Friday, December 24, 2010

Time Marxes On!

On New Year's Eve, Turner Classic Movies is having a Marx Brothers fest: Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, then Go West — in that order. That's like eleven hours of Groucho, Harpo, Chico and in the first four, Zeppo. I'm sure you've been invited to dozens of raucous parties and have great debauchery planned for that night but there are worst things for which one could set one's TiVo. That's assuming you don't have those movies (a) on DVD and/or (b) memorized like some people I could mention.

Then on New Year's Day, IFC is running an odd 24-hour marathon of The Larry Sanders Show. It seems to be the same twelve episodes played over and over all day and all night. On January 2, they do much the same thing with old episodes of Mr. Show. Both shows are joining the regular IFC evening lineup right after that. No word if they're running the unexpurgated versions of Larry Sanders or the ones that omit the naughty words and therefore are not as funny.

• Posted at 2:11 PM · LINK

What I Did Yesterday

Yesterday afternoon, I had to go over to Canon Drive in Beverly Hills...a street on which I've long had about a 75% chance of running into Larry King. Didn't see him this time, which disappointed me. I wanted to yell at him to stop goofing off and go get a job.

On second thought, maybe that was him in the full-body Frosty the Snowman costume. Frosty did look repeatedly married and he was asking pointless questions and wearing suspenders.

I did see something odd. A woman around Larry's age — yes, there are some — is driving a black Mercedes. (A Mercedes in Beverly Hills? What are the odds?) A guy in a small white truck swerves near her and somehow — I didn't see exactly how — clips off her rear view mirror on the passenger's side. Both pull over and get out. The man says something apologetic which reveals that he is not of this land; that he has a thick accent of no (to me) identifiable origin. Might be Slavic. Might be Arabic. Could even be French, I suppose. The lady neither knows nor cares.

Instantly, she unleashes a torrent of angry racial, "Why don't you %@#!$! go back where you came from?" remarks. She really, really does not like people who are not like her. The man rapidly goes from humble and eager to atone to feeling he is the victim here. He raises his voice in response which thickens his accent which makes him seem more the hostile immigrant. Passers-by stop to watch the floor show but I duck into a store to buy something necessary but horribly overpriced. When I come out with it, a policeman is there — the Beverly Hills P.D. is never far — and he has them separated by a few yards as he tries to dial down the explosive rhetoric to something that is just a matter for that lady in the Progressive Insurance commercials to settle. I hear the officer say, "Come on, it's Christmas."

The alien-hating lady insists, "Not for people like him!"

Sometimes, people just are angry because they want to be angry.

• Posted at 9:30 AM · LINK