Secrets of the City

“He’s a peeping tom!”

“Maybe I’m the only one who cares…”

Two comments say otherwise, max.

Indeed you are not. I have a copy of the apparently out of print “What it is and How it is done” from ‘98 which I remember purchasing at Let It Be. I should go and have him sign it, again.

Being a crisping lover, I was severely disappointed to learn the actual contents of his website.

Bah-dum-bum! No? Nothing? Crap.

At any point does he try to kick David Letterman in the face? Yes, I am very old…

Yeah, his website is terrible but I am totally in for going to see him. Should we make it a group event?

I actually saw this Letterman when it was on the first time! I too, am old.

In fairness to Glover, the Letterman appearance was a stunt, and he was in character as Rubin Farr, a character that appeared in a few of his own videos, as well as in the movie Rubin and Ed. This sort of eccentric stunt was really not that uncommon on Letterman at the time.

And I say yes, let’s go as a group, bubbles.

I always thought it was just a bad acid trip. only because I’ve acted that way before.

Do we know when the tickets will be on sale?

I too thought Glover was on the drugs. Am a little disappointed to discover otherwise. It doesn’t get any better than Letterman in his wrestling shoe era. Kaufman vs. Lawler anyone?

hello, mcfly!! your website looks like it was made in the 50s! anybody home? think, mcfly, think!

Bubbles, I saw it live too. We’re both old.

My Nazi IT people won’t let me go to the web site. When’s the show?

I’ll also be going. Whee! I love that little man.

He’ll be here February 1st to the 3rd. Tickets are not yet on sale.

This has nothing to do with this post but I submitted a link and it disappeared from the unapproved list but it hasn’t been posted yet. Is it just gone? I was trying find the link because I didn’t save it.

Here’s a protracted, but true, Crispin Glover story. I had a friend named Tracey when I lived in LA, who fascinated me. She was obsessed with Jung, and everything in her life was framed as a cosmic coincidence. Her stories were so exaggerated that I was never certain if she was a chronic liar or just genuinely possessed a life of staggeringly serendipitous experience. I tended to believe her, though, because whenever I was with her, extraordinary coincidences would happen. “I was talking to Christian Brando the other day …” she would say, and whoops, there he was, walking down the street, Christian Brando.

A lot of her stories were about Crispin Glover. The first she ever told me had her driving around Santa Monica and she happened to pick Crispin Glover and Nicholas Cage up in her car, despite the fact that she never had met them before this moment. And they kept calling her Tracey, despite the fact that she had never told them her name. Her stories progressed like this, getting weirder and weirder, with her eventually getting into a brief fling with Glover. Of all her stories, these were the strangest, but I couldn’t tell if they were exaggerations, outright lies, or if they were just strange because, well, they were about Crispin Glover.

So on my last day in Hollywood, before I moved back to Minneapolis, I went for lunch at Musso & Frank’s, because it is a great old Hollywood restaurant and I never felt I took advantage of it enough. And, seated in the booth next to me was Crispin Glover, in a very neat suit and tie. He met a young woman there, and she interviewed him for a magazine, and I listened in. And the interview was very mellow and very smart, and Glover had an etymological dictionary with him, and sometimes looked up words in it. She asked him if he was eccentric, and he looked it up, and discussed its scientific origins, that it represents something that spins around something with a strange orbit, or without a fixed center, and he thought this was a very nice way to describe him.

After the interview finished, the young woman left, and I did something I never do — I leaned over to talk to him. I apologized for interrupted his meal, but I said that I had a friend who claimed to know him, but I was never certain whether she was telling the truth or not, because her stories were always strange and filled with coincidence.

“Are you talking about Tracey?” he asked.

Oh, and I didn’t approve the link, Bixby, because we linked to the story about a week ago. Sorry — once something is unapproved, it just disappears.

Weird, max, very weird.

One of the best Glover-related stories I ever heard was on a broadcast of This American Life in 2003 or so (before I moved here). The story was about a guy who made a movie. He had filmed the same story three times, once it was real, twice he used actors. The story was about a guy who drove down to Bakersfield to hang out outside of a TV station hoping to get on the air. A cameraman came out to test a new camera and shot some footage of the guy who was psyched to have a camera pointed at him. He left and the cameraman forgot about him. A few weeks later, the random guy called the TV station and said he was putting together a talent show in his hometown and the guy should bring the camera up to get some footage. The guy was described as a kinda dirty/white trash/factory worker type, scrawny, drove a rusty convertible.

Camera guy said, what the hell, I’ll got up there. He got to the talent show and was told the guy was getting ready for the show in the back. The local moritician was doing his makeup as he got into drag to do an Olivia Newton John song (it was late 1970s or so). Obviously, the show was a trainwreck.

Anyway, a few years later the guy re-did the story, embellished it a bit and got Sean Penn to play the role. A few years after that he got Crispin Glover to play the role.

I think the movie was at Sundance in 2002 or 2003. Can’t remember the name of it, which kills me because I really want to see it!

Those are Trent Harris’s Beaver Trilogy films. Trent also directed Rubin and Ed. I was emailing him a few years back because I got interested in his films. He was a really decent guy in emails.

Sweet, thanks, Max! I emailed him too because I wanted to find a copy of it. He was a good guy.

wow. i sure want to see the whole trilogy.
although i think that may require a lot of drugs and alcohol.

You’re up pretty late, Chuck.

Me? I’m MnSpeaking in my sleep.

Unrelated, but I would live here.

Me? I’m MnSpeaking in my sleep.

Well, that explains some of the posts lately…

Here’s the link to buy tickets.

Which night is everybody going? I’m thinking Sat.

How’s Saturday for you, Bubbles?

Saturday works fine for me!!

Cool! I just got my tix.