It’s Culver City and I’m registered here at the Culver City Hotel. The story goes that John Wayne won this joint in a poker game. Facilities and rooms are named after famous film performers. There’s the Munchkins Restaurant downstairs, Clark Gable Room, Duke’s Bar, the John Wayne Room of course, and here I sit in the Marilyn Monroe Room. And what should turn up on TV tonight – it’s late, it’s almost 1 a.m. – but The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe’s last movie, Clark Gable’s last movie, Montgomery Clift’s last movie. The vulnerability of thick- and thin-skinned people. How old was Monroe when she died? Thirty-five, 36? Two framed pictures of her iconize the walls of this retro-restored room I occupy.

                                                  Courtesy Photos

At Ford’s Filling Station, a restaurant so named because Harrison Ford’s son started and runs it, I ordered fish & chips, and so did Susan Obrow, my affectionate dark-haired host. She loves Culver City and how the arts are faring here. She told me that Brian Wilson’s son has opened a restaurant, too. And there are others. “The sons of famous men are opening restuarants,”she said.

The Kirk Douglas Theatre stands on one corner. Debbie Allen features a dance studio here in Culver City. Susan Obrow and I ducked out to dinner after seeing we weren’t going to make the reservation, given the time it was going to take the dance troupe from India to register as they bunched in line ahead of us at the check-in desk. Beautiful kids. Elegant and graceful. From such observations, I’d concluded they must be dancers.

 Meanwhile, the chasing of horses in The Misfits – by airplane, by Jeep, by truck, by lasso, by cowboy hat, by cowboy shirt, by blonde-sick-love – loses me. It always did. Here these white men buck and jeck, trying to lasso and finally roping one sweating wild horse. The metaphor rolls on. Cowboys. Gangsters. Vixens and ho’s. But in The Misfits, everybody is sensitive.

I suppose they’re still out there and going to be out there roping, trapping, capturing, typing up and taming Iraqis and Afghanistani these days? Conquerors of their known world. Despair mongers. Cowboy hat. Baseball cap. Taming a horse, to anglophone, meant taming a wild woman, too. Shrew. In English the man will forever congratulate the man.

 It’s when they try to turn their belief and behavior into controlling policy and philosophy that everything falls apart.

Kiss me, Culver City, and bid Prohibition booze and jazz and Louis Armstrong’s house your fondest cheese fondue adieu.

 Al Young
Copyright © 2008 by Al Young

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 11:16 pm and is filed under Poems and Lyrics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.