“Making movies and preserving them are the same thing.”
- Martin Scorsese, 2009 Golden Globes Cecil B. DeMille award speech.

Your author’s favorite movies released in 2008 told stories about alienation. The characters were lone, misunderstood, one-man armies like The Dark Knight and Redbelt; or former superstars banished to the margins of life, like Randy “The Ram” in The Wrestler; or postmodern activists like Che and Milk whose audacity propels them as epic leaders as it equally prompts their murder; or social outcasts and misfits like the celebrity impersonators in Mister Lonely, the picaresque gobot WALL-E, and the country simpleton in Jerzy Skolimowski’s undistributed Four Nights With Anna.  These movies portray the perverse, sinuous, sometimes sublime, and often violent predicament of alientated individuals.
Your author’s favorite movies of 2009 tell stories about identity.  Perhaps personality refabricates into others of one’s own self?  The 21st century has allowed, for the individual, a sublimation of guises, technological or psychological, whether believed to be real or fake. It is popular for people to walk around as if a camera follows them at all times, catching the idealized angle and posture in the world of the head as seen on TV and magazines - like the motto of YouTube: “Broadcast Yourself.”  2009 has been a year for the drama of the behavior of identity.  America elected a leader who has made mountainous progress for the image, sensibility and emotions of the country, yet has not proven variegated in the policy of economics and war.

Observe & Report (Jody Hill).
The Informant! (Steven Soderbergh).
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Werner Herzog).
The characters of these three favorite movies of the year are first motivated by the effects of a particular contemporary malaise: in Bad Lieutenant, it is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as in Observe & Report it is 9/11, and in The Informant!, it is the impalpable red tape of corporate conspiracy. These events bear seeds that compel the characters to do violence and abuse their particular roles of power.  The male megalomaniacs of each movie do not question their actions, but impetuously justify them, and the viewer watches as new layers peel off the psychic selves of these men, who use the fanfare of injustice as a platform for their unruly, manipulative, vigilante actions.

Terry McDonagh is the Bad Lieutenant, “port of call: New Orleans,” and the city, as both setting and signifier, is like the old gothic plantation house where McDonagh’s ex-cop father and the old man’s girlfriend still dwell, deeply spaced and rife with the ghosts of sin-eaters. McDonagh’s use of painkillers for his back (injured saving a jailbird during the Katrina aftermath) turns into a merciless drug habit. This affects his policing only in intensity, and it is to his ecstatic credit that he finds a way of solving his own decadent problems by intertwining them with his cop work.

Still, when things at the end seem at an upswing, the Bad Lieutenant sits alone in a hotel room, glowering sadly over his coke, and he is off to repeat his old late-night clubkid shakedown, for a bite of the kibble. Who he is still slips from his fingers – he clings to a lucky crack pipe, actually sees near-dead souls breakdancing, and ingeniously indicts an old society matron as “You’re what’s wrong with this fucking country!” The Bad Lieutenant is not a bad cop. He acts flagrantly in his own aggrieved, chaotic interest, but also orchestrates a successful murder investigation.

In Observe & Report, Ronnie Barnhardt is obsessed with guns, and obsessed with his own idea of himself using them in combat as an adjudicator of wrong things.  He is a parking lot patriot and fat-ass fascist, and his superhero-ego splits.  Ronnie turns himself into exurbanite spy Gil Jacobsen, a secret savior of the American way of life, and Gil ends up getting gang-stomped by cops to the Flash Gordon soundtrack.   Part of Ronnie’s classic American syndrome is his total helplessness - he desperately wants to be part of the war effort, and so at the movie’s climax Ronnie’s soul achieves supreme composure after he gunblasts the mall-flasher.

Marc Whitacre, in The Informant! is a man who projects a strange ingratiating honesty, but that honesty is rooted in a psychological dark matter of fibs. Like the Bad Lt. and Ronnie Barnhardt, Whitacre perceives his transgressions as acts of ultimate good, and is thrilled to see the stipple portrait of himself in the Wall Street Journal. He fools the FBI and smiles for the surveillance camera. He conducts a Nigerian advance-fee scam and incites his bosses at the corporate corn company to the certainty of microbial Japanese subterfuge. After all of Whitacre’s intricate mendacities, the greatest surprise is the discovery he wears a hairpiece.

Soderbergh uses a peanut gallery of familiar comedic actors from TV and stand-up who pattern the movie with a brisk bathos, along with the jouncy Marvin Hamlisch score, and Whitacre’s absurdist, factoidal voiceovers, which are seeming non sequitors that turn the all-too-familiar V.O. device on its tail. Likewise Soderbergh satirizes the “based on a true story” conceit, which Hollywood so underhandedly believes endows its crappiest output a moral veracity - “So there.”

Movies should be trusted to create, for the audience, the most dire fantasy, where and when the audience might experience and apply their own human predicaments: a possessed cop, a wily corporateer, and a tormented security guard at the mall. These movies are giddy, portentous, and naked.

Paul Rudd - Actor of the Year.
Mr. Paul Rudd is a grave and hilarious leading man. In Role Models (David Wain) - released Nov. 2008 but watched by your author in 2009 - Rudd plays a guy whose first reaction to the world is negative, summating a mid-30s male hotheadedness born from the hatred of his own life, and taking it out on everyone else. To Danny Donahue, the world is a betrayer and insulter of his vague ideals. Danny has a million pet-peeves, like coffee-sizes in Italian and when people say “ASAP.” Every instance becomes a justification for Danny to vent his own aggravation with himself. He ends up losing his girlfriend and in jail.
In I Love You Man (John Hamburg), Rudd plays a guy who is happy. He is a supportive and caring fiancee and a moderately successful real estate agent. But his happiness is revealed to be a certain contentment, a finickiness about order that instigates an abhorrence to spontaneity, or self-reflection. Rudd’s wide-ranging effects as an actor and comedian come delicately together. He is handsome enough to be charming (like the intellectual slacker in Clueless and macho cocksman in Anchorman) but just shrimpy enough to be a believable social geek (first glimpsed by Rudd’s Paris in Romeo & Juliet and then Knocked Up).

Mr. Paul Rudd is also the co-creator of your author’s TV show of the year, Party Down, as if Clifford Odets met with John Hughes to make a sitcom. Let’s get Rudd in the next 2009 Golden Globes Cecil B. DeMille award winner Martin Scorsese’s next picture!

Bruno (Larry Charles).
Bruno parodies with mondo-movie derring-do what people will do to get famous, narrated as a continuum of degradation on the part of both ishmein Bruno and the ambitiously prejudiced victims of his shenanigans. Bruno and his team are certain perverse moralists playing the cultural pinball machine for the end of a decade, exploiting the quest for fameness with dildo-machines and sushi served upon wetbacks. Bruno will hold you to your word and will use it to his end, not exactly unadulterated but not out of context either - like the Supreme Court hearings.

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino).
The director uses his vainglorious stature as an indie/hollywood avatar of creative freedom to indict the indie/hollywood historical epic.  He has fun employing the topic of history so favored by both the industry and the art film - WWII and the Nazis. But Basterds is not a holocaust movie, and instead the Jews get to brutalize the Nazis. Goebbels is an SS movie mogul, his blockbuster a violent sniper film based on events that had happened only a few years before but easily embellished to support the cause.

Pop WWII movies are indulged: the dumb grunt “Lt. Aldo Raine,” femme fatale spies, charmed Nazi psychos. But this is not just revisionist history, which for all its innovation still seeks a naturalistic truth, but a history that is personological.  The intellectual past is seized by a substantial, goofy strategy (could it be said that cable TV newsvangelist Glenn Beck did the same this year by titling his book with the name of freethinker Thomas Paine?).  Shoshanna plans out the ultimate indie film, in revenge against the Nazi Party moviemaking industry, whose leisure-classed patrons, in a French arthouse set demonically ablaze, are mowed down by two Jews disguised as Italianos.

Star Trek (J.J. Abrams)
Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie)
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Stephen Sommers).
Diehard fans of the Star Trek TV show, the Sherlock Holmes books, and G.I. Joe action figures were either appalled or elated by the new beginnings of each these pop brands.  J.J. Abrams is a kinda smarter director than Guy Ritchie, and while no-name actors are assembled and put into action with a ripsnorting, mindbending finesse by J.J. in Star Trek, great Hollywood actors Downey Jr. & Jude whisk through Sherlock, beating an egg that resists to be smoothed, always a few steps better than their surroundings, which constitute Rachel McAdams, the overdone setpieces, and the underdone gags. Sherlock hints at cheekiness in its plot materials (wireless networking, chemical warfare, Holmes’ idea of a gun-silencing mechanism), but never lets them breathe. Star Trek endears even non-fans to the memory of the show by a graceful insinuation of the poppy catchphrases, the iconic score and Vulcan idiosyncratics.  It is a fine metaphor of re-triggered franchises, the viewer of the old and the viewer of the new – like Commander Spock, both here right now in space but stuck back in time.

G.I. Joe, unlike Trek and Sherlock, is a first stab at making a live-action movie of the product, and it esteemably succeeds. It is patient with the audience’s expectations for insightful, fucked-up action.  The Joes are indeed like a rambling team out of Howard Hawks, and it seems natural that Paris, France should end up so fantastically sacrificed.  Your author and co-viewer Q.R. Markham were half-inspired to dig out from the basement their action figures to re-enact Storm Shadow fighting Snake-Eyes.

The ending of each of these flicks anticipates that the real villain is yet to come, for a sequel pending box office returns (like Batman Begins) - Klingons, Prof. Moriarty, and Cobra Commander.  Obama is positioned similarly against his given enemies.

Antichrist (Lars von Trier)
Couples Retreat (Peter Billingsley, the kid from A Christmas Carol).
So much of each movie mimics the other. Modern married couples retreat to “Eden” to work on their marital issues. Eden is mysterious, not what it seems, a dreadful remote area in nature puppeteered by an occult force (whether the subconscious or the French). The couples confront one another in the bare nude, a certain occluded horniness makes friction. But the viewer feels like Willem Dafoe, the character “He,” with a concrete wheel nailed into his leg and dragging himself into a tree-hole, as Vince Vaughn waxes again and again like an animatronic wolf on the dumbest assumptions of love and happiness. Retreat from the Anti-Couples!

Avatar (James Cam)
District 9 (Neil Blomkamp)
Gamer (Neveldine/Taylor)
The transport of human consciousness is treated by these three movies.  As the decade ends they provide the working boilerplate for movies to come in the next. The idea of “the new human” is not new, and has been informing sci-fi literature for a good part of the 20th century. But this theme might not have been accessible to the popcorn & pretzel-bites date-night multiplex crowd until they themselves had been soft-wired and pod-plugged to the squibby neurolexoid.  And the movies lay on heavy the Commando gearhead gunnery - no matter the supertechnic advancements in information science upon which the flicks are premised, the army is suberbly raunched out for blood-and-guts combat.  The mix of multi-dimensional camera technology, soldier-of-fortune hardware, and bowlderized social messages is what moviegoers should expect to be shoved into theaters as if unprecedented in the following ten years, as the technical takes the prestige awards.  Observe & Report could somehow too be a presage…

In Gamer, one “games” via humanoid marionette: entering the mental and motor skills of another individual, in video game format, and sending that individual into the virtual killzone. But the locales are dark and confusingly placed, and though the filmmakers seem to want to embed the viewer right up in the crazy shit, the killzone is so vague and the colors so faux-sepia, the melodrama fizzes. Any surreal saving grace is effected when Dexter inexplicably does a dance number to “Puttin On The Ritz.”

Avatar and District 9 both end with the protagonist accepting full transformation into an alien species, and the viewer is led to believe that the character is better for it. The aliens in both movies are symbols of third-world refugees, indigenous peoples, noble savages. In District 9, the aliens are immigrants; in Avatar, they are the occupied aborigines. In both, the bad army guys are inglorious bastards hellbent to oppress, enslave, plunder and kill. James Cameron has the U.S. marines blown away as seemlessly as Los Angeles cops in The Terminator.

Avatar gives up on humanity in a way that WALL-E did not. District 9 plays with audience empathy by making the protag both a victim and a racist, but the movie soon drops its Ideas in favor of a pile of hinge-less, febrile action scenes. In Avatar, the hero begins as a spy for the “Jarhead Clan” but ends up siding with the tree-huggers after he is forged into the cosmic consciousness.  As the furtively applicable scrivener Q.R. Markham remarks, the scenes on Pandora look like the 1970s psychedelic album covers of Yes.  Let’s hope, that if James Cameron wins an Oscar, he gives thanks in Na’vi language, so that it would be known no one really understands what Hollywood is trying to say.

The Manhattan apartment building Alwyn Court turned 100 this year. . .

In April 1908, Walter Russell, a New Yorker, filed for bankruptcy. The Tribune listed the man’s assets at nearly $30,000, and his debts at $330,000. They were tabloid figures. Most of Walter Russell’s money was in real estate. Russell was a builder of cooperative studio apartments north of 57 ST in Manhattan, and recognized as an innovator in the field. Investments in his projects had totaled nearly 2 million dollars. These ventures were multiple dwellings located near Central Park with good light and working artist’s quarters. In an era when most New Yorkers whose esteem could afford it preferred a single family home, Russell and his associates marketed to the high-business end of the Art World as first tenants. Popularly, Artists lived freewheeling, communal lives, predisposed to inhabit a room that is surrounded on all sides by other rooms of other inhabitants, in continuation. But the cooperative system engendered a new kind of shareholder, so the buildings were more often occupied by stockbrokers and executives bent on the flair of culture’s forward-guard.

At the time of Russell’s bankruptcy, a new apartment building on the southeast corner of West 58 ST and Seventh AV was being completed; planned as a select, cooperative setting of luxuriant living. Walter Russell, a green man with Van Dyke beard, aesthete’s beret, orator’s pedigree and a stable of Arabian horses in Oyster Bay, had been instrumentally involved in the origins of the co-op, though no sooner were the building’s emblazonments being molded by the Atlantic Terracotta Company in Staten Island, than Russell was listing as a dischargeable creditor Mr. Alywn Ball, the chief broker of the building as well its namesake, Alwyn Court.

As if in a new light zone, no exterior proportion of building Block in town has been as densely assigned an imaginative identity in proportion to its available square footage as has Alwyn Court. Flurries of up-fanned earth grow snarled silhouettes while stalactites of indescribable adornment rhapsodize the entranceway arch; vases disgorge petals like floating majorette boots, in low niches are flagstaffs banded shapeshiftingly to hold the night oracle. Space girth and space use grapple like wrestlers. In such a way, Alwyn Court is an indigenous work of New York City architecture.

As a young man Walter Russell worked as a magazine illustrator and covered the Spanish-American War for Collier’s. His folkloric business acumen combined with a grave penchant for Beauty to move Russell into the city’s real estate market. Manhattan’s potential for development was like the act of railroads through the frontier over bridges where ferries once ran. Wall Street freebooters had forced the city’s environs up the island, and no longer did only immigrants live in appartements.

In 1902, Andrew Carnegie, the steel maven, had built for himself a mansion on East 92 Street and Fifth Avenue. This would be the first house in America to be reinforced with a steel infrastructure, as well as the first single-family dwelling in New York City with a personal passenger elevator, itself reliant on steel cables. Carnegie had made an intergalactic fortune in steel. Steel made skyscrapers, and steel made the cables for the elevators which caused skyscrapers to be actionable. So, as any man would, Carnegie put these innovations into his house, inscribing his own personal space with the two biggest achievements his life investments had yielded.

In comparison to the precepts of Carnegie, Walter Russell operated on the lower sides of Central Park, concerned with elements less joistable than steel. “Elements are not things,” said Russell, “they are conditions.” The man was a sculptor and portraiturist commissioned by Mark Twain, both Presidents Roosevelt, songster Victor Herbert, and the State of Florida, where Russell made a statue of the first American soldier killed in World War II. Rudyard Kipling penned Russell a letter that would be The Great Gamesman’s very last. Russell also wrote music; presided over the Society of Arts and Sciences; founded the New York Ice Skating Club; and taught himself the practice of physics. He supported his formulas with phrases a philosophical steamfitter would use. “Every particle of matter in the universe is separated from its condition of oneness.” He comported the easygoing camaraderie of the motivational speaker with the disturbed conviction of the rocket engineer, and worked out of the studio bowers atop Carnegie Hall, the music emporium which also provided residencies to Artists of acceptable renown. Carnegie Hall is one block south of Alwyn Court, same side of the street, just north of the Times Square fantasy factory where cannonball jugglers, sandhogs, schmeg-meists and hustlers shared seats in the grindhouse. “Say thou to him that his moving is My moving, for without Me he can in no wise move.” Alwyn Court is an architecture of the element Neptunium, which Walter Russell is loosely – as well as Plutonium - credited with having discovered for The Periodic Chart.

Though more rooms were built for personal maids and servants to live and work, the apartments of Alwyn Court, originally, featured music rooms, salons, and a conservatory where private performers of refined, abstruse taste may have played. Who knows what adventures of the subconscious were inspired in the few children who grew up creating Transvaal cavernscapes in its deep arched hallways, who heard voices in the window ledges over which the homunculus giggles and The Sun Man shrieks.

Preeminent to the new-looker of the building are the giant salamanders breathing fire. These salamanders are the largest forms and placed as if according to project housing along expressways: 54 each like a deck of playing cards including the jokers. As noted on the Landmark Preservation Commission plaque at the building’s entrance, the salamander is the royal symbol of King Francis I of France, Court of Angouleme, coronated 1515-1547. The salamander, like a gargoyle, will protect - Builders Rites have accorded a certain shazam. Because the creature is said to live in fire, it staves fire; a whole world that lives in that which destroys it. In 1910, this mythos was exploited when Alwyn Court went up in flames. The exterior was unharmed, and the few residents temporarily displaced by the incident could not in effect call themselves refugees.

A deaf animal, the salamander respires through its skin and responds firstly to ground vibrations. In appearance it is an otherworldly thing, passed over by zoos and toymakers; its own name slick and sinewy. Alwyn Court is a product of an era of New York City regional design, Post-Civil War to pre-WW II, when so many new things were influenced, modeled or inspired by the way France made itself look: the creators of The Statue of Liberty, the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel, the words “apartment” and “vaudeville.” As the emblem of King Francis I – his standard, pendants, drapeaux, sword-hilts and crownwork - it is what the Lion is to Great Britain, the Harp to Ireland, the Beaver to New York State (in prehistoric times beavers stretching six feet in length, like krakens of the Jersey Meadowlands).

Walter Russell was a highly disciplined individual, variously so, who in his many books and writings set forth a mystical belief reflecting both the bootstrap New England childhood and Old World education abroad. “I draw strength from a super-power which is Light,” Russell confides to his readers. Light, guise of Energy, like the cloak of spies in war, and all the presence and absence of human action colludes around the right use of that Energy. The only published biography of the man, by an acolyte, is titled The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe. If published today, fairly, Russell would resemble the spirituality/self-help section of the bookshop rather than occult or philosophy. He would most suitably trigger Discourse online.

In the late 1920s and 30s Russell was an ally of Thomas J. Watson, the prime mover of IBM. Russell lectured that company’s administrative brass on Two-Way Thinking and The Hydrogen Age: “the very secrets of life and death, which have eluded men for ages, lie within a knowledge of space.” Never much of a stylist with words, Russell wrote lengthy, panascopic novels for children’s reading, preciously bound in leather and lavishly illustrated by the author. These books were not liquid assets. Later in life, he and his second wife Lao Russell, whom he married in Reno, Nevada, collaborated on treatises that warned of the effects ozone erosion would have on the new human. Russell, in ways, is the grandfather whose anxious influence is dismissed by your parents but whose self-published books on civic constancy, landscape architecture and necromancy are sitting in trunks in the attic, still unrid of.

Voluminous cups garlanded by swamp-snakes given heads of fey thespians, merman faces gawking at the public, token cherubs clinging to bowl bottoms. The presence of secret sophistication within the living units seduces the potential lessee: that wealth goes hand-in-hand with the imagination of history and that one may gain it. Soon after Alwyn Court was constructed, residential development snowballed up Manhattan island. The prestige of initial northwardness wore out quickly. And the French style by which the building was influenced was not that which would be found en masse in buildings like Grand Central, the Public Library, the Farley Post Office, the Old Police Headquarters, or even the Ansonia Hotel up on West 75 Street & Broadway where a Bohemia of august consequence became legion - Babe Ruth, Theodore Dreiser and Arnold “the Big Fixer” Rothstein never made it to Alwyn Court. The building emptied of tenants by the 1930s and new owners carved the inside into smaller pieces, like when T.G.I.F.’s, originally a swinging East Side singles bar, went franchise offering the same fried fare for the same.

King Francis I was known for his grandiloquent promotion of the Arts. The King persuaded the immigration of Leonardo da Vinci to French domain, where Mona Lisa was given final strokes. Paintings in the halls of Fontainebleau show the Master dying in His Majesty’s arms. Amongst King Francis’ legacy of letters is a correspondence dated 1524 from Giovanni da Verrazzano, the sea-voyager. Da Verrazzano was born near Florence at a time when that city was a capital of the Holy Roman Empire - the publication of Dante’s Divine Comedy having been two hundred years earlier, the rough equivalent in time scheme of today’s U.S. Constitution. Verrazzano is the first European to have sailed into Lower New York Bay, his expedition kickjumped by King Francis I for reasons similar to those of the Dutch East India Co. sending off Henry Hudson: to unsaddle Spain’s ride upon the laurels of Christopher Columbus, whose adventures were already passed down like the tales of The Argonauts and Uncle Remus and the Whirling Dervish. Verrazzano may have been a pirate executed by the Spanish during The Italian Wars, as some records claim, or eaten by tribes in Canada. Either way, the Narrows over which spans the bridge named in the 1960s for Verrazzano lead to New York Harbor, the galaxy’s greatest while territory called New World is still being discovered by water. For unknown reasons, Verrazzano stopped short at the Upper Bay, like “Just the Tip” Tommy at the Elk Hotel most afternoons down in the Glittering Gulch. But Verrazzano named the land his ships encountered as Angouleme, for Francis, like Virginia for the Queen, and the Abbott who rode the sea’s dragon to the isle of St. Brendan.

Alwyn Court is an Upper West Side building in what years later commuters call Midtown. In 1908, immigrant communities in the Lower East Side, by ethnicity count, were often larger than that of their homeland capitals, and, compounded, they lived in Grotesque tenement buildings. The downtown slums were chiefly owned by those New Yorkers bathed in the money of the Mauve Decade, who sought mythology in their own expedition up past 42 Street so that the current peerage did not register them as fugitives. Fifteen years later Russell would propose to the Real Estate Board of New York a six-mile extension of landfill south of Manhattan Island into the bay. His pitch was based on “the law of centralization of the wheel principle and which is immutable as the law which forces water to seek its own level.” He feared that commercial districts would rampage Upper Manhattan, whose re-fertilization was Russell’s own personal concern, and claimed that “nothing in New York is permanent, but that great centers form themselves as nuclei for the time being, live their lives of brief prosperity and move on, ever obeying the law.” Unable to envision the Bowery or Soho scenes in the 1970s, Russell stumped to graft Broadway, already the longest avenue in the state, another 120 blocks toward the Atlantic Ocean.

Whether discussing realty method or The Sex Principle, Russell’s writings grant highest priority to the materialistic maximization of balance. Each May, Russell would retreat from the urban routine and seek “solitude and aloneness in forests.” He admitted that, ever since the age of seven, as Spring set in, he experienced an ineluctable seizure of illumination. In order to foster this flash of deeper realms, mine it for clues upon clues, he must flee the world, out to “checker-ferns, Arbutus leaves, pulpit-jacks.” He published a lyrical recording of these experiences in 1949, The Book of Early Whisperings, “varying lack of body awareness balanced with my ever-increasing cosmic God-consciousness with God and Nature.”

By May Day 1909, Walter Russell’s debts were cleared by the U.S. District Court, after a brief dispute by his most-owed creditor over language regarding equity in land versus cooperative shares: quantifiable air-rights, bought and sold, and, at the time, elusive of the Bankruptcy Code. The way to comprehend all multitudes of things at once, which stillness is a rapid motion through space. The surface of Alwyn Court elicits no mystery to the order of the skybox. Each day dozens of red doubledecker sightseeing buses barrel past the structure, though often enough the Tour Guide is finishing up with facts on Central Park and gearing up to point out the Carnegie Deli, where pastrami sandwiches are made in imitation of prehistoric sizes.

References.

. . . we indulged fast foods and drank big gulps and drew pictures of what we believed it looked like down where the S-man lives. . .

Jesus Army(.mp3)

My New New Yorker.

. . . bus driver, husband to Ethel, father to Bonnie & Jennie, drummer for the Cootie Band, dutiful gardener, carrier of camera & coffee thermos, Twilight Zone fan, grandpa, the old goat, who liked to guk it all up. . .