sweetheart redux

  jill crane obituary

    Above - both sides of a valentine mom made me  in 1993 or 1994 Pages from one of the magazines mom and I used to make for ourselves in like the early nineties.   The hand is mine and the pretty stargirl hippie drawing is hers:

Well, it's going to be my mother Jill's birthday this Sunday, September 18th.  She died May 2, 2016.  I'm going to post things that remind me of her this weekend.  this (above) is one of our favorite scenes in the 1991 film Dogfight .  The first time we saw it was shortly after River Phoenix died.  We turned to each other simultaneously when this part came on and started crying because it was so sad that River was dead. This was another movie we loved, Housekeeping (1987):   My mom and I loved Guns N' Roses.  We had the video for Patience (above) on VHS and both loved the scene (at 5:19 - 5:21) where he's watching TV in his hotel room and looks disenchanted and handsome.  We rewound the tape just to see that part once or twice and even had it on "pause" at that scene before, and took a picture of the TV screen.     us in front of her apartment, garage sale, 1997  one of her many (possibly over a thousand ...

If you are a frequent reader of the blog, you know that much of what appears on here is an exploration of two of the main characters of my life, my mom Jill Crane and her best friend Bill Tunilla , and the years spent with them in Pasadena.   Whenever I walk around my old Pasadena stomping grounds (often), I take note of the changes versus all the things that have stayed the same, and I take it all so personally, thinking things like “When I was a kid, I had no idea they would build a Target on this block someday.”   I have a hard time keeping up, and often give Geof (who is unfamiliar with the area) directions that apply to the Pasadena of two decades ago, like the other night when we went to a movie at a Pasadena theater he hadn’t been to before and that I guess I hadn’t been to since I saw “Me and You and Everyone We Know ,” which seems like just last year or something but was actually released in 2005 (I looked it up).   I told him “Just park behind this bui...

  "cheer up, son":  Apocalypse Now Death Cards scene Sad: -In fourth grade my teacher was a flamboyant gay drama coach whom I adored even though sometimes he was high-maintenance, requiring constant attention and adoration from his students.  He had a very lesbianish friend he'd known for forever who was a part-time flight attendant - because she loved adventure - and also a substitute teacher; she taught our class whenever our teacher was out sick.  They were probably both in their forties.  He wore a professorial cardigan and a goatee.  She was tiny, with thinning short hair and an appealingly ugly face, and when I saw Rocky Horror years later I was reminded of her by the character of Columbia.  I was very attached to them and always imagining what they were like in their regular lives outside of school, just hanging out with their friends, and what their respective apartments may have looked like and what music each listened to.  One day, ...

I was raised middle class but I always knew I would be poor. In the broadest possible terms, my mom was from a poor dad and a poor mom so she was 100% poor, while my dad was 50/50, so that has me at 3/4 poor, not in precise math I guess but definitely in fractions as done through an emotional filter. So, maybe that has something to do with it.  In any event, when I went grocery shopping with my middle class dad and stepmom, it was usually to the Gelsen's in Marina del Rey, and in case you've never been there, let me describe the experience. For starters, the store resides withing spitting distance of a marina full of docked yachts and the top-shelf only bars where carefree, asshole-ish yacht-owners drink and dine (maybe not in precise geography but definitely in the Marina del Rey of my mind). Being in Gelsen's and knowing that all goods on display could be bought by this half of my family was a palpable relief. At this Gelsen's, if you were standing in front of a r...

When I was a little kid my mom lived in this rooftop apartment on Marengo Street in Pasadena.  But rooftop apartment isn’t quite the right description – it wasn’t an open-air bar atop a fancy hotel.  It was this building:    My dad had custody of me during the week, letting my mom have me for the weekends. This apartment was the first and best location for my mom weekends.  I was still crazy about her and she wasn’t out of control yet.  She was an alcoholic but she managed to keep the same part time job for years.  In her later years she became a hoarder; but at the apartment on Marengo she was just a scatter-brained collector with a perfect eye trained towards trash and cheap stuff that was beautiful.  In this apartment, the vintage children’s books weren’t on the floor and soaked in cat pee like they were in her last apartment, and the old toys weren’t mixed in with clothes she never wore in the bedroom she couldn’t ope...