————————

Barn Find in Portugal

How would you like to have bought this property?

Imagine you’re going to live in Portugal.

You find a lovely farmhouse set on a decent plot of land.

The place has been empty for 15 years…

While exploring your new property you find a large barn.
The door is padlocked and welded shut and it’s all rusted solid.
So you grind the padlock and the welds off and………

Click here to see.

Worried about overpopulation? Then here’s some good news (unless governments screw it up):

Smoking could kill 1 billion this century: WHO

 

BANGKOK (Reuters) – One billion people will die of tobacco-related diseases this century unless governments in rich and poor countries alike get serious about preventing smoking, top World Health Organization (WHO) experts said on Monday.

“Tobacco is a defective product. It kills half of its customers,” Douglas Bettcher, head of the WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative, said at the start of an international conference in Bangkok to draw up a masterplan for the world to kick the habit.

“It kills 5.4 million people per year and half of those deaths are in developing countries. That’s like one jumbo jet going down every hour,” he said.

With smoking rates in many developing countries on the rise, particularly among teenagers, that annual death toll would rise to 8.3 million within the next 20 years, he added.

However, if governments introduced measures such as aggressive taxation, banning cigarette advertising and making offices and public places totally tobacco-free, smoking rates could halve by 2050, he said.

“It’s a completely preventable epidemic,” Bettcher said, citing countries such as Singapore, Australia and Thailand where tough anti-smoking laws have helped people to quit.

“If we do that, by 2050 we can save 200 million lives.”

Officials from 147 countries are attending the week-long conference, which is likely to agree on binding laws against cross-border tobacco advertising — a move against events such as Formula One — as well as tougher legislation against cigarette smuggling.

Around 600 billion cigarettes were smuggled in 2006 — 11 percent of the world’s consumption — according to the Framework Convention Alliance (FAC), an umbrella group of hundreds of anti-tobacco organizations.

As well as keeping the prices artificially low and thereby stimulating demand, the counterfeit cigarette industry also deprives governments of more than $40 billion in missed taxes, the FCA estimates.

BAN ON ADS

In Thailand, smoking rates have fallen from 30 percent in 1992 to around 18 percent, a decline health officials attribute to a ban on all domestic tobacco advertising 15 years ago.

“The most important medicines in tobacco control are: number one, increasing taxation; number two, bans on advertising; and number three, smoke-free public places,” said Hatai Chitanondh of the Thailand Health Promotion Institute.

Besides agreeing laws on cross-border advertising and smuggling, the conference is also likely to issue guidelines for countries introducing legislation on “second-hand smoke” and “smoke-free” areas.

Although not legally binding, anti-smoking campaigners are delighted with the explicit wording of the guidelines.

“There is no safe level of exposure to tobacco smoke and notions such as a threshold value for toxicity from second-hand smoke should be rejected as they are contradicted by scientific evidence,” a draft copy of the guidelines said.

“Approaches other than 100 percent smoke-free environments, including ventilation, air filtration and use of designated smoking areas have repeatedly been shown to be ineffective.”

Ifixit.com dissects an iPhone, in glorious color.

…not to be mean, but they could do worse than modeling the Red Skull on Mort Sahl‘s face.

I just got back from another installment of Moving Arts’ “The Car Plays,” at the Steve Allen Theatre. (The show continues the first Sunday of every month through October; tickets go on sale two weeks beforehand and sell out within about 9 seconds, so if you want to attend, keep watching this space.)

On the way over, I found myself wondering if the event was already over. You see this sometimes in the theatre: the sensation that isn’t so sensational any more. We did “The Car Plays” last September, and the clamor for tickets was deafening. Those of us who were lucky enough to be involved (and get tickets) were glad to be there. I wondered if this was going to be a case of been there, done that.

Luckily, I was joined by five guests who are not regular theatregoers. They loved it. Each one of them remarked how different this event was — what a great idea — what an event. That just reminded me — again — of what I love about having expedient access to strange cultural events utterly unavailable where I grew up.

It was interesting to see my play “All Undressed with Nowhere to Go” revived — and, again, performed in a car, exactly as it was written to be done — but with a different director and with one new actor. The returning actor was Laura Buckles, whose work I’ve grown to appreciate more and more; I told Laura some time ago that from now on she has to be in all my plays. She was terrific in Nancy Weiner’s “The Invalid James” (in this production, directed by my good friend Trey Nichols), she was great Friday night in a reading from my workshop, and she was great last year (and this year) in this play, in a role I wrote somewhat with her in mind. Last year James Smith played “Jerry”; James has been in my plays “The Size of Pike,” “Happy Fun Family,” “Animals,” “Safehouse,” and probably others that elude me at the moment — to me, he really gets the rhythm of my lines and the subtext of my characters. Either that, or I keep subconsciously writing for him. Or, another choice, he’s just really good in them and elevates the material. Or all of those options. He wasn’t available for this revival, and neither was the original director (Trey), so I recommended Tony, who was in my play “Visiting Ours,” as the seemingly nice young man who reads porn to the old lady in the nursing home. I’ve also worked with Tony on several other plays not my own, and have always admired his odd comic delivery. He can be amazing in a role. The new director, Paul Nicolai Stein, changed the action around a bit for this 9-minute play about adulterers who can’t find a good spot to consummate their deceit high in the parking areas of the San Gabriel mountains. For one thing, the play now started with Jerry off in the “mountains” (the parking lot of the Steve Allen) “urinating” off the edge. For another, the button — the comedic summing-up of the play — that worked so well with James’ interpretation wouldn’t work with Tony’s interpretation. I’ve seen many of my plays remounted and reinterpreted, but never before within such a short period of time and inside a car, so this was oddly illuminating about how interpretative a performance can be. (And I say this after three decades of doing theatre of some sort.) And, as Tony later pointed out, the one I saw was only the first performance:  They still had 14 additional performances that night.

(Yes, each 9-minute “Car Play” is performed 15 times.)

I saw many of the writers and theatre enthusiasts I’ve known over the years from Backstage West, Entertainment Today, ReviewPlays.com, and the LA Times, so I’m sure some ink is going to follow on this. And, as I said, “The Car Plays” will continue into the fall (albeit with a shifting slate of plays). I saw 10 of the 15 plays tonight. As I was saying to the dean of our program at USC, this is a difficult little form to write in — as with haiku (good haiku), the rules are rigid and the form demanding. Each play has to be 9 minutes, each has to have an inciting incident, it must take place inside a car, and it must have a “button” that ends the action.

So much care has gone into writing, directing, acting and producing them, that I believe I can spot a problem looming with this production in nearby Santa Barbara (seemingly inspired by our success last September, which was Pick of the Week in the LA Weekly). “Pick your own” sounds like an owner’s manual for chaos.

By putting the Clintons into it.