Regular Show Oooh

[Melchior Dow]

DEWITTYeah. God, he looked good. He's maturing into a remarkably handsome man. I wonder sometimes, though, how much passion he has in him. As he says in The Deer Hunter, he's a control freak.

DEWITT: Well, I enjoy violence. Ever since my accident, I've enjoyed seeing people mutilated or hacked up on the screen....Meryl Streep--I love her, She's so beautiful. She was awful in Julia, and I think it taught her a lot about film acting. She's another great stage actress. I slipped into Happy End on Broadway...I knew she'd become a star. Midsummer at the Yale Rep....a wonderful Helena.

DEWITT: Yeah. I think so. Cimino was trying to paint Vietnam as a moral hell, but he did so at the expense of an entire race. It was quite a feat to make all the "Gooks" look alike--they don't, you know. It's powerful as hell, but there are too many improbabilities, and it's very disturbing morally. I think it will do for the United States in Vietnam what Gone With The Wind did for the Confederacy in the Civil War. In some ways, The Deer Hunter may be the Gone With The Wind of our time.

DEWITT: Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. About on-par with Cousin. Cousine: real lightweight. Maybe I could pick the ten best movies of 1978...I don't think I've seen ten movies in 1978. Terry Malick's Days of Heaven was wonderful. There's Dolby for you. And camerawork--Zsigmond again in places, and Haskell Wexler. Believe it or not, that movie taught me a lot about cinema...about compositions, how to use a moving camera, color...That's the best movie of the year, better than Malick's Badlands, too. His best. I loved Brooke Adams. Real odd, distinctive beauty. And intelligence.

DEWITT: Yes, but not as much. That was a pretty good movie. I think people came down too hard on it after Pauline Kael wrote that ridiculous rave--the one that got plastered over all the ads. Philip Kaufman has a witty visual style, but the ending was a bummer. People in San Francisco are getting a little too mellow.... mel, if you will. Everyone's a pod.

DEWITT: Anything with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. You think I'm joking, right? No, I love those Hammer things. Horror of Dracula: erotic as hell. Fangs into big-busted women in low-cut night gowns...Dracula's a fun guy. They're bringing him back in a new movie with Frank Langella. I snuck into the theater when he was in Boston with it...hated the production, but Langella was terrific-the most cuddlesome vampire ever to suck a jugular. Laurence Olivier will be Van Helsing-I'm gonna be first in line. Then Werner Herzog has remade Murnau's great Nosferatu-the one where Max Schreck looks like a giant rat.

DEWITT: You question with the truculence of many drugged Republicans. Why don't you walk back to your car? There's more in Boris Karloff's monster in Bride of Frankenstein than in Interiors. God, what a wheeze-bag bore. I was embarrassed for Woody Allen. Oooh, were those actors acting. Oooh, spilling their guts out into the camera, "I'm so empty I'm so depressed I've got so much anger in me Watch me crack up Boo-hoo isn't life depressing Look at those waves I'm gonna walk into the surf Whoosh whoosh crash splash." Bleah. That's Woody Allen trying to be arty. All that Freudian bullshit.... I like the guy, he's genius and all that, but he tried to be Bergman in one movie, and not even Bergman could do that. Anyway, Bergman's best movie is Smiles of a Summer Night. I wept at that. Good comedies are usually so sad....

DEWITT: Hey, there's no definitive nothing. Nowhere. I like Kubrick, and he's a cold bastard. I dig Antonioni. They use actors, but they're more concerned with exploring the boundaries of the medium. That's cool. Altman's films are sloppy, but so is true art. Your mother is art, man.

DEWITT: Oh, you mean my regular column stuff. Yawn. They always show the same movies around here. Treasure of the Sierra Madre: One of John Huston's finest movies, with a flamboyantly weird performance by Bogey and real Mexican bandits....

DEWITT: I have to churn this stuff out every week: forgive the stylistic lapses. That's all critics do anyway, spew cliches. Oral diarrhea. I try to keep my garbage lively, but that's all it is, garbage. I don't get paid. I'd rather be out strangling young women and hanging around playgrounds.

DEWITT: Well I don't do it, but I like to watch it. I'm a voyeur. Hitchcock, DePalma, Scorcese's Taxi Driver. They keep me out of trouble. It's a crazy world, y'know Chaim? A crazy world. What else is this week? The Third Man. A thrilling Carol Reed movie, with those magnificent camera angles out of German expressionism and Orson Welles's Harry Lime, a slippery, outrageous performance by one of our greatest filmmakers. Touch of Evil is also in town. Best first and last scene in film history. Am I boring you?

DEWITT: Orange County, Providence, New Haven; don't ask. I had my accident in Cambridge. Never been the same. I'll never get laid again. Can't even eat. Spent the years since slurping butyl nitrate through a straw. You should see the zits...

The sound of pads clashing, coaches yelling and whistles blowing have been prevalent on valley high school football practice fields for weeks, but on Friday night teams finally got to pop pads with someone wearing a different uniform.

Friday, one week before the 2015 regular season kicks off, was a popular scrimmage night, and the winners of the desert's two main leagues got together when defending De Anza champs Shadow Hills traveled to La Quinta for a high-octane practice game with the defending DVL champion Blackhawks.

Well, I would say La Quinta had the better of the play overall, looking more confident offensively than the Knights, but neither team exactly spent a lot of time in the end zone. The Blackhawks had three or four sustained drives, while the Knights had trouble keeping the Blackhawks out of their offensive backfield. Shadow Hills did put together one gorgeous long drive using the two-minute drill before "halftime." It began with a long run by returning All-CIF stud Tony Williams Jr. and ended with him corralling a short touchdown pass in the flat.

The biggest "Oooh! Aaaah!" moment came at the hands of La Quinta linebacker Bryan Mello. Actually more like the shoulder of Mello. In a meeting of two of the best valley players, the talented senior linebacker from La Quinta absolutely crushed Williams in the backfield. It was the kind of hit that belonged in mid-November not Aug. 21. It was the play of the night.

La Quinta quarterback Michael Avina looked sharp. As you might expect, he looked very comfortable running the offense and the ball seemed to have a little more zip on it this year. Avina will be the stabilizing force as the offense will be counting on a lot of new faces after many members of a talented line and stat-stuffing tailback Chris Toribio have moved on to the college level. From what I saw tonight, it appears Avina will be up to the task, while the rest of the offense gets its feet under them.

Shadow Hills basically has the opposite problem. Tons of returning players but fresh faces at quarterback. Junior Damien Stovall and sophomore JD Lang are battling for the spot. It's hard to learn much from a scrimmage like this, but Lang was at the helm during the Knights' most successful drive. He had a nice run to convert a third down and threw a TD to finish it.

I was impressed by the size of the crowd. Both sides had a nice contingent, which I guess shows just how excited everyone is for the season to start again. This game did pit two of the best fan bases in the desert, so maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised.

It wasn't just the two teams working trying to get into regular-season form. A large group of officials were on hand working the game. Veterans showing rookies what to do, where to stand, how to handle the ball and the clock. Every once in a while a new ref would throw a flag, and a veteran would pick it up using it as a teachable moment. It was interesting to watch.

With the exception of La Quinta not wearing their real uniforms, it would have been hard to tell this wasn't a regular season game with the sheer number of hard hits. I kept thinking if this was an NFL preseason game, I would get all my key players out of there. I appreciated the high level of intensity, though, made for an entertaining evening.

Peg's stories of hoboing and wandering, odd-jobbing, playing harmonica and passing the hat on street corners, reconstruct the plights of countless creative, restless southern black men who could find few satisfactory outlets for their energies in the long years of Jim Crow culture. Scarred and battered, yet exuberant, Peg has somehow survived. He recounts in fascinating episodic fashion a life lived by wits and endurance, offering insights and visions as well as prejudices and illusions.

Peg first joined the medicine show circuit in 1938, learning the business from such veteran performers as Pink Anderson. For years, Peg acted as straightman for various funnymen whose routines of eclectic patter were a hodge-podge of folk humor, minstrel remnants and slapstick buffoonery. The shows were designed to draw crowds of farm and mill families, who might buy snake oil or curative soaps. With his favorite medicine man, Chief Thundercloud (Leo Kahdot, a fullblooded Oklahoma Potawotamie, who died in 1973), Peg traveled the South for years, arriving in a textile mill town on payday or at a tobacco warehouse during harvest time.

In the last few years, Peg has returned home to live with his brother Bill. Folk festival organizers have "discovered" him and introduced him to audiences throughout the US. When not performing, he can be found fishing, gardening or playing cards within a few hundred yards of his birthplace, where his grandparents worked as slaves.

The following article was edited by Allen Tullos from field recordings taped for a documentary film about Peg. The film is being produced by Tom Davenport of Delaplane, Va., for release in the spring, and is supported by a grant to the University of North Carolina Folklore Curriculum from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council.

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