Keeper of the Clown Bell

I like the Winter Olympics. I attended the 1976 Insbruck games and saw  Franz Klammer and  Dorthy Hammel win gold.  All a hazy 50 year old memory for me now but I was there, hight of the Cold War , surrounded by spooks fighting for control of Europe and the future of the West. There was some great hockey at the '76 games which I also saw along with Alpine ski jumping and some other sports I can't remember. I was 14 years old and after a few days at the Olympiad I wandered around Austria with my grandparents swooshing the slopes of  Kitzbühel  and  Zürs. A lot has changed in the world over the past 5 decades but the Winter Olympics are mostly the same except for goofy snow board races and big air  loop-de-loops. Thank God we won the Cold War! A year and a half earlier President Nixon had resigned his presidency and I'll always remember the tears I wept watching this man address the nation on a black and white TV my grandfather had gifted me. It was a...

  First Kiss Standing outside an Episcopal church in Middletown, RI this October I was approached by a TDS addled Senator (D-RI) who said, "I didn't expect to see you here." It's probably true, I don't live in Rhode Island and I haven't summered there for well over a decade but I did make the 8 hour drive up I-95 to attend a memorial service for our old friend who had passed away in the summer after a long illness. She died in Scotland, which is a place she loved, and was buried there but her American friends insisted on gathering to celebrate her life and spirt on Yankee soil. I responded to the Senator, "I wouldn't miss this, she was a very important person in my life" which was the truth and he grunted an affirmation then pressed on to glad-hand his constituents. The recently deceased was best friend to his wife so maybe he had heard second hand stories or idle gossip about my past associations and intertwining history with the lady being eulo...

When I was a boy my parents took me to the Uptown theater in Washington, DC to see Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece, "2001: A Space Odyssey," in all its 70mm glory and while I don't remember much from my pre-teen youth I do remember this spectacle. The America of 1968 was just starting to chase the LBJ Great Society pipe dream and the near future envisioned by Arther C. Clark and Kubrick had not yet taken it's  50 Years of Failure  detour so the fantasy of orbiting space stations and expansive moon colonies seemed achievable. In fact, a young boy of today watching this movie might rightly ask, "why don't we have these things? Shouldn't I be living in a Moon base? What happened to this future I was meant to inhabit?" There's an answer for those questions and it's shown in the film's opening "Dawn Of Man" sequence when the circle of monkey-men huddled around a watering pool get beaten and run-off by a competing clan of mon...

  Longtime readers of the KOTCB blog will know that Rob "Meathead" Reiner has a lifetime pass on Clown Bell ringing due to his 1984 film "This Is Spinal Tap" which remains one of the most based and high-handed spankings ever delivered to Hollywood, celebrity culture and the "liberal" ethos (such as it is) in these United States of America. It matters not a whit that this  evisceration of America's post-1973 corps was performed by comedic thespians possessed by the spirit of the times in an effort to ridicule the Anglo-Saxon, high testosterone, white supremacy of Heavy Metal Rock 'n Roll. This Mockumentary depicts the cultural revolution of "The 60's" and its degenerate 1970's aftermath with more unfiltered authenticity than reality itself. The unintended consequence of creating a work of art that gets interpreted by the audience in ways that the artist couldn't conceive of during production is a recurring source of merriment f...

It was a lazy, hot July afternoon and I'm lounging with my son in the man cave watching the FIFA Club World Cup final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey just shocked by the way Chelsea is dominating PSG. Not what we expected but... I can't say we were feeling bad about the halftime score as we discussed first half plays and various strategies for the second half while ignoring Doja Cat and other misfits perform satanic rituals during the   "Global Citizen" halftime show . Just another sportsball diversion with the usual fake enthusiasm and cultural wasteland pomp we've all grown accustomed to when, to our surprise, a diminutive and deformed   Emmanuel Kelly took to the stage and busted out the opening lines of Coldplay's kindergarten carol “A Sky Full of Stars.” Laughter filled the room at the site of this Iraqi troll, deformed by chemical warfare and abandoned in a box, now temporarily fronting an English pop band at an international spectacle seen by millions....