Even now, some people will tell
you never to make a career from championing Enoch Light, or anything
else alot of other people think is stupid. It may play in zines
and such, but you'll never get that music critic job on National
Public Radio. Why speak of the plinky pings and pongs of The
Light Brigade when you can dissect Melissa Etheridge, a.k.a.
Serious Music.
But I think the exact opposite is true. People used to think
Dean Martin was cheesy . . . now he's tragic!!!
When a fellow like me stands up in public and defiantly declares
Gig Young scholarship to be his contribution to today's hepcat-starved
world of popular culture studies, he can probably get that National
Public Radio two minute goofball piece on All Things Considered,
waxing ironic about Nutty Ol' Gig and his Koo Koo Flicks. But
when you need a funny follow-up piece and you fumble by trying
to tread the same smarm by pushing Jim Hutton on all the new
Gigheads. . . well, you know what you've done. You know that
Jim Hutton is just a cheap knockoff, right down to the really
small hair, but you don't care. You've become faux kooky, and
that only plays on Nick At Nite. Faux kooky has no perspective.
It avoids looking at anything in its context. It assumes that
if it's old, it must be funny. It promotes the outlook that nothing
is serious. You've become the kind of person who, in order to
favor one arm, cuts off the other with the mad justification
that if you can easily make yourself left-handed if you just
get rid of that pesky impediment of a right arm. And if that
left arm represents pandering kitschy tendencies that might make
a quick buck, like Gig, you know what that right arm represents,
don't you?
Ingmar Bergman.
I know, I know, I know what you're saying - what if Nick Tosches
had chosen Leonard Bernstein instead of Dean Martin? Plenty of
chaos and West Side Story parties at faux hipster lounges.
It just isn't done. Ingmar doesn't lend himself to having a martini
variation named after him. What would an Ingmartini be anyway?
Gin and more gin and still more gin until you achieve (in this
order) lack of communication, dark secrets, spiritual breakdown,
and, then, a moment of dark realization, with a cocktail onion?
I don't think Esquivel would attend that function. Y
ou're
also telling me that plenty of people - your film scholars, your
Swedes - write alot of boring essays on Ingmar Bergman for no
one to read, where as no one writes any boring essays on Gig
Young for no one to read. Until now, that is. When I do the big
sellout to pop culture, Entertainment Weekly is not going
to want that "Ingmania!" article - too many letters
complaining about the exclusion of Casablanca! But "I
Dig Gig"? I'd be set for life - or at least until the fad
ends, sometimes after I publish The Gig Young Bachelor Cookbook.
But somewhere in my soul-less slumber, the very pretty Liv
Ullman (much prettier than Peggy Lee, for instance) gestures
in Swedish disappointment. She knows that I've sold my psyche
short, failed to represent the part of me that sees life as more
than snickering smarm and cigarettes, and all for what WHAT???
Some guy who tried to seduce Mitzi Gaynor in a yacht??? Forgive
me, Liv!!!
You see, no matter how much I like my left arm (the limb that
lives for Teacher's Pet), that doesn't mean I'm ready
to sell my right arm (the one that's ca-raazy for Cries and
Whispers) to the black market. So the only choice is to remain
a two-armed son of a bitch whose opposite sides work together
for a larger truth! And that's much more interesting, isn't it?
Ask Liv, she was in that version of Lost Horizen with
the dreadful Burt Bacharach songs, she'd know.
It occurs to me. After a lifetime of portraying swingin'-yet-befuddled imbibers in good suits, Gig chose to end it all in a suicide murder with his wife. That's even more tragic than Dean Martin's life! Why, it's positively Bergmanesque! I think I've discovered a subject both swingers AND Swedes can love!!! Sköl!