THE MOST PATHETICALLY UNINTERESTING STORY EVER TOLD

Could be writing about the results of various elections around the country--Republicans won some key races but lost the one they tried most desperately to win, and a gay marriage initiative was soundly defeated by the placidly homophobic residents of Maine--but the story that I kept rereading this morning was a brief item from Reuters detailing the sentencing of a man accused of stalking Ryan Seacrest.

I kept rereading it because it seems frankly impossible. Why the hell would anybody stalk Ryan Seacrest?

Sure, most stalkers are victims of extreme mental illness, and are driven by their demons to do things that seem incomprehensible. But their targets, at least, usually make sense: They want to bask in the aura of icons like John Lennon or Barbra Streisand, or they see TV actresses like Stephanie Zimbalist or Rebecca Schaeffer, who are pretty in blandly unthreatening ways, and they think they can get close to them, make them their own.

But Ryan Seacrest? Seriously? I mean, sure, the guy's ubiquitous, and has an annoyingly gladhanding manner, and...Actually, I'm having a hard time saying anything about him. He's as substantial as heavily-moussed cotton candy, and it's hard to imagine him inspiring any sort of passionate feelings in anyone one way or another. Maybe the alleged stalker, an Army Reservist named Chidi Uzomah, is a hardcore Casey Kasem partisan who is pissed about Seacrest hijacking that sweet, sweet America's Top Forty gig.

Otherwise, the question isn't so much Why? as Why Bother?

PUSSY CATS IS THE CRAZIEST PEOPLES

In honor of Halloween--and also because I've been watching a lot of Chuck Jones pictures lately--here's one of the best horror-themed cartoons ever made. I've always loved this, but in recent years, it's become even more meaningful to me. I mean: Has there ever been a better depiction of what it's like to live with an easily-frightened black-and-white cat?

THE MEMORY OF HIS FUNERAL REMAINS ATTACHED IN MY BRAIN

1) You know the drill: A pointless Larry King quote, another Random Thoughts post. And if you don't know the drill, you must be new here. Welcome! And also, how the hell did you get here? It's not like I've been doing anything to increase traffic around these parts. Are you sure you're in the right place? Would you like something to eat? I've got some potato chip crumbs around here somewhere...

2) Hey, anybody remember the bright, shiny promise of Obama's presidency? How it was going to be so, you know, different and all? How he was going to close Gitmo, get us the hell out of Iraq and by God make sure the health care system in this country was overhauled?

Yeah. I'm sorry, but fuzzy words and half-hearted efforts really won't cut it. Particularly galling is his pitiful efforts to make some sort of dent in the insurance industry's death grip on American health care. He waffled on support for a public option--presumably he was checking to see what way the wind blew--and let a band of right-wing lunatics set the terms of the debate. At no point did he lead forcefully, or even act like he particularly gave a rat's ass. With the economy still tanking and more and more people realizing the limits of their insurance coverage, there has never been a better time to pass real, significant reform. And Obama is just kind of letting the moment pass.

Not that any of this is unexpected, but still...sad.

3) Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man has yet to open in my personal neck of the woods, and I'm still waiting. It's easily one of my most anticipated films of the year, and yet, I don't necessarily expect it to be my favorite. Last year's offering from the Coens, Burn After Reading, was one of the year's best, but almost by default: How much competition did it have, really? Movie-wise, pickins have been mighty slim lately.

But this year...holy crap! Just off the top of my head, Coraline, Up, In The Loop, Moon, Inglourious Basterds, Ponyo, Lorna's Silence, The Informant! and Where The Wild Things Are--a fine list by any standards. Quite honestly, A Serious Man would have a long way to go to match any of those.

Then again, with the Coens, I've learned never to trust my initial reaction. It took me three viewings to finally appreciate The Big Lebowski.

4) Rapacious, money-grubbing rock manager Dee Anthony has died at the age of 83. Every single obit IDs him as the guy who broke Peter Frampton in the United States, but presumably not wishing to speak ill of the dead, they tiptoe around what he actually did to Frampton's career.

Yes, the record-breaking success of Frampton Comes Alive was engineered by Anthony, but that very success led him to view Frampton as he viewed all the artists in his stable: as commodities. Anthony didn't care about Frampton as an artist or human being, he only cared about how much money his pretty boy Trilby could generate. So there was a rushed follow-up to Frampton Comes Alive, the laughable I'm In You, an album so dismal Frampton himself hated it. (It did, however, inspire the title of Frank Zappa's I Have Been In You, so there's that.)

Even more notoriously, Anthony teamed up with another noted seventies schlockmeister, Robert Stigwood, and together they teamed their biggest clients, Frampton and The Bee Gees, in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a movie so bad I'm surprised I haven't spent more time writing about it here. More than just a terrible, terrible piece of celluloid, it was also a notorious flop, damaging the careers of pretty much everyone involved with it: Director Michael Schultz would never again get an A-list gig, Stigwood never achieved the moguldom he clearly desired, the Bee Gees' incredible Saturday Night Fever success was revealed as a mere fluke.

But the worst fallout came down on Frampton. He was never more than a journeyman rocker, but the massive, and somewhat questionably achieved, success of Frampton Comes Alive made him suspect in the eyes of most critics, and with his commercial prospects crumbling, he had no support system. Anthony put him back on the road, playing to smaller and smaller crowds, a former Sun God revealed as nothing more than a man. And when money stopped rolling in, Anthony dumped Frampton without a second thought, having used him for all he could get.

But none of the obits quite explain all that.

5) I meant to post this yesterday, but this was my actual reaction to the Yankees heading for the World Series:



Sadly, this is pretty much my reaction to any good news.

6) Finally, the cats: Monika's been an ongoing source of concern lately. She's sixteen, and had been going strong, but all of a sudden she became scrawny, slow-moving and very, very frail, as if finally showing her age. She has, at this point, lived longer than any cat I've ever known, so I prepared myself for the inevitable, as she just kind of sat around and looked out of it.

Delmar apparently sensed that, too, since he's been strutting around like King Shit, acting about as assertive as a furry little bundle of neuroses possibly can. He's been downright confident lately, secure about his place in the world.

Well, watch out, Del: Instant Karma's gonna get you. As he walked through the living room this morning, Monika, perched on a chair, reached down and bitch-slapped him. He looked from side to side, as if he couldn't figure out what just happened. Monika hopped down from the chair, sat in front of him and just stared. Del backed away slowly at first, then beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen.

So, in other words, it's business as usual around here.

YES, KIDS, THIS WAS ONCE CONSIDERED ENTERTAINMENT

True, even in this day and age dessicated, dead-eyed Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester inexplicably considers herself a singer, and there are always the various Disney Channel/Nickelodeon tweener stars, who release singles and albums at a furious rate, whether they have any musical talent or not. For the most part, though, these ill-advised attempts at a second career don't actually interrupt the shows themselves.

As opposed to the seventies, when a broad-based audience might unsuspectingly tune into an action/adventure show, only to be confronted with the terrifying spectacle of its lead character breaking out into song. It happened on Wonder Woman, Starsky And Hutch, The Dukes Of Hazard...and okay, it never actually happened on Buck Rogers, but we did have to watch Gil Gerard dancing, which was arguably worse. Oh, and it occurred repeatedly on The Bionic Woman, and my poor twelve-year-old psyche was permanently shattered by enduring such horror:



OK, "permanently shattered" may be a bit of an overstatement. In fact, I have no memory of even seeing this, even though I was a regular watched The Bionic Woman. I can only assume I chose to block it out so the pain couldn't hurt me. In any event, I stumbled across this while looking for something else (Joey Heatherton clips, if you must know), and it made me laugh. Think they made that flag big enough?

BREATHE, STUPID, BREATHE! YA FORGOT TO BREATHE AGAIN!

Again, it's been quiet around here all week posting-wise, but that's partly because the only things that kinda made me feel like writing were the passings of famous people (producer Daniel Melnick, composer Vic Mizzy, actor Joseph Wiseman--Dr No his own bad self!--and, now, Soupy Sales), and it tends to seem sometimes like this entire site is devoted to death and sadness, so I just kind of left it all alone.

Instead, a semi-amusing observation: this morning, while preparing turkey sandwiches to take to work, I noticed my box o' sandwich bags actually had a diagram on the back explaining how to seal the bag. Now these are just cheapo, generic bags, lacking even the complexity of your advanced Ziploc technology. These are the kind of bags that have a flap you fold under and, uh...that's it, really. I'm not the most technologically advanced guy, and I tend to have to be shown how something works repeatedly before I understand it, but still: There's a flap, you fold it, you're done. Anybody could figure that out. It's instinctual, like a cat using a litter box. But someone at Hy-Vee corporate HQ decided we needed to be shown how to work it.

For some reason, that makes me happy.

I'LL EAT YOU UP, I LOVE YOU SO

Believe me, I cried repeatedly during Spike Jonez's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved children's classic Where The Wild Things Are, so often I couldn't even count the number of times. But I can pinpoint exactly when I knew it was going to be a rough ride, emotionally: At the very beginning, when I realized Jonez had given the story's young protagonist, Max, a sister, who looked to be about five years older than him. A sister that age increases your feeling of isolation when you're a kid, the sense that you have no peers in your own family. I know this, of course, from experience. At that point I knew this movie, which is a journey into the emotional landscape of a little boy, was inevitably going to be a journey into my own head as well.

So it may be a little difficult to offer any kind of objective assessment of this film. It gets so much right, emotionally and otherwise, that any flaws it may possess fall away. (If flaws it has. Honestly, it seemed pretty much pitch-perfect to me.) But clearly Where The Wild Things Are deserves a spot at or near the top of any list of the greatest films ever made about childhood. It is being marketed (at least to some extent) as a kid's movie, and that's true, but it's a movie for all the kids who don't quite fit in, who spend most of their time living in their own worlds. It explores those worlds, what they are like and how they came to be. It remembers exactly what it was like to be eight or nine and feel like the only person in the world who has ever been so insanely happy or miserably sad, how the world is full of mysteries that must be explored, how scary it can be to feel things when all of your emotions are as raw as your skin.

Oh, and it has monsters, because little boys instinctively love monsters, and any fantasy world they conjured when inevitably include some. And these monsters all reflect some part of Max, including the parts he can't quite understand. They are loving and warm and angry and ignored and terrifying and mysterious and sweet and kind. They make him their king, then later admit he was never really a king, at just the same time Max realizes it as well. So he must leave them and return to his own world, where he isn't a king, but a little boy with a mother who loves him very much.

And I'm crying right now because I'm thinking of the final scene, but also an earlier sequence where Max comes across his mother, fearful of losing her job, and tries his best to cheer her up. She ask him to tell a story, and he does, and she dutifully transcribes it, preserving this moment in his life, in their lives, in a scene that is as perfect a depiction of love as the movies have ever given us, and which of course inevitably reminded me of my mom, who gave me endless reams of Big Chief tablets, encouraging me to fill them with whatever I might imagine, who appreciated me for what I was no matter what and holy crap, see what I mean? I can't evaluate this movie because it intersects too closely with everything I've ever been.

I can't even discuss the beautifully understated visual style Jonez brings to the film, because its enchanting images of a forest playland reminded me so much of the row of evergreens I used to run and hide in whenever my emotions got out of hand, and I'll just start rambling about my past again, or how the only other movie that so perfectly captures the outsized emotions of childhood is Meet Me In St. Louis, because then I'll go off on another Vincente Minnelli tangent.

So let me just say this: See this movie.

SORRY FOR ALL THE DOWNTIME LATELY, FOLKS

Oh, I've been meaning to write. I've had things to say about the Roman Polanski affair, about my favorite non-animated film of the year so far (The Informant!), about NBC's inexplicable decision to name Jon Bon Jovi as "Artist In Residence," whatever the hell that means. And the cats have been seriously messing with my mind lately, and I thought I could use this space to try to figure out why.

But I haven't done any of that, and in fact my presence here has been increasingly sporadic. Eh, what can I say? The usual mix of anxiety and depression, plus a lot of other stuff that I just don't want to get into. (Two words: Bad dates.)

So by way of entertainment, here's a Spike Jonez-directed Beastie Boys video, three minutes and change of pure genius. (Have I mentioned that period in the nineties when Ill Communication was pretty much the soundtrack of my life as I wrote in a white-hot fury I'd never known before? Have I mentioned I really miss those days?) Jonez's film of Where The Wild Things Are opens today, of course, and I can't wait. Hell, maybe it'll even inspire me to write something.

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

It comes out of nowhere, as it always does.

This time it happened while clicking on an entry at The New York Times website. When it appeared, it carried a banner ad for a performance by the Lipazzaner Stallions at Madison Square Garden. And I fell back.

I can't even remember how old I was, but let's say I was in high school. The Lipizzan Stallions were a regular attraction on the local stadium circuit, showing up at least once a year at Vet's Auditorium in Des Moines or Hilton in Ames. The commercials heralding these appearances were ubiquitous, and rather cheesy, as corny and easily-mocked as ads for Holiday On Ice or some such. Once, while the whole family sat around the TV, I made some snotty comment, something along the lines of, "Who would ever want to see that?"

"Oh, but they're so beautiful," Mom replied. "I remember reading about them when I was little, and I've always wanted to see them in person."

I didn't respond. I couldn't respond. What could be said? The commercial ended, the program resumed. It was never discussed again.

Just a moment in time, lost, forgotten. Except I could never quite forget it. It stayed, it lingered, all the rest of my life. For one moment, my mother had shown a part of herself I had never sen before, a part I could never have guessed existed. It made her more complicated, more human. And I had mocked it, unintentionally, sure, but still, I had hurt her on some level, and I could never bring myself to apologize.

Instead, I did what most people do: I hid it away and pretended it never happened. It worked at the time, and it still does, mostly. After all, how often in the course of my day-to-day existence am I going to encounter a reference to the Lipizzan Stallions? It almost never happens. Almost.

Then when it does, it's always unexpected, and I can never prepare. But really, what could I do to shield myself from a thirty-year-old memory, something most people would have long forgotten? But I can't forget, and I shouldn't: Sometimes I feel my memory of Mom is slipping away, but then this or something like it pops into my head, a chance to recall how human she was, a small, defining trait that seemed so unlike her, a reminder of how much I will always miss her.

I...I HAVE NO EXCUSE

Swear to God, I have no intention of turning this space into an endless, tedious recitation of the previous night's dreams. But...

So I dreamed I was watching Jay Leno's new show (which right away suggests this is something more closely resembling a nightmare), and he had a whole panel-ful of guests. There was some anonymous black guy who never said anything and received no camera time, Billy Bob Thornton and Dan Aykroyd. Thornton rambled on and on, making some psuedo-philosophical point in a rather belligerent manner, then kind of ran out of steam, and sat in awkward silence. Aykroyd brought up a bullet-ridden death scene Thornton had in a recent movie, and asked what gauge wire he used to set off the squibs. Thornton started raving incoherently, and as he did so, began frothing at the mouth, great waterfalls of some chalky white substance cascading from his mouth with every word spoken.

Aykroyd tried to stifle his laughter, but Leno, Anonymous Black Guy and the studio audience roared with laughter. Finally, as Thornton realized what was going on, he smiled, reached into his jacket and produced the bottle of Mylanta he kept gulping during commercial breaks. Aykroyd announced, for viewers at home "and the olfactorily-challenged here in the studio," that one of tonights guests reeked of cheap booze, "but decorum prevents me from saying which one." Thornton began laughing so hard he pissed his pants, and Aykroyd and Anonymous Black Guy dragged him off stage.

At which point, sadly, Leno was left with nothing to do but mug for the camera and launch into a pretaped comedy bit. Such a prospect was so horrifying, I had no choice but to wake up.

Is this what my life has come to? My dreams involve Billy Bob Thornton peeing his pants in front of Jay Leno? What the hell is wrong with me?

BABY, THAT'S THE WAY IT'S GOTTA BE

Wow, posting has been even more sporadic than expected. Apologies, and I'll try to do better, but honestly, things are kind of wacky around here, and it's going to be awhile before any kind of normalcy settles in, so wait and see, I guess. Not that it matters, since a helpful article in a recent Des Moines Register article explained some easy tips for blogging--keep it short, and never write about personal matters--that I violate routinely, so maybe I'm doing this wrong. (But probably not. Don't all authors, web-based or otherwise, mostly write about themselves? Then again, if you've ever read The Register, you'll quickly realize no one on staff knows jack about writing.)

Anyway, the point is...well, there is no point, I just wanted to put up some new content. And for me, that usually involves a clip job, and when resorting to such things, who better to showcase than Noted Cult Rocker Marshall Crenshaw, from back when he still had a full set of hair. So here's everyone's favorite erstwhile Beatlemania star with a cover of Soldier Of Love. Oh, and Fun Fact about this song: If you use selected lines from this--"surrender to me," for instance--while arguing with your wife and/or girlfriend, you will only make the situation worse. It's true!

MAKE LOVE TO THESE WOMEN, LANGUID AND BITTERSWEET

She reaches to the floor, picking up her boots, pulling them on over her black-and blue striped tights, which, combined with her sky blue minidress and emo-girl haircut, suggest she is trying to look much younger than she is. Not that she's old--mid-thirties, maybe--but her age is too advanced to be parading around like this. "Good morning," she smiles. I have no idea who she is.

I actually slept well, I say.

"Then we both got what she wanted." She smiles again, mechanically, and says, "It's time."

Yeah, I say, even though I have no idea what she's talking about.

"I wish it didn't have to be this way. But..." Her voice trails off as she looks at her watch. A second ago she wasn't wearing a watch. She rises from the bed and heads into another room. I follow.

Turn out it's the bathroom. She sits on the toilet, removing the boots she just put on, pulling her dress off over her head. "I really do like you. I wish you weren't a patient. If the clinic knew I was here--"

Yeah, but how are they going to find out?

"Well, exactly. I can't wait until next week." She rises from the toilet and backs me out to the living room. She is very thin, almost skeletal. A skeleton with sweet, sweet breasts, which press against my chest as we share what I fear will be one last kiss. "Take care," she says, and walks back through the bathroom door.

Again, I follow. Only this is no longer the bathroom. I'm standing in the hallway outside of the apartment, all glass and sunlight, and she is nowhere in sight. Must be a nice apartment, whoever lives here. I turn, walk back through the door, and for one split second all is sweet oblivion, nothing but darkness and this familiar sound.

MWOR! MWOR! MWOR!

My eyes open.

MWOR! MWOR! MWOR!

Delmar sits at the foot of the bed, facing away from me, yowling his heart out, his stumpy tail furiously thumping the mattress. My eyes shift to the clock--4 AM. I have to be at work in three hours. This, regrettably, is not a dream.

I CAN'T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I WORE A WHITE SHIRT

1) Ah, yes, the capriciously-chosen Larry King quote signifying another fresh-baked batch o' Random Thoughts. I've upgraded; instead of recycling Larry quotes from his old USA Today column, I'm using fragments from his Twitter page. Rest assured, the title of today's post makes no more sense in context. In fact, there is no context.

2) Since the Interweb tells me it's what Everyone's Talking About, I should probably make some mention of Mackenzie Phillips' claim that she had a ten-year sexual relationship with her dad. But really, what is there to say? Beyond ICK, I mean?

The thing is...well, there's two things, actually. The obvious one is, Is this even true? Not that it couldn't be--Phillips' dad was noted satyr and drug vacuum John Phillips, as morally reprehensible as any man could be (although kudos to his great score for The Man Who Fell To Earth!)--but, well, he's conveniently dead, nobody else can verify the claim and Phillips is most famous as a wackjob and publicity whore who has regularly used her image as a perpetually recovering junkie as an opportunity to score TV gigs she'd probably never receive otherwise. A look at her filmography reveals more guest appearances as herself (inevitably offering yet another hard-luck story designed to make us feel for her) on TV talk shows than as a character on dramatic TV. She's told us far too much about herself already, yet she's only bringing this up now? Sounds...suspicious.

But fine. Even if it's true, why does anybody need to know about it? She's the former co-star of One Day At A Time, for God's sake. Does anyone care? Yeah, she says she's trying to put a human face on the very real nightmare of incest, but there's such a creepy air of opportunism and desperation about everything she says and does that Phillips is actually only perpetrating the myth that incest survivors are damaged goods. Not to sound insensitive, and I'm sure she's had a plenty fucked-up life with or without her dad's sexual advances, but she really needs to just go away and deal with it in private.

3) Anyone remember that brief post-election period of optimism, when Obama seemed to be making all the right moves, including the announcement of his plan to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay? Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? Especially in light of his decision to use a half-assed law enacted by the Bushinistas to continue holding 50 prisoners at Gitmo without bothering to obtain congressional approval for doing so. True, Obama's people are putting some kind of touchy-feely bullshit trimmings on this, claiming that the detainees will be granted full habeas corpus hearings, blah blah blah, but it's still a blatant reversal of his stated intention, not the first and surely not the last. Possibly the most depressing, though.

4) Wow, I guess I had fewer Random Thoughts floating about my head than expected. Maybe the only reason I structured today's post in this particular fashion is because I simply didn't want to devote an entire piece to Mackenzie Phillips. That, and I was pissed about the whole Obama thing, and just wanted to mention it. But beyond that, I got nothing. Oh, except to note that this week's run of Mary Worth has been action-packed, and how often can you say that about Mary Worth?

5) And the cats, of course, because I always mention them when I write one of these. Monika's her usual self, but Delmar--I'm kinda worried about Del. He's taken to snuggling up with me when I sleep, and he curls up on my lap and purrs, and he's far less prone to violence or odd behavior than he used to be. He's acting...normal, almost. If you didn't know him, you'd think he was an ordinary cat.

Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Psychokitty?

IT WILL COME BACK TO YOU

I suppose one of the reasons I've stayed with the same insurance agent for many years is because anytime I have to deal with her one-on-one, it means a trip back to my old home town, which somehow turns into a different experience every time I return. This weekend involved a vehicular misadventure which prompted just such a trip, and I found myself lost in time, shuttling back and forth between past lives.

I took the back way to Perry, from through Waukee and Adel, a route I used to drive every day when I shuttled children from all over Dallas County to Head Start in Adel. There weren't that many kids on the route, and they weren't too talkative, so they were forced to just sit there and listen to whatever music I liked, Siamese Dream and Melon Collie-era Smashing Pumpkins, Automatic For The People-era REM, and lots and lots of Beck. None of that shows up in my personal playlist these days, but I could hear it all in my head as I drove down the hill along Highway 6, 1995 fading into early '96, a period where I could feel it in my bones, that finally my life was building to something, when anything seemed possible.

In a sense, that was true. The spring, summer and autumn of '96 were marked by my belated efforts at a libertine period, living life with an abandon I'd never known before, and early in '97, I met what I thought was the perfect woman, and embarked on a whole new life, far away from the places and people I'd always known.

But that life fell apart, and the only safe place to pick up the pieces seemed to be back in Perry, where, due to dire financial straits and a period of unemployment, I moved in with Mom, who had returned to the house I had briefly called my own in that wild period in the mid-nineties. It was many years down the road, but Mom hadn't changed the alterations I'd made to the house: The walls in the living room were still painted gray and the ceiling black, and the chalky white image of a sword-wielding skeleton continued to welcom you into the bathroom, where the walls remained adorned with favorite quotes from James Joyce and Hunter Thompson.

Lord knows why Mom hadn't had somebody paint over all that (though I believe she was particularly tickled by the Thompson quote, which I'd illustrated with a garish charcoal crayon scrawl of a nightmarish clown), but when I found myself back in the house in the late summer of 2002, all those signifiers of my previous life seemed to mock me, to remind me of the person I was, the person I'd never be again.

Life continued there for several months. I got a job, put away some money, made plans to escape. But unlike before, I couldn't quite imagine a future this time. The person who'd painted those walls was someone who pounded out endless streams of wordage, for payment or for his own amusement, while draining six packs of Rolling Rock as The Replacements blasted in the background. But he'd been replaced by a person who no longer felt the ability or desire to write, and who hardly even listened to music anymore. Joy was a thing of the past. Mom tried to keep my spirits up, but I was too old to be mothered, and after striking out in the world, this small town seemed like nowhere.

Perry had nothing to offer me at that point in my life, no comfort to give. Yet today as I drove away from the insurance office, I ate at the Chines buffet at the strip mall by the bypass, then drove through downtown and stopped at the library. And it was all exactly the same, but the feeling was different. For maybe the first time, I remembered that brief period with some measure of fondness. My situation then seemed so hopeless, all I could see, all I could feel was negativity. But now I remembered how good the food was at this particular restaurant, and as I walked through the library, I noticed the shelves still held a copy of Jamie Farr's autobiography Just Farr Fun, which I had checked out once as a joke, and wound up...well, not enjoying, but at least reading. (Skimming, actually.) It was a pleasant memory of a more pleasant time, or at least more pleasant than I'd ever allowed it to be.

I ended my trip by stopping into Alco, the discount store that opened with much fanfare back in '76, part of a regional chain that was once seen as a threat to Main Street businesses, much as Wal-Mart is viewed now. And at the time, Alco was something new for a small town, offering one-stop shopping for everything, toys and electronics and clothes and hardware. You couldn't find everything there, but you could find most of what you'd need for day-to-day living.

Alco today is much like it was then. The clothes they carry are still mostly from Wrangler and Haggar, the electronics are still manufactured by Emerson, and even the piped-in music hadn't changed: Peg, Steely Dan's inescapable radio hit from '77. That was the summer I started really listening to music, and began writing and drawing a comic strip solely for the amusement of my brother, and where, in this very store, I bought a paperback of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and LPs of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring and George Gershwin's Concerto In F, and of course, the novelization of Star Wars, and I was struck then as I am now by the fact that this place, so mundane and provincial, contained so many things which would point me to another, better world, which would take me away and, ultimately, bring me back home.

ANOTHER REASON TO HATE CANCER

Just wanted to note the passing of one of my all-time favorite character actors, Henry Gibson, who lost a brief bout with cancer at the age of 73.

He shot to a weird kind of fame as a cast member of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, the popularity of which seems almost incomprehensible today. But Gibson had been around before that, of course--his movie debut came under the direction of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor, and he had a hilarious part as a hipster Indian in the late-period Three Stooges epic The Outlaws Is Coming.

He was one of the few Laugh-In performers to have a career beyond that show, mostly courtesy of Robert Altman, who cast him as a sinister "wellness expert" (and probable Scientology rep, though that isn't explicitly stated) in The Long Goodbye, and gave him the role of a lifetime as Haven Hamilton, a powerful, ego-crazed country star who inadvertently rediscovers his humanity in Nashville. Right there Gibson gave outstanding performances in two of the greatest films ever made.

He found himself a working character actor, doing everything from sitcoms to cartoon voiceover work, and he could play sinister as well as sweet. He became a member of Joe Dante's repertory company--he was the best thing in The 'burbs and was hilarious in a Dante-directed episode of Eerie, Indiana--and will always be beloved as the head of the Illinois Nazis in John Landis' The Blues Brothers.

He was one of those people who could make any movie or TV show better just by being in it, and he will be sorely missed.

PAIN DON'T HURT

The headlines have all been pretty much the same: DIRTY DANCING STAR PATRICK SWAYZE DIES AT 57.

Honestly, I've never even seen Dirty Dancing, but even if I had, I'm still pretty sure I'd still think of Swayze first ande foremost as Dalton, his iconic character from Road House.

Ah, Road House. That movie has been ironically appreciated by hipsters everywhere ever since its release in 1989, celebrated for its goofy dialogue and outrageous characterizations. But as so many internet chat boards this morning seem to reveal, maybe the joke was on us the whole time, or better yet, maybe our appreciation was never wholly ironic.

Maybe the endlessly quotable, easily mocked dialogue in Road House ("Do you always carry your medical records around with you?" "Saves time.") amounts to its own deconstructive text, even as the philosophical beliefs ("Man's search for faith, that sort of shit") of our mullet-sporting, tai chi-practicing hero are entirely sincere. And after all, as an action movie, it's extraordinarily well-made. And Swayze...dammit, Swayze is great.

In fact, Road House wouldn't be the action movie of choice for Gen Xers everywhere were it not for Swayze's perfectly-judged performance. He's nicely self-aware but perfectly serious, even sincere, and he single-handedly keeps the whole thing from tipping over into parody. No matter how silly the situation, Swayze utters every line as if he means it, and we believe him. Dalton's a man of action anyone would want on their side.

Just as Swayze himself would ultimately become one of the few celebrities anyone could admire. He stayed married to the same woman for decades, a rare feat for a movie star, and he never let fame go to his head. He took his life and his work seriously, and by all accounts was a great guy.

And then, of course, there was his well-documented battle with pancreatic cancer, during which he became--corny as it may sound--a real-life hero. Told he had less than five months to live, he handily outlasted his grim prognosis, determined to fight a battle he ultimately couldn't win, all to enjoy the beauty of one more day, one more sunrise, one more moment on earth.

Dalton himself couldn't have done any better. Pain don't hurt, indeed.

ENSLAVED TO EVERY CRUEL WHIM AND DESIRE OF A RUTHLESS MADMAN!

Whatever else I may have been planning on writing about is significantly less important than this breaking news: Roger Corman is getting an Academy Award!

True, it's one of those lame-career achievement Oscars, and presumably mostly in recognition of all the people (Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich) who toiled in Corman's exploitation factory early in their careers, but I'd like to think the Academy is finally coming around to appreciating real movies. Which would you rather see? Some lame thing with Gwyneth Paltrow in a corset, or this?



The choice seems clear.

WHY DON'T YOU SPEND YOUR WHOLE LIFE SLEEPING?

3 AM, and maybe I can get another half hour of sleep, a half hour of quiet and calm--

WUMP! patpatpatpatpatpat SKRETCH SKRETCH SKRETCH patpatpatpat

Pause.

patpatpatpatpat CRASH!

Monika again, the pitter-patter of her feet echoing loudly in this small apartment, and punctuated by sounds of God knows what. She's taken to leaping about wildly, getting into everything then moving quickly on, and generally acting like an inquisitive kitten.

But according to the cat age to human age conversion chart, her equivalent age would be eighty. How many eighty-year-olds go running and leaping like this? Mall-walking, sure, but Monika is jumping on everything in sight, caroming off the walls like Donald O'Connor. It's kind of cute--hell, it's adorable--but it's also incredibly irritating, because she leaves an inevitable path of destruction in her wake.

Also, she's very loud. And she insists on doing this now, when I'm trying to sleep.

And what can I do to stop her? Pick her up and hold her? She'll squirm out of my arms. Throw her in her carrier? She'll yowl furiously and tip the thing over. Shut her in another room? She'll scratch at the door.

So I get up and go about my morning business, a bit earlier than I'd like to. She continues to leap and cavort. I fill her water dish, and she sticks her front paws in and splashes the floor. I change the litter box, and she hops into it and starts literally punching the litter.

Finally, I sit down, figuring I might as well relax and watch her play. Naturally, she picks that moment to hop up on the bed and go to sleep. Was this all some elaborate plan to get me out of the bed, just so she could have the whole thing to herself?

Knowing Monika, I'd have to say yes.

WALK ON, WALK ON

As recently as ten years ago, Jerry Lewis' labor day telethon extravaganza still had some sort of cultural relevance. Sort of. The local stations carrying it--The Love Network--were network affiliates, willingly bumping ad dollars in prime time, giving themselves over to Jerry through the night and all the next day.

True, it was a far cry from the glory days of the sixties and seventies, when top singers and comedians would stop by and entertain live, and big-name stars would join Lewis on stage. Still, you'd get to see imported performers from lesser Broadway shows and second-tier musical acts like Ringo Starr's All Star Band, and co-hosting duties were handed to the likes of Ed McMahon, Tony Orlando and Norm Crosby, who admittedly failed to amuse or enlighten on any level, but at least they were there, familiar TV faces you had seen in the past, providing some level of comfort by their very presence. More importantly, the whole furshlugginer ball of wax still showcased the awesome spectacle of Lewis himself, cranky as ever, lurking about the stage like an aneurysm waiting to happen, self-righteously lambasting any critics who failed to appreciate his work, routinely chastising anonymous assistants who failed to cater to his whims with all due speed.

Things had already gotten pretty dire in the past decade--for one thing, few network affiliates bother carrying it anymore, and those that do seldom run the whole thing--but the program this year was absolutely painful to behold. Third-rate Vegas magicians were introduced with embarrassing superlatives, and much of the show was given over to sub-America's Got Talent singers and dance troupes, many of which the co-hosts couldn't even bother introducing by name.

Ah yes, our co-hosts, Jann Carl and Nancy O'Dell, perky blond "correspondents" from rival TV infotainment programs, here united by both their fealty to Lewis--expressed over and over and over again--and their utter vapidity. This was it? This was the best they could get? Sure, Ed McMahon is shilling Budweiser in Heaven, but what about Tony Orlando? Did he really have better things to do?

Saddest of all was our host, a shambling, pathetic old man, rambling incoherently, blinking incessantly. Jerry Lewis was once one of the most famous men in the world, and dammit, he really was a great comedian and a brilliant filmmaker. But he was also always an arrogant prick, and this year his telethon seemed to represent some sort of ironic come-uppance: All his friends have either died or deserted him, and he had nothing to fall back on but his increasingly frail comic gifts, and they simply weren't enough. In that sense, his final, ritualistic performance of You'll Never Walk Alone took on an unexpected poignance: Lewis seemed to be singing to himself.

YOU WOULDN'T ACT SO ADULT NOW

I'm not too proud to admit I just spent way too much time searching for clips from some of Mitzi Gaynor's variety shows from the seventies, ostensibly to use as illustration for another of my ongoing explorations of how weird, inexplicable things from my childhood take on other forms in adulthood.

Such an urge may have been inspired in part by a trip back to my hometown yesterday, a place I've managed to avoid for probably a year or so. Whenever I do this, I'm always visited by ghosts from my past, apparitions I'd prefer to avoid, thank you very much. And more often, I find myself struck by how nothing is quite as I remember it, how memories distort reality, how everything is subjective, how nothing is objectively true.

Which, you know, is kind of a bummer.

And while Heaven knows I'm more than willing to write about incredibly depressing things around here, hey, it's a holiday weekend (even though I have to leave for work in forty minutes or so) and, really, who wants to spend it brooding? It's been awhile since I indulged myself with a good old-fashioned clip job--and by "awhile" I mean since my last post--so let's enjoy, shall we?

Here are The Replacements with Kiss Me On The Bus. Sure, Paul Westerberg will never be this great again, but the good news is, since he's found some measure of sobriety, he's less likely to go out in public with hair like this.



Beastie Boys with Hey Ladies.



Bernard Herrmann's magnificent title music from Hitchcock's underrated Marnie.



And a strong contender for Favorite Song Ever, Marvin Gaye's scarily intense Trouble Man.

IF YOU CAN'T TALK LOVE THEN YOU BETTER GET OUT

Ah, it's been awhile, hasn't it? I had a day off last week, and usually on days off I can devote time to writing, but eh, I was busy. And today's a day off as well, and I'm not particularly busy, but I've got a lot on my mind and...well, posting isn't exactly a priority these days.

Not that I haven't had things I wanted to discuss. In particular, I wanted to explore my sneering reaction to Teddy Kennedy's death to how I felt upon hearing of the death of songwriter Ellie Greenwich. She was best known for the teenage symphonies she and Jeff Barry wrote for in the early sixties, particularly The Ronettes' Be My Baby, which has to rank pretty high in the annals of Greatest Things Ever. And not to downplay Greenwich's contribution (she wrote the music, Barry the lyrics, and God knows the music is appropriately dreamy), but what makes the record isn't the song, or Ronnie Spector's haunted vocals, or the brilliant arrangement by Jack Nitzsche or the awesome drums of Hal Blaine--it's all these things together, as they were so awesomely assembled in the studio by genius producerPhil Spector.

And Spector was a genius, no doubt--if his Wall Of Sound masterpieces didn't prove it, the stark, intimate sound of Plastic Ono Band confirmed it. But he was also notoriously psychotic, abusive and, finally, murderous. And yet...everything horrible about him doesn't make his work any less great. Why, then, can I forgive him, and not Kennedy? Is it simply because we kind of expect artists to be terrible people, but politicians, being in charge of our lives, should be held to a higher standard?

An interesting point to ponder, but hey, I'm not gonna take the time to explore it in depth here. In fact, things may be more sparse around here than usual, since major changes are underway. (In my life, that is. Not at this site. Hell, I haven't even changed the format in all this time.) Well, "major" may be too grand a way to state it--it's not like I'm getting married or anything--but it's something that will keep me occupied for the next month or so.

Appy polly loggies, then, for such an uneventful post, but hey, I'll try to provide some entertainment. Here's the hilariously deadpan video for Gleaming Spires' Are You Ready For The Sex Girls, which should have been a smash but somehow wasn't. The Spires were an offshoot of the early eighties incarnation of Sparks, and anything affiliated, however tangentially, with Sparks is automatically aces in my book. A great song, plus pie and coffee...what more could anyone ask for?