low hangers, too...

S and I watched this movie Killer of Sheep tonight. It was made in '77 and released on DVD earlier this summer. I saw it at I (Heart) Video several times, but never picked it up. So I put it on the Netflix queue and it arrived yesterday.

It's an amazing movie, beautiful, touching, about the harsh realities of being black in mid-70s LA. (I guess that's what it's about!) As I watched it, I kept getting inspirations that I had to write down. We were in S's room watching on his computer and I didn't want to stop the movie so I grabbed what I could, a brown Crayola brand marker and post-it notes.

During the course of the movie I wrote six post-its, one on bright pink, the rest on bright yellow paper:

• THIS OLD MAN
• 2 Robbers @ once
• golden afro
• letters to Sun
• devil screwing his wife
• We live like niggers

The movie had a wonderful soundtrack, including an amazing version of Dinah Washington singing "This Bitter Earth," first when the main character and his wife were dancing in their apartment (very sexy) and then again when the main character was at his job at the slaughterhouse (I closed my eyes). There were also great sounds of the kids in the movie, playing and fighting and singing. The main character's wife and six-year-old daughter are singing together at the beginning of the movie, the woman forgetting some of the words, the little girl following the structure of the tune but not the correct notes usually. They weren't onscreen which really enhanced the starkness of what was onscreen in grainy b&w. Later, the little girl was singing along with Earth, Wind and Fire to her dolls.

Somewhere, children were singing "This Old Man." S and I smoked before we sat down to watch the movie (natch), and it struck me that "This Old Man" could be funny with different lyrics, i.e.:

This old man, he played one,
plugged my knickknack with his thumb...

and the lyrics get more and more rude and/or bizarre as it goes along. I was thinking this might be a good thing to do at CampCamp, the talent show next week (which will be the penultimate CampCamp, sadly, so I really feel the need to be involved). So I wrote THIS OLD MAN on a post-it note to remind me to do that.

In the movie, two guys show up at the main character's house having devised a scheme that they want him to be in on. I think it has something to do with killing somebody. Oh yeah, and right before that, the main character's son saw two dudes jump over the fence in an alley with a TV they'd obviously just stolen. I got to thinking: I wonder if there's ever been a story written (or a movie made) in which two robbers or groups of robbers happened to hold up a liquor store or a bank at the exact same time. What could happen? They could shoot each other, or they could work together. Mayhem ensues. It seemed like an idea worth writing down, but then again, I was high. But anyway, that's why I wrote 2 Robbers @ once.

Just before we watched the movie, I took a shower, my first shower of the day; I was feeling grungy and my glasses wouldn't stay up on my nose (because my head was greasy) and a cold front was blowing in (not to mention I was high) and a hot shower sounded nice. While I was in there, I got a brilliant idea but I don't wanna share it just yet. (I'm still a little high, so it might not seem like such a great idea later, but I'm gonna sit on it for now, just in case.)

The movie was full of beautiful little black kids, sullen boys and sassy girls. I got to thinking that something that could really make my character Rich White stand out was if he had a golden afro, since his mama's white and his daddy's black. It would make him stand out and give him power.

The little girl asks her daddy where does rain come from and he says, oh, it's 'cause the devil's beating his wife. When I was a kid, we used to say the devil was beating his wife when it was raining and the sun was shining. I don't know where that came from.

I was wondering out loud just this very morning how the word tally-wacker came to be known as a term for penis. My stepfather uses it, and it's in that movie Sordid Lives... I just Googled it and got a link for a beer called Arbor Tally Wacker, a link to an MP3 download of a song called Slappy the Tallywacker, and a online personal ad for tallywackerattacker, all with obvious connections, but no historical evidence of where it came from. Maybe S said he thought it was Scottish or something.) Anyway, I thought that it would be an interesting thing for a character to say, that rain was caused by the devil screwing his wife.

And then I got more into thinking about Randy Reardon's upbringing and his mother Mona's racism. I could imagine her saying, "We live like niggers," making some reference to Rich and his family moving in across the trailerpark.