J.D.’s Columns

The Movie Business Northwestern Montana After a summer of laying in the grass beside good trout streams, the fun tickets ran dry in Browning, Montana. I had connections in California, made a few phone calls, and came up with a job as a location scout for a group who wanted to shoot yet another mountain man movie. Two hundred and fifty bucks a week, plus expenses. Big money in those days. I had no idea what a location scout did, but I did know the mountains where the film was to be shot. At the appointed time of the first meeting with my new employer, a black Lincoln town car pulled up in front the Timber! Cafe, in Augusta. Out of the driver's side climbed a pudgy white male human, clad in beaded elk fringe leggings over Gucci shoes. Around his neck was sixteen troy ounces of chain with a golden goat dick dangling from it. I should've run out the back door of the Timber!. Instead, I hurried onto the sidewalk to prevent this Californian from being eaten by log truck drivers. My t...

Ponderings           At the age of 84, I am certifiably old in the game of life,   but not quite ready to cash in my chips. It has been an interesting process. When I was 21, I was certain that I would have a handle on the changes by the time I was thirty. What I didn’t know was that the changes come faster than one can accommodate or adjust to them. Thus, as an old fart, I have lingering questions.      For instance, who or what am I to believe now that lying has been institutionalized by the government at all levels? Will Artificial Intelligence, which mines cyberworld for its information, eventually learn to lie to us? “Gee. AI, how is the security of our power grid?” “Oh, just wonderful, JD.  It is the most secure power system ever developed by humans.”      So, I have sluiced my memory box to reclaim chunks of knowledge that were given to me over the years by folks who had no reason or inclina...

Being Rich       I grew up in a union household where being rich smelled of worker exploitation.  I am old now and my thousand bucks a month Social Security check ensures that I will never be accused of ill-gotten rewards. My daughter and I were recently discussing how diddled we, as members of the working class, were becoming because our leaders are greedy people when she reminded me of how we once felt rich, during the Wendy’s era.       We were living between Petaluma and Point Reyes, northern California, while I took care of an assortment of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, dogs, and poultry, including peacocks, on a couple hundred acres of prime Marin County pasture.       The property was bordered on the north by Red Hill Road that began in Petaluma then snaked up and down through San Francisco’s milk supply and ended up twenty miles west at Point Reyes National Seashore and the big blu...

                              The Executioner’s Fork         Five of us roomed in three bedrooms, a kitchen and one bathroom of a stout white house near Harvard Square. Charles, the producer of the unfinished film that gnawed at our waking lives shared a room with Beryl, who ate only with chopsticks and spent her days with runes and Tarot cards.      I'd quit a tree-trimmer’s job in California, enrolled in graduate school in Cambridge, then dropped out and returned to California for six months to help Charles as he ran his lens across the new consciousness born in the Haight-Ashbury. In Cambridge my friends from college were dealing Mexican weed and windowpane acid. My room was a leaded-glass turret with a radiator that sounded like it puked hailstones. There were brown roses on the wallpaper.  By pressing my thumbs on my eyes, just so, the ro...

  Catching Dewie’s Mare        I was a tad grouchy that October morning, forty-some years ago, when my old stock truck rolled along the Snake River and onto the flatlands where Dewie and Carolyn lived in a barn above their fluctuating herd of horses. Dewie was a horse trader, Carolyn a horse tamer and carpenter. Dewie said he always had more horses than he could afford, and Carolyn claimed they had three doors in the barn house that went nowhere.      Dewie stood with a rope halter outside a pole corral with half a dozen horses all snuffy, tails in the air, stirring up dust. When he saw me, he turned and hooked a boot heel in the corral fence and stuck out a paw. We shook hands and he asked what I was doing.       I allowed that I was headed to find winter work in California, that I had quit my ranch job in the high country yesterday when I discovered all my missing work gloves under the seat of th...

The Kitchen Radio      On the prairies of western Nebraska, a plastic AM radio tuned to KCOW was a standard  kitchen appliance. It provided gossipy news, country music, Kiddie Carnival, and tornado warnings, sunrise until dark. That is where I learned the words and tune to Teddy Bears’ Picnic.       After sunset, the outside world flooded the kitchen. AM frequencies from thousands of miles away skipped into the Sandhills. One of the strongest signals was from XELO, Juarez, broadcasting from just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, out of reach of US regulators.       That was where I first heard Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, Bebopaloola, Waiting for a Train. The frequencies were taken over late at night by what we called Holy Rollers. The piece that follows is an example of their programming. I once had a recording of this broadcast so I could demonstrate to my effete FM-listening east coa...