The Drink Tank 100 (2006).pdf

This is issue 100. I’ve been at

this for a little over a year and a half

and I’m so proud that this issue is

happening. You’ll discover that every-

thing in this issue is numbered. Those

numbers can be looked up in the

back in the guide to the contributors.

There’s also so much more.

So let us start things

rolling...with Frank Wu and the art of

Mr. Brad Foster!

Then he lashed a sawed-off shotgun

and pulled the painting off the wall.

And walked out, past security cameras

from which he didn’t bother to hide his

face. Back in the taxi, he made more

“World’s Stupidest Criminal” errors.

The biggest was prying the Picasso

out of the frame, and then leaving

the frame, covered in his ingerprints,

in the back of the taxi. He was

thoughtful enough, though, to leave

the driver a ten-pound note.

Grant-McVicar is the son of John

McVicar, once England’s Public Enemy

Number One (and the subject of an

excellent Roger Daltrey album and

movie).

You’d think his dad would have taught

him a trick or two. Apparently not.

The would-be thief was caught and

received a combined sentence (for this

crime and a dozen others) of 15 years.

Perhaps acting as his own lawyer

might have been a mistake, too.

2. PHILIP K. DICK’S HEAD

Here’s a tip: If you make something

really cool and then show it to a bunch

of people, be careful lest you lose it.

David Hanson, sculptor and founder

of Hanson Robotics, spent 25K of his

own money to make a robotic version

of Philip K. Dick’s head. Why? Well,

Dick did write “Do Androids Dream of

Electric Sheep?”, the basis for the ilm

“Bladerunner,” in which androids are

hard to distinguish from people.

And the robot head was cool, with

Number 1: RANDOM LIST NO. 743A:

4 NOTABLE THINGS LEFT BEHIND

ON TAXIS, PLANES OR TRAINS

by Frank Wu

Number 2: Missing Things by Brad

W. Foster

Number 3: Bono Vox by I M Roger

Number 4: Two Stills from John

Cassavetes’ Shadows

I travel a lot, from convention to

convention, and I always worry that

I’ll lose something. The way Holden

Caulield left his team’s fencing foils

on a subway. Or the way Frank Kelly

Freas had paintings stolen from the

trunk of a locked car. But I doubt if

I’ll ever experience anything like these

horror stories.

1. INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE

Russell Grant-McVicar had the

Picasso theft all planned out, just not

planned out well. He’d taken a taxi

from the Hilton Hotel in London to

the Lefevre Gallery, a prominent West

End dealer in Impressionists. Visible

from the street was Picasso’s 1939

oil painting, “Tete de Femme,” of his

then-lover Dona Maar. Grant-McVicar

asked the taxi to wait for him while he

popped inside. He asked an employe

to conirm that it was a Picasso. And

that it was worth a million dollars.

36 servomotors for expressions and

an artiicial personality based on

mathematical analyses of Dick’s

writings and constructed by Andrew

Olney. The head was so cool that

it appeared on the cover of “Wired”

magazine.

Everybody wanted to see it.

So before that fateful day when

Hanson lost his head (c’mon, you

knew that was coming), Hanson had

been traveling for weeks, making

two trips to Asia and pulling 15 all-

nighters in 40 days. On his way to

Google headquarters in Silicon Valley,

he boarded a plane in Dallas at 5 in

the morning. In Las Vegas, the light

attendant woke him to tell him they

were changing planes. In a mental

fog, he left the head in a bag in the

overhead compartment.

The friendly America West folks

did ind PKD’s head in Las Vegas and

packed it off to San Francisco, but it

never arrived. Perhaps it wound up

in Alabama with the company that

salvages lost items, or perhaps - with

all the wires sticking out - it was

mistaken for a bomb. “That would be a

really strange ending,” Hanson noted,

“if the head of a Philip K. Dick robot

wound up being exploded by another

robot.”

PKD’s head is still missing.

noted that this was the worst recording

experience of their career.

When U2 returned to Portland years

later, Bono appealed for help retrieving

the lost lyrics, repeated the plea to no

avail in 2001.

Meanwhile, a woman named Cindy

Harris stumbled upon the briefcase in

the attic of a rented house in Tacoma,

Washington. It took her a while to

realize that the case was Bono’s, and

that it was stolen. It took her and her

friend Danielle Rheaume another year

to penetrate the protective bureaucracy

surrounding the band.

But in 2004, 23 years after they

had gone missing, the briefcase and

the lyrics notebook were reunited with

Bono, who called it “an act of grace.”

Comparisons between the inal

and long-lost lyrics have never been

published.

Portland, Oregon, Bono had the

lyrics to U2’s next album stolen from

a taxicab. The band was under a

lot of pressure. This would be their

sophomore record - a challenge for any

band - and worse, they were making

it about God. Even worse, the studio

time was already booked and coming

up fast. Bono quickly whipped out

new lyrics, and he felt spiritually

inspired as he did so, but the band still

4. THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF

JOHN CASSAVETES’ CLASSIC

INDEPENDENT FILM, “SHADOWS”

John Cassavetes is best known for

acting in “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The

Dirty Dozen” (for which he received

an Academy Award nom for best

supporting actor). But he was also

an important, if slightly obscure, ilm

director.

His irst ilm, “Shadows,” is

considered by Leonard Maltin to be

“a watershed in the birth of American

independent cinema.” Dealing with

3. BONO’s LOST LYRICS

After a show at the Foghorn in

race issues, it was shot cheaply

in 16mm in black and white on

the streets of New York, with an

improvised script and volunteer crew

and jazz score by Charles Mingus.

When Cassavetes irst screened

his ilm in 1957, the audience was

puzzled and confused; many walked

out. After that disappointing response,

Cassavetes hired a Hollywood hack

to make a more commercial version,

swapping out half the length of the

ilm. The second version, from 1959,

was popularized, but many thought

the original better. Jonas Mekas wrote

at the time, “I have no further doubt

that whereas the second version of

‘Shadows’ is just another Hollywood

ilm - however inspired at moments

- the irst version is the most frontier-

breaking American feature ilm in

at least a decade.” But the original

negative had been cut up to make the

second version, which became widely

circulated, and the irst was lost,

seemingly forever.

But critic Ray Carney, who’s spent

a lifetime writing scholarly works on

Cassavetes, refused to admit that it

was gone.

Carney spent years and tens of

thousands of his own dollars searching

for the ilm, even interviewing dozens of

people to follow a lead that the ilm had

been donated to a school somewhere in

the midwest. He even worked with the

original actors and audience members

to recreate the original version.

Finally, after 17 years, his search

paid off. He was contacted by a

woman whose husband had owned a

junk shop in downtown Manhattan.

He had regularly replenished his wares

with purchases of (you guessed it) stuff

that had been left behind on subway

cars.

Carney’s personal theory - based on

interviews from people who might have

been involved - is that folks carrying

the ilm back from its inal original

screening were distracted when an

attractive blonde got on the train.

In any case, the only surviving

print of Cassavetes’ ilm was found in

an attic of a relative in Florida. The

celluloid base was shrunken and

brittle, but the emulsion was clear and

sharp. It was even better than the

overlapping scenes in a restored copy

of the second version recently prepared

by UCLA.

Cassavetes’ lost ilm was found.

But the story doesn’t end there.

Interesting, Cassavetes’ widow, actress

Gena Rowlands, has battled Carney to

suppress this original version.

She wants to promote a white-washed

version of Cassavetes as someone who

never suffered through depression or

artistic struggles or self-doubts.

Rowlands - who did not even know

that there were two versions - has

demanded that Carney give her the

original, so she can destroy it. He has

refused, claiming that it must be saved

for future generations.

Rowlands also meddled with the

recent Cassavetes DVD set. She

threatened to kill the project if the

original version were included, or if

Carney’s name - after he had spent

300 hours on the project - were not

expunged. Because she had the

money, she won. But the battle goes

on today...

Total:

4 things lost, 3 retrieved. Not bad.

Y’all know how I feel about Los

Angeles: A certain cloudy mixture of

love and failure hangs over the city

for my eyes. But I can’t deny that

Kelly Green catches it just right

inher piece.

the Imperial Palace Hotel), but perhaps

the most fun, with diorama sets and

interactive displays. However, the

cultural spot that has been catching

my imagination just lately is a little

place in Venice Beach.

Venice Beach itself is another

of our famed lake spots. You know,

Ocean Front Walk with its famous

Muscle Beach where Ahhhnold himself

hung from the bars; jugglers tossing

chainsaws; incense, tattoos, Chinese

watercolors, marijuana can be had

with relatively little effort. The internet

café is a new hangout on the sidewalk.

I noticed, as I sipped my half double

decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of

lemon (you’ve seen ‘LA Story,’ haven’t

you?), a two-story gilt and marble-clad

house studded with bronze statues.

I do mean ‘studded.’ Dragons

crawl up the outside wall; Roman

and Greek soldiers stand alert on the

rooline; squirrels and bunnies play on

the lawn and front porch. I count so

many bronzes gracing this otherwise

‘okay’ home. There’s a porch, unusual

in LA; a balcony, v. unusual in LA; a

café table and wrought iron seats in

the front yard, extraordinarily unusual

in a city known for lightingeredness.

Victorian without the gingerbread,

Gothic without the dark, this gold and

black and marble home has a tough

metal hide of off-putting bronzes but

the windows are shaded with lace and

gauze, and the lowers grow,

in the yard, in the lower

boxes under each window, in

the pots by the front door.

This is El Bordello

Alexandra. I assume it’s

NOT a tourist attraction, just

someone’s idea of home. And

LA says, yeah, it its right in.

Welcome.

Til next time,

this is your LA Cultural

Correspondent, saying, “Don’t

eat the ish!”*

*Fish, especially the

white croaker, caught from

Santa Monica Pier is full of

mercury. You don’t want

mercury poisoning, do you?

Number 5: Dateline: Los Angeles by

Kelly Green

Number 6: Photo by Kelly Green

I think most people profess a

disdain for Los Angeles because they

can’t get a handle on the place. LA

ain’t just one thing: it’s not a Big

Apple, not a Windy City, certainly not

a Big Easy. LA is beauty and poverty,

desert and beach, masterpiece

art museum and museum of

Jurassic technology. We’re a

car culture cuz nobody walks

in LA; we have an annual

marathon that draws a

quarter million runners (some

dressed as Elvis; some with

world record times: consider

running 26.2 miles in a slow

2 hours 15 minutes.)

As yr. faithful Angeleno

cultural correspondent (yeah,

we’re all angels here) I had

thought to essay on the

Petersen Automotive Museum,

certainly not the only car

museum around (there’s a

fairly nice one in Las Vegas at

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