THE GODS MUST BE HAPPY AND SMILING
by Bryce Martin
First N!xau and now Jack Elam.
They may not be big names to all out there, but two of my favorite people on the big screen have passed on this year. It is sad, but inevitable. If anything is inevitable, it seems to be death. Taxes you do not have to pay, contrary to adage. You can go to prison instead.
N!xau. What a name. You have all these pretentious ______s out there trying to come up with a cool reading of an odd name to fit on a marquee, record label, or American Express card, and up comes some Kalahari bushmen as pure as the driven snow with a real name of his own to top any you could possibly dream up. Reading more about his death, I discover that his real name was G!kau. Still a singular marvel, because it maintains the apostrophe, but not quite up to N!xau on the cool quotient. In addition, it was not N!xau, a South African, who made the change from G!xau. It was a simple typing error during the formation of the first The Gods Must Be Crazy movie in 1982 in which N!xau-really-G!kau played the role of Xixo. The film was released in the United States in 1984. Sequels followed.
The original, in case you missed it (I know you would not forget) involves the ramifications of a bushman (Xixo) finding a Coke bottle tossed from an airplane and thinking it coming from the gods.
Too bad Francis X. Bushman from the silent era was not available for a cameo.
For those who missed the details, N!xau died July 1 from tuberculosis while hunting guinea fowl.
For anyone over 50 years of age, all I have to say for them to pinpoint in their craniums just who the hell Jack Elam is are these words: �You know, the guy with the bad eye that rolled around.�
�Oh, yeah. Him.�
I know they know at that point.
There was the leer, too, the smiling one to go with the wandering eye. That face was a stage of its own under a Western hat. Not all of Elam�s movies were cowboy ones but the ones you most remember sure were.
My earliest moment of movie terror involved Elam. The bad guys had the good guys pinned down in an outpost on the prairie in the movie Rawhide. The wind was blowing the thin topsoil of the plain to the point where visibility was at a minimum and eyes were pitted and useless from the dust. Suddenly, a young boy no older than two or three drifts from the house onto the flat area outside, between the bullets of the outlaws and the god fearin� sodbusters inside. The shooting stops once the boy is noticed and all is silent. Then, we see Elam, his grinning, menacing face, roving eye with its crazy gleam. With the camera back on the boy now, bullets fly near his feet, stirring up small explosions. The boy cries. The camera now rotates back to Elam. He is grinning, leering some more, pulling the trigger and is a picture of mad rapture.
Nobody could play that type of baddie like Elam.
Jack Elam passed on October 20.
Remember him, don�t you? The guy with the�
Tell them how the weather was... -- Ernest Hemingway bryce_martin_1@Lycos.com
Thursday, October 23, 2003
Thursday, October 02, 2003
IT'S ALL ONE THING
by Bryce Martin
To all things there is an order. Your order is not necessarily my order. When I tape whatever it is I tape on television, I don�t try to edit out the commercials or promos. I do it that way for one reason; I want to capture it just the way it was. It is all one thing, it is a totality. That�s because I�m pre-remote. I am before the hand-held channel changers. If you wanted to change the channel, you got up and turned the knob. That usually meant you didn�t get up, not to get away from the commercials anyway. So, I'm accustomed to seeing all of it, the commercials, the announcements, all the filler in-between. I bring this up to get to my subject of the moment: an old favorite of mine, a patty melt. A patty melt is what it is for a reason. Take out any part of it, rearrange how it is put together, and it is not a patty melt. It is something else. A patty melt is a totality; a sum of all its parts. First off, the bread is rye, not plain, not sourdough, not wheat, not something else, but your basic rye bread. You toast the bread on a griddle or in a skillet. The meat is better if it is ground round, but it can be just hamburger, just ground beef. That part is a matter of preference and does not hurt anything. Here now is an important ingredient. Onion, red or white is fine. I like white. Here, though, is the key: sliced in rings; not diced. If you do everything else right, but you dice the onion, then you�ve ruined it. Grill the rings until they are caramelized. That�s big. The cheese you use is swiss, nothing else, swiss. It is relevant to remember to melt the cheese slices on the burger, and not on the bread. Now, put it together and you have one delicious sandwich. I left out the salt and pepper part. As the phrase goes, season to taste.
by Bryce Martin
To all things there is an order. Your order is not necessarily my order. When I tape whatever it is I tape on television, I don�t try to edit out the commercials or promos. I do it that way for one reason; I want to capture it just the way it was. It is all one thing, it is a totality. That�s because I�m pre-remote. I am before the hand-held channel changers. If you wanted to change the channel, you got up and turned the knob. That usually meant you didn�t get up, not to get away from the commercials anyway. So, I'm accustomed to seeing all of it, the commercials, the announcements, all the filler in-between. I bring this up to get to my subject of the moment: an old favorite of mine, a patty melt. A patty melt is what it is for a reason. Take out any part of it, rearrange how it is put together, and it is not a patty melt. It is something else. A patty melt is a totality; a sum of all its parts. First off, the bread is rye, not plain, not sourdough, not wheat, not something else, but your basic rye bread. You toast the bread on a griddle or in a skillet. The meat is better if it is ground round, but it can be just hamburger, just ground beef. That part is a matter of preference and does not hurt anything. Here now is an important ingredient. Onion, red or white is fine. I like white. Here, though, is the key: sliced in rings; not diced. If you do everything else right, but you dice the onion, then you�ve ruined it. Grill the rings until they are caramelized. That�s big. The cheese you use is swiss, nothing else, swiss. It is relevant to remember to melt the cheese slices on the burger, and not on the bread. Now, put it together and you have one delicious sandwich. I left out the salt and pepper part. As the phrase goes, season to taste.