Karl Malden was Detective Mike Stone. He patrolled the Streets of San Francisco (A Quinn Martin Production) around the same time that Clint’s Dirty Harry Callahan and McQueen’s Bullitt were plugging perps and getting into rad car chases respectively. But Stone/Malden wasn’t into such hot dogging. He wasn’t the rebel. He wasn’t the inconoclast. Stone probably came up on the force around the same time that Jimmy Stewart’s Det. Scottie Ferguson nearly fell off a building and discovered that he suffered from a bad case of vertigo in the process. Scottie was saddled with a desk job but couldn’t even hack that. Stone must have learned some hard lessons from Ferguson’s plight there. Stone was the father figure. He was the cement that kept the streets from cracking apart from so much Bay Area seismic activity. Stone was more likely to give you a stern talking to than draw his gun. I think the entire state of California could use one of those stern talkings to right about now.

Malden was just as much the mentor offscreen as Stone was on it. In 2006 I interviewed local character actor and florist Al Nalbandian for the San Francisco Chronicle about his long acting career. Being a Bay Area actor, he appeared in a few episodes of Streets (about four by my count). “(Malden) was a very capable man,” Al told me as he sold long stem roses and other fine flowers at his Union Square stand, “One time, when the director didn’t know what he was doing, Malden went out there and told him what to do. He helped Michael Douglas out in those episodes. Douglas is lucky to have had such a partner.” Douglas has always given more credit to Malden as an acting teacher than to his father, Kirk Douglas. While Stone was showing Steve Keller the ropes on the force, Malden was teaching Douglas how to act. (Al is still out there selling flowers by the way.)

A friend of mine works at a pretty good video store in the Mission District. He tells me that there are a handful of young, hipster types who have become obsessed with Streets. A couple of them have even found Mike Stone’s house on DeHaro Street. The city in those episodes of Streets is long since gone, replaced by high tech gulches, new ballparks and biotech hubs. Still, Malden pumped so much life into that character that anyone passing by that house on DeHaro would half expect Mike Stone to stroll out of that front door of his and regale you with tales of the best hotdogs in the Potrero or the best chili in the Tenderloin.

Karl Malden passed away today at the age of 97. He will be missed.

In addition to the Streets boxsets and the Kazan/Brando movies, you should also check out Karl Malden’s job as a Tony Perkin’s hardassed dad in the baseball/mental health drama Fear Strikes Out. It’s one of Malden’s best roles in a career of best roles. Bay Area residents can still watch Streets on KOFY TV-20 weekdays at 11am.

I never really thought I’d end up voluntarily writing obits as a hobby (or habit). As for Mr. Jackson, I can only leave you with this…

Now seems like a good time to score that copy of “Off the Wall” that I’ve been meaning to pick up for a while now.

Farrah – every older kid had her poster taped up to her wall when I was a seven years old. That poster. You all know it. They sold it in comic books ads that badly suffered from the morray effect along with pin-ups of Sean Cassidy, Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, KISS and R2-D2. Farrah was in Logan’s Run. You could get an iron on t-shirt of her from that movie in similar ads. Farrah waded into the sci-fi waters once again as she faced a robot stalker in Saturn 3, the first in a long line of Alien rip-offs scattered throughout the 1980s. In addition to fending off advances from a giant robot with a tiny head, she also had to do love scenes with Kirk Douglas in that one. Harvey Keitel also appeared as Saturn 3’s human villain but the producers overdubbed his Brooklyn brogue with an English accent. That would never happen today. Farrah used to be married to Lee Majors of the Six Million Dollar Man. They were a 70s TV power couple for a while there. My sister’s boyfriend at the time wanted my sister to try to look more like Farrah. “Only if you look like Lee Majors,” was her reply. Farrah became a made for TV battered women’s icon in the mid-80s with The Burning Bed. My mother loved that movie. Farrah was wigged out on drugs on Letterman while she hyped her Playboy spread in the 1990s. Still, the American public fell in love with her in the 1970s and never fell out of love with her. She will be missed.

David Carradine and Farrah Fawcett both gone in one month. That childhood of mine is really dying one piece at a time. One request: can some pro wrestlers or B-movie actors save some seal pups from oncoming traffic so I can write about that instead of blogging obits? Please? Thanks.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Today marks the two year anniversary of the suicide and crimes of pro wrestling star Chris Benoit, the most bleak tragedy in a segment of the entertainment industry that is unusually prone to them. A few days after the incident, I wrote the following essay in an attempt to get my thoughts straight on something that was both staggering and surreal. Although I sent this piece to some editors I knew, the depressing nature of these events made me not pursue its publication with my usual tenacity. To mark this grim anniversary (as well as the recent in-ring death of Japanese wrestling icon Mitsuhara Misawa AKA Tiger Mask), here is my essay on Benoit…

Pro Wrestling’s Unsustainable Lifestyle
By Bob Calhoun
June 27, 2007

Wrestlers go crazy. That’s what they do. They live their lives walking a line between fantasy and reality. The crowd might know it’s all fake, phony, a put-on, but they react to every body slam and spine buster as if they were real. Professional wrestling is a form of theatre designed to create mass hysteria. It fosters this in the fans at home watching on the boob tube, in the fans packed into the arena screaming for blood and, mostly, in the wrestlers themselves.

I worked in pro wrestling’s bargain basement for seven years. I never paid my dues the way that Chris Benoit did and I didn’t make it to the heights of Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment. But even in the little punk rock wrestling show that I used to grapple and announce for, I saw what the squared circle spectacle could do to a guy. It wasn’t just the bumps and bruises but it was the out of control desire to take those bumps and bruises. It was the need to be in the ring and in front of those fans even when there were only tens or hundreds of them let alone the thousands that a man like Benoit played to.

In a tour that I was involved with in 2001, we had a wrestler who had suffered from too many concussions. He was starting to black out in public. He was forgetting where he was. He was really spooking the rest of the boys. The promoter did the right thing and sent him home on a plane to be with his family. It was only a short time later before he got in the ring and started working small time indie shows again around his hometown. This wasn’t a guy who made his living from pro wrestling. He was probably lucky if he made 25 bucks from those shows he worked. Collecting concussions from wrestling was most likely going to endanger his ability to hold down his day job yet he still did it. He just couldn’t stay away.

Roddy Piper calls this “the sickness” in his autobiography, In the Pit with Piper (Berkeley Trade, 2002). He discusses it at length but never quite defines it. He just knows it’s there. And all of us who have been involved with pro wrestling at any level have felt its pull. After a while, you start wanting to become the character that you play in the ring. The day-to-day mundane inconveniences of family court, doing your taxes or filling out job applications pale in comparison to living in a world where all of your problems can be solved with a well-placed shot to your opponent’s skull. Now you take that mindset that’s already hard to resist and you add steroids, mounds of painkillers and weekly doses of head trauma to it and you have an all too often lethal chain of circumstances.

Wrestlers die. They die a lot. A March 12, 2004 USA Today article (High death rate lingers behind fun facade of pro wrestling) states that wrestlers have death rates about seven times higher than the general U.S. population and that wrestlers are 20 times more likely to die before the age of 45 than pro football players. A sampling of the wrestlers who died prematurely between 1997 and 2004 (the dates that the article examined) reads like a who’s who from our collective adolescence: “Ravishing” Rick Rude, “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, Road Warrior Hawk, The British Bulldog, The Junkyard Dog, Crash Holly and of course Owen Hart, who plummeted to his death performing a botched 78 foot repel from the rafters during a 1999 pay-per-view. Since the publication of that article, the death toll has gone even higher and so often it has been without the media attention that the especially gruesome Benoit murder/suicide is getting.

Chris Benoit worked a hard, high impact style of pro wrestling. He regularly dove off of ladders or flew from the top rope and onto the cold concrete floor. His professionalism at so much self-abuse won him a rabid cult following among wrestling fans if not the crossover stardom that The Rock and Hulk Hogan have enjoyed. And pro wrestling is a hard business. There’s no off-season. There’s no time off. No vacations. These guys go at it 52 weeks a year with no breaks unless they need to rehab from an injury that’s so severe that the promotion and the wrestlers themselves have no other choice but to undergo surgery and subsequent rehab. You can only imagine what the incessant touring, house shows and TV matches can do to a grappler’s personal life if they ever even have one.

To cope with this, wrestlers pop pain pills at alarming rates, and then there’s the constant allure of recreational drugs and alcohol. On top of that, the business demands superhuman physiques that are usually only attainable through regular cycles of steroids and human growth hormone as well as the lifting of very heavy weights. Wrestlers are constantly on the road and more than a few have died crashing their cars as they drove the hundreds of miles in between scheduled bouts. Even more have been found dead in hotel rooms. Wrestlers spend a lot of time in hotel rooms.

But Chris Benoit didn’t meet the average pro wrestler’s ignominious end from a coronary in a Cozy 8. He became a real life horror show. For those who haven’t been paying attention to the cable TV news crawl, during the weekend of June 22-24th, he strangled his wife on Friday, suffocated his son on Saturday and then hung himself in his weight room on Sunday. Roid rage is getting a lot of play in the press for Benoit’s breakdown, but the magnitude of his atrocities make it hard to pin the blame on roids, wrestling or even the Mephistopheles-like Vince McMahon.

But still, you wonder what other profession would have had Benoit scrambling around the country away from his family almost every day of the year, taking chair shots, diving out of the ring and then having to slam steroids and somas just to stay on schedule. What other form of sports or entertainment has the recent track record of tragedy that seems to come so naturally to pro wrestling? Pro wrestling in its current form is an unsustainable lifestyle. While McMahon and his WWE are circling the wagons in order to deflect blame for this latest wrestler death, one can only hope that the wrestlers themselves take a good long look in the mirror or risk ending up in sports entertainment’s statistical slagheap.

Artwork: Brandi Valenza

DAVID CARRADINE has been found dead in a Bangkok hotel room. The reports of his death are getting more and more lurid. He may have hanged himself with a cord of some kind. The US Embassy in Thailand is only confirming his death right now. Reports of suicide or mysterious circumstances could just be the results of the Bangkok rumor mill. Carradine lived hard and fast but still made it to 72. In an interview in Psychotronic from the 1990s, Carradine discusses dropping acid and doing other hard drugs like it’s a regular occurrence for him. While Dennis Hopper left his days of easy ridin’ behind him, cleaned himself up and started plugging GOP candidates like both Bushes and Bob Dole at Republican conventions, Carradine lead the rebel life until the end.

Three weeks ago I posted a blog comparing my one run-in with Carradine to my more recent meeting with Bruce Dern (another frequent star of Roger Corman exploitation movies in the 1960s and 70s). I ended up casting Carradine in a bad light. I feel kind of bad about that now, or at least weird about it. On the train ride this morning I even had some thoughts of taking the thing down, but hell, it all happened (plus, it’s only a goddamned blog). And even though Carradine just sat there at his merch table and couldn’t even look up at me, I’m still a fan. I’ll still throw on Death Race 2000 (1975), Death Sport (1978) or even episodes of Kung Fu The Legend Continues every now and then. And you’ve gotta’ be a fan to love Kung Fu the Legend Continues.

Carradine has his SF Bay Area roots. Like me, he went to San Francisco State University. He dropped out and hung out with the Beatniks in North Beach. He chased his espressos with weed. He also held down a job cleaning out the brewing tanks at the Lucky Lager Brewery in San Mateo back when that cheap brew’s bottle caps had weird visual puzzles printed on them.

Carradine beat out Bruce Lee for the role of Kwai Chang Caine in TVs Kung Fu the 70s. Adding insult to injury, Lee created the concept for the show, a fact that Kung Fu’s producers seem to conveniently forget in so many DVD “making of” documentaries. Carradine became the first mainstream martial arts star without being a martial artist. When American Shaolin author Matthew Polly brought some video tapes of old Kung Fu episodes to THE actual Shaolin Temple in China, the monks all thought that the lofan (Carradine) was making fun of them with his bad technique. Bruce Lee went to Hong Kong, made kung fu classics, and became a tragic movie legend on par with James Dean. Like his father, John Carradine, David had brushes of cinematic greatness mixed together with heaps of low budget dreck and an occasional cult classic thrown in. John was in Grapes of Wrath (1940), Stagecoach (1939) and The Ten Commandments (1956) to name a few. He was also in the Astro Zombies (1968) and Blood of Ghastly Horror (1972). David was in the early Scorsese films Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Mean Streets (1973) as well as Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory (1976). He was also in Dead and Breakfast (2004). While not on the level of Bruce Lee as a cultural phenomenon, Carradine still carried enough mystique to play the title in Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies.

For whatever reason, I’m still hoping that rumors of suicide are just that and that David Carradine went the way I always thought he would: from partying just a little too hard for a man his age. While the urge to practice tai chi moves to his old how-to videos may be hard to resist, you should also make the time to check out some of Carradine’s more interesting films. Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) comes to mind, where Carradine chews the scenery along with Michael Moriarty as a mythical Mexican flying snake god menaces New York City. Also see Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), the movie where Carradine dukes it out with none other than Chuck Norris (!) to a soundtrack by Spaghetti Western maestro Francesco De Masi. Also check out Circle of Iron (1978), another project originally created by Bruce Lee but realized by Carradine, this time posthumously. Lee came up with the concept but Carradine was cast in the picture a few years after the Enter the Dragon star’s untimely death. Although Lee may have preferred it differently, the two actors will always be linked and both will be equally missed.

You can leave a comment for David Carradine’s family on his website.

I set up a 75-lb. TKO brand heavy bag in my garage and started sparring again. I’m feeling the effects already – my hands hurt.

My band, Count Dante and the Black Dragon Fighting Society, is backing up Thor, the Rock Warrior, bender of steel bars, destroyer of hot water bottles and singer of such metal anthems as Let the Blood Run Red and Thunder on the Tundra at Slim’s (333 11th St., SF, CA) again this coming Wednesday May 27th at 8pm. Roughly translated this means that me, Jim and The General are going to be Thor’s band for the night. We did this about a year ago and many headbangers and even lowly hipsters came away from Slim’s that night exclaiming that it was the show of the year. We’re also playing an opening set so there’s going to be a whole lotta Count Dante and the Black Dragon Society at Slim’s next Wednesday. If the appearance of the Thunder God who lives to rock wasn’t enough to draw you out on a school night, ArnoCorps is headlining. They headlined last years’ dose of Thor/Dante merged Rag-Na-Rocking and the results were historic if not truly epic.

But back to boxing: since I have to relearn an entire set’s worth of Thor’s music in a little less than two months, I’ve had to listen to a mega dose of Thor. Call it total emersion into the art of the man who brought us the classic film Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare. Last week I started boxing to the same Thor CD that I use to pick up bass riffs from and, thus, found the perfect use for Thor’s straight ahead metal. Songs such as Thunder Hawk drive me to plunge my heavy fits ever deeper into the bag’s canvas and sand mass. When I am wavering, Thor’s lyrics offer affirmation, urging me to keep my arms up and throw leather as the bag sways back in forth in a futile effort to avoid my blows. “Thunder Hawk/I am the Thunder Hawk,” Thor’s voice tells me from the CD boombox on top of my washing machine. Yes, at that moment as I double the right hook into the side of the bag as if I am sinking those blows into an opponent’s ribcage, I am the Thunder Hawk! “In the sewers and the stench/Feeling sweaty, feeling drenched.” Thor, o ancient predator, you truly understand. Thunder Hawk ends. I take a break for a minute and lift my arms above my head and take deep breaths. Knock Them Down starts with its grinding power riff. Another round begins.

“I was born a fighter/Survivor of the street/Only Rage and Fists/Kept me on my feet.” Again Jon Mikl Thor understands the pugilistic urge better than even Jack London or Norman Mailer. “Knock them Down/Oh Yeah Knock Them Down/Rub all their dirty faces into the ground.” No one says it better than Thor.

It only stands to reason that Thor’s muscle rock would be the perfect soundtrack to manly physical pursuits such as boxing, judo or weight lifting. He is the first man to hold both the Mr. USA and Mr. Canada bodybuilding titles. The question now becomes, why doesn’t Thor open a chain of Thor’s Gyms across the US and Canada? With his godlike powers, he has revived a long dead Vancouver hockey team. He has done, and continues to do, feats of strength most of us schleps can only dream of. He has a new record label, Vulcan Sky, which has singed ArnoCorps. Your average Thor’s Gym can pump the music of Thor and other Vulcan Sky artists 24/7 and deliver us from the techo and disco usually played at your average 24 Hour Fitness. I’ll have to ask him about this at practice on Tuesday. Maybe I should write a business proposal.

You can buy tickets for next Wednesday’s show by clicking here.

Wed. May 27, 2009, 8pm
ArnoCorps
Thor
Count Dante & the Black Dragon Fighting Society
Freddie Flex & the Heavy Eric Si-Fi Show
at Slim’s
333 11th St.
San Francisco, CA 94103
$12.00

Here’s a video of last year’s mayhem:

I was really shocked to see the obit for former Creature Features producer Bob Shaw on SFGate.com today. This is so soon after Creature Features host Bob Wilkins passed away – way too soon. Shaw was only 56. Bob Shaw was a monster nerd who broke into television by assisting Bob Wilkins on Creature Features. Shaw helped Wilkins (along with future CF host John Stanley and ISW co-founder August Ragone) with the research into classic (and not so classic) horror and sci-fi movies. He also pieced together the crackerjack title montage of movie clips that played under the beloved Creature Features theme song during the show’s opening. “Stylishly done,” were George Takei’s remarks about Shaw’s work when the Trek star was a guest on the show. After Creature Features, Shaw became KTVU’s resident Roger Ebert, but I always liked him better. He went out of his way to give a glowing review to Godzilla 1985 when other lazy critics were content to just let it head up their year’s worst lists. He pointed out that Pearl Harbor contained no Pacific Islanders in it but had lots of scenes of truckloads of white actors yelling “Go! Go! Go!.” He understood the artistic value of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. I just watched Bob in the Creature Features documentary, Watch Horror Films Keep America Strong. He’s really funny in it. It’s hard to believe he’s gone.

Shaw passed away last Friday from liver failure and complications from Crohn’s disease.

He was one of us, one of us (and he’d know the reason for the repeat better than anyone).

The hard times for monster men continue.

Here’s some of Shaw’s handiwork…

I wonder when the overlords of Amazon.com (or maybe mere hackers) will realize that my punk wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal, deals with GLBT themes? I mean it has gay characters and parodies of gay characters. It also has a pic of a man’s wiener reproduced in full color (IE: He Who Cannot Be Named of the Dwarves in all of his public and pubic glory). As of right now my bestselling book is still ranked. It even cracked the wrestling book top 20 for the first time in a month or so. Of course Amazon would never think that a book on pro wrestling could possibly be gay.

Over the weekend, Amazon.com deranked a wide range of books by gay or lesbian authors and books with GLBT themes. Amazon basically classified the offending materials (many of them sci fi books with gay themes) as pornography, making them harder to find with regular Amazon searches. They deranked David Gerrold’s Martian Child for some strange reason even though the film adaptation of the book (with John Cusak) shows up on HBO Family(!) all the time, but they left his 1970s time travel opus The Man Who Folded Himself alone. In The Man Who Folded Himself, the main character creates alternate versions of himself though time displacement and ends up having gay orgies with them. He later bends the time continuum so much, that he creates a female version of himself and knocks her up. I guess that must be what made everything okay with this book and whoever did this at Amazon–he eventually procreates.

This shows the stupidity of censorship: the censors don’t bother to read or understand what it is they are censoring. I would chuckle over this when I’m through being scared. Amazon already has a disproportionate effect on what does and doesn’t get published. If we allow them to monopolize books, both through moving old fashioned hardcopy and electronic books with their kindle, they will end up monopolizing ideas. Scary stuff for any of us, readers and writers alike, but even more so for someone with a guy with a book that prominently features El Homo Loco prancing around in a pink tutu and dry humping his opponents into submission.

Here’s Salon.com’s Broadsheet’s take on this and a link to an interview with David Gerrold. A hacker is now claiming responsibility for this. Still, let’s keep an eye on this megacorp.

Ironically, this blog is going to be reposted on Amazon.com via RSS.

Why do Hollywood A- listers hate the women who work at makeup counters in mall stores so much?

In a bid to become Hollywood’s undisputed King of Ruphenol, Seth Rogen has a scene where he date rapes Anna Faris in his new mall cop epic Observe and Report. Rogen, as bipolar security guard mounts Faris’ character Brandi and starts pumping away when she is practically passed out (with vomit residue on her face) from handfuls of pills and gallons of tequila. (If only Paul Blart were there to save her.) Halfway through the act, Brandi stirs to give retroactive approval by blurting, “Why are you stopping motherfucker?” But, according to Faris at least, this is all okay because Brandi works at a makeup counter and is even proud of this (from an interview in the Onion AV Club):

No, really, Brandy is the worst. I’ve played a few bad characters in my day, but I think she’s the worst. She works at the makeup counter, and she’s very proud of that fact.

In the minds of Rogen and Faris (and writer/director Jody Hill), women who work at mall makeup counters are like genocidal maniacs or child killers, figures so lowly and cruel that any violence done to them is justifiable. Now the question becomes: what did makeup counter workers ever do the Seth Rogen and Anna Faris? Did women working in the Walgreen’s makeup section kill Rogen’s brother? Did some Macy’s clerks wipe out Faris’ entire family, forcing her to flee from her native homeland?

In comedy, the claim of being an “equal opportunity offender” is often used to cover up multitudes of misogyny, racism and other petty hatreds on the part of the comics who invoke this. That still doesn’t stop it from being true every now and again. Try juxtaposing the funny episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm or South Park with the shows’ occasional duds and see how you feel about them. The biggest crime when walking out on this ledge is not being funny and when you ain’t funny, you land with a thud.

The scene in Observe and Report seems like something out of a Paul Schrader movie. However in Taxi Driver or Hardcore, the protagonist who commits such an act ends up harboring suicidal (or homicidal) guilt over it. In today’s twisted America, it’s all part the new Spring Break comedy sensation.

You can see the scene at the end of this trailer and judge for yourself:

POST SCRIPT: Will I see Observe and Report? Probably not, but it does have Ray Liotta in it. I even saw In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale because Liotta was in it. I am at cross purposes here.

According to Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann and other rabid right wingers, the Obama Administration is in the midst of planning Maoist style reeducation camps plucked right out of Joe McCarthy and Jack Webb’s cold war fevered imaginations. Now what about these reeducation camps? Will financial aid be available for them? Can you pay for their tuition with Pell Grants? What about scholarships? For adult reeducation camps, will you need a GED to attend? How will your SAT scores affect your chances of attending the reeducation camp of your choice? For K-12 reeducation camps, will Obama institute a reeducation camp voucher program for any parents who live in a district with lousy public reeducation camps and want to send their kids to private reeducation camps? Will these reeducation camps leave any children behind? Will they hold teachers accountable? Will reeducation camp commandants receive pay based on merit or will the teachers’ unions stand in the way? Will there be prayer in re-education camps or at least a moment of quiet contemplation where camp attendees are encouraged to contemplate the dominant protestant faith of the United States of America? What about physical education in reeducation camps? Will reeducation camps have music programs or will they only focus on the three R’s (two of which ironically don’t even begin with the letter R): reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic? Will attendees of reeducation camps pledge allegiance to the flag or will the Obama logo do?

With the rising cost of college tuition in this country (up 6% in 2006 and another 6.3% in 2007) and with only 75% of US high school students earning their high school diplomas according to The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, I applaud President Obama’s bold new reeducation policy. With so many jobs being lost in our economic downturn, if there’s one thing this country needs, it’s a reeducation.