I’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” a number of times. I enjoyed it a number of those times. However, during my latest viewing, I could not ignore a particular continuity goof, nor the plot contrivances and the abject lack of chemistry between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint.

Today, if this movie were remade – verbatim – it would bomb. Even with production values improved to what is capable now, with location shots instead of set pieces – but the original script, plot and pacing intact – the film would be an utter failure, a snoozefest that stretches disbelief beyond any credulous boundary.

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Since I’ve been so busy with CrippleBush lately, I’ve neglected the hell out of Divided Front. Today, I tried to remedy that. I planned on re-recording a handful of tunes but, now that the day is done, I managed three. It amazes me sometimes how I manage to piss my time away without accomplishing anything substantial.

As it is, I’m glad I managed the three tunes. I took a decent chunk of time to tab out “Down and Out in New York City” … it’s been bugging me for so long that no one else in the world has tabbed the song.

It isn’t laziness that kept me from doing myself, though. I can pick out a song, find the notes, figure out the riffs and fills, the chords and the melody … but it’s such an arduous, harrowing process. It doesn’t come easily for me. I don’t pick the correct notes right off and blaze through a tune in minutes. I have to painstakingly dissect it, find a sequence of notes and then use that to determine the key and, from there, I start to learn the song.

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This is a James Brown tune from the “Black Caesar” soundtrack. I have never been able to find a tab of it, so I did it myself.

There are a few fills missing. I didn’t feel like tabbing them out since they’re all based on the key, which I’ve provided. Just noodling in the minor / relative major scale will do the trick.

There are probably mistakes. I’m fairly sure the verses don’t ever go [ Ab Gb ], but I liked the variation so I transcribed it that way.

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[ Bb minor / Db Major (Bb C Db Eb F Gb Ab) ]

Yeah, man, like you know…

[ Verse riff: ]

[ Verse 1: Ab Bb | Ab Bb | Ab Gb | Ab Bb ]

I was born in New York City, on a Monday
Seems I was out shinin’ shoes by Tuesday noon
All the fat cats in the bad hats doing me a really big favor
Got the fat cats in the bad hats laying it on real good

[Chorus: Bb Ab Gb ]

Here’s a dime, boy
Gimme a shine, boy

Horn and Flute riff:

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I watched ‘Predator 2′ the other day, maybe two days ago … I can’t remember because my concept of time has been turned entirely on its head thanks to the graveyard shift. I ordered some sushi and took in some sci-fi action from 1990 starring Danny Glover as the improbable man of high action.

Maybe he would have been more believable to me if he wasn’t wearing zoot-suit grandpa pants upon which I could see the line of his tighty-whities when he put his High African Booty in the air while running for cover from gunfire — in one of the first scenes. Maybe if he wasn’t ingrained in my mind as the avuncular “Too Old for this Shit” Murtaugh from the Lethal Weapon movies. Maybe. But it worked, regardless. The movie worked on a lot of levels, particularly the one of high camp … which I’m not sure was intentional.

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Sho, I watched Sean Connery in ‘The Name of the Rose’ tonight. Good thing I wash alone because I had no one’sh time but my own to washte with that plodding beasht of boredom-inshpiring pacing and banal plot.

Still, the movie has its merits. Christian Slater is not one of them. He is now at the top of my list of actors whose presence in the cast will prevent me from watching something. I have since ‘Heathers’ avoided all of his works like the swine flu (Winona Ryder also irks me), but this movie kept gnawing at my consciousness and I decided to put my Slater compunction aside, mostly because it’s one of his (I think) first films … so how obnoxious could he yet be, right?

He was more annoying than anything else in the film, playing the “beautiful” young novice, fancy-boy jackass. Nice tonsure, you douchebag.

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I just watched ‘Predator’ for the first time in about 10 years. It’s still entertaining. The special effects have held up really well, too, for a movie more than 20 years old.

Yesterday, I watched ‘RoboCop 2′. There was a god awful piece of crap of a movie. Amazing to me that Frank Miller wrote it. Frank Miller, who is one of my favorite comic book authors. The man who rescued Batman from the homo-tastic clutches of the ’60s-era ruination wrought by the Adam West depiction … Miller made Batman dark and gothic, gritty and menacing.

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I’ve never really lived anywhere else than in the area of New York City. I spent a few summers in the bucolic Upstate countryside, four years amidst the flat nothingness of mid-Michigan … but I spent an entire childhood and adolescence amidst the flat nothingness of anti-urban-but-not-quite-rural Long Island only 38 miles from Manhattan, and have now spent close to a decade in Brooklyn.

New York, when I was a kid, was the place where my dad worked and where the Rangers played hockey. It was the place where my poster of John McEnroe walking through a smut-filled Times Square was photographed. But I had no concept of the city as a grand and dangerous place. It was Barclay Street and Madison Square Garden. For a long time.

The nature of this place in the ’80s was lost on me because I was never permitted to be subjected to its vagaries — except to witness what seeped into my limited locales. Unlike the cougar I dated who romped and stomped through the Lower East Side in the Koch years, I was watching Thundercats and Transformers in a cookie-cutter house out east.

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I’ve been on a movie watching kick lately, since my girl is out of town. She and I were watching ‘the Shield’ and ‘Deadwood’ religiously, so there was no room in the queue for anything else. When ‘Deadwood’ started sucking, we just switched over to non-stop ‘Shield’ … that show is amazing.

On the agenda for today was, effectively, a pornographic movie called ‘Shortbus’ … which was so awful I turned it off after less than ten minutes. It’s a bad sign when a movie consists entirely of fucking (and hokey changes of character that involve panning through a pastel drawing of New York), complete with ejaculations, and it’s not even remotely erotic. Plus, I don’t even like white people, let alone watching them fuck … and the token Asian woman doesn’t count, fill in your own aspersion. If there’s an option on Netflix to give a movie no stars, this one’s got it coming… hardy, hardy har.

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No cursing, I promise.

I watched ‘Unforgiven’ for the first time Tuesday night. I enjoyed it. I love Westerns, in general, and I think Clint Eastwood is both a crackerjack director and a consummate badass.

That doesn’t count as curse.

Still, though this movie was considerably better than the dross that is churned out year after year, I found it to be a little thin … especially for an Oscar-winner, but winning an Oscar doesn’t really signify the greatness it is purported to bestow. Denzel Washington won for ‘Training Day’ supposedly … sure, he was a convincing villain, but Oscar-worthy? It’s commonly held that it was a make-good for being snubbed before.

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I am not going to be objective. So when I say that it is a sign of being fucked in the melon that you get off by shitting upon someone else or being shat upon, I don’t care if you think it’s normal. It’s not. You’re a freak, you’re mentally ill and you probably have Hepatitis C.

But that little fit of hate distracts me already from what I’m really here to deride … “The Time Traveler’s Wife” … oh, please God, why?

The commercials are not going to cause a reaction any stronger than whatever I jot down here but, for the sake of hyperbole — of which I’m so fucking fond — the movie’s promotional spots make me want to kill someone associated with the film while I vomit from disgust.

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