This past Thursday, I went to a book release party for Keith Knight's new book of comics, What a Long Strange Strip It's Been. The pirate store went all out for the event, buttressing its usual offering of lard and guts with frills like beer and soda, chips and salsa, and a huge box of chocolates (booby-trapped with just enough cough syrup bonbons to keep me nervous, but not enough to scare me away entirely).

Mr. Knight's band, The Marginal Prophets -- a sort of hippity-hoppy group with two singers (cute, funny, smart lyrics with Hegel references!), a stand-up bass, and a ukelele -- played for awhile, but the sound system kept exploding into blasts of feedback, so they opted to fly netless and perform without it. To do this, they asked us, the audience, to support them by clapping out a rhythm. Clapping to the beat always makes me feel like a super Christian, but the band was just so balls out (and to the wall), it was the least I could do. I even found myself smiling that glassy-eyed grin that seems to go hand-in-hand with clapping -- I couldn't help it!

I did some more goofy clapping on Friday, to the musical stylings of Jim Riggs, the Mighty Wurlitzer organist. (Ohmygod, did I ever tell you about the time Sophia was in the market for a used organ? She found a whole list of them in the classifieds, and, sitting next to me on the couch, she dialed the first number. The guy picked up and she actually said, totally innocently, "Hi, I'm calling about your used organ?" Then we both spontaneously, simultaneously combusted into laughter and she hung up. Like we were in seventh grade! The best part was that she called back and tried to appologize and explain, but the guy refused to understand what was so funny about used organs. Maybe that's an important part of being an organist: not having a sense of humor? Anyway, Sophia has a piano now.) We were there for Paramount Movie Classics night, and this time around Jim was warming up the crowd for Jaws, playing some old standards and even some of the famous "dun duh, dun duh" movie score. Good, clean, god-fearing fun.

The movie itself was really scary. I mean it! It was also much grittier than I remember. Actually, I was surprised by how fine a film it was, what with the characters all developed, etc.

I remember reading all this stuff about how, during the filming of the movie, Spielberg was in a total panic over how fakey the shark looked, so he only used it in a few scenes. But yay, it turns out that, and this is one of the oldest lessons of horror movies, what you don't see is a lot scarier than what you do. (Holy crap, the "That can't be! That's inside the room!" sequence of Aliens? Just thinking about it gives me chills. And they're multiplying!)

I wonder what Spielberg would have done with Jaws if he directed it today. Totally ruin it, right? There'd be some ridiculous computer generated shark, and it would get all these tight, loving, close-up shots, which would appear in pretty much every scene of the movie. Or, as a guy said while we were filing out of the theater (one of those mighty erudites who's funny to overhear, not so funny to be married to), "If they made that movie now, Spielberg would add a scene at the end where they cut open the shark and Quint pops out, still alive." Totally.

But the ending is one of the best parts of the movie. "Quint?" the Richard Dreyfuss character says to the Roy Scheider character. "No," he says. And that's it! They just turn and start paddling their way home ... there's maybe some wry joking after that, but really, that's pretty much the ending. So spartan. So perfect.

But yeah. I don't even think the movie would be called Jaws anymore. Amnity Emnity, maybe. Bloody Waters? We're All Going to Die? Shark on the Water? Raiders of the Lost Shark? OK that's not funny at all. Not even not-funny funny. Naptime!

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)

(PS: My diary has officially moved over to my official evany.com website. Let's meet up over there!)