Tuesday, February 20, 2024

A note on the pic chosen for my annual Hesperado posting

All the cool people (all 4.5 of them) know about my annual posting tradition on my ex-blog, The Hesperado.  To grace each one, I quickly developed a habit of gracing them with a pic of some celebrity with panache:  The first was Frank Sinatra -- followed by Dean Martin, Robert Blake, Lee Marvin, Albert Camus, Patrick McGoohan, and last year,Jean-Paul Belmondo.

My first instinct was to continue the implicit trend I'd set, of selecting only masculine icons whose persona exudes a cynically studied and jaded joie de verve.  The next one I had loaded up was Clint Eastwood, kicked back in a chair out in the desert with a beer. 

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The only thing that gave me pause, however, was the likely fact that most of the people who know me from Paltalk chat would have seen that, as I had used it for the room before.  This ever so slight misgiving helped to trigger a change of mind in the groove of my thought process.  I then hit on calling the annual posting "Shut up and deal" with a picture of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine from the 1960 movie The Apartment.  However, once again, my Paltalk room intervened, in that I chose those for a new room name.  I then recalled another phrase, also spoken by Shirley, from that winsomely effervescent movie:  "That's the way it crumbles -- cookie-wise, that is."  Nevertheless, my brain was still on auto-pilot, and I was prepared to use the same picture.  Then it hit me: I should rummage around for a better one.  And I found a wonderful one, where Jack expresses a priceless synthesis of existential resignation and dogged integrity (a paradoxical fusion he embodied exquisitely ten years later in the 1970 movie The Out-of-Towners).  A perfect pic for those of us who feel like out-of-towners in our own West.