Last Sunday, a church in my neighborhood hosted what its signage referred to as "A Michelle Bachman Event". Since the event took place on a Sunday, in conjunction with regular services, would that not mean the church was offering a tacit endorsement of Bachman for president? And if so, shouldn't that immediately cause the church to lose its sweet, sweet tax-exempt status?
The law is pretty clear on that, but the Republican party increasingly believes itself to be above the law. And not just the laws of man; clearly, it has no use for the laws of God, or at least for the intent of the man all Republicans loudly proclaim as their savior, Jesus Christ.
Consider Michelle Bachman. She was absolutely, fanatically opposed to raising the debt ceiling, whatever the consequences may have been. Her oft-stated mantra is, we don't need to borrow and spend more, we need to cut and save.
Oh, but what would Michelle cut? The same thing all the other Republicans would cut: "Entitlement" programs such as Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start. Programs, obviously, designed to help the neediest among us, the poor, the elderly, the disadvantaged. No Republican is quite brazen enough to come right out and say "Fuck the poor" but they don't really need to: Deeds speak so much louder than words.
These people, again, stridently proclaim their Christianity. But how do they balance their tireless advocacy for the wealthy, their blatant disregard for the poor, with the actual words of Jesus, as found in Matthew 25: 31-46. We'll use the King James version, for the sake of tradition:
31When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
34Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
35For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
36Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
37Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
38When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
39Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
40And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
41Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
42For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
43I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
44Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
45Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
46And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
I mean, that's not the least bit ambiguous, is it? The meaning is clear, right? So if you claim to live your life according to the teachings of someone, and blatantly ignore everything he stood for just to further your own personal agenda...
I guess what I'm saying is, enjoy your everlasting fire, Michelle.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Thursday, August 04, 2011
NEW CONTENT, OF A SORT
Oh, I've meant to post stuff. It's not like there's nothing to talk about. But whenever I felt like discussing, say, the whole debt-ceiling debacle, I'd find myself getting more and more depressed and...well, who needs that? Not you, faithful reader. And certainly not me.
Still, as a way of generating some sort of new content here, we turn--as we haven't for awhile--to out old friend YouTube. This interstitial from the first season of Sesame Street handily displays everything that made that show such a watershed for developing young minds--it has a dreamy, free associative quality that allows a viewer's mind to wander where it will, and (thanks mostly to the music) a somewhat melancholy feel as well. Nothing made for kids these days is like this anymore--certainly not the current incarnation of Sesame Street--and we're all poorer for that.
All well and good, but let's face it: I'm including this mostly because it has a beagle.
Still, as a way of generating some sort of new content here, we turn--as we haven't for awhile--to out old friend YouTube. This interstitial from the first season of Sesame Street handily displays everything that made that show such a watershed for developing young minds--it has a dreamy, free associative quality that allows a viewer's mind to wander where it will, and (thanks mostly to the music) a somewhat melancholy feel as well. Nothing made for kids these days is like this anymore--certainly not the current incarnation of Sesame Street--and we're all poorer for that.
All well and good, but let's face it: I'm including this mostly because it has a beagle.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
BUT HEY, AT LEAST HE DIDN'T COMPARE ANYONE TO EVA BRAUN
So Jerry Lewis was at some TV critic's confab or other, there to promote a cable TV documentary about his career, and, as usually happens when he makes a public appearance, he took the opportunity to reveal his essential Jerry Lewis-ness, his uncanny ability to deliver a few observations that are undeniably cogent and wise, but mixed with a noxious egotism and a profound inability to understand when too much is way more than enough.
He railed against reality TV: "The medium is busy knocking its brand out to display the fat lady at 375 pounds who in two months is gonna be 240. Who gives a shit?"
He railed against the movie industry, technology and pretty much anything that popped into his mind: "The industry has destroyed themselves. It's no longer relevant because it puts all its product on a stupid phone. You're going to put Lawrence Of Arabia on that goddamned stupid sonofabitch? [Social media] are wonderful technical advances, but once people see how much its cluttering up their life, they'll figure it out for themselves. We're not going to have human beings in twenty years. People won't be talking to other human beings."
All well and good, and pretty much dead-on (although, hey Jerry, why do you have to work blue?), but the problem is, who the hell is Jerry Fucking Lewis to complain about people not talking to other human beings? This guy's whole life has been spent holding grudges against people who dared to contradict him, or told him something he didn't want to hear, or simply asked him a question. (My favorite part of the DVD commentary tracks of Lewis' Paramount titles were his muttered passive-aggressive asides about journeyman cinematographer Wallace Kelley, who shot most of Lewis' films. I gather Kelley once may have made the mistake of actually taking credit for a lighting effect or something, thus giving the impression that they weren't personally crafted by The Total Filmmaker himself.)
As happened, for instance, at this very same event, when someone asked him about his self-announced plans to retire after this year's Muscular Dystrophy telethon. "Who told you that? I never read it. Anything you read, read it twice."
Lest you think Jerry was just being coy, making with the funny and the ha-ha, when another reporter asked him what his exact role would be on this year's telethon, he responded, "It is none of your business."
Geez, Jerry. "I didn't mean to sound rude, but on September 5th, the day after that program, I will have an international press conference, and I will have plenty to say about what I think is important, and that is the future, not the past."
Now see, this is where this almost gets poignant, or would if it weren't kind of creepy, like a Krusty The Clown remake of Sunset Boulevard. Here's Jerry Lewis at 85, faced with the prospect that his annual 24-hour telethon, once a beloved national institution, has been cut down to six hours, a sure sign that the world has moved on, but he can't quite deal with reality. No, he'll hold an "international press conference" to clarify his role in this thing that nobody cares about. Clearly, in Lewis' mind, the world still revolves around him. He's still as big as ever, it's the telethon that got small.
He railed against reality TV: "The medium is busy knocking its brand out to display the fat lady at 375 pounds who in two months is gonna be 240. Who gives a shit?"
He railed against the movie industry, technology and pretty much anything that popped into his mind: "The industry has destroyed themselves. It's no longer relevant because it puts all its product on a stupid phone. You're going to put Lawrence Of Arabia on that goddamned stupid sonofabitch? [Social media] are wonderful technical advances, but once people see how much its cluttering up their life, they'll figure it out for themselves. We're not going to have human beings in twenty years. People won't be talking to other human beings."
All well and good, and pretty much dead-on (although, hey Jerry, why do you have to work blue?), but the problem is, who the hell is Jerry Fucking Lewis to complain about people not talking to other human beings? This guy's whole life has been spent holding grudges against people who dared to contradict him, or told him something he didn't want to hear, or simply asked him a question. (My favorite part of the DVD commentary tracks of Lewis' Paramount titles were his muttered passive-aggressive asides about journeyman cinematographer Wallace Kelley, who shot most of Lewis' films. I gather Kelley once may have made the mistake of actually taking credit for a lighting effect or something, thus giving the impression that they weren't personally crafted by The Total Filmmaker himself.)
As happened, for instance, at this very same event, when someone asked him about his self-announced plans to retire after this year's Muscular Dystrophy telethon. "Who told you that? I never read it. Anything you read, read it twice."
Lest you think Jerry was just being coy, making with the funny and the ha-ha, when another reporter asked him what his exact role would be on this year's telethon, he responded, "It is none of your business."
Geez, Jerry. "I didn't mean to sound rude, but on September 5th, the day after that program, I will have an international press conference, and I will have plenty to say about what I think is important, and that is the future, not the past."
Now see, this is where this almost gets poignant, or would if it weren't kind of creepy, like a Krusty The Clown remake of Sunset Boulevard. Here's Jerry Lewis at 85, faced with the prospect that his annual 24-hour telethon, once a beloved national institution, has been cut down to six hours, a sure sign that the world has moved on, but he can't quite deal with reality. No, he'll hold an "international press conference" to clarify his role in this thing that nobody cares about. Clearly, in Lewis' mind, the world still revolves around him. He's still as big as ever, it's the telethon that got small.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
IF YOU MUST RETURN IT, YOU CAN SEND IT HERE
Every Friday, I picked Sue up from her van pool. We'd never go home; we'd go out to eat somewhere, usually someplace quick and cheap, a KFC or a Subway. It might have been nice to go someplace better, to linger over fine food, to laugh and share our thoughts.
No time for that, though. She saw her therapist on Friday evenings. She liked to get there a little early, to sit in solitude and gather her thoughts. Me, I had my own ritual: I'd keep driving up the Rockville Pike to the Borders bookstore in Germantown.
It was an unnecessary drive in a way, since we had a Borders in our own neighborhood. The one in Germantown had a different vibe, though. The cafe area dominated the entire front section, and on weekends it featured live acoustic music. I'd linger in the magazine section--every Borders seemed to stock a different lineup of magazines--listening, reading, relaxing. It was, in a way, my own form of therapy: with that weekly ritual, I purged whatever demons I may have been wrestling at the time. I began to relax, to be still.
During those waning months of my marriage, I had any number of Borders stores I haunted with some frequency. The one in Northern D.C. had the best selection of DVDs and graphic novels, the one at White Sands had the most eclectic lineup of fiction and media studies. Still, I wondered, why so many stores? Why not have one huge location combining all the best features of every store?
Indeed, the seemingly insatiable need for expansion, to place an outlet in every conceivable market, was one of the factors cited in the decision of Borders' corporate overlords to shutter the entire chain. There were other reasons--the tanking economy, the rise of e-books--but expansion overkill was almost certainly the last straw.
For consumers, however, the signs of the end had come in the form of the chain's reaction to slowing sales of recorded music and movies: the once substantial (if overpriced) music and movie sections were reduced by half or more, if not eliminated entirely, and replaced by a bizarre assortment of pop-culture gewgaws. The Borders here in the Des Moines suburbs carried so many Nightmare Before Christmas-themed figurines and board games, it felt more like Hot Topic, albeit a brightly-lit Hot Topic that sold a metric ton of Tom Clancy novels.
That particular location closed a few months ago, and though I had spent many, many happy hours there over the years, in the end, I wasn't sorry to see it go. It had turned into nothing more than a delivery system for the latest best-sellers, and the author most likely to stop by for a book signing was Sarah Palin. It was no longer a place for me, or anyone who cares about books, and it never would be again.
No time for that, though. She saw her therapist on Friday evenings. She liked to get there a little early, to sit in solitude and gather her thoughts. Me, I had my own ritual: I'd keep driving up the Rockville Pike to the Borders bookstore in Germantown.
It was an unnecessary drive in a way, since we had a Borders in our own neighborhood. The one in Germantown had a different vibe, though. The cafe area dominated the entire front section, and on weekends it featured live acoustic music. I'd linger in the magazine section--every Borders seemed to stock a different lineup of magazines--listening, reading, relaxing. It was, in a way, my own form of therapy: with that weekly ritual, I purged whatever demons I may have been wrestling at the time. I began to relax, to be still.
During those waning months of my marriage, I had any number of Borders stores I haunted with some frequency. The one in Northern D.C. had the best selection of DVDs and graphic novels, the one at White Sands had the most eclectic lineup of fiction and media studies. Still, I wondered, why so many stores? Why not have one huge location combining all the best features of every store?
Indeed, the seemingly insatiable need for expansion, to place an outlet in every conceivable market, was one of the factors cited in the decision of Borders' corporate overlords to shutter the entire chain. There were other reasons--the tanking economy, the rise of e-books--but expansion overkill was almost certainly the last straw.
For consumers, however, the signs of the end had come in the form of the chain's reaction to slowing sales of recorded music and movies: the once substantial (if overpriced) music and movie sections were reduced by half or more, if not eliminated entirely, and replaced by a bizarre assortment of pop-culture gewgaws. The Borders here in the Des Moines suburbs carried so many Nightmare Before Christmas-themed figurines and board games, it felt more like Hot Topic, albeit a brightly-lit Hot Topic that sold a metric ton of Tom Clancy novels.
That particular location closed a few months ago, and though I had spent many, many happy hours there over the years, in the end, I wasn't sorry to see it go. It had turned into nothing more than a delivery system for the latest best-sellers, and the author most likely to stop by for a book signing was Sarah Palin. It was no longer a place for me, or anyone who cares about books, and it never would be again.
Friday, July 15, 2011
ALL THESE PLACES HAD THEIR MOMENTS
I sit on top of the passenger car, surveying the nocturnal landscape. The outskirts of a small town--a meatpacking plant, a filling station, a river snaking through the night. Just as I'm figuring out my surroundings, I hear noise at the end of the train.
I climb down. A family--an old woman, two distracted adults and several small children--of indeterminate ethnicity insists that I participate in their ritual. Glowing rings appear in their hands, are tossed in the air, and all family members catch them, expertly. One ring is flipped to me. I catch it, barely, but it tries to pull from my hand. I let it go, and it flutters briefly, then clatters to the ground. Only now it is no longer a ring, its hollow center is full, like a bottle cap. All other rings, their centers also full, fall to the earth, their magical glow extinguished.
The old woman regards me with great sadness. "Death," she says. "Death will follow you."
"Follow me where?" I ask, climbing without much enthusiasm into one of the elegantly-appointed cars of the train.
"Everywhere." She pulls the door shut.
Cats and dogs, some remembered, some unknown, crawl through the car. I ignore them, drawn to the rickety steps with the railing around them, illuminated by a single bulb. A shelf runs along one side of the stairs, filled with old board games--Clue and Monopoly, sure, but also Dark Shadows and Mr. Ree! and Planet Of The Apes. That last one was mine, of course, and I want to stop and linger over it, but I continue down the stairs. There should be a little dresser at the bottom, with the bathroom on the other side, and the familiar clutter of the dining room all around--this is the house I grew up in right? Something long dead and all that?
But no. I get to the bottom of the stairs and it's just another car in the train. The club car, and really? This is the death following me? Skeletons and cheesy-looking zombies dressed in old-timey suits? This is supposed to represent what?
I slide open the door of the club car and continue on to the front of the train--or possibly the back, since I have no idea which direction I'm going. There's a car full of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, and kind of like the cats and dogs, some are more familiar than others, but I focus on a screened-in area beside this car, filled with diffuse, unearthly sunlight. I enter, making awkward conversation with more people I barely know.
But I recognize them. They're musicians who worked briefly with my ex-wife. Some of them are perfectly cordial, some are pissy and bitter, holding inexplicable grudges against me. One is particularly vocal, and I cut him off by saying, "Hey, I just wanted her to make a halfway decent album, and you couldn't deliver."
"Yeah," he says, "but what about what she wanted?"
Death. Yeah, I get it. My marriage. Ha. Very symbolic, like that stupid MASH episode where we see everyone's dreams. Next thing you know I'll be floating in a river of severed limbs, just like Hawkeye, and please, God, can I never think of that again, or any episode of MASH from the BJ-with-a-moustache era?
The train stops.
Or simply ceases to exist, since I don't actually disembark. I stand at some sort of crossroad--ooh! symbolism!--deciding which way to go. The landscape looks vaguely familiar--kind of like the bottom of Cemetery Hill, but not really--so I just pick a direction at random and start walking.
Soon enough, I'm joined by Paul, who greets me with his usual, "Hey."
"Hey. How was the new Harry Potter?" I ask.
"Do you want me to tell you? I'll be seeing it again with you..."
"Yeah, I know, and that's why I'm thinking this whole 'death will follow you' thing just isn't making much sense. I mean, yeah, I dated your Mom, and that didn't work out, so sure, another failed relationship, another 'death'"--I make sure to deploy ironic air quotes--"but you and I still hang out."
"Yeah, we're hanging out right now."
I stop walking. "But you're not actually here."
And indeed he's not. The road has stopped at a large white house, with a neatly-trimmed lawn and a river running beside it. People sit on the steps, people I should know, dressed like cast members from The Waltons in their Sunday-go-to-meetin'-time clothes. They're portrayed by ex-cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000 because why the hell not, but they're passing around old photos and mementos and things I should know. They're talking about Mom, but they're getting the details wrong.
"You can't know," I say. "You weren't there. I wasn't there, either, I wasn't there, even though she asked me. She wanted me to come up that Monday night, to crash at her place before I took her to the doctor the next day, but I begged off because I was tired, and so she fell and when I got there Tuesday she had that horrible bruise on her head and she was hallucinating and...Maybe if I'd been there, maybe if I'd been there..."
My tear-filled eyes make the sun-dappled water in the river shimmer more than usual, then it twinkles, and I realize there is no river, it's just an elaborate video display, and the image changes to a wall of ads for nineties hip-hop albums. There are shelves all around, books and DVDs and old LPs. Mom sits beside me in a plush leather chair.
"I'm afraid I could spend some money here," I say.
"Do you have money to spend?" Mom asks.
"Some, yeah."
She smiles. "If you see something you want, you should get it. If you wait, it may not be there when you come back." Her words hang in the air, fading. I realize I'm coming back into the waking world.
There's a cat on my pillow and a cat at the foot of the bed. Janie is in my arms. I pull her a little closer as she sleeps, feeling her breathing. The fan gently blows the cord of the window blinds, and I listen as it bounces against the wall, clack, clack, clack.
I climb down. A family--an old woman, two distracted adults and several small children--of indeterminate ethnicity insists that I participate in their ritual. Glowing rings appear in their hands, are tossed in the air, and all family members catch them, expertly. One ring is flipped to me. I catch it, barely, but it tries to pull from my hand. I let it go, and it flutters briefly, then clatters to the ground. Only now it is no longer a ring, its hollow center is full, like a bottle cap. All other rings, their centers also full, fall to the earth, their magical glow extinguished.
The old woman regards me with great sadness. "Death," she says. "Death will follow you."
"Follow me where?" I ask, climbing without much enthusiasm into one of the elegantly-appointed cars of the train.
"Everywhere." She pulls the door shut.
Cats and dogs, some remembered, some unknown, crawl through the car. I ignore them, drawn to the rickety steps with the railing around them, illuminated by a single bulb. A shelf runs along one side of the stairs, filled with old board games--Clue and Monopoly, sure, but also Dark Shadows and Mr. Ree! and Planet Of The Apes. That last one was mine, of course, and I want to stop and linger over it, but I continue down the stairs. There should be a little dresser at the bottom, with the bathroom on the other side, and the familiar clutter of the dining room all around--this is the house I grew up in right? Something long dead and all that?
But no. I get to the bottom of the stairs and it's just another car in the train. The club car, and really? This is the death following me? Skeletons and cheesy-looking zombies dressed in old-timey suits? This is supposed to represent what?
I slide open the door of the club car and continue on to the front of the train--or possibly the back, since I have no idea which direction I'm going. There's a car full of brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, and kind of like the cats and dogs, some are more familiar than others, but I focus on a screened-in area beside this car, filled with diffuse, unearthly sunlight. I enter, making awkward conversation with more people I barely know.
But I recognize them. They're musicians who worked briefly with my ex-wife. Some of them are perfectly cordial, some are pissy and bitter, holding inexplicable grudges against me. One is particularly vocal, and I cut him off by saying, "Hey, I just wanted her to make a halfway decent album, and you couldn't deliver."
"Yeah," he says, "but what about what she wanted?"
Death. Yeah, I get it. My marriage. Ha. Very symbolic, like that stupid MASH episode where we see everyone's dreams. Next thing you know I'll be floating in a river of severed limbs, just like Hawkeye, and please, God, can I never think of that again, or any episode of MASH from the BJ-with-a-moustache era?
The train stops.
Or simply ceases to exist, since I don't actually disembark. I stand at some sort of crossroad--ooh! symbolism!--deciding which way to go. The landscape looks vaguely familiar--kind of like the bottom of Cemetery Hill, but not really--so I just pick a direction at random and start walking.
Soon enough, I'm joined by Paul, who greets me with his usual, "Hey."
"Hey. How was the new Harry Potter?" I ask.
"Do you want me to tell you? I'll be seeing it again with you..."
"Yeah, I know, and that's why I'm thinking this whole 'death will follow you' thing just isn't making much sense. I mean, yeah, I dated your Mom, and that didn't work out, so sure, another failed relationship, another 'death'"--I make sure to deploy ironic air quotes--"but you and I still hang out."
"Yeah, we're hanging out right now."
I stop walking. "But you're not actually here."
And indeed he's not. The road has stopped at a large white house, with a neatly-trimmed lawn and a river running beside it. People sit on the steps, people I should know, dressed like cast members from The Waltons in their Sunday-go-to-meetin'-time clothes. They're portrayed by ex-cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000 because why the hell not, but they're passing around old photos and mementos and things I should know. They're talking about Mom, but they're getting the details wrong.
"You can't know," I say. "You weren't there. I wasn't there, either, I wasn't there, even though she asked me. She wanted me to come up that Monday night, to crash at her place before I took her to the doctor the next day, but I begged off because I was tired, and so she fell and when I got there Tuesday she had that horrible bruise on her head and she was hallucinating and...Maybe if I'd been there, maybe if I'd been there..."
My tear-filled eyes make the sun-dappled water in the river shimmer more than usual, then it twinkles, and I realize there is no river, it's just an elaborate video display, and the image changes to a wall of ads for nineties hip-hop albums. There are shelves all around, books and DVDs and old LPs. Mom sits beside me in a plush leather chair.
"I'm afraid I could spend some money here," I say.
"Do you have money to spend?" Mom asks.
"Some, yeah."
She smiles. "If you see something you want, you should get it. If you wait, it may not be there when you come back." Her words hang in the air, fading. I realize I'm coming back into the waking world.
There's a cat on my pillow and a cat at the foot of the bed. Janie is in my arms. I pull her a little closer as she sleeps, feeling her breathing. The fan gently blows the cord of the window blinds, and I listen as it bounces against the wall, clack, clack, clack.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
KINDA LONELY HERE, ISN'T IT?
Wow. It seems as if new posts here, already decreasing in frequency, are becoming as rare as Bigfoot sightings. I haven't died, and I haven't officially decided to vacate this space.
I just...don't have much of an urge to write anymore. This could very well pass, but it could take some time, and whatever readership I may have actually built up here (Ha!) will likely grow bored and move on. And who could blame them? There's nothing here to read!
But you're still here, aren't you, Theoretical Person Reading This? You decided to show up, and for your effort, you deserve some kind of entertainment. Since I'm not capable of providing that myself, here's a typically lurid TV spot from a late seventies slasher classic. They really don't make 'em like this anymore.
I just...don't have much of an urge to write anymore. This could very well pass, but it could take some time, and whatever readership I may have actually built up here (Ha!) will likely grow bored and move on. And who could blame them? There's nothing here to read!
But you're still here, aren't you, Theoretical Person Reading This? You decided to show up, and for your effort, you deserve some kind of entertainment. Since I'm not capable of providing that myself, here's a typically lurid TV spot from a late seventies slasher classic. They really don't make 'em like this anymore.
Friday, July 01, 2011
A STEADY HAND TO PULL THAT LOAD BEHIND
Flipping the channels yesterday, I unexpectedly came across an episode of this.
I hadn't thought of this show for...geez, decades, I suppose. It ran for a season and a half back in the mid-seventies, and it never really lived on in syndication. Like most TV, it was there briefly, then gone forever.
But seeing it again, with that montage-heavy opening, so typical of its era, and Merle Haggard's theme song, and Claude Akins' craggy face and Frank Converse's epic moustache, I was suddenly transported back in time, to a very specific and vivid memory.
I'm sitting on one end of the couch with comic books scattered on the floor around me, and my oldest brother Keith sits on the other end, a paperback in his hand, though he's watching more than reading. Dad is in his recliner, his ever-present can of Grain Belt beside him, and Mom in her chair. My brother John, sipping an iced tea in his rocking chair, watches as well, though perhaps ironically. My sister Julie sits at the old school desk beside the couch, a textbook and paper in front of her.
The TV is tuned to Movin' On, of course, and it's still the old black-and-white Philco, not the Quasar color set we'd acquire by the time this show reached its second season, when we could see Akins' Kenworth rig in all its green glory. Dad and Keith keep a running commentary going about that Kenworth, about how they show it doing things it simply wasn't capable of, and Keith uses the phrase "Hollywood jive" to describe the show more than once.
Mom watches intermittently, looking up whenever Converse is onscreen, returning to her cozy British mystery novel whenever the focus shifts back to Akins. Julie is completely disengaged from the whole thing, scribbling furiously at her homework.
Me, I'm just sort of there, zoning in and out, happy just to have a moment with so many of us together. My brother Mike is already married, my sister Ann off to college, but here the rest of us sit, gathered around the cathode-ray fireplace, everything else in the world miles away, and I am content.
I hadn't thought of this show for...geez, decades, I suppose. It ran for a season and a half back in the mid-seventies, and it never really lived on in syndication. Like most TV, it was there briefly, then gone forever.
But seeing it again, with that montage-heavy opening, so typical of its era, and Merle Haggard's theme song, and Claude Akins' craggy face and Frank Converse's epic moustache, I was suddenly transported back in time, to a very specific and vivid memory.
I'm sitting on one end of the couch with comic books scattered on the floor around me, and my oldest brother Keith sits on the other end, a paperback in his hand, though he's watching more than reading. Dad is in his recliner, his ever-present can of Grain Belt beside him, and Mom in her chair. My brother John, sipping an iced tea in his rocking chair, watches as well, though perhaps ironically. My sister Julie sits at the old school desk beside the couch, a textbook and paper in front of her.
The TV is tuned to Movin' On, of course, and it's still the old black-and-white Philco, not the Quasar color set we'd acquire by the time this show reached its second season, when we could see Akins' Kenworth rig in all its green glory. Dad and Keith keep a running commentary going about that Kenworth, about how they show it doing things it simply wasn't capable of, and Keith uses the phrase "Hollywood jive" to describe the show more than once.
Mom watches intermittently, looking up whenever Converse is onscreen, returning to her cozy British mystery novel whenever the focus shifts back to Akins. Julie is completely disengaged from the whole thing, scribbling furiously at her homework.
Me, I'm just sort of there, zoning in and out, happy just to have a moment with so many of us together. My brother Mike is already married, my sister Ann off to college, but here the rest of us sit, gathered around the cathode-ray fireplace, everything else in the world miles away, and I am content.
Monday, June 20, 2011
SERIOUSLY, HONESTLY, NO SHIT, REALLY...THIS IS THE LAST TIME I'LL WRITE ABOUT THIS THING
Despite my ongoing obsession with the astonishingly misconceived musical Spider-man: Turn Off The Dark, I didn't bother writing anything about the official opening of the show last week. Since the ousting of its formerly "visionary" director/co-writer/co-designer Julie Taymor, the show, according to most critics, turned out exactly as anyone could have predicted: Instead of Taymor's batshit insane down-in-flames grab for glory, the show instead became dully respectable, a competent salvage job of something that shouldn't have been salvaged.
So okay, we saw that coming, nothing more to say...except Taymor, who should have shut up and moved on a long time ago, felt moved this weekend to talk about what became of her baby.
Speaking to a conference of theatrical types, she proclaimed her disgust with her Spider-man producers, who, in a desperation move as Taymor's show missed numerous opening dates, used focus groups to try to salvage something from the show. "It's very scary if people are going to move towards that, to have audiences tell you how to make a show. Shakespeare would have been appalled. Forget about it.It would be impossible to have these works come out because there's always something that people don't like."
Sure, Julie. Except Shakespeare cannily tailored his plays to the audience of the time, mixing his deeper themes with low comedy specifically designed to appeal to the groundlings. Also, he could write--once the script was set, it was rehearsed and performed. There was no "process" to "discover" the show, no endless reworkings of crazy theatrical concepts at the expense of coherent storytelling.
Besides, Taymor's producers only turned to the focus groups after she was fired from the show. She was given months and months and months and months to "find" her show, and she never did. She wasted seventy million dollars of investors' money on her ridiculous notions--Spider-man as a supporting character in a show about the power of myth, or some fucking thing--and she would have been perfectly happy to keep spending, with no regard for what her producers needed (that is, a profitable show) or an audience might have wanted (some kind of entertainment).
Of course, those pesky audiences were part of the problem, according to Taymor: "Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you. It's very hard to create. It's incredibly difficult to be under a shot glass and microscope like that."
Well, granted, it would be hard to be under both a shot glass and a microscope, but inexplicable metaphors are nothing new for Taymor. But again, much of the online chatter about the show's astounding non-quality came once previews started. Once you're asking audiences to pay for tickets--at full prices, mind you; there were no discounts during the preview period--they're going to respond. That's how the process works. And if the audience is overwhelmingly telling you that your show has problems, you fix them. If you can't do that, your producers have every right to fire your ass.
Sure, I'm usually all about the artist here, but Taymor was working on a Broadway musical, where the rules have always been in place. And the first rule has always been: It's all about the show. Directors, songwriters, authors, even big-money stars have all been replaced when shows are in trouble. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but Taymor acts as though it's all brand new.
The biggest mistake the producers of Spider-man: Turn Off The Dark made was not dumping Taymor much earlier in the process. Like, for instance, when she submitted an incoherent script that had very little to do with the title character. Or after the first, say, ten million bucks were spent with nothing to show for it. After sixty million more was spent, firing Taymor was a mercy killing.
Now if they'd just close the show altogether, we could all pretend this never happened, and I'd finally shut up about it.
So okay, we saw that coming, nothing more to say...except Taymor, who should have shut up and moved on a long time ago, felt moved this weekend to talk about what became of her baby.
Speaking to a conference of theatrical types, she proclaimed her disgust with her Spider-man producers, who, in a desperation move as Taymor's show missed numerous opening dates, used focus groups to try to salvage something from the show. "It's very scary if people are going to move towards that, to have audiences tell you how to make a show. Shakespeare would have been appalled. Forget about it.It would be impossible to have these works come out because there's always something that people don't like."
Sure, Julie. Except Shakespeare cannily tailored his plays to the audience of the time, mixing his deeper themes with low comedy specifically designed to appeal to the groundlings. Also, he could write--once the script was set, it was rehearsed and performed. There was no "process" to "discover" the show, no endless reworkings of crazy theatrical concepts at the expense of coherent storytelling.
Besides, Taymor's producers only turned to the focus groups after she was fired from the show. She was given months and months and months and months to "find" her show, and she never did. She wasted seventy million dollars of investors' money on her ridiculous notions--Spider-man as a supporting character in a show about the power of myth, or some fucking thing--and she would have been perfectly happy to keep spending, with no regard for what her producers needed (that is, a profitable show) or an audience might have wanted (some kind of entertainment).
Of course, those pesky audiences were part of the problem, according to Taymor: "Twitter and Facebook and blogging just trump you. It's very hard to create. It's incredibly difficult to be under a shot glass and microscope like that."
Well, granted, it would be hard to be under both a shot glass and a microscope, but inexplicable metaphors are nothing new for Taymor. But again, much of the online chatter about the show's astounding non-quality came once previews started. Once you're asking audiences to pay for tickets--at full prices, mind you; there were no discounts during the preview period--they're going to respond. That's how the process works. And if the audience is overwhelmingly telling you that your show has problems, you fix them. If you can't do that, your producers have every right to fire your ass.
Sure, I'm usually all about the artist here, but Taymor was working on a Broadway musical, where the rules have always been in place. And the first rule has always been: It's all about the show. Directors, songwriters, authors, even big-money stars have all been replaced when shows are in trouble. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but Taymor acts as though it's all brand new.
The biggest mistake the producers of Spider-man: Turn Off The Dark made was not dumping Taymor much earlier in the process. Like, for instance, when she submitted an incoherent script that had very little to do with the title character. Or after the first, say, ten million bucks were spent with nothing to show for it. After sixty million more was spent, firing Taymor was a mercy killing.
Now if they'd just close the show altogether, we could all pretend this never happened, and I'd finally shut up about it.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
KILL ME NOW
When you see the headline Arizona Town Cashes In On Rock Song, there is no need to click on the story because OF COURSE it will be about the citizens of Winslow taking advantage of the town's fleeting mention in that stupid, stupid Eagles song.
And sure enough, Winslow has installed a bronze statue of a "floppy-haired man with a guitar" (this description, like the story itself, comes from The New York Times, the Arts & Entertainment section of which has clearly seen better days)on a corner near--sigh--Standin' On The Corner Park, which is odd because unless I'm mistaken the actual lyrics of the song are, "standin' on A corner in Winslow Arizona" but why split (floppy) hairs? Once you've decided to name a park after a line in an overplayed country-rock groaner from the seventies, you've already taken leave of your senses. Oh, and hey, there's an annual Standin' On The Corner Festival that draws "thousands" (according to the Times, which I suspect didn't do a lot of fact-checking on this particular story), so...dear God, I can't go on.
The notion of thousands--or even dozens--of people reorganizing their lives just so they'll have time to attend something called the Standin' On The Corner Festival fills me with a sense of overpowering despair. Everybody is entitled to their own obsessions, and it's not like I, with my Jerry Lewis obsession, have any room to question anybody's taste. But still, people making a pilgrimage to a town just because of its mention in a fucking Glenn Frey song...
Seriously. Kill me now.
And sure enough, Winslow has installed a bronze statue of a "floppy-haired man with a guitar" (this description, like the story itself, comes from The New York Times, the Arts & Entertainment section of which has clearly seen better days)on a corner near--sigh--Standin' On The Corner Park, which is odd because unless I'm mistaken the actual lyrics of the song are, "standin' on A corner in Winslow Arizona" but why split (floppy) hairs? Once you've decided to name a park after a line in an overplayed country-rock groaner from the seventies, you've already taken leave of your senses. Oh, and hey, there's an annual Standin' On The Corner Festival that draws "thousands" (according to the Times, which I suspect didn't do a lot of fact-checking on this particular story), so...dear God, I can't go on.
The notion of thousands--or even dozens--of people reorganizing their lives just so they'll have time to attend something called the Standin' On The Corner Festival fills me with a sense of overpowering despair. Everybody is entitled to their own obsessions, and it's not like I, with my Jerry Lewis obsession, have any room to question anybody's taste. But still, people making a pilgrimage to a town just because of its mention in a fucking Glenn Frey song...
Seriously. Kill me now.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
WHEN ALL HOPE SEEMS LOST, WHEN DESPAIR BECOMES OVERPOWERING, THERE WILL BE A BLAND, BLAND LIGHT
This headline from the Associated Press says it all: Pretty In Pink's Andrew McCarthy Writing Memoir. And by "says it all," I mean the AP used the headline to remind us who McCarthy is, or more accurately, was--a guy who was in a semi-loved movie, though he's not the reason anyone liked it. They could also have said Weekend At Bernie's Star Andrew McCarthy Writing Memoir, but then readers would be scratching their heads trying to remember which of the two remarkably uninteresting leads from Bernie's was McCarthy and which was the other guy.
Anyway, the point is--Andrew McCarthy is writing a memoir? Seriously? According to the AP story, which reads suspiciously like a slightly-reworked press release, it will reveal how McCarthy's "journeys helped him defeat his fear of love and commitment." All well and good, but hopefully there will be room for discussions of his distinguished film career, including, um, Pretty In Pink. And Weekend At Bernie's. Plus that all-time box-office smash Fresh Horses, and of course that awful Gertrude Stein/Alice B. Toklas thing he was in. And Weekend At Bernie's 2!
When a megastar of McCarthy's magnitude decides to sit down and spill the beans, it behooves us all to pick up a copy. And take a nice, refreshing nap.
Anyway, the point is--Andrew McCarthy is writing a memoir? Seriously? According to the AP story, which reads suspiciously like a slightly-reworked press release, it will reveal how McCarthy's "journeys helped him defeat his fear of love and commitment." All well and good, but hopefully there will be room for discussions of his distinguished film career, including, um, Pretty In Pink. And Weekend At Bernie's. Plus that all-time box-office smash Fresh Horses, and of course that awful Gertrude Stein/Alice B. Toklas thing he was in. And Weekend At Bernie's 2!
When a megastar of McCarthy's magnitude decides to sit down and spill the beans, it behooves us all to pick up a copy. And take a nice, refreshing nap.
Monday, June 13, 2011
WE WERE ONLY HERE FOR AWHILE
It wasn't so much that I made a point of avoiding a family reunion this past weekend as...oh, okay, I did avoid it.
In fairness, I had things to do. Paul had a baseball game, then we had to see Super 8 (which we both enjoyed) and, for about a minute during the day, it did occur to me that the two of us could drive to Dawson and take part in this big family whoop-de-doo, but it occurred to me also that I'd have to keep explaining to everyone who Paul is, because aside from my brother John and my sister Ann, nobody would have any idea.
Which is kind of odd, because he is of course mentioned here quite a bit, and in status updates of Facebook, and various other places where I hang out online. Paul, Janie, the dog and cats, assorted exes and various friends--there's a regular cast here (even though some of them are kinda like Jeff Conaway on Taxi and disappear once it becomes obvious they're not working out), and regular readers of this site are presumably as familiar with them as viewers of MASH were familiar with Hawkeye, Colonel Potter and that guitar-wielding guy Loudon Wainwright played in three episodes.
But--well, look, I was going to go off on a pissy little tangent about how nobody in my family reads my blog, but that's not really the point. The reason I avoided this thing is, I hate--HATE--family reunions. I'm five years younger than my closest sibling, and my cousins are older still, and whenever I'd get dragged to one of these things as a kid, I felt profoundly alone and abandoned because there was nobody for me to talk to, nobody paying attention to me, nobody comforting me as my sense of isolation overwhelmed me and sent me off to cry alone. Also, even though I was only five or six or seven, I still sensed the weird stifled emotions that were always present when everyone tried to play nice. (I couldn't really give you all the details, but my oldest brothers hated each other--I recall one epic Quiet Man-style donnybrook that raged down the stairs, through the dining room and living room and out the front door--but at family get-togethers, they always smiled and talked to each other. Knowing what they were like at home, and being too young to understand the protocol of events like this, the disconnect fried my tiny brain. It was like they'd been replaced with pod duplicates.)
It sounds facetious, or like a too-pat TV-movie style explanation, but the family reunions I was forced to attend as a kid probably had a lot to do with the fact that I wound up in therapy by the time I was in seventh grade. That is, they took the feelings of isolation and despair I already had as part of my day-to-day existence (again, five years younger than my closest sibling, plus parents who were already into middle age by the time I started school, plus an isolated rural home surrounded by abandoned, rusting farm equipment, the type of heavy-handed symbolism that would cause any rational viewer to roll their eyes if they saw such nonsense in some shitty indie picture) and ramped it up to unbearable extremes. I remember kicking and screaming, begging Mom and Dad to let me stay home, I hated family reunions so much. I dreaded them for weeks in advance, my heart pounding, unable to sleep. And nobody seemed to realize just how profound that dread was, any more than they noticed me at the actual functions, sitting in a corner glassy-eyed, sinking in a Bergman-esque well of despair.
So, yeah, I'm an adult now, and presumably better-equipped to deal with these things, but you know, the last time the tribe gathered en masse was at Mom's funeral, so it just seems that these things are destined to have depressing subtexts for me. In other words, I could have sucked it up and gone to this thing, or I could have spent a beautiful Saturday afternoon hanging out with an eleven-year-old who makes me laugh and gets all my John Williams references.
I'll stand by my choice.
In fairness, I had things to do. Paul had a baseball game, then we had to see Super 8 (which we both enjoyed) and, for about a minute during the day, it did occur to me that the two of us could drive to Dawson and take part in this big family whoop-de-doo, but it occurred to me also that I'd have to keep explaining to everyone who Paul is, because aside from my brother John and my sister Ann, nobody would have any idea.
Which is kind of odd, because he is of course mentioned here quite a bit, and in status updates of Facebook, and various other places where I hang out online. Paul, Janie, the dog and cats, assorted exes and various friends--there's a regular cast here (even though some of them are kinda like Jeff Conaway on Taxi and disappear once it becomes obvious they're not working out), and regular readers of this site are presumably as familiar with them as viewers of MASH were familiar with Hawkeye, Colonel Potter and that guitar-wielding guy Loudon Wainwright played in three episodes.
But--well, look, I was going to go off on a pissy little tangent about how nobody in my family reads my blog, but that's not really the point. The reason I avoided this thing is, I hate--HATE--family reunions. I'm five years younger than my closest sibling, and my cousins are older still, and whenever I'd get dragged to one of these things as a kid, I felt profoundly alone and abandoned because there was nobody for me to talk to, nobody paying attention to me, nobody comforting me as my sense of isolation overwhelmed me and sent me off to cry alone. Also, even though I was only five or six or seven, I still sensed the weird stifled emotions that were always present when everyone tried to play nice. (I couldn't really give you all the details, but my oldest brothers hated each other--I recall one epic Quiet Man-style donnybrook that raged down the stairs, through the dining room and living room and out the front door--but at family get-togethers, they always smiled and talked to each other. Knowing what they were like at home, and being too young to understand the protocol of events like this, the disconnect fried my tiny brain. It was like they'd been replaced with pod duplicates.)
It sounds facetious, or like a too-pat TV-movie style explanation, but the family reunions I was forced to attend as a kid probably had a lot to do with the fact that I wound up in therapy by the time I was in seventh grade. That is, they took the feelings of isolation and despair I already had as part of my day-to-day existence (again, five years younger than my closest sibling, plus parents who were already into middle age by the time I started school, plus an isolated rural home surrounded by abandoned, rusting farm equipment, the type of heavy-handed symbolism that would cause any rational viewer to roll their eyes if they saw such nonsense in some shitty indie picture) and ramped it up to unbearable extremes. I remember kicking and screaming, begging Mom and Dad to let me stay home, I hated family reunions so much. I dreaded them for weeks in advance, my heart pounding, unable to sleep. And nobody seemed to realize just how profound that dread was, any more than they noticed me at the actual functions, sitting in a corner glassy-eyed, sinking in a Bergman-esque well of despair.
So, yeah, I'm an adult now, and presumably better-equipped to deal with these things, but you know, the last time the tribe gathered en masse was at Mom's funeral, so it just seems that these things are destined to have depressing subtexts for me. In other words, I could have sucked it up and gone to this thing, or I could have spent a beautiful Saturday afternoon hanging out with an eleven-year-old who makes me laugh and gets all my John Williams references.
I'll stand by my choice.
Friday, June 10, 2011
IF I FELL
The dog barks at car tires hissing on the rainy streets. The cats mostly sleep, waking occasionally to acknowledge my presence. I've got some Warren Zevon playing, milk and donuts ready to be consumed, and a weekend on the way. Everything is exactly as it should be, except for one thing.
Janie's not here.
No, no, it's okay. She's just visiting her sister for the week. We've talked everyday since she's been gone, and she can't wait to get back. To her recliner, her bed, her cats. And me, presumably.
I can't wait for her to get back, either. She belongs here. Her voice, her laughter, her everything. When I bought this place, I thought...well, honestly, I'm not sure what I thought. I wanted a place of my own, someplace to call home. But it turned out to be just another place to live, no different from the anonymous apartments that had come to define my existence.
But now, when I walk through the front door after a brutal day at work and Janie is here, and we kiss and we laugh and we love, I finally feel like I'm coming home.
Janie's not here.
No, no, it's okay. She's just visiting her sister for the week. We've talked everyday since she's been gone, and she can't wait to get back. To her recliner, her bed, her cats. And me, presumably.
I can't wait for her to get back, either. She belongs here. Her voice, her laughter, her everything. When I bought this place, I thought...well, honestly, I'm not sure what I thought. I wanted a place of my own, someplace to call home. But it turned out to be just another place to live, no different from the anonymous apartments that had come to define my existence.
But now, when I walk through the front door after a brutal day at work and Janie is here, and we kiss and we laugh and we love, I finally feel like I'm coming home.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
WARMTH
I've got a co-worker who still has a rotary phone, who has no idea what a debit card is, who grumbles whenever the radio in the stockroom is tuned to a station that plays a lot of eighties stuff like Bon Jovi or The Thompson Twins because he can't stand that "new" music. He'd probably be happy to have any of the items advertised in this commercial.
But really, who wouldn't want that couch? And it comes with a free portable TV! There's no technology you have to master with these things--with that TV, you could take it anywhere. You'd plug it in, flip the on switch and there it was. Maybe you had to play around with the rabbit ears to get reception, but you didn't need a decoder box, your house didn't need to be wired, you didn't need a router or a wifi card or a minutes plan or anything back in those days. Life was good.
Even the pitchman in this ad is straightforward: Here's the merchandise, here's what it does, this is how you get it. No irony, no flashy graphics, just a simple, effective spiel. You'd never see such a thing these days. But why not? It works. (Again, I really want that couch, hideous seventies burnt-umber color and all.)
Obviously, we'll never go back to a pre-digital world. But I've noticed that some of the people most likely to mock how we looked and acted back in those days are people who were around then. Have they forgotten their own past? Have they forgotten how much better-built merchandise was, and how well it all worked? Have they forgotten how happy we were with what we once had?
But really, who wouldn't want that couch? And it comes with a free portable TV! There's no technology you have to master with these things--with that TV, you could take it anywhere. You'd plug it in, flip the on switch and there it was. Maybe you had to play around with the rabbit ears to get reception, but you didn't need a decoder box, your house didn't need to be wired, you didn't need a router or a wifi card or a minutes plan or anything back in those days. Life was good.
Even the pitchman in this ad is straightforward: Here's the merchandise, here's what it does, this is how you get it. No irony, no flashy graphics, just a simple, effective spiel. You'd never see such a thing these days. But why not? It works. (Again, I really want that couch, hideous seventies burnt-umber color and all.)
Obviously, we'll never go back to a pre-digital world. But I've noticed that some of the people most likely to mock how we looked and acted back in those days are people who were around then. Have they forgotten their own past? Have they forgotten how much better-built merchandise was, and how well it all worked? Have they forgotten how happy we were with what we once had?
Monday, May 23, 2011
IT CAN'T BE WRONG WHEN IT FEELS SO RIGHT
Pop cultural history seemed already to have forgotten Joseph Brooks. His most famous achievement, the lugubrious pop song You Light Up My Life, was a massive hit back in 1977, winning an Oscar and a Grammy, but it quickly became a thing to be mocked, then, soon enough, ignored--even radio stations that regularly program "the biggest hits of the seventies" usually leave it off their playlists, though it was the top-charting song of its year.
The odd thing about Brooks, though, was that he kept doing things, whether anyone wanted him to or not. He'd become a millionaire cranking out commercial jingles, and he used his money to fund a number of vanity projects. He wrote and directed the movie You Light Up My Life, designed as a showcase for his songwriting, and it was a modest hit, largely due to the popularity of the title song. But it was enough to convince him he was an auteur--he followed it with If Ever I See You Again, a drippy romance about a successful pop songwriter forcing his way back into the life of his ex--Brooks starred, despite having zero screen presence and a vaguely reptilian appearance--and Headin' For Broadway, about a group of hopeful kids willing to do whatever it takes to find stardom.
These were movies nobody could possibly want to see, and predictably, they flopped. Somehow, Brooks kept working. A few years ago, he became something of a laughing stock with his Broadway musical In My Life, a misguided semi-romantic trifle which he wrote, scored, produced and directed. Stage musicals are usually collaborative affairs, but Brooks refused any kind of assistance for his terrible show--he would do exactly what he wanted, and he wasn't going to let anyone tell him no.
Not that he would have listened. The word "no" clearly meant nothing to Brooks, who was due to stand trial for sexual assault on over a dozen women he had lured to his Upper West Side apartment with promises of some kind of work in some unspecified project. He posted ads online and held private auditions. When the naive young hopefuls appeared at his door, he offered to show them his Oscar, he poured them wine, asked them to perform a scene he'd devised. Then he raped them.
Even in the New York tabloids, Brooks' unfolding legal saga was never front page news. He just wasn't big enough, famous enough. No matter how hard he tried, how much money he made, he was always a show-biz also-ran. He killed himself over the weekend, a miserable end to a worthless existence, and The Post and The Daily News both buried the story in the back pages. Nobody cared about his fucking Oscar.
The odd thing about Brooks, though, was that he kept doing things, whether anyone wanted him to or not. He'd become a millionaire cranking out commercial jingles, and he used his money to fund a number of vanity projects. He wrote and directed the movie You Light Up My Life, designed as a showcase for his songwriting, and it was a modest hit, largely due to the popularity of the title song. But it was enough to convince him he was an auteur--he followed it with If Ever I See You Again, a drippy romance about a successful pop songwriter forcing his way back into the life of his ex--Brooks starred, despite having zero screen presence and a vaguely reptilian appearance--and Headin' For Broadway, about a group of hopeful kids willing to do whatever it takes to find stardom.
These were movies nobody could possibly want to see, and predictably, they flopped. Somehow, Brooks kept working. A few years ago, he became something of a laughing stock with his Broadway musical In My Life, a misguided semi-romantic trifle which he wrote, scored, produced and directed. Stage musicals are usually collaborative affairs, but Brooks refused any kind of assistance for his terrible show--he would do exactly what he wanted, and he wasn't going to let anyone tell him no.
Not that he would have listened. The word "no" clearly meant nothing to Brooks, who was due to stand trial for sexual assault on over a dozen women he had lured to his Upper West Side apartment with promises of some kind of work in some unspecified project. He posted ads online and held private auditions. When the naive young hopefuls appeared at his door, he offered to show them his Oscar, he poured them wine, asked them to perform a scene he'd devised. Then he raped them.
Even in the New York tabloids, Brooks' unfolding legal saga was never front page news. He just wasn't big enough, famous enough. No matter how hard he tried, how much money he made, he was always a show-biz also-ran. He killed himself over the weekend, a miserable end to a worthless existence, and The Post and The Daily News both buried the story in the back pages. Nobody cared about his fucking Oscar.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
THOUGH YOUR DREAMS BE TOSSED AND BLOWN
What are you going to do, get all weepy about Louis Prima and Keely Smith? Or Buddy Hackett, or Johnny Carson, or even The Beatles, for God's sake? It was just a place where people did some stuff, a piece of a past that can never be recovered.
It's not like it's real history we're talking about here, only show-biz history. But it's long been part of the peculiar nature of Las Vegas that it preserves its past in amber, or at least an amber-colored (but heavily watered-down) drink. How else to explain the continued existence of The Sahara Hotel & Casino, which still sat at the north end of the strip like an aging madame, full of stories about the nearly-forgotten greats she used to escort? (And she'll always refer to her gentlemen friends as escorts, not johns. What the hell do you think she was, some two-bit hooker?) The former "Jewel Of The Desert" shut down yesterday, but it had been closing bit by bit through the years, serving as some sort of reminder of the past in a town that barely has a present.
For the pleasures offered by Las Vegas are, by design, fleeting. Times change, people move on, no one remembers. Really, why should they? Oh, so the Sahara was for many years the home base for Jerry Lewis' Labor Day telethon? That's nice, but so what?
After all, Lewis himself is retiring from that institution after this year. Though he has yet to find a cure for Muscular Dystrophy, there is no question that Lewis' time in the spotlight is due to end. He was once as big as anyone, and he and Dean Martin could pack 'em in like nobody's business, but to watch him continue year after year, unwilling and unable to change with the times, diminishing his own reputation every time he referred to the likes of Jann Carl as a "marvelous" talent, abandoned by the few relevant celebrity friends he still has...well, it was a sad, sad spectacle, like watching the suckers being chased out of the Sahara on its closing day, all of them wanting one more chance to play their lousy dollar slots.
It's not like it's real history we're talking about here, only show-biz history. But it's long been part of the peculiar nature of Las Vegas that it preserves its past in amber, or at least an amber-colored (but heavily watered-down) drink. How else to explain the continued existence of The Sahara Hotel & Casino, which still sat at the north end of the strip like an aging madame, full of stories about the nearly-forgotten greats she used to escort? (And she'll always refer to her gentlemen friends as escorts, not johns. What the hell do you think she was, some two-bit hooker?) The former "Jewel Of The Desert" shut down yesterday, but it had been closing bit by bit through the years, serving as some sort of reminder of the past in a town that barely has a present.
For the pleasures offered by Las Vegas are, by design, fleeting. Times change, people move on, no one remembers. Really, why should they? Oh, so the Sahara was for many years the home base for Jerry Lewis' Labor Day telethon? That's nice, but so what?
After all, Lewis himself is retiring from that institution after this year. Though he has yet to find a cure for Muscular Dystrophy, there is no question that Lewis' time in the spotlight is due to end. He was once as big as anyone, and he and Dean Martin could pack 'em in like nobody's business, but to watch him continue year after year, unwilling and unable to change with the times, diminishing his own reputation every time he referred to the likes of Jann Carl as a "marvelous" talent, abandoned by the few relevant celebrity friends he still has...well, it was a sad, sad spectacle, like watching the suckers being chased out of the Sahara on its closing day, all of them wanting one more chance to play their lousy dollar slots.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
I GROW OLD, I GROW OLD
1. This title, of course, comes from T.S. Eliot. That is, it originated with Eliot, but for me, it comes from the old National Lampoon parody The Love Song Of J. Edgar Hoover, which served as my dramatic reading in a freshman speech class. After I finished, the teacher asked me if I'd even heard of Eliot. Since all I really knew were the few lines from The Hollow Men referenced in Apocalypse Now--sadly, I had no idea what the Lampoon piece was parodying--I said no. My teacher was disappointed.
It was at that moment that I came to believe, as I still believe to this day, that I'm not nearly as smart as I want to be.
2. The two paragraphs above repeatedly featured the words "I" or "me"--twelve, counting variations. One of the reasons posting around here has become less frequent is because I'm trying to make this space less relentlessly self-centered. Many posts in the past were devoted to painfully detailed retellings of awful (and, far less often, joyous) occurrences in my life. All well and good when there is some larger point to be drawn, some fondly-recalled universal moment we've all shared, or even when there's some catharsis to be had by exorcising old demons. Sometimes, though, I resorted to just offering tediously detailed descriptions of bad dates, things that weren't even interesting as I experienced them.
So, you know, sorry about that.
3. All well and good, but hey, today's my birthday, so I get to be a little self-indulgent, right? Problem is, I've got nothing to say. I'm forty-six today, well past the halfway mark--presumably, at least; yeah, you never know how long you'll live, but neither of my parents lived to see eighty, so the odds aren't exactly in my favor--and past the point of taking stock but not to the point of looking back.
My life is still unfolding, in other words. I was in my forties when I decided to become a homeowner, and in the last year alone I've acquired an actual, permanent girlfriend and a small flock of critters. I still have no idea how to do basic things around the house--thank God Janie knows how to set a mousetrap!--but there's time to learn.
But not all the time in the world. There is a definite sense that, even as it unfolds, life is still winding down. I'm aware that my body can no longer do certain things I used to take for granted, and I'm more aware than ever that everything I see and know could be gone tomorrow. These aren't bad things, really--they just make me appreciate what I've got.
4. Obligatory Moment Of Delmar: I love all my cats very much, and will go to my grave insisting the late and much-missed Scotchie was the best cat ever, but there's no question that my beloved little ball of rage Del is my favorite cat in this world or any other. He's been by to rub against me repeatedly as I've been writing, and at one point reared up on his hind legs to begin chewing on my elbow. Sure, he has dozens of psychoses, but more than anything else, he's fiercely devoted to me. Plus, he's adorable!
Though not, it must be said, as adorable as the beagle, who has also been over to say hi repeatedly as I've been writing. Four-legged creatures love me!
5. The first time I wrote a birthday post it was a fairly dismal day, spent buying tires or some such. The pattern repeated from then on, assuming I took note of the day at all. This year...I dunno. Why bother complaining? I'm alive, I'm happy. Life is good.
It was at that moment that I came to believe, as I still believe to this day, that I'm not nearly as smart as I want to be.
2. The two paragraphs above repeatedly featured the words "I" or "me"--twelve, counting variations. One of the reasons posting around here has become less frequent is because I'm trying to make this space less relentlessly self-centered. Many posts in the past were devoted to painfully detailed retellings of awful (and, far less often, joyous) occurrences in my life. All well and good when there is some larger point to be drawn, some fondly-recalled universal moment we've all shared, or even when there's some catharsis to be had by exorcising old demons. Sometimes, though, I resorted to just offering tediously detailed descriptions of bad dates, things that weren't even interesting as I experienced them.
So, you know, sorry about that.
3. All well and good, but hey, today's my birthday, so I get to be a little self-indulgent, right? Problem is, I've got nothing to say. I'm forty-six today, well past the halfway mark--presumably, at least; yeah, you never know how long you'll live, but neither of my parents lived to see eighty, so the odds aren't exactly in my favor--and past the point of taking stock but not to the point of looking back.
My life is still unfolding, in other words. I was in my forties when I decided to become a homeowner, and in the last year alone I've acquired an actual, permanent girlfriend and a small flock of critters. I still have no idea how to do basic things around the house--thank God Janie knows how to set a mousetrap!--but there's time to learn.
But not all the time in the world. There is a definite sense that, even as it unfolds, life is still winding down. I'm aware that my body can no longer do certain things I used to take for granted, and I'm more aware than ever that everything I see and know could be gone tomorrow. These aren't bad things, really--they just make me appreciate what I've got.
4. Obligatory Moment Of Delmar: I love all my cats very much, and will go to my grave insisting the late and much-missed Scotchie was the best cat ever, but there's no question that my beloved little ball of rage Del is my favorite cat in this world or any other. He's been by to rub against me repeatedly as I've been writing, and at one point reared up on his hind legs to begin chewing on my elbow. Sure, he has dozens of psychoses, but more than anything else, he's fiercely devoted to me. Plus, he's adorable!
Though not, it must be said, as adorable as the beagle, who has also been over to say hi repeatedly as I've been writing. Four-legged creatures love me!
5. The first time I wrote a birthday post it was a fairly dismal day, spent buying tires or some such. The pattern repeated from then on, assuming I took note of the day at all. This year...I dunno. Why bother complaining? I'm alive, I'm happy. Life is good.
Saturday, May 07, 2011
SOME THAT YOU RECOGNIZE, SOME THAT YOU'VE NEVER EVEN HEARD OF
There's no point in arguing that Yvette Vickers was an underrated actress, that she deserved better than Attack Of The 5o Foot Woman and the similar Z pictures associated with her name. Sadly, there's not even any use in commenting on her achingly carnal beauty.
Because now, when she's remembered, it will be as that ancient pin-up queen whose mummified remains were found by a neighbor. So she's officially a freak now, a has-been who never quite was, and the ghoulish circumstances of her death are all anyone will ever talk or care about. The fascinating life she led--she was discovered by Billy Wilder, Russ Meyer shot her Playboy spread, she was a fringe player on the Hollywood scene for years--will be forgotten.
Still. At her peak, studio execs treated her as just another blonde in a town full of them, and audiences failed to make her the star she should have been. But now, at last, people will remember her. As befits a mummy, she has become immortal.
Because now, when she's remembered, it will be as that ancient pin-up queen whose mummified remains were found by a neighbor. So she's officially a freak now, a has-been who never quite was, and the ghoulish circumstances of her death are all anyone will ever talk or care about. The fascinating life she led--she was discovered by Billy Wilder, Russ Meyer shot her Playboy spread, she was a fringe player on the Hollywood scene for years--will be forgotten.
Still. At her peak, studio execs treated her as just another blonde in a town full of them, and audiences failed to make her the star she should have been. But now, at last, people will remember her. As befits a mummy, she has become immortal.
Monday, May 02, 2011
STILL AND STRANGE
Yeah, of course I remember life in suburban D.C. in those awful days and months following 9/11, that horrible feeling of looking up, looking around, squinting into the beautiful blue sky, waiting for the next attack.
Not that we had to wait long, because the attack came from within. Osama Bin Laden and his associates surely knew that the attacks on the Twin Towers, Pentagon and wherever the fourth plane was supposed to hit were only the first step. Sure enough, paranoia on a massive scale erupted, and we as a nation were all too willing to surrender our civil liberties, to support a baseless war, to do whatever in the name of...what?
What was the goal? Was it to get Bin Laden? Because if it was, why the hell were we in Iraq? Why did we do half of what we did? Why...Ah, forget it. It's four AM, I need to get ready for work and Osama Bin Laden has been stopped at last. Yes, we know he was more a figurehead than anything else, and we know his associates are still out there, plotting revenge.
There'll be a sequel, in other words. But at least, for now, the story has an ending.
Not that we had to wait long, because the attack came from within. Osama Bin Laden and his associates surely knew that the attacks on the Twin Towers, Pentagon and wherever the fourth plane was supposed to hit were only the first step. Sure enough, paranoia on a massive scale erupted, and we as a nation were all too willing to surrender our civil liberties, to support a baseless war, to do whatever in the name of...what?
What was the goal? Was it to get Bin Laden? Because if it was, why the hell were we in Iraq? Why did we do half of what we did? Why...Ah, forget it. It's four AM, I need to get ready for work and Osama Bin Laden has been stopped at last. Yes, we know he was more a figurehead than anything else, and we know his associates are still out there, plotting revenge.
There'll be a sequel, in other words. But at least, for now, the story has an ending.
Sunday, May 01, 2011
DEFINITELY NOT RACIST
I've been rereading Mark Harris' mostly-exemplary book Pictures At A Revolution, which examines the genesis and cultural impact of the five movies nominated for the Best Picture Oscar at the 1968 awards. Harris' point is that two of those movies, Bonnie And Clyde and The Graduate, represented what was about to come, the New Hollywood of the seventies and early eighties, while two of the others, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and Doctor Dolittle, represented the staid Old Hollywood that looked increasingly clueless as social and aesthetic changes swept the nation. (The fifth nominated picture, In The Heat Of The Night, was kind of somewhere in between, and as a well-crafted, well-intentioned but essentially dull enterprise, it's the type of Oscar bait that still shows up every year.)
Reading the book now, the most interesting section by far is director Stanley Kramer's experiences schlepping Guess Who's Coming To Dinner through the studio pipeline. This is a movie that, in its pro-interracial marriage premise, seemed daring in the development stages, but by the time it was released, felt instantly dated. The civil rights era had gone a long way to change America's views of race.
Hadn't it? By Kramer's stated intent, he wanted "the black bridegroom to be so exceptional that if anyone objected to him, it could only be due to racial prejudice." Harris wryly points out how far Kramer would go to make this character exceptional: he wasn't just successful in his field, "but an Ivy League-educated potential Nobel laureate who worked for the United Nations on worldwide health missions."
Uh, you can probably see where I'm going with this, right? There are, Lord knows, plenty of reasons to rue Barack Obama's presidency, from a cabinet full of Wall Street insiders to his seeming inability to hold to a simple policy position. But to suggest that he's somehow not entitled to the office, that he's just not smart enough, that he didn't deserve his Ivy League education...well, to paraphrase Stanley Kramer, those objections could only be due to racial prejudice.
The obvious offender would be Donald Trump, whose increasingly offensive string of claims about Obama reveal much more about his need to be constantly talked about than anything else. Trump almost certainly doesn't believe this shit, but he knows if he says it, the media will cover it.
And they do, every word of it. Trump is not the problem, any more than Sarah Palin or Sean Hannity or any other far right nutjob. The problem is the way the story is inevitably framed by the media overlords. They present Trump's blatherings as if they represent some sort of coherent point of view, as if there's some validity to them. There is none, of course. Even the most ideologically rigid exec at Fox News knows how smart Obama is--after all, they used to claim he was some sort of elitist snob, out of touch with every Johnny Lunchpail and Sally Housecoat in this great nation. Yet they bring on experts to "debate" Trump's claims, when they know very well there's nothing to be debated. The man is lying. Call him on it and move on. Ignore the motherfucker, deny him the attention he so nakedly craves, and he'll go away.
No mainstream reporters are quite willing to come right out and say the obvious: If Trump's remarks are racist, then his sudden popularity among Republicans must say reveal much about the party's rabidly anti-Obama stance. But they're not quite willing to say that. Until they do, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner will continue to seem weirdly relevant. Which seems impossible, of course, but there's a lot of things going on these days that shouldn't be happening, but somehow are.
Reading the book now, the most interesting section by far is director Stanley Kramer's experiences schlepping Guess Who's Coming To Dinner through the studio pipeline. This is a movie that, in its pro-interracial marriage premise, seemed daring in the development stages, but by the time it was released, felt instantly dated. The civil rights era had gone a long way to change America's views of race.
Hadn't it? By Kramer's stated intent, he wanted "the black bridegroom to be so exceptional that if anyone objected to him, it could only be due to racial prejudice." Harris wryly points out how far Kramer would go to make this character exceptional: he wasn't just successful in his field, "but an Ivy League-educated potential Nobel laureate who worked for the United Nations on worldwide health missions."
Uh, you can probably see where I'm going with this, right? There are, Lord knows, plenty of reasons to rue Barack Obama's presidency, from a cabinet full of Wall Street insiders to his seeming inability to hold to a simple policy position. But to suggest that he's somehow not entitled to the office, that he's just not smart enough, that he didn't deserve his Ivy League education...well, to paraphrase Stanley Kramer, those objections could only be due to racial prejudice.
The obvious offender would be Donald Trump, whose increasingly offensive string of claims about Obama reveal much more about his need to be constantly talked about than anything else. Trump almost certainly doesn't believe this shit, but he knows if he says it, the media will cover it.
And they do, every word of it. Trump is not the problem, any more than Sarah Palin or Sean Hannity or any other far right nutjob. The problem is the way the story is inevitably framed by the media overlords. They present Trump's blatherings as if they represent some sort of coherent point of view, as if there's some validity to them. There is none, of course. Even the most ideologically rigid exec at Fox News knows how smart Obama is--after all, they used to claim he was some sort of elitist snob, out of touch with every Johnny Lunchpail and Sally Housecoat in this great nation. Yet they bring on experts to "debate" Trump's claims, when they know very well there's nothing to be debated. The man is lying. Call him on it and move on. Ignore the motherfucker, deny him the attention he so nakedly craves, and he'll go away.
No mainstream reporters are quite willing to come right out and say the obvious: If Trump's remarks are racist, then his sudden popularity among Republicans must say reveal much about the party's rabidly anti-Obama stance. But they're not quite willing to say that. Until they do, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner will continue to seem weirdly relevant. Which seems impossible, of course, but there's a lot of things going on these days that shouldn't be happening, but somehow are.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
A PROFOUND SENSE OF LOSS, NARROWLY AVERTED
There are days that we all remember, days that change everything. The Kennedy assassination. The Challenger explosion. 9/11.
And, most sobering of all, the day Ryan Phillippe suggested he may or may not quit acting.
When The New York Post--certainly one of the nation's finest news-gathering organizations--reported a half-assed quote from Phillippe about being so sick of the paparazzi surrounding him twenty-four hours a day that he was thinking of getting out of the acting game, the first thought that crossed the minds of every right-thinking citizen was, "NOOO! We can't live in a world in which Ryan Phillippe's shimmering star presence no longer illuminates our hearts and movie screens."
Well, okay, maybe that wasn't our first collective thought. First it was, "Who the hell is Ryan Phillippe again?" Then, after a quick stop at IMDb, just to confirm that, Flags Of Our Fathers aside, the guy hasn't really been in much of note, we thought, "Wait, paparazzi are stalking this guy?" Then we went about our business. Come to think of it, we didn't really care about Phillippe one way or the other.
But if we had, his rep was quick to inform Access Hollywood--a show so distinguished it should have won a string of Peabody awards by now, assuming they're giving out Peabodys for total crap these days--that no, no, Ryan's cool, he doesn't want to quit acting, he's just looking to branch out. Maybe some producing, directing, that sort of thing. So, sort of like his one-time director Clint Eastwood, only with zero screen presence and marginal talent.
The point is, despite our momentary panic at the thought of losing this vast talent, our screens will continue to be filled with all the Phillippe we can stand, whatever form it may take. Breathe easy, America!
And, most sobering of all, the day Ryan Phillippe suggested he may or may not quit acting.
When The New York Post--certainly one of the nation's finest news-gathering organizations--reported a half-assed quote from Phillippe about being so sick of the paparazzi surrounding him twenty-four hours a day that he was thinking of getting out of the acting game, the first thought that crossed the minds of every right-thinking citizen was, "NOOO! We can't live in a world in which Ryan Phillippe's shimmering star presence no longer illuminates our hearts and movie screens."
Well, okay, maybe that wasn't our first collective thought. First it was, "Who the hell is Ryan Phillippe again?" Then, after a quick stop at IMDb, just to confirm that, Flags Of Our Fathers aside, the guy hasn't really been in much of note, we thought, "Wait, paparazzi are stalking this guy?" Then we went about our business. Come to think of it, we didn't really care about Phillippe one way or the other.
But if we had, his rep was quick to inform Access Hollywood--a show so distinguished it should have won a string of Peabody awards by now, assuming they're giving out Peabodys for total crap these days--that no, no, Ryan's cool, he doesn't want to quit acting, he's just looking to branch out. Maybe some producing, directing, that sort of thing. So, sort of like his one-time director Clint Eastwood, only with zero screen presence and marginal talent.
The point is, despite our momentary panic at the thought of losing this vast talent, our screens will continue to be filled with all the Phillippe we can stand, whatever form it may take. Breathe easy, America!
Saturday, April 23, 2011
AMBULATORY PENIS: A CAUTIONARY TALE
You could feel sorry for him, up to a point. Life as a giant walking dick couldn't be easy, after all. He was what he was, and sometimes--again, he couldn't help it--his cream would spurt all over the place. That was the nature of things for Ambulatory Penis.
No one said he should hide himself away. But hanging around the playground? Not only asking kids about his cream, but forcing them to taste it?
There are rules to society. Ambulatory Penis found out too late, sobbing uncontrollably as he was hauled off in handcuffs, his only words to the press a hushed, "I'm only as God made me." Despite the rumors of his dalliance with Fruit Pie The Magician, he was a first-time offender, and the judge was prepared to be lenient. Still, after all he'd been through, Ambulatory Penis kept babbling at the arraignment about his creamy, creamy filling, and the punishment was harsh: Chemical sterilization.
His jail time was relatively brief, but as a registered sex offender, he found housing hard to come by. He was seen rarely in public, his circumsised head hung low in shame. His enforced flaccid state made him physically unattractive, and when he passed away, his very name was a joke.
Still, some people recall...well, perhaps the details are too painful. But if they try, they see him as he was, and remember.
No one said he should hide himself away. But hanging around the playground? Not only asking kids about his cream, but forcing them to taste it?
There are rules to society. Ambulatory Penis found out too late, sobbing uncontrollably as he was hauled off in handcuffs, his only words to the press a hushed, "I'm only as God made me." Despite the rumors of his dalliance with Fruit Pie The Magician, he was a first-time offender, and the judge was prepared to be lenient. Still, after all he'd been through, Ambulatory Penis kept babbling at the arraignment about his creamy, creamy filling, and the punishment was harsh: Chemical sterilization.
His jail time was relatively brief, but as a registered sex offender, he found housing hard to come by. He was seen rarely in public, his circumsised head hung low in shame. His enforced flaccid state made him physically unattractive, and when he passed away, his very name was a joke.
Still, some people recall...well, perhaps the details are too painful. But if they try, they see him as he was, and remember.
I TOLD YOU EVERYTHING I POSSIBLY CAN
They're bad songs, most of them--Macho Man, Hold The Line, Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad--but they still get played with alarming frequency, in department stores or waiting rooms or dozens of different places. They're just sort of there, part of the collective consciousness.
Yet hearing them now, in pristine digital sound, doesn't seem right. These songs were made to be heard on AM radio. Specifically, they should be wafting from a transistor radio carried by someone on the bus, or the tinny factory speakers in my brother's Chevette. I should be moving forward, past endless barren cornfields, the sky overcast, all branches bare.
Where would I be going? To school, to a movie, simply for a ride? No matter. The important thing is, sooner or later, I would be returning to the house where I lived, to the fuel-oil stove and a casserole-based dinner, to the 19" Quasar which was always on, even when nobody was watching, to the sounds of conversation. Whatever I was doing, eventually I'd go home.
What was I? Twelve? At that age, I still seemed to be living the life I always had, the life I assumed would continue. It seemed as though the warmth and comfort of this particular place would always exist. Yeah, sure, there was a wider world out there, and some day I'd be hurled into it, but that was so far away it was beyond imagination. This was my life, my world.
Things changed. Gradually at first, and I tried to hold tight to the only things I knew. Soon enough, though, the ground erupted and I fell, consumed by overpowering depression , unable to function in any meaningful way until my late twenties. Then I got better. Sort of. I reentered the world.
Marriage. Divorce. Sleepless nights and the occasional doomed relationship. Another relationship, this one I thought for real, but it ended, too. My dad died, and my oldest brother, then Mom. That home I once knew was well and truly gone. Images from the past would blip into my brain and I'd chase them away, unable to process them.
Through it all, I endured. I found a path and took it, winding up here, with a house of my own, three cats and a dog. And Janie, of course, who accepts me for what I am, even when I burst into song for no particular reason. There are familiar rituals, constant conversation, things to do. There are ups and downs, but through it all, there is love.
At long, long last, when I walk through the door every night, it feels like coming home.
Yet hearing them now, in pristine digital sound, doesn't seem right. These songs were made to be heard on AM radio. Specifically, they should be wafting from a transistor radio carried by someone on the bus, or the tinny factory speakers in my brother's Chevette. I should be moving forward, past endless barren cornfields, the sky overcast, all branches bare.
Where would I be going? To school, to a movie, simply for a ride? No matter. The important thing is, sooner or later, I would be returning to the house where I lived, to the fuel-oil stove and a casserole-based dinner, to the 19" Quasar which was always on, even when nobody was watching, to the sounds of conversation. Whatever I was doing, eventually I'd go home.
What was I? Twelve? At that age, I still seemed to be living the life I always had, the life I assumed would continue. It seemed as though the warmth and comfort of this particular place would always exist. Yeah, sure, there was a wider world out there, and some day I'd be hurled into it, but that was so far away it was beyond imagination. This was my life, my world.
Things changed. Gradually at first, and I tried to hold tight to the only things I knew. Soon enough, though, the ground erupted and I fell, consumed by overpowering depression , unable to function in any meaningful way until my late twenties. Then I got better. Sort of. I reentered the world.
Marriage. Divorce. Sleepless nights and the occasional doomed relationship. Another relationship, this one I thought for real, but it ended, too. My dad died, and my oldest brother, then Mom. That home I once knew was well and truly gone. Images from the past would blip into my brain and I'd chase them away, unable to process them.
Through it all, I endured. I found a path and took it, winding up here, with a house of my own, three cats and a dog. And Janie, of course, who accepts me for what I am, even when I burst into song for no particular reason. There are familiar rituals, constant conversation, things to do. There are ups and downs, but through it all, there is love.
At long, long last, when I walk through the door every night, it feels like coming home.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
THE DAY WILL COME WHEN OUR CHILDREN WILL ASK HOW WE AS A NATION ALLOWED JONAH HILL TO BECOME A STAR, AND WE WILL LOOK AWAY, ASHAMED OF OUR COWARDICE
Say, remember that box-office smash and all-time classic movie Get Him To The Greek? Do you remember seeing it and thinking, "Ah yes, Russell Brand and Jonah Hill. Now there's a comedy team for the ages"? Or do you, more likely, remember seeing the ads for it and thinking, "Yeah, maybe I'll catch up with it on cable or something"?
Get Him To The Greek wasn't a flop, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire, either. And considering that it cost way more than necessary to produce, and a whole lot more to market, you might think that Hollywood studios would be in no hurry to offer ridiculous deals to its two stars. You would, obviously, be wrong--why else would I be writing this thing?
Thus, the portly, non-photogenic Hill is currently shooting 21 Jump Street, a presumably comedic updating of the painfully earnest Johnny Depp TV series from the late eighties. This project has been in development forever it seems, and at no time has anyone connected to it bothered asking why the fuck they're bothering with a movie version of a TV show that nobody really remembers. More to the point, no studio execs have ever bothered asking why they're funneling obscene sums of money into Hill's production company in the first place. (He's not just bringing his unique brand of anti-charisma to 21 Jump Street as an actor--he's writing and producing the damned thing as well.)
Nothing against Hill, who was reasonably funny in Superbad, but that's just it--his entire career seems to be based on the success of that one movie. On the basis of that, I can understand giving the guy some gigs as a character actor. But starring roles? And his own production company? Nobody ever gave anything like that to the guys from Porky's, and that movie made a lot more money than Superbad. But then, that was made when studio execs had some sense of perspective. (When the sweaty, coked-out mindset of eighties Hollywood seems like model of common sense, things have deteriorated beyond salvation.)
Even more baffling than the ascent of Hill is the treatment given to his one-time co-star, Russell Brand. When Get Him To The Greek opened, we were deluged with articles treating Brand as a star. Not as someone on the brink of stardom, but a full-fledged movie star, despite the fact that he hadn't really done anything. (Yeah, he was a big deal back in England, but so was the guy who played Selwyn Froggitt, and nobody ever put him on the cover of Rolling Stone.) And sure enough, Brand was soon given the lead in the remake of Arthur, a movie even more deeply unnecessary than a redo of 21 Jump Street. When that movie was released two weeks ago, Warner Bros. made a half-hearted attempt to inflate the weekend grosses, but to no avail: it's a flop.
Rather than admitting their mistake, or at least pretending the whole thing never happened, Warners is reacting to Brand's lack of success by offering him a production deal of his own, as well as the lead in a comedy in which he'll play an arrogant soccer star who, through tiresome plot mechanics, has to--wait, you've never heard this one before--coach a team of rag-tag youths.
It's perhaps unfair to single out Hill and Brand as examples of everything wrong with movies today. The problem isn't with them as performers so much as the mindset of the studio functionaries who keep greenlighting this shit. There's virtually no way any of the announced vehicles for these two gentlemen could possibly be any good, and audiences have consistently shown indifference to their presences, yet here they are, or others like them, taking up space at the multiplexes with movies nobody wants to see.
Ticket prices keep going up, ticket sales keep going down. Can't anybody in Hollywood read a graph?
Get Him To The Greek wasn't a flop, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire, either. And considering that it cost way more than necessary to produce, and a whole lot more to market, you might think that Hollywood studios would be in no hurry to offer ridiculous deals to its two stars. You would, obviously, be wrong--why else would I be writing this thing?
Thus, the portly, non-photogenic Hill is currently shooting 21 Jump Street, a presumably comedic updating of the painfully earnest Johnny Depp TV series from the late eighties. This project has been in development forever it seems, and at no time has anyone connected to it bothered asking why the fuck they're bothering with a movie version of a TV show that nobody really remembers. More to the point, no studio execs have ever bothered asking why they're funneling obscene sums of money into Hill's production company in the first place. (He's not just bringing his unique brand of anti-charisma to 21 Jump Street as an actor--he's writing and producing the damned thing as well.)
Nothing against Hill, who was reasonably funny in Superbad, but that's just it--his entire career seems to be based on the success of that one movie. On the basis of that, I can understand giving the guy some gigs as a character actor. But starring roles? And his own production company? Nobody ever gave anything like that to the guys from Porky's, and that movie made a lot more money than Superbad. But then, that was made when studio execs had some sense of perspective. (When the sweaty, coked-out mindset of eighties Hollywood seems like model of common sense, things have deteriorated beyond salvation.)
Even more baffling than the ascent of Hill is the treatment given to his one-time co-star, Russell Brand. When Get Him To The Greek opened, we were deluged with articles treating Brand as a star. Not as someone on the brink of stardom, but a full-fledged movie star, despite the fact that he hadn't really done anything. (Yeah, he was a big deal back in England, but so was the guy who played Selwyn Froggitt, and nobody ever put him on the cover of Rolling Stone.) And sure enough, Brand was soon given the lead in the remake of Arthur, a movie even more deeply unnecessary than a redo of 21 Jump Street. When that movie was released two weeks ago, Warner Bros. made a half-hearted attempt to inflate the weekend grosses, but to no avail: it's a flop.
Rather than admitting their mistake, or at least pretending the whole thing never happened, Warners is reacting to Brand's lack of success by offering him a production deal of his own, as well as the lead in a comedy in which he'll play an arrogant soccer star who, through tiresome plot mechanics, has to--wait, you've never heard this one before--coach a team of rag-tag youths.
It's perhaps unfair to single out Hill and Brand as examples of everything wrong with movies today. The problem isn't with them as performers so much as the mindset of the studio functionaries who keep greenlighting this shit. There's virtually no way any of the announced vehicles for these two gentlemen could possibly be any good, and audiences have consistently shown indifference to their presences, yet here they are, or others like them, taking up space at the multiplexes with movies nobody wants to see.
Ticket prices keep going up, ticket sales keep going down. Can't anybody in Hollywood read a graph?
Friday, April 15, 2011
ALL NECESSITIES PROVIDED
I remember reading an interview with the great director Sidney Lumet, who died this weekend at the age of 86, in which he was asked if he had a particularly identifiable style.
No, he said, because he believed every story had a particular way it needed to be told, and his job as director was to find it. As example, he cited one of his best-known movies, Network. Many scenes he chose to shoot in an almost verite style, the better to establish the reality of the world he's presenting. He realized, however, that certain individual scenes would seem ridiculous if shot in a naturalistic manner. So these scenes have their own style, whether over-the-top flamboyant, or rich with the shadowy menace of classic noir, or whatever.
The trick was deciding how far to push these individual scenes for maximum impact while not allowing the different styles to clash with each other, to make sure the film stood as its own fully-integrated entity, not just a collection of scenes. And if you've seen Network, you know Lumet more than met his goals. You can dislike the movie itself, mostly due to Paddy Chayefsky's declamatory script, but it's impossible to quibble with Lumet's handling of it--purely as a piece of filmmaking, it is absolutely brilliant.
As was so much of what he did--Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince Of The City, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. He was incredibly prolific, and he made a few also-rans, as well as a number of outright losers. (If you have a few spare hours sometime, ask me what I think of The Wiz.) Good, bad or great, everything he did was the work of a man who above all had the intention of telling you a story. He was something rarer and more valuable than an artist. He was a professional.
No, he said, because he believed every story had a particular way it needed to be told, and his job as director was to find it. As example, he cited one of his best-known movies, Network. Many scenes he chose to shoot in an almost verite style, the better to establish the reality of the world he's presenting. He realized, however, that certain individual scenes would seem ridiculous if shot in a naturalistic manner. So these scenes have their own style, whether over-the-top flamboyant, or rich with the shadowy menace of classic noir, or whatever.
The trick was deciding how far to push these individual scenes for maximum impact while not allowing the different styles to clash with each other, to make sure the film stood as its own fully-integrated entity, not just a collection of scenes. And if you've seen Network, you know Lumet more than met his goals. You can dislike the movie itself, mostly due to Paddy Chayefsky's declamatory script, but it's impossible to quibble with Lumet's handling of it--purely as a piece of filmmaking, it is absolutely brilliant.
As was so much of what he did--Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince Of The City, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. He was incredibly prolific, and he made a few also-rans, as well as a number of outright losers. (If you have a few spare hours sometime, ask me what I think of The Wiz.) Good, bad or great, everything he did was the work of a man who above all had the intention of telling you a story. He was something rarer and more valuable than an artist. He was a professional.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
WOOFS OF SORROW, WAGS OF JOY
It was a year ago today, on what would have been my mom's eighty-second birthday, that I somewhat reluctantly drove down to the Animal Rescue League to see this beagle puppy Tabbatha had told me about. I had no intention of bringing it home with me, but as we all know, the puppy had other ideas.
And Isabella T. Beagle (there's nothing excessively cutesy about that name, is there?) has brought me more joy in that year than I would have thought possible. She does this in all the standard dog ways--bouncing, rolling, barking unexpectedly, deploying the big brown soulful eyes to get whatever she wants.
Mostly, though, she's just there when I need her. I mean, cats are great and all, and for that matter, so are girlfriends, but there are some problems in life that can only be solved by hugging a dog. And the great thing about Bella is, after a minute or so of hug-time, she starts squirming furiously, as if to say, "OK, sad time's over. Let's go play." And she's right, of course--after hugging her, I always feel better, and playing with her always makes me happy.
Which isn't to say she can't be a pain in the ass, because she can. Janie and the cats would all be perfectly happy if she wasn't around. On the other hand, there was the time Janie was scared to the point of crying, and Bella gently climbed onto her lap and carefully licked away her tears. And though Staley--who, incidentally, is one of the greatest cats in the history of the species--doesn't exactly like the dog, the two of them are nuzzling each other even as I write this.
The main thing bout Bella--look, I'm kind of reluctant to bring this up, because it sounds like so much sentimental bullshit, or feel-good semi-mystical hooha, or something. But it's to do with the day she came into my life. I'm quite sure Tabbatha wasn't giving any thought to the fact that I was going through my annual Mom's Birthday Sadness when she called to tell me about this adorable puppy. That was on a Friday night, and I didn't care to head out that night, waiting instead until the next day to take a look--April 10th.
As I drove home with this tiny, helpless beagle snuggled against my side--the last time she'd be so calm in my presence!--the day was suddenly transformed. No longer would April 10th be a signifier of the loss of the most important person in my life. It would be a day celebrating a new chapter, a day of joy, of happiness.
Of life.
And Isabella T. Beagle (there's nothing excessively cutesy about that name, is there?) has brought me more joy in that year than I would have thought possible. She does this in all the standard dog ways--bouncing, rolling, barking unexpectedly, deploying the big brown soulful eyes to get whatever she wants.
Mostly, though, she's just there when I need her. I mean, cats are great and all, and for that matter, so are girlfriends, but there are some problems in life that can only be solved by hugging a dog. And the great thing about Bella is, after a minute or so of hug-time, she starts squirming furiously, as if to say, "OK, sad time's over. Let's go play." And she's right, of course--after hugging her, I always feel better, and playing with her always makes me happy.
Which isn't to say she can't be a pain in the ass, because she can. Janie and the cats would all be perfectly happy if she wasn't around. On the other hand, there was the time Janie was scared to the point of crying, and Bella gently climbed onto her lap and carefully licked away her tears. And though Staley--who, incidentally, is one of the greatest cats in the history of the species--doesn't exactly like the dog, the two of them are nuzzling each other even as I write this.
The main thing bout Bella--look, I'm kind of reluctant to bring this up, because it sounds like so much sentimental bullshit, or feel-good semi-mystical hooha, or something. But it's to do with the day she came into my life. I'm quite sure Tabbatha wasn't giving any thought to the fact that I was going through my annual Mom's Birthday Sadness when she called to tell me about this adorable puppy. That was on a Friday night, and I didn't care to head out that night, waiting instead until the next day to take a look--April 10th.
As I drove home with this tiny, helpless beagle snuggled against my side--the last time she'd be so calm in my presence!--the day was suddenly transformed. No longer would April 10th be a signifier of the loss of the most important person in my life. It would be a day celebrating a new chapter, a day of joy, of happiness.
Of life.
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
I'm no prude, okay? Nor am I some Bill O'Reilly conservative type, or a fundamen6talist Christian nutjob. Nonetheless, I must ask: Do we need jokey cameos from Hugh Hefner in a movie aimed at kids?
I'm speaking, of course, of Hop, the new animated/live-action mongrel that is, as the ads proclaim with a certain level of pride, "from the director of Alvin & The Chipmunks," which you may remember as the movie in which semi-beloved characters from an earlier era are reduced to eating shit and conspiring to get their human buddy laid. So expectations are already low.
Still, this is a movie about the Easter Bunny, which is one of those childhood concepts that ceases to have any significance once you reach the age of, I dunno, seven or so. So presumably, if you're making a movie about the Easter Bunny, you're setting your sights on really young kids as your target audience.
Now I realize that when millions and millions of dollars are spent on a movie, it has to try to reach as large an audience as possible. Presumably the filmmakers wanted to provide some sort of entertainment for the adults who are accompanying all those kids. They could have done this by creating a well-crafted, witty film that would enrapture everybody, the kind of thing Pixar can do without even trying.
Or they could take the most cynical route imaginable and make a bunch of cheap semi-dirty jokes, trot out the likes of Hefner and the deplorable Chelsea Handler, and give audiences a cameo from David Hasselhoff because...wait. Why would you do any of that? Even for b-level celebrities, haven't Handler and Hasselhoff long passed their sell-by date? Would anybody in any audience conceivably welcome their presence?
Probably not, but it's not like the maker of Hop give a sweet shit. If they did, they would have made a good movie.
I'm speaking, of course, of Hop, the new animated/live-action mongrel that is, as the ads proclaim with a certain level of pride, "from the director of Alvin & The Chipmunks," which you may remember as the movie in which semi-beloved characters from an earlier era are reduced to eating shit and conspiring to get their human buddy laid. So expectations are already low.
Still, this is a movie about the Easter Bunny, which is one of those childhood concepts that ceases to have any significance once you reach the age of, I dunno, seven or so. So presumably, if you're making a movie about the Easter Bunny, you're setting your sights on really young kids as your target audience.
Now I realize that when millions and millions of dollars are spent on a movie, it has to try to reach as large an audience as possible. Presumably the filmmakers wanted to provide some sort of entertainment for the adults who are accompanying all those kids. They could have done this by creating a well-crafted, witty film that would enrapture everybody, the kind of thing Pixar can do without even trying.
Or they could take the most cynical route imaginable and make a bunch of cheap semi-dirty jokes, trot out the likes of Hefner and the deplorable Chelsea Handler, and give audiences a cameo from David Hasselhoff because...wait. Why would you do any of that? Even for b-level celebrities, haven't Handler and Hasselhoff long passed their sell-by date? Would anybody in any audience conceivably welcome their presence?
Probably not, but it's not like the maker of Hop give a sweet shit. If they did, they would have made a good movie.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
CATS! ALSO, DOG!
Do any of you--specifically, the two remaining readers I still have--remember the old days of this site? When leftist political screeds (laced, sadly, with frequent Star Wars analogies) would alternate with painfully detailed explorations of the minutia of my personal life? Man, with a surefire combo like that, no wonder this thing took off!
I mention this because, first of all, it seems weird that I never even mention things like the assault on Libya by The Coalition Of The Still-Willing, or the non-existent economic recovery, or radiation leaking over from Japan. The world could end tomorrow, and I'd still spend all my time here complaining about that stupid fucking Spider-Man musical.
What's even more mystifying is my inability or unwillingness to write about my life. That is, my life now; God knows, I've spent plenty of time turning over the rocks of my past. (Talking about past suicide attempts: a positive way to embiggen your readership!) I mean, for crying out loud, she's been here for weeks now and I still haven't said a word about new cat Cookie.
Cookie is Janie's cat--because Janie has officially moved in, and hey, I haven't mentioned that, either--and, man oh Manischewitz, she's the furriest cat I've ever known. But the thing is, unlike other recent feline addition Staley--who I should also talk about more often, because she's awesome--Cookie barely sheds at all. If she sleeps on my pillow, I'll be able to get up the next morning breathing clear. If Staley's next to my head all night, I'll spend the day hacking up hairballs.
Since there are now three cats roaming around the house (beloved malcontent Delmar is still here, of course, and dealing with all this as best he can), the poor beagle is forced to spend more time in her kennel, just to allow the cats some wandering around time without a rambunctious dog trying to stomp them.
At first, I was kind of opposed to this idea. Isn't it terrible to confine a dog for long periods of time? But actually, as many dog trainers can tell you, it is in fact a good idea. Isabella loves her kennel--she jumps into it willingly, and immediately curls up. It's kind of her home inside her home, and more importantly, it helps establish a routine for her. There are rules around here, just like any other household, and this is one Bella is expected to follow. When she obeys, she is rewarded with love. And biscuits, which frankly count for more in her world.
It occurs to me that if Bella has rules she is expected to follow, and if Janie and I have certain responsibilities we have to carry out each day, the cats are pretty much free to do whatever the hell they want, any time of day. As they would no doubt tell you, this is part of the natural order of things.
I mention this because, first of all, it seems weird that I never even mention things like the assault on Libya by The Coalition Of The Still-Willing, or the non-existent economic recovery, or radiation leaking over from Japan. The world could end tomorrow, and I'd still spend all my time here complaining about that stupid fucking Spider-Man musical.
What's even more mystifying is my inability or unwillingness to write about my life. That is, my life now; God knows, I've spent plenty of time turning over the rocks of my past. (Talking about past suicide attempts: a positive way to embiggen your readership!) I mean, for crying out loud, she's been here for weeks now and I still haven't said a word about new cat Cookie.
Cookie is Janie's cat--because Janie has officially moved in, and hey, I haven't mentioned that, either--and, man oh Manischewitz, she's the furriest cat I've ever known. But the thing is, unlike other recent feline addition Staley--who I should also talk about more often, because she's awesome--Cookie barely sheds at all. If she sleeps on my pillow, I'll be able to get up the next morning breathing clear. If Staley's next to my head all night, I'll spend the day hacking up hairballs.
Since there are now three cats roaming around the house (beloved malcontent Delmar is still here, of course, and dealing with all this as best he can), the poor beagle is forced to spend more time in her kennel, just to allow the cats some wandering around time without a rambunctious dog trying to stomp them.
At first, I was kind of opposed to this idea. Isn't it terrible to confine a dog for long periods of time? But actually, as many dog trainers can tell you, it is in fact a good idea. Isabella loves her kennel--she jumps into it willingly, and immediately curls up. It's kind of her home inside her home, and more importantly, it helps establish a routine for her. There are rules around here, just like any other household, and this is one Bella is expected to follow. When she obeys, she is rewarded with love. And biscuits, which frankly count for more in her world.
It occurs to me that if Bella has rules she is expected to follow, and if Janie and I have certain responsibilities we have to carry out each day, the cats are pretty much free to do whatever the hell they want, any time of day. As they would no doubt tell you, this is part of the natural order of things.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
PRETTY SURE I'VE USED THIS AS A TITLE BEFORE, BUT THERE'S NOTHING ELSE TO SAY: AAIIEEEE!
Looking back, it seems kind of impressive that I used to post here every day, but let's face it: Much of what appeared here was merely padding. There were lazy, single paragraph posts, there were lame "can't think of a premise" posts and there were shitloads of clip jobs.
And many--too many?--of those clips showcased random numbers from TV variety specials of the seventies. And yes, many of those numbers featured the barely competent Lynda Carter, because she served as a shining exemplar of seventies celebrity. Enormous breasts aside, she had no particular reason to be a star, yet there she was on TV anyway, and worse, she was singing.
One might have thought I had exhausted the available library of Lynda clips, and even I thought I had, but the internet is a bottomless pit of unnecessary things, so there's always the dreaded More: More Lynda, More singing, More dancing, More campy Peter Allen songs that aren't even very good on their own terms.
But hey, enough with the talking. Take it away, Carter Miranda!
And many--too many?--of those clips showcased random numbers from TV variety specials of the seventies. And yes, many of those numbers featured the barely competent Lynda Carter, because she served as a shining exemplar of seventies celebrity. Enormous breasts aside, she had no particular reason to be a star, yet there she was on TV anyway, and worse, she was singing.
One might have thought I had exhausted the available library of Lynda clips, and even I thought I had, but the internet is a bottomless pit of unnecessary things, so there's always the dreaded More: More Lynda, More singing, More dancing, More campy Peter Allen songs that aren't even very good on their own terms.
But hey, enough with the talking. Take it away, Carter Miranda!
Thursday, March 17, 2011
IN WHICH I GO OFF ON ANOTHER WEIRD TANGENT
Look, I have no control over the types of things that pop into my head. That's the only way I can explain why I found myself wandering around the other day singing The Hut Sut Song.
If you, quite sensibly, wonder what the hell I'm talking about, you clearly didn't know my mom, who would break into this from time to time. As to how or why the damned thing ever came to exist, as Dr. Floyd said of the monolith in 2001, its origin and purpose remain a total mystery. Posting this on St. Patrick's Day makes no sense whatsoever, but what do you want? At least I'm not going on about El Brendel again.
If you, quite sensibly, wonder what the hell I'm talking about, you clearly didn't know my mom, who would break into this from time to time. As to how or why the damned thing ever came to exist, as Dr. Floyd said of the monolith in 2001, its origin and purpose remain a total mystery. Posting this on St. Patrick's Day makes no sense whatsoever, but what do you want? At least I'm not going on about El Brendel again.
Monday, March 14, 2011
CAN'T SEE NO SKY
There was never blood, not any of the times I slashed my wrists. Oh, I wanted there to be: rivers of crimson, my very essence visibly departing. I wasn't some fucking cutter. This wasn't done for cheap effect. I wanted to die every single time.
Unfortunately, as the great philosopher Daffy Duck once observed, pain hurts. Sure enough, the more pressure I applied to my wrist, the greater the pain. Well, I'd think, what if I mess this whole thing up? What if I don't die, but somehow lose the use of my hands, or otherwise have to continue to live in a state of unbearable agony?
The fact that I could never take that permanent step raises the possibility that I didn't, if fact, want to die. Okay, maybe a few of those times, when I was just trying to send some kind of message to my mom and dad, or my wife, or whoever was unfortunate enough to be in my orbit at that particular time. Maybe. But there were so many other times when I floundered all alone with my despair, when the only shred of hope I could cling to was the promise of sweet oblivion--oh yes, those were the times when I did indeed wish to leave this world permanently.
Funny, though...like so many things in my past, I remember the details--my cat Monika sitting at my feet, the mocking sunshine outside the window, the tender flesh of my wrist growing whiter and whiter as I drove the blade down harder--but I can't recall the context. What overwhelming depression could have led me to such feelings? What could have prompted me to want to say The Big Adios? What emotions were so intense, what could have gone so wrong, what was my fucking deal?
I can remember plots of TV shows from thirty years ago. I can remember details of aimless car trips my brother and I took when I was in junior high. I can remember a thousand voices and songs and conversations. But the circumstances and emotions that made me want to kill myself--sorry, no. Those are the things I can't recall.
So I continue to live, relatively happily. There are plenty of down days, sure, but the thought of ending it all never crosses my mind. Why would it? That's not a rational way of thinking. Still, from time to time I'll notice the scars on my wrists, up and down and crisscrossed like a subway map, and I'll wonder what it felt like to hate myself so much.
Unfortunately, as the great philosopher Daffy Duck once observed, pain hurts. Sure enough, the more pressure I applied to my wrist, the greater the pain. Well, I'd think, what if I mess this whole thing up? What if I don't die, but somehow lose the use of my hands, or otherwise have to continue to live in a state of unbearable agony?
The fact that I could never take that permanent step raises the possibility that I didn't, if fact, want to die. Okay, maybe a few of those times, when I was just trying to send some kind of message to my mom and dad, or my wife, or whoever was unfortunate enough to be in my orbit at that particular time. Maybe. But there were so many other times when I floundered all alone with my despair, when the only shred of hope I could cling to was the promise of sweet oblivion--oh yes, those were the times when I did indeed wish to leave this world permanently.
Funny, though...like so many things in my past, I remember the details--my cat Monika sitting at my feet, the mocking sunshine outside the window, the tender flesh of my wrist growing whiter and whiter as I drove the blade down harder--but I can't recall the context. What overwhelming depression could have led me to such feelings? What could have prompted me to want to say The Big Adios? What emotions were so intense, what could have gone so wrong, what was my fucking deal?
I can remember plots of TV shows from thirty years ago. I can remember details of aimless car trips my brother and I took when I was in junior high. I can remember a thousand voices and songs and conversations. But the circumstances and emotions that made me want to kill myself--sorry, no. Those are the things I can't recall.
So I continue to live, relatively happily. There are plenty of down days, sure, but the thought of ending it all never crosses my mind. Why would it? That's not a rational way of thinking. Still, from time to time I'll notice the scars on my wrists, up and down and crisscrossed like a subway map, and I'll wonder what it felt like to hate myself so much.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE TURN OFF THE DARK
Of all the unfortunate things to come from the whole Charlie Sheen affair, the worst by far is that it has stolen the nation's pop cultural spotlight away from that godawful Spider-Man musical.
Really, they might as well start billing it as "That God-Awful Spider-Man Musical" but until they do, it's still called Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, which, as I've said over and over again, is the worst title of anything conceived in human history. Turns out, the title was contributed by Bono, who is perfectly happy to have people call him Bono, so the sheer stupidity of it becomes a bit more understandable.
But not acceptable. The annoyingly pretentious Irishman dreamed up the title based on a story he vaguely recalled about a kid who said "Turn off the dark" instead of "turn on the light". Ha, ha. That's cute, Bono, but what the fuck does it have to do with Spider-Man? By that logic, I could write a terrible musical adaptation of Taxi Driver and call it "Travis Bickle: Masho Peetato" and explain that the title comes from my inability as a child to properly pronounce "mashed potatoes". Would that have anything to do with the character at hand? Of course not. Does "turn off the dark" have anything to do with Spider-Man? Of course not.
Bono's indulgence is clearly typical of the show right down the line. Seriously, read this synopsis of the plot. Sure, a typical Marvel Comics plot could be ridiculously convoluted, but it would at least be straightforward. This...this makes no damned sense. And worse, it's obvious that Spider-Man/Peter Parker is a hapless bystander in his own show, that director Julie Taymor (who was referred to in every story about this thing until previews began as "visionary director Julie Taymor") is more interested in the whole Arachne/mythology thing and grafted some shit she was already working on onto the Spider-Man show because there was funding for it.
Taymor deserves all the mockery she's been receiving--did I mention the show includes a supervillain fashion parade?--but to offer a half-hearted defense of her position, the show as it stands is only partially her fault. Sure, the creative debacle is entirely her doing, but there's no way anyone should have let the show get that far. Once anybody with any business sense read her script, they should have clearly said, "Thanks, not what we're looking for." Nobody could have thought that fake-poetic hooha about Greek mythology was a good idea in a show about a contemporary superhero. Maybe they were waiting around to get some idea of Taymor's staging concept--her, uh, vision, if you will--but again, once they saw this crap in rehearsals, the producers should have either pulled the plug or started over with an entirely different concept. All the wirework in the world can't save a bad idea.
Now that Taymor has been shown the door (or metaphorically snapped her cable and plunged to the stage) it's unclear how the new creative team can possibly salvage this thing. They are so far only being given a three-month window to work this into shape, so there's no time to start from scratch. (Everyone who has seen the damned thing agrees that the whole Arachne thing needs to be dropped, but given how much of the physical production is built around her, that seems unlikely.) And really, why should they change it? Taymor's show is already considered one of the worst things in Broadway history; bringing it to the level of respectable competence would reduce a legendary disaster to a merely dull failure.
Really, they might as well start billing it as "That God-Awful Spider-Man Musical" but until they do, it's still called Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, which, as I've said over and over again, is the worst title of anything conceived in human history. Turns out, the title was contributed by Bono, who is perfectly happy to have people call him Bono, so the sheer stupidity of it becomes a bit more understandable.
But not acceptable. The annoyingly pretentious Irishman dreamed up the title based on a story he vaguely recalled about a kid who said "Turn off the dark" instead of "turn on the light". Ha, ha. That's cute, Bono, but what the fuck does it have to do with Spider-Man? By that logic, I could write a terrible musical adaptation of Taxi Driver and call it "Travis Bickle: Masho Peetato" and explain that the title comes from my inability as a child to properly pronounce "mashed potatoes". Would that have anything to do with the character at hand? Of course not. Does "turn off the dark" have anything to do with Spider-Man? Of course not.
Bono's indulgence is clearly typical of the show right down the line. Seriously, read this synopsis of the plot. Sure, a typical Marvel Comics plot could be ridiculously convoluted, but it would at least be straightforward. This...this makes no damned sense. And worse, it's obvious that Spider-Man/Peter Parker is a hapless bystander in his own show, that director Julie Taymor (who was referred to in every story about this thing until previews began as "visionary director Julie Taymor") is more interested in the whole Arachne/mythology thing and grafted some shit she was already working on onto the Spider-Man show because there was funding for it.
Taymor deserves all the mockery she's been receiving--did I mention the show includes a supervillain fashion parade?--but to offer a half-hearted defense of her position, the show as it stands is only partially her fault. Sure, the creative debacle is entirely her doing, but there's no way anyone should have let the show get that far. Once anybody with any business sense read her script, they should have clearly said, "Thanks, not what we're looking for." Nobody could have thought that fake-poetic hooha about Greek mythology was a good idea in a show about a contemporary superhero. Maybe they were waiting around to get some idea of Taymor's staging concept--her, uh, vision, if you will--but again, once they saw this crap in rehearsals, the producers should have either pulled the plug or started over with an entirely different concept. All the wirework in the world can't save a bad idea.
Now that Taymor has been shown the door (or metaphorically snapped her cable and plunged to the stage) it's unclear how the new creative team can possibly salvage this thing. They are so far only being given a three-month window to work this into shape, so there's no time to start from scratch. (Everyone who has seen the damned thing agrees that the whole Arachne thing needs to be dropped, but given how much of the physical production is built around her, that seems unlikely.) And really, why should they change it? Taymor's show is already considered one of the worst things in Broadway history; bringing it to the level of respectable competence would reduce a legendary disaster to a merely dull failure.
Monday, March 07, 2011
REFLECTIONS IN THE WAVES, OR SOME DAMN THING
Oh, this is a crappy song.
I was twelve when this came out, and I hated it then. I hated the neo-classical piano and the whooshing synthesizers and the whole aliens-and-shit angle, which just comes out of nowhere and...everything about it, basically.
Except. That whole "reflections in the waves spark my memories" bit. "Some happy, some sad/I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had." When I'd hear this song in the middle of the night on the AM radio in my bedroom, those lines seemed authentically rueful, the lament of someone who'd been around, a message to me that everything in life doesn't always turn out for the best--after all, if Dennis DeYoung's friends could miss out on the pot of gold, what hope did the rest of us have?
These days, obviously, I realize that part of the song is just as phony as everything else. But once upon a time it served its purpose--it injected a bit of melancholia into a profoundly stupid pop song, and it made me realize that even the most placid surface could mask troubling depths. Which means on some level I'll always be grateful for a Styx song. My life, consequently, has been lived in shame.
I was twelve when this came out, and I hated it then. I hated the neo-classical piano and the whooshing synthesizers and the whole aliens-and-shit angle, which just comes out of nowhere and...everything about it, basically.
Except. That whole "reflections in the waves spark my memories" bit. "Some happy, some sad/I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had." When I'd hear this song in the middle of the night on the AM radio in my bedroom, those lines seemed authentically rueful, the lament of someone who'd been around, a message to me that everything in life doesn't always turn out for the best--after all, if Dennis DeYoung's friends could miss out on the pot of gold, what hope did the rest of us have?
These days, obviously, I realize that part of the song is just as phony as everything else. But once upon a time it served its purpose--it injected a bit of melancholia into a profoundly stupid pop song, and it made me realize that even the most placid surface could mask troubling depths. Which means on some level I'll always be grateful for a Styx song. My life, consequently, has been lived in shame.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
HOW I SPENT MY WEDNESDAY
Standing with the other suckers roped into jury duty for twenty minutes or so, waiting for the court house to open. When the doors are finally unlocked, we shuffle obediently through the metal detectors, find the restrooms, make note of all the vending machines and finally make our way to Room 303.
"We'll validate your tickets when you're dismissed for the day. Please take a badge and have a seat," says the pleasantly efficient blond in the surprisingly low-cut silver top. She'll say it a hundred times or more as the jury room continues to fill. It is now a quarter to eight, and the wait begins.
And how lucky for me. Though most people in the packed room sit quietly, reading or messing with their phones, I'm sitting in front of two right-wing nutjobs. They don't seem to know each other, but they feel amazingly comfortable sharing their noxious world views with each other.
It starts out with one of them going on about the "cowardly" Democrats in Wisconsin, which leads nicely into some anti-union bullshit, and then it goes downhill from there. By the time one of them is waxing nostalgic for the eighties--"We had a good president, and kids could fight. None of this fucking stuff about bullying. Who is some committee to decide what a bully is, anyway?"--I start to loathe the criminal justice system. Imagine having your guilt or innocence decided by these goofballs.
Fortunately, the Donald Westlake/Richard Stark book I brought along provides excellent distraction--damn, that guy could write!--at least until the person in charge appears at the front of the room and instructs the right side of the room to follow her for orientation. Unfortunately, I'm on the left side, which means I get to listen to more pearls of wisdom from the cornfed Glenn Becks behind me. It's not even eight-thirty. Shit.
I'm already up to page 50 in my book when the person in charge--who tells us her name, and it confirms that she is not in fact the woman I once had a mild crush on many, many years ago--reappears and leads us down the hall to a surprisingly disheveled courtroom, with boxes piled in one corner and a rack of folding chairs against a wall. She rolls out a vintage Zenith, pops in a VHS tape and our orientation begins.
As befits a tutorial presented in an obsolete format, the video walks us in the most dated way imaginable through the essential stuff we need to know about being a juror. One of the most important things it stresses is to avoid reading newspapers or watching TV. Uh, right. This tape is being played to a room full of people with cellphones and iPads, who can easily find out anything they need to know in seconds, and we're being told that we can have loved ones cut out any relevant stories from newspapers before we read them. I know that Polk County has had to make some pretty severe budget cuts, but would it be too much to ask that our orientation material be produced in this century?
The tape ends, and we're addressed by a judge, who reiterates half of what we've already heard, then apologizes for the age of the video. The idea of skipping the video altogether and merely having the judge address us from the get-go apparently never occurred to anybody. After all, that would speed up the process, and God knows we wouldn't want that.
Back to the jury room, where names are called for potential jurors for specific trials. I'm one of thirty potential jurors for a trial being overseen by Judge Rosenberg, whose name is mentioned half a dozen times, as in "Judge Rosenberg jurors, please line up in the hallway," or "Judge Rosenberg jurors, please wait to the left of the jury room," or "Judge Rosenberg jurors, please wait."
So we wait in the hallway. And wait. And wait. Conversations start, then peter out from lack of interest. People lean against walls or marble columns, walk around briefly, the lean some more. All thirty of us watch, mesmerized, as an elderly gentleman polishes the balustrade, and shortly after wondering whether "polishing the balustrade" works better as a euphemism for oral sex or masturbation I realize it has been years since I've been quite this bored.
What was supposed to be a fifteen minute wait stretches to an hour. It's obvious that the case we were to hear is being settled, but nobody keeps us informed. Finally some functionary who is different from all the other functionaries we've seen this morning gathers all the Judge Rosenberg jurors together and tells us the obvious: The case is settled. "However," she adds, "this does not mean you are being released from service. There is one other trial scheduled, and we may yet need alternates for the two other trials getting underway"--and here she checks her watch in an absurdly theatrical manner--"shortly, so please return to the jury room and wait."
Which we do, for another hour or so, until another yet another functionary appears, telling us to go home. I wait for the line to thin out before having my parking ticket validated by the blond in the surprisingly low-cut top, which is now covered by a white shirt buttoned to the neck.
Someone must have said something.
"We'll validate your tickets when you're dismissed for the day. Please take a badge and have a seat," says the pleasantly efficient blond in the surprisingly low-cut silver top. She'll say it a hundred times or more as the jury room continues to fill. It is now a quarter to eight, and the wait begins.
And how lucky for me. Though most people in the packed room sit quietly, reading or messing with their phones, I'm sitting in front of two right-wing nutjobs. They don't seem to know each other, but they feel amazingly comfortable sharing their noxious world views with each other.
It starts out with one of them going on about the "cowardly" Democrats in Wisconsin, which leads nicely into some anti-union bullshit, and then it goes downhill from there. By the time one of them is waxing nostalgic for the eighties--"We had a good president, and kids could fight. None of this fucking stuff about bullying. Who is some committee to decide what a bully is, anyway?"--I start to loathe the criminal justice system. Imagine having your guilt or innocence decided by these goofballs.
Fortunately, the Donald Westlake/Richard Stark book I brought along provides excellent distraction--damn, that guy could write!--at least until the person in charge appears at the front of the room and instructs the right side of the room to follow her for orientation. Unfortunately, I'm on the left side, which means I get to listen to more pearls of wisdom from the cornfed Glenn Becks behind me. It's not even eight-thirty. Shit.
I'm already up to page 50 in my book when the person in charge--who tells us her name, and it confirms that she is not in fact the woman I once had a mild crush on many, many years ago--reappears and leads us down the hall to a surprisingly disheveled courtroom, with boxes piled in one corner and a rack of folding chairs against a wall. She rolls out a vintage Zenith, pops in a VHS tape and our orientation begins.
As befits a tutorial presented in an obsolete format, the video walks us in the most dated way imaginable through the essential stuff we need to know about being a juror. One of the most important things it stresses is to avoid reading newspapers or watching TV. Uh, right. This tape is being played to a room full of people with cellphones and iPads, who can easily find out anything they need to know in seconds, and we're being told that we can have loved ones cut out any relevant stories from newspapers before we read them. I know that Polk County has had to make some pretty severe budget cuts, but would it be too much to ask that our orientation material be produced in this century?
The tape ends, and we're addressed by a judge, who reiterates half of what we've already heard, then apologizes for the age of the video. The idea of skipping the video altogether and merely having the judge address us from the get-go apparently never occurred to anybody. After all, that would speed up the process, and God knows we wouldn't want that.
Back to the jury room, where names are called for potential jurors for specific trials. I'm one of thirty potential jurors for a trial being overseen by Judge Rosenberg, whose name is mentioned half a dozen times, as in "Judge Rosenberg jurors, please line up in the hallway," or "Judge Rosenberg jurors, please wait to the left of the jury room," or "Judge Rosenberg jurors, please wait."
So we wait in the hallway. And wait. And wait. Conversations start, then peter out from lack of interest. People lean against walls or marble columns, walk around briefly, the lean some more. All thirty of us watch, mesmerized, as an elderly gentleman polishes the balustrade, and shortly after wondering whether "polishing the balustrade" works better as a euphemism for oral sex or masturbation I realize it has been years since I've been quite this bored.
What was supposed to be a fifteen minute wait stretches to an hour. It's obvious that the case we were to hear is being settled, but nobody keeps us informed. Finally some functionary who is different from all the other functionaries we've seen this morning gathers all the Judge Rosenberg jurors together and tells us the obvious: The case is settled. "However," she adds, "this does not mean you are being released from service. There is one other trial scheduled, and we may yet need alternates for the two other trials getting underway"--and here she checks her watch in an absurdly theatrical manner--"shortly, so please return to the jury room and wait."
Which we do, for another hour or so, until another yet another functionary appears, telling us to go home. I wait for the line to thin out before having my parking ticket validated by the blond in the surprisingly low-cut top, which is now covered by a white shirt buttoned to the neck.
Someone must have said something.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
NOTHING'S GONNA CHANGE MY WORLD
Suddenly, it's five years.
I'm forty-five. Five years is a long time, a considerable chunk of my life. And yet five years is how long I have lived in this world without Mom.
LiFe without her comforting words, her wise counsel, her fiercely-held opinions? It once seemed unbearable. And how I would miss her sense of humor--she could make me laugh anytime I talked to her. She was--and I hesitate to use the term, but there's really no better description--a life force: everyone who came into contact with her was better for knowing her. She was the center of my life, my world, my universe. Life without her would be no life at all.
Still, here we are. Life has gone on, and I might make note of the fact that the first sentence of this paragraph was a lift from the Bob Seger song We've Got Tonight, which has nothing to do with what I'm writing about. In fact, I hate Bob Seger, and I particularly hate that song, and maybe it only popped into my head because I'm trying to think of something, anything, to distract me from the subject at hand, because I don't want to start grieving all over again.
Or maybe it popped into my head because I'm frankly kind of bored. I don't want to be writing another tribute to Mom. What else is there to say? This site came into being as a way of dealing with my grief, but it quickly became something else, because after all, how long could the grieving process last? I still remember so many little details, and still do all I can to honor Mom's memory, but the simple fact is, that memory doesn't mean as much to me now as it once did. It just doesn't. It can't. If it did, I'd live under it every single day, unable to move forward.
It is, after all, the nature of all things to move forward. And so I have--I rarely think of Mom anymore. Life goes on, things in their season, and all that. Letting go is a natural and inevitable part of the process.
Still, something stings my eyes. Couldn't be tears, though. Not after five years.
I'm forty-five. Five years is a long time, a considerable chunk of my life. And yet five years is how long I have lived in this world without Mom.
LiFe without her comforting words, her wise counsel, her fiercely-held opinions? It once seemed unbearable. And how I would miss her sense of humor--she could make me laugh anytime I talked to her. She was--and I hesitate to use the term, but there's really no better description--a life force: everyone who came into contact with her was better for knowing her. She was the center of my life, my world, my universe. Life without her would be no life at all.
Still, here we are. Life has gone on, and I might make note of the fact that the first sentence of this paragraph was a lift from the Bob Seger song We've Got Tonight, which has nothing to do with what I'm writing about. In fact, I hate Bob Seger, and I particularly hate that song, and maybe it only popped into my head because I'm trying to think of something, anything, to distract me from the subject at hand, because I don't want to start grieving all over again.
Or maybe it popped into my head because I'm frankly kind of bored. I don't want to be writing another tribute to Mom. What else is there to say? This site came into being as a way of dealing with my grief, but it quickly became something else, because after all, how long could the grieving process last? I still remember so many little details, and still do all I can to honor Mom's memory, but the simple fact is, that memory doesn't mean as much to me now as it once did. It just doesn't. It can't. If it did, I'd live under it every single day, unable to move forward.
It is, after all, the nature of all things to move forward. And so I have--I rarely think of Mom anymore. Life goes on, things in their season, and all that. Letting go is a natural and inevitable part of the process.
Still, something stings my eyes. Couldn't be tears, though. Not after five years.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
NOTHING SO APPALLING IN THE ANNALS OF HORROR!
More passings of people I'd always hoped would be around forever.
Betty Garrett, for instance, has died at 91. She was a mainstay of MGM musicals in the late forties and fifties, but the famously conservative studio cut her loose when her husband, Larry Parks, was blacklisted for pro-Communist sympathies. (He named names, which made him a pariah of the right and the left.) Garrett found work at other studios, she and Parks did a ton of summer stock, and she finally became a much-loved character actress. I couldn't find my favorite moment Garrett had on film (her performance of It's Fate, baby, It's Fate from the otherwise undistinguished Take Me Out To The Ballgame) but this will do nicely, as she effortlessly takes charge of an amazing ensemble including Tommy Rall, Janet Leigh and Bob Fosse in a number from Richard Quine's wonderful 1955 musical My Sister Eileen.
Pancreatic cancer took the great character comedian Kenneth Mars at 75. Like Garrett, he made anything better simply by being in it, whether it was an episode of Murder, She Wrote, the cult favorite Fernwood 2Nite, or, the roles that granted him immortality, Mel Brooks' The Producers and Young Frankenstein. That last film, in particular, has a cast full of great comic performers, but Mars, in a relatively small role, steals it from them all.
Finally, heart failure finally took producer David Friedman, the distinguished impresario behind some of the finest films ever made.
That was, of course, Blood Feast, one of several movies Friedman produced for writer-director Herschell Gordon Lewis. The almost-competent cinematography and dime store effects came courtesy of Lewis, but that patently insincere warning at the top of the trailer was pure Friedman, a master of selling the sizzle without the steak. So many of his titles--Trader Hornee, The Erotic Adventures Of Zorro--sound entertaining, but most of the inventiveness was spent on the titles and ad campaigns. Still, they generally at least delivered on their promise to show gorgeous naked babes, so there's that. Friedman flourished during a more innocent time of exploitation cinema, though he later produced the notorious Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The S.S., from which he removed his name, as well as some hard-core porn. But he always had a sense of humor about what he did, and never took himself seriously.
And it was a sense of humor that united Friedman, Mars and Garrett. The world is worse without them.
Betty Garrett, for instance, has died at 91. She was a mainstay of MGM musicals in the late forties and fifties, but the famously conservative studio cut her loose when her husband, Larry Parks, was blacklisted for pro-Communist sympathies. (He named names, which made him a pariah of the right and the left.) Garrett found work at other studios, she and Parks did a ton of summer stock, and she finally became a much-loved character actress. I couldn't find my favorite moment Garrett had on film (her performance of It's Fate, baby, It's Fate from the otherwise undistinguished Take Me Out To The Ballgame) but this will do nicely, as she effortlessly takes charge of an amazing ensemble including Tommy Rall, Janet Leigh and Bob Fosse in a number from Richard Quine's wonderful 1955 musical My Sister Eileen.
Pancreatic cancer took the great character comedian Kenneth Mars at 75. Like Garrett, he made anything better simply by being in it, whether it was an episode of Murder, She Wrote, the cult favorite Fernwood 2Nite, or, the roles that granted him immortality, Mel Brooks' The Producers and Young Frankenstein. That last film, in particular, has a cast full of great comic performers, but Mars, in a relatively small role, steals it from them all.
Finally, heart failure finally took producer David Friedman, the distinguished impresario behind some of the finest films ever made.
That was, of course, Blood Feast, one of several movies Friedman produced for writer-director Herschell Gordon Lewis. The almost-competent cinematography and dime store effects came courtesy of Lewis, but that patently insincere warning at the top of the trailer was pure Friedman, a master of selling the sizzle without the steak. So many of his titles--Trader Hornee, The Erotic Adventures Of Zorro--sound entertaining, but most of the inventiveness was spent on the titles and ad campaigns. Still, they generally at least delivered on their promise to show gorgeous naked babes, so there's that. Friedman flourished during a more innocent time of exploitation cinema, though he later produced the notorious Ilsa, She-Wolf Of The S.S., from which he removed his name, as well as some hard-core porn. But he always had a sense of humor about what he did, and never took himself seriously.
And it was a sense of humor that united Friedman, Mars and Garrett. The world is worse without them.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
DON'T TRY TO FIGHT IT
It was called the music room, mostly because it was the only available space left in the whole school for the band and choir to rehearse. No one was fooled, though. The awful acoustics and overhead door on the north side marked it for what it originally was--a garage.
It was, therefore, the only sheltered area in the entire building that could temporarily house a pickup, and so that was where we gathered: seventh and eighth graders being allowed for the first time in school history to build a float for the homecoming parade. This honor had previously only been bestowed on freshman and up, and the significance wasn't lost on us. It meant we were practically in high school, which meant we were practically adults.
Normally we would have been outside working on this, but a furious rain pounded the ground, as it had the whole previous night, as it was scheduled to do all day. If it continued, the parade and all related events scheduled for that afternoon would be canceled, but none of the twelve and thirteen-year-olds gathered inside the music room were thinking of that.
Most concentrated on the papier-mache figure taking shape on the back of the pickup, some sort of angry bird wearing a YJB Raiders helmet. Others, less ambitious, hung on the periphery, happy just to have been granted a period full of extended goof-off time, free from the burdens of the classroom. I was one of those, though I wasn't all that celebratory about my freedom. I hated gatherings like this, feeling perpetually isolated from most of my classmates, so non-social it hurt.
Still, somehow I found myself leaning against the driver's side door of the pickup when Dale, one of my classmates, and Marty, a grade ahead, slid into the cab from the other side. They motioned me inside, handed me the key--how had they gotten hold of it?--and Marty said, "We need some music."
I turned it to auxiliary. Dale punched buttons on the radio until he came to KIOA, the local Top Forty station, the one station everyone listened to. We suffered through some commercials and the top of the hour newscast, then, finally, music.
Well I was sixteen, sick of school
Didn't know what I wanted to do
I bought a guitar
I got the fever
That's rock & roll
I was twelve, and I already knew Shaun Cassidy was nothing but a TV pretty boy, that this song, this product, had nothing to do with real rock & roll. But Dale and Marty were bopping their heads in time to the music, and damned if I didn't start pounding out the beat on the steering wheel. By the chorus, we were all three singing along.
Come on everybody, get down and get with it
Come on everybody, get down and get with it
Come on everybody, get down--that's rock & roll
We kept swinging our bodies back and forth in time to the rhythm, and pantomimed playing along to the cheesy sax solo. For three minutes, we freed ourselves to wild abandon.
That song ended, some Neil Diamond crap came on, we emerged from the pickup. Dale and Marty went off to do something else, and since I wasn't explicitly invited to join them, I crept back to the periphery. I had briefly glimpsed something new and different, a kinship with people I barely even knew, but now I stood in the corner by the big windows, watching the rain, falling, falling.
It was, therefore, the only sheltered area in the entire building that could temporarily house a pickup, and so that was where we gathered: seventh and eighth graders being allowed for the first time in school history to build a float for the homecoming parade. This honor had previously only been bestowed on freshman and up, and the significance wasn't lost on us. It meant we were practically in high school, which meant we were practically adults.
Normally we would have been outside working on this, but a furious rain pounded the ground, as it had the whole previous night, as it was scheduled to do all day. If it continued, the parade and all related events scheduled for that afternoon would be canceled, but none of the twelve and thirteen-year-olds gathered inside the music room were thinking of that.
Most concentrated on the papier-mache figure taking shape on the back of the pickup, some sort of angry bird wearing a YJB Raiders helmet. Others, less ambitious, hung on the periphery, happy just to have been granted a period full of extended goof-off time, free from the burdens of the classroom. I was one of those, though I wasn't all that celebratory about my freedom. I hated gatherings like this, feeling perpetually isolated from most of my classmates, so non-social it hurt.
Still, somehow I found myself leaning against the driver's side door of the pickup when Dale, one of my classmates, and Marty, a grade ahead, slid into the cab from the other side. They motioned me inside, handed me the key--how had they gotten hold of it?--and Marty said, "We need some music."
I turned it to auxiliary. Dale punched buttons on the radio until he came to KIOA, the local Top Forty station, the one station everyone listened to. We suffered through some commercials and the top of the hour newscast, then, finally, music.
Well I was sixteen, sick of school
Didn't know what I wanted to do
I bought a guitar
I got the fever
That's rock & roll
I was twelve, and I already knew Shaun Cassidy was nothing but a TV pretty boy, that this song, this product, had nothing to do with real rock & roll. But Dale and Marty were bopping their heads in time to the music, and damned if I didn't start pounding out the beat on the steering wheel. By the chorus, we were all three singing along.
Come on everybody, get down and get with it
Come on everybody, get down and get with it
Come on everybody, get down--that's rock & roll
We kept swinging our bodies back and forth in time to the rhythm, and pantomimed playing along to the cheesy sax solo. For three minutes, we freed ourselves to wild abandon.
That song ended, some Neil Diamond crap came on, we emerged from the pickup. Dale and Marty went off to do something else, and since I wasn't explicitly invited to join them, I crept back to the periphery. I had briefly glimpsed something new and different, a kinship with people I barely even knew, but now I stood in the corner by the big windows, watching the rain, falling, falling.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
PUSSYCATS
A friend was moving, she couldn't take all of her pets with her, so please welcome to the stage another player--new kitty Staley. I don't really need another critter around here, what with the cat and the dog I already have, and Janie's cat, which will presumably be joining us shortly.
But Staley is fuzzy and gray, and darned if she doesn't look a bit like much-beloved and still much-missed Monika and...and she's just insanely lovable, is what she is. She's already shown she can hold her own against a leaping Beagle, and even though Delmar hates her, that's not too troubling, because of course Del hates everyone. (Except me, of course.) It's a little disconcerting to be reading in bed and suddenly have a fuzzy gray presence appear in my peripheral vision--for one brief moment, I think Monika's still around--but there's comfort in that presence, as well.
So again, welcome to Staley, but a sad farewell to Tura Satana, the iconic, magnetic star of one of Russ Meyer's greatest films, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Unfortunately for Satana--her real name, incidentally, which is one of the many awesome things about her--that film was released in 1965, a time when nobody in the filmmaking establishment was paying any attention to the disreputable likes of Russ Meyer, so her amazing performance, which should have led to a long, well-earned career, pretty much led nowhere.
She wasn't a great actress, but she was an astonishing presence--would it be too much to compare her to Cyd Charisse?--and she certainly deserved better than the Al Adamson crapfests she wound up doing. Later in life, as appreciation for Faster, Pussycat! became more common, she became famous for simply being, adored by fans for one great role.
And while it would have been great if she'd done more, what she did was more than enough.
But Staley is fuzzy and gray, and darned if she doesn't look a bit like much-beloved and still much-missed Monika and...and she's just insanely lovable, is what she is. She's already shown she can hold her own against a leaping Beagle, and even though Delmar hates her, that's not too troubling, because of course Del hates everyone. (Except me, of course.) It's a little disconcerting to be reading in bed and suddenly have a fuzzy gray presence appear in my peripheral vision--for one brief moment, I think Monika's still around--but there's comfort in that presence, as well.
So again, welcome to Staley, but a sad farewell to Tura Satana, the iconic, magnetic star of one of Russ Meyer's greatest films, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Unfortunately for Satana--her real name, incidentally, which is one of the many awesome things about her--that film was released in 1965, a time when nobody in the filmmaking establishment was paying any attention to the disreputable likes of Russ Meyer, so her amazing performance, which should have led to a long, well-earned career, pretty much led nowhere.
She wasn't a great actress, but she was an astonishing presence--would it be too much to compare her to Cyd Charisse?--and she certainly deserved better than the Al Adamson crapfests she wound up doing. Later in life, as appreciation for Faster, Pussycat! became more common, she became famous for simply being, adored by fans for one great role.
And while it would have been great if she'd done more, what she did was more than enough.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
Some time ago, in the wake of multiple posts lamenting the punishingly dull, relentlessly self-important botch that was Superman Returns, I mentioned my regret that the shift toward dourly serious superhero movies meant it was extremely unlikely that we'd ever again see a movie like Richard Lester's Superman 3, which is a whole lot worse than Superman Returns but a lot more interesting, as Lester's obvious contempt for the genre and discomfort at handling a summer tentpole were palpable. The days had long passed, I thought, when a studio would hire a director as obviously incompatible with this kind of material.
I was wrong, apparently, although in the case of The Green Hornet, it's hard to know who is more incompatible with the mechanics of superhero machinery, director Michel Gondry, more noted for his decidedly low-tech whimsy, or co-writer/star Seth Rogen, whose slacker/stoner persona is rapidly approaching its sell-by date. To their credit, neither men seems remotely interested in making a big dumb action movie. In fact, they don't quite seem to know what the hell they're doing.
That's mostly intended as a compliment. It would be impossible to describe The Green hornet as a good movie, exactly, but it's a lot of fun, with some of the go-for-broke inventiveness of Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, albeit without the visual and thematic unity of that film. Half of what happens, plot-wise and character-wise, seems utterly random, and not always intentionally so, but that makes it wonderfully free of Screenwriting 101 conventions. A late scene where Rogen puts together the motivations of the two main villains is the closest it even comes to pretending to care about the storyline.
So the movie rises and falls on its individual scenes. Some of them, particularly anything involving Rogen or co-star Jay Chou hitting on Cameron Diaz, are pretty squirm-inducing. But the scenes revealing Chou's abilities as a crackpot inventor as well as an ass-kicking martial artist (and incidentally, Gondry shows a real flair for filming and editing action scenes; who knew?) are delightful, everything involving Christoph Waltz's insecure villain Chudnofsky (or Bloodnofsky, as he later decides to call himself) is solid gold, and how can you not love the fact that Gondry sticks a homage to the sped-up threeway scene from A Clockwork Orange into this would-be franchise movie?
The Green Hornet did unexpectedly well in its opening weekend, but I suspect it won't have legs, and any kind of sequel seems unlikely. That's okay. It's reassuring to know that the Hollywood development process even allowed something this eccentric to get made in the first place.
I was wrong, apparently, although in the case of The Green Hornet, it's hard to know who is more incompatible with the mechanics of superhero machinery, director Michel Gondry, more noted for his decidedly low-tech whimsy, or co-writer/star Seth Rogen, whose slacker/stoner persona is rapidly approaching its sell-by date. To their credit, neither men seems remotely interested in making a big dumb action movie. In fact, they don't quite seem to know what the hell they're doing.
That's mostly intended as a compliment. It would be impossible to describe The Green hornet as a good movie, exactly, but it's a lot of fun, with some of the go-for-broke inventiveness of Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, albeit without the visual and thematic unity of that film. Half of what happens, plot-wise and character-wise, seems utterly random, and not always intentionally so, but that makes it wonderfully free of Screenwriting 101 conventions. A late scene where Rogen puts together the motivations of the two main villains is the closest it even comes to pretending to care about the storyline.
So the movie rises and falls on its individual scenes. Some of them, particularly anything involving Rogen or co-star Jay Chou hitting on Cameron Diaz, are pretty squirm-inducing. But the scenes revealing Chou's abilities as a crackpot inventor as well as an ass-kicking martial artist (and incidentally, Gondry shows a real flair for filming and editing action scenes; who knew?) are delightful, everything involving Christoph Waltz's insecure villain Chudnofsky (or Bloodnofsky, as he later decides to call himself) is solid gold, and how can you not love the fact that Gondry sticks a homage to the sped-up threeway scene from A Clockwork Orange into this would-be franchise movie?
The Green Hornet did unexpectedly well in its opening weekend, but I suspect it won't have legs, and any kind of sequel seems unlikely. That's okay. It's reassuring to know that the Hollywood development process even allowed something this eccentric to get made in the first place.
Monday, January 17, 2011
I REALLY LOVE TO WATCH THEM ROLL
This is a not-untypical day off: Janie and I went out for breakfast, we came home and hung out, took epic-length naps...That's about it. Right now she's watching Underworld on cable, a movie I don't care for but which I'm finding to be a perfect zone-out movie, something that can be on in the background and I can dip in and out of without any concern that I'm missing anything.
That's kind of the point of my life that I've reached, and honestly, I'm good with it. I'm no longer nagged by the feeling that I'm supposed to be doing something else. I haven't seen as much of the world as I might like, I've never finished, much less published, any of those novels I started, and I've sentenced myself to a life with a job, not a career, which means I'll never earn as much money as I thought I needed to be happy.
Thing is, though, I am happy. Mostly, anyway. It doesn't matter how worldly we are or what our income level is, life will always be made up of small, individual moments. And if more of those moments are joyous than sad, well, that's a life well-lived. As long as Janie and I can inexplicably burst into songs from Mary Poppins while snuggling in bed, as long as beloved beagle Isabella leaps like an overgrown bunny through snow banks, as long as Delmar growls, hisses and finally purrs when curled up on my lap...At times like those I feel love, both given and received. And what could produce greater happiness than that?
That's kind of the point of my life that I've reached, and honestly, I'm good with it. I'm no longer nagged by the feeling that I'm supposed to be doing something else. I haven't seen as much of the world as I might like, I've never finished, much less published, any of those novels I started, and I've sentenced myself to a life with a job, not a career, which means I'll never earn as much money as I thought I needed to be happy.
Thing is, though, I am happy. Mostly, anyway. It doesn't matter how worldly we are or what our income level is, life will always be made up of small, individual moments. And if more of those moments are joyous than sad, well, that's a life well-lived. As long as Janie and I can inexplicably burst into songs from Mary Poppins while snuggling in bed, as long as beloved beagle Isabella leaps like an overgrown bunny through snow banks, as long as Delmar growls, hisses and finally purrs when curled up on my lap...At times like those I feel love, both given and received. And what could produce greater happiness than that?
Friday, January 14, 2011
DISTURBING, SURE, BUT STILL CRISPLY
In the past, I've tended to use terms like "Lovecraftian nightmare" to describe vintage TV commercials that featured edible objects coming to terrifying life. I mean, a talking, disembodied hand or a lumbering pitcher of fruit-flavored drink would be, if we saw them in our everyday lives, a horror beyond comprehension.
Still, you know what? I say, good for Mr. Salty!
Though I doubt he ever really served in the Navy, he at least found someone willing to rent him a costume, and through sheer pluck, and without actually accomplishing anything more than being "crisply"--which, you know, he's a pretzel; it's like congratulating a human for having skin--he manages to get the all-white citizens of this anonymous city singing his praises. Of course, presumably after the ceremony, everyone will gather 'round and consume him, and his bland smile won't be enough to cover the unbearable pain, but at least he had his moment.
Still, you know what? I say, good for Mr. Salty!
Though I doubt he ever really served in the Navy, he at least found someone willing to rent him a costume, and through sheer pluck, and without actually accomplishing anything more than being "crisply"--which, you know, he's a pretzel; it's like congratulating a human for having skin--he manages to get the all-white citizens of this anonymous city singing his praises. Of course, presumably after the ceremony, everyone will gather 'round and consume him, and his bland smile won't be enough to cover the unbearable pain, but at least he had his moment.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
GRAY
A great day yesterday, spent almost entirely in the company of Paul--we went to a movie, we ate out, mostly we made each other laugh. (Yes, my sense of humor is like an eleven-year-old's.) In all we did, the radio and computer were barely utilized, and the TV was used for entertainment purposes only.
It wasn't until this morning, glancing at the headlines at The New York Times, that I even became aware of the shootings in Arizona. And the horrifying details filled me with...nothing, really. A vague sadness, a faraway sense of despair.
But no grand emotions. Just made me feel sort of numb, and the feeling continues. I'm all alone here now, Paul is back with his mom and Janie's gone for the weekend, so I hunker down here with the beloved cat and dog, staring out the window at the gray day, waiting for the snow.
It wasn't until this morning, glancing at the headlines at The New York Times, that I even became aware of the shootings in Arizona. And the horrifying details filled me with...nothing, really. A vague sadness, a faraway sense of despair.
But no grand emotions. Just made me feel sort of numb, and the feeling continues. I'm all alone here now, Paul is back with his mom and Janie's gone for the weekend, so I hunker down here with the beloved cat and dog, staring out the window at the gray day, waiting for the snow.
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