A WORLD WITHOUT WENTZ

America's entertainment press, you have failed us!  It's been--yikes!--weeks since either Reuters or the Associated Press have featured a boring, utterly meaningless interview with Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz.

How are we to know what he thinks, how he feels, what his plans are for that why-bother clothing line of his, or if he intends to make some more crappy, easily ignored music?  I mean, yeah, sure, I could follow his Twitter feed, but come on--that would suggest that I give a shit.

Which I don't, most emphatically.  I can't imagine anybody does.  And yet Reuters and the AP, the world's most reliably middle-of-the-road news sources, were on a Wentz-based roll there for awhile, showcasing chats with Mr. Ashlee Simpson as if every utterance from this barely-sentient mediocrity was somehow golden, as if readers across the globe were waiting for more news on the man's every action, as if Fall Out Boy could conceivably inspire that level of devotion (or even mild interest) from any human, ever.

But now, sadly, the news feed from these wire services contain only news of the latest American Idol or Dancing With The Stars fatalities, or upcoming TV schedules, or the latest news about boy god Justin Bieber, who is actually less interesting than Pete Wentz but is, at least, currently popular.

But I'm sure Pete will be back, making some momentous announcement or other (my prediction: Fall Out Boy gets back together--but under a different name, because they'll have, like, a different sound, and they don't want to mess with their, you know, legacy), and, while ignoring real news that matters to real people, Reuters and the AP will be there.  Godspeed, you ink-stained wretches!

AMBULATORY PENIS RIDES AGAIN!

Oh, Ambulatory Penis, we'd forgotten all about your brief dalliance with the flamboyantly-garbed (and revealingly named) Fruitpie The Magician.  Not since Charles Bronson's brief affair with Charles Nelson Reilly had such an icon of rugged masculinity revealed his bi/curious tendencies. 



Of course, you still felt the need to cast yourself as the dominant in this pairing, and handed off the usual praise of your "creamy filling" to an underage girl.  Some people at the time felt this was a blatant attempt to simply widen your fan base, that your heart--or whatever organ--really wasn't in it, but, much like your chocolate-lovin' time spent with Happy Ho-Ho, this was a bold move at the time.  These days, such behavior would barely rate a shrug, and indeed, it's sad how few people remember you.

But some of us remember, Ambulatory Penis.  Once seen, the vision of a cartoon dick happily skiing down a mountain can't be unseen, and for that, we'll always love you.  Just not, you know, in that way.

A WEEKEND OF BLISS, THEN THE RAINY SEASON

It wasn't late yet, but threatening clouds had appeared on the horizon, and I had quite a drive ahead of me, and work the next day.  "Don't go yet," she said.  "Don't you want to wait for the storm?"

"Well, no, actually," I replied.  "I was hoping to get ahead of it."

"But we can sit on the porch and watch it, let it pass over us, watch the lightning.  I love storms when they get so"--her eyes widened considerably, and her hands formed crazy patterns--"intense, and the thunder gets so loud it's one continuous rumble, and you wonder if it's turned into a tornado, and you close your eyes and let it pass over you, like this could be your last moment on earth."

"Yeah, well."  What the hell was I supposed to say to that?  "Not a lot of fun to get caught in while you're driving, though."

"That's what I mean.  Don't get caught in it.  Stay here with me."

"Stay--how long?  The night?  I have to work tomorrow.  I'd have to cut out early in the morning."

"Just stay for now.  Until the storm passes."

We sat on her porch.  She turned off all the lights in the house, the only illumination coming from distant lightning flashes or the passing headlights of the occasional car.  "Times like this, I like it out here," she said quietly, almost as if talking to herself.  "This is where I'm from, but it isn't where I want to be."

"What do you want?"

"Someplace where there's...something to do.  But not too much.  Or...I don't know.  Sometimes I feel like I just want to keep moving, like wherever I'm at isn't where I'm meant to be."  She paused.  "You're not like that, are you?  You're settled, you're--"

"Boring?"

"That's not what I meant.  But, well, yeah.  You don't have any sense of adventure left."

"Well, I'm here, watching a storm with you.  That's something I've never done before."

She laughed.  "OK.  Good point."  She drew closer to me.  We kissed, even as both of us knew our time together had already started winding down.

LIFE'S FULL OF CONSEQUENCES

It's difficult, from a twenty-first century perspective, to evaluate the life arc of Lena Horne, who has died at the age of 92.  It's impossible to imagine the difficulties, both professional and personal, faced by black Americans in the thirties and forties, when Horne's career was gearing up.  And yet, given the very real barriers even the wealthiest and best educated African-Americans faced at the time, it must be pointed out that Horne was a child of privilege, and a bit of a snob. 

In other words, yes, she deserved better than she got, particularly from Hollywood, but as a singer she was never really all that special.  Good, yes, but she was arguably no better than hundreds of other singers, both black and white.  Horne was never shy about using her race to her advantage, or attempting to deny it when that, too, was to her benefit.  Her skin was lighter than that of, say, Ethel Waters, her co-star in Cabin In The Sky, and she knew that would get her places Waters could never go.  In retrospect, it makes Horne look conniving, but she did what she felt she needed to do.  Not that it got her very far; Hollywood had no use for a black leading lady at that time, no matter how beautiful she may have been.

So she went back to nightclubs, and fashioned a career as an all-around entertainer.  She may not have been a truly great singer, but she was very good, and she had something more than talent: She had presence.  Once she took the stage, you couldn't look anywhere else.

Here she is dueting with improbable singing partner Eddie Anderson on a Harold Arlen/E.Y. Harburg classic.  The movie, of course, is Cabin In The Sky, Vincente Minnelli's first film as director, and it's impossible to watch it without wondering how he might have handled it with a bit more experience behind the camera. Though sometimes maddeningly static, it's much better than its reputation, and if some aspects of it seem a bit, uh, insensitive when viewed today, it was almost progressive by the standards of the time.  In those days, merely allowing black actors to play romantic scenes was a big deal.  If it had been a bigger hit, Horne's career may have gone in a whole different direction.  But at least she had this one shot, and it was a good one. 

AH, WHAT'S THE USE?

I realize I'm a week late with this, but in case you haven't seen it (and assuming it hasn't been pulled from YouTube by Fox's legal department), here's this thing.



Two lines of thought here:

1) Like most hardcore fans of The Simpsons, I haven't actually watched any new episodes of the show in years.  When last I watched with any passing regularity--three, four years ago maybe?--it was occasionally amusing, but the laughs had become distressingly generic.  The vivid characterizations and razor-sharp social satire (and endlessly quotable dialogue) that defined the show at its peak had been replaced by obvious gags and tediously familiar storylines.  It wasn't bad, exactly, at least not late period MASH bad, but it wasn't the show so many had once loved.

So I first heard about this intro last Monday, after the episode featuring it aired.  I couldn't bring myself to actually watch it until mid-week, and couldn't bear to really consider it until now.  This is absolute proof on every level: The Simpsons is beyond salvation.

Leaving aside for a second that basing an intro around a disposable pop single that will, God willing, be forgotten in a year or so is the type of opportunistic grab for cultural relevance this show used to satirize, the actual use of the song was apparently mandated by Fox executives, who wanted to fit the show into some sort of promotional scheme.  The fact that after twenty years on the air, the producers of the show that essentially legitimized the Fox network lacked the balls to tell their corporate overlords to fuck off tells you everything you need to know about the current creative regime on the show.  If they lack integrity when it comes to matters like this, they'll lack integity when it comes to creative matters as well.

And it shows in this intro.  They start it out with Lisa, of all people, breaking into this song.  Yeah, she used to read Non-Threatening Boys magazine and had her bizarre Corey obsession, but musically, she'd never listen to this crap, much less perform it.  But she's not a character anymore, is she?  Just a dead-eyed pawn who will do or say anything the producers want her to say.  (And having Nelson intro the chorus?  Seriously?  He's an Andy Williams fan!  He wouldn't know Ke$ha from a whole in the head.)

Visually, too, this is a creative disaster.  The Simpsons unwisely overhauled its spiky, garish visual style with the advent of high-def sets, resulting in cleaner lines and more elaborate color styling.  But so what?  The animation in this sequence is smooth, but utterly lifeless: All the characters move in exactly the same way, their only goal to get from point A to point B, much as their only function is to mouth generic laugh lines. 

These were once specific people.  We watched the show because we knew we'd laugh,  but we knew we'd care, too.  But when the people churning it out don't care, viewers can't, either.

2) I'm occasionally chided by those more pop culturally aware for being, you know, out of it, but seriously, what the hell's the deal with this song?  Rolling Stone recently ran an unintentionally hilarious profile of Ke$ha that tried to somehow she's some kind of, like, artist, because her stuff comes from someplace, um, like personal and shit?  (Because nobody's ever before recorded pop songs about drinking and fucking.)

My problem with the song is embedded in the very first line: "Wake up in the morning feelin' like P Diddy"--Wait.  Really?  What the hell is this, 1998?  That was about the last time anyone could make a non-ironic reference to The Artist Formerly Known As Puffy without being seen as hopelessly out of it. 

Obviously, there are other reasons to hate the song--the generic production, the tedious overuse of Autotune, the fact that it was recorded by someone with a dollar sign in her name--but when you start your song by giving a shout out to one of the biggest charlatans in modern pop, you deserve...well, you deserve to be associated with present-day Simpsons.

AND THEY RAN THROUGH HIS FINGERS LIKE GRAINS OF SAND

The streetlights are bright along here, but the harsh glare is diminished slightly when I stand in my backyard.  There, I can look up at the night sky and actually see it for what it is.  The stars glitter as they always do, the moon goes through its phases, and the flashing lights of passing airplanes remind me that someone, somewhere, is off doing something, is having an adventure, is living their life.

How I used to envy such people when I was a kid, standing outside at night, looking up.  We lived on a farm, far from bright city lights, and when I'd walk beyond the reach of the porch light, I was surrounded by an inky, unknown world. Everything was where it should be, but all our cars, the trees in the yard, the ruts in the lane, all took on a slightly menacing appearance as they were illuminated by nothing but the bone-white light of the moon.  And some nights, the moon was dark.

On those nights, the only thing guiding me were the stars themselves, so far away, so indifferent to earthly concerns.  But then there would be a moving star, a flashing light, an airplane making its way to wherever it may be going.  There were people on board that thing, and without knowing it, they had passed my way, and our lives had, briefly and obliquely, intersected.

"Take me with you," I would think.  "Let me be there for all your comings and goings.  Take me from this place.  Let me see the world."

How could I have known what awaited me?  It took awhile, but I had all those adventures I wanted so much back then.  I've ridden in planes at night, flying indifferently over vast expanses of nothingness.  I've traveled, I've seen things, I've lived.  Oh, and loved, too, and lost, and had everything I've cared about taken away.  I've done things and seen things I could never have imagined as I stood there at the end of the lane, alone and in the dark, longing for another world.

And now, with all the weight of this accumulated experience, I still stand in the darkness looking up at the sky.  Lights blink, a plane passes by.  I have no desire to go wherever it is going.  I'm fine right here.

HOW CAN YOU SAY GOODBYE WHEN YOU'RE NEVER AROUND IN THE FIRST PLACE?

I realize there hasn't been a whole lot of traffic around here lately, either from me writing new posts or folks stopping by to read them, but I thought I would nonetheless point out that I'll be gone for a little while.  Just for the weekend, but these are my days off, the days I'm most likely to have time to sit down and write.  So that won't be happening, and I have no idea when regular posting will resume.

But let me leave off with a piece of music.  I've been thinking about Bernard Herrmann a lot lately.  I've especially been listening to his much underrated cantata Moby Dick, and wondering what his reputation would be like if he'd composed more "serious" music and hadn't written so many film scores.  On the other hand, has any film composer scored so many truly great films?  Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Vertigo, North By Northwest, Psycho, Sisters, Taxi Driver--holy crap!  And none of those movies would be what they are without Herrmann's magnificent music. 

Here's an excerpt from the fake opera Salammbo, composed for Citizen Kane.  For purposes of the film, it's sung by Kane's wife, a competent saloon singer who had no business performing as a classical soprano.  So Herrmann wrote a deliberately challenging score, vocally; my ex-wife, a classically-trained singer, used to wince at the final note every time I'd play this.

So here, performed by a vocalist who can do it justice (no less than Dame Kiri Te Kanawa) is a magnificent piece of music by a man who should be more widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest composers.  Yes, this work is a deliberate pastiche, a loving parody of romantic Italian opera.  Somehow, though, especially in that final crash of brass, it sounds like it could only have been written by Herrmann.

THIS IS LIKE THAT THING THAT REMINDS ME OF THIS THING LIKE THAT THING IN THAT ONE MOVIE

After one of my supervisors made the observation that a particular dreaded task "wasn't a favorite," I found myself responding, "Like Tasha Yar at a Star Trek convention."

If you're not a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that line--I hesitate to even give it even so grand a label as "joke"--may make no sense whatsoever.  But the thing is, I'm not a fan of the show myself.  I don't think I've ever seen an episode all the way through.

And yet, I know how widely reviled the character Tasha Yar is, almost as little-loved as Wesley Crusher, and I know both of them vanished fairly early in the run of the series.  I know what the Borg are, who Q is, and the Riker's Beard Rule.  I even know the episode The Naked Now carries the same status in fan circles that Spock's Brain holds in the original Star Trek, an episode so astonishingly inept and misguided it seems incredible that it was ever produced.  And I know this about Spock's Brain even though I'm no fan of the original series, either.

I just sort of acquired all this knowledge somehow, and I suppose it's held in the same part of my brain that knows of the existence of Leighton Meester, that can conjure lyrics to more than one Lady Gaga song, that remembers the exact layout of the set from Match Game and can recall the shock when Fannie Flagg appeared one week not in the lower right spot on the panel but instead on the left. 

Of course, I remember that last part mainly because Mom and Dad seemed so surprised when it happened, as if the shifting of a minor celebrity's position on a game show panel somehow threatened the very fabric of their being.  And the odd--Is odd the right word?  Maybe terrifying or profoundly sad would be better--thing is, this is as much a defining memory of my parents as any I have.  Many details of my life with them fade from my brain, but I remember how much they liked Match Game.

CUE RELENTLESS OVERUSE OF "ONE TIN SOLDIER"

Regular readers--both of you!--may have noticed an unusually long silence around these parts.  That's mostly thanks to the new puppy, who is full of energy and demands a lot of attention.  And there are various responsibilities that go with owning a home--for some reason, people actually expect you to keep your lawn trimmed--and what with one thing and another, I haven't had a whole lot of time.

But hey, in the interest of providing the bare minimum of what could acceptably be termed "entertainment," I offer a clip from the most painfully earnest drive-in movie of all time, Billy Jack.  This clip pretty much sums up the movie itself: a whole lot of speechifying, followed by some ass-kicking to keep us all awake.  Pay special attention to Tom Laughlin's amazing performance in his seemingly endless diatribe.  Not even Shatner himself could manage to overact so outrageously while attempting to underplay.  Kudos, sir!

SOMETHING THAT I'M S'POSED TO BE

The pleasure of a story--in both telling and hearing--is in its predictability.  However it may twist and turn, a story will still begin and end, and the ending is always predetermined.   So if I tell you the beginning of this story, you will most likely be able to guess the rest.  Still, I'll continue the telling, if only because this tale introduces another player onto the stage, one who will no doubt become a regular attraction here.

And the story begins like this:  Me at home last Friday evening.  The phone rang.  It was Tabbatha.  "What are you doing?" she asked, her usual greeting.

Nothing much.  Um, watching Dragnet, actually.

"Sounds exciting.  Listen, I'm at the Animal Rescue League in Southridge.  There's a six-month-old Beagle here I think you need to take a look at."

Yeah?

"She's very laid-back and very sweet.  I've just got a feeling about her.  I think she'd be the perfect dog for you."

But I don't really need a dog.

"You love dog-sitting Brody."

Yeah, but that's for a day or two.

"And you always say you want to keep him"

But that doesn't mean I'm, you know, serious.  I mean, I have a cat.

"Well, Delmar will have to adjust."

I'm not sure Del can adjust.

"Besides, this dog is nothing like Brody.  She's way calmer.  You need to have her.  You should at least come and take a look."

The story continues: Fine, I said, I'd take a look.  It was just a courtesy.  I had to work last Saturday, and planned to take my car into the shop after that, but I had an hour and change to kill in between, so I took a swing down to Southridge Mall, to see the dog, at least, but with no real intention of doing anything more.

Let me pause here to say something about Beagles: I don't care for them.  Not that I've ever personally known one, but as dogs go, they've always struck me as too calculated in their cuteness, what with the big floppy ears and soulful eyes and whatnot.  They're the type of dogs that are ready-made to appear on posters with some sort of HOLD ON BABY, FRIDAY'S COMIN' message scrawled beneath.  Besides, I prefer big dogs, your German Shepherds or your Golden Retrievers, dogs that look like, well, dogs.   Beagles are just kind of there, and though they're better than tiny, why-bother dogs (though Isabella herself is pretty small, and I realize that by mentioning her name, I've kind of given away the ending of the story.  But again, you've probably already guessed it by now, right?), they've never been my cup of tea.  I'm pretty firmly a cat person, anyway.

I explained to the young woman at the ARL that a friend had told me to come take a look at a Beagle puppy, and she took me over to a cage.  The sign said MISSY/BEAGLE/SIX MONTHS/VERY SWEET AND LOVABLE.  Inside was a tri-colored puppy, black, white and brown, who did indeed have floppy ears and soulful eyes, eyes that regarded me with no particular interest.  "You're just another one of them," the eyes seemed to say.  "Another person who will look at me, get my hopes up, and not take me home."

I asked the attendant some questions, then--foolishly--asked if I could actually spend some time with her.  She unlocked "Missy's" cage, took her to the play are in the back, took off the leash--and the puppy immediately jumped into my arms and snuggled her head against my shoulder.  You're trying too hard, I thought, even as I felt my heart melting a bit.  But not melting enough to actually want to take her home.

She went back into the cage, but foolishly, I lingered.  "Missy's" cage was right next to that of the only other dog in the store, a Norwegian Elk Hound puppy, a larger, more imposing piece of work.  I noticed that as people came and went, looking at the dogs, they ignored "Missy", focusing instead on the more dramatic creature next to her.  Not that Missy cared.  She stayed curled up on her blanket in the back of the cage, not even trying to put on a show, apparently convinced that no one would take her anyway.

Again, this was last Saturday, which, as it happens, was also my Mom's birthday.  And as "Missy" continued to be ignored, I heard in my head a line from Mom's favorite song, Bein' Green: "People tend to pass you over 'cause you're not standing out like flashy sparkles on the water or stars in the sky."  And somewhere I heard Mom's voice, too, asking me why I just stood there instead of accepting something that was meant to be.  There was a puppy who needed my love.

And so the story reaches its inevitable conclusion: I have a dog.  Her name is no longer Missy but Isabella--mostly just Bella--because there's no way in hell I'd ever have a dog named Missy.  She is indeed the most wonderful thing in the world, and those floppy ears and soulful eyes are more endearing than I could ever have imagined.  Even Delmar, my cranky, emotionally disturbed cat, is...well, he's not exactly under Bella's spell, but he's learning to tolerate her.  I keep them separated when I'm not home, but I've noticed them drinking together from the same water dish, and Del even bats playfully at her tail.  For Del to be so accepting, even borderline affectionate, is something of a miracle.

But I have a feeling that won't be the last miracle this little Beagle brings into my life.

WE CAN HOLD ONTO LOVE LIKE INVISIBLE STRINGS

Today would have been Mom's 82nd birthday.  This is for her.

EARLY '84: SATORI

"You weren't serious about it, were you?" she asks.

I know what she means, but I play dumb.  "Serious about what?"

"You cut.  It's nothing.  We see it all the time.  You didn't want to die.  You wanted to...well, that's what I'm here to find out."

"No, see, I did.  At least at first."  I look at the bland, orange-brown walls, the nondescript carpeting, the surroundings clearly designed to be as unthreatening as possible.  Soothing, perhaps, if your nerves are easily relaxed.  Me, well, my nerves felt like they were on the outside, and every voice, every sound, every rush of air disturbed them.  I wanted no disturbances.  I just wanted stillness.

"I just wanted stillness," I continue.  "However I could get it."

"Your mother said you were upset.  One of your cats was sick and she suggested having it euthanised--"

"Euthanised?  No, that's not...that's not the right word.  She wanted to kill her.  Shemp is a great cat, she just has these little episodes sometimes.  She's...I don't know, maybe she's epileptic or something.  Yeah, it's scary to watch, but you don't just get rid of something because it isn't quite right.  Shemp is...I love Shemp."

I'm crying now, and it's pathetic, like I'm following a fucking script, like I'm Timothy Hutton having a major breakthrough in Ordinary Fucking People and suddenly everything's going to make sense now, because the movie's almost over and the audience has to understand.  "And you're going to read something into that, aren't you?" I ask.  "Shemp's fucked up and so am I, and if she's disposable, then what am I?"

She nods, just slightly.  "I don't think...Let me put it this way: There's nothing wrong with you.  I've talked to the people on duty the night you were admitted, they said you seemed shaken and scared.  But also funny.  You kept making jokes."

"I don't remember that."

"They said you seemed to be doing it almost to distance yourself from what was going on, a reflex action."

"You make me sound like Woody Allen."

"Are you a fan of his?"

"Yeah."  What the hell?  I wan't expecting a question like that.

Her slightly distant manner drops away.  She's almost animated.  "Do you like his older movies, the funnier ones or--?"

Seriously?  "No.  I mean, yeah, those are great, too, but, you know, Zelig--"

"I wondered if you'd seen that one.  What did you think of it?"

"Well," I stammer, incredibly self-conscious and feeling like I'm suddenly doing a really half-assed Woody Allen impression.  "It was kind of, um, disturbing..."

"In what way?"

What are we, Ebert and Siskel all of a sudden?  "He didn't, you know, couldn't, you know, be, um..."  I stop.  I get where she's going with this.  "He didn't feel comfortable being himself, he was so desperate to fit in, he sacrificed his own personality.  He couldn't relate to the world."

I pause, waiting for her to say something.  She doesn't, so I continue.  "And he probably, you know, had a weird, spastic cat that his mother wanted to put to sleep.  Is that what you're suggesting?"

She smiles, shaking her head.  "No, I was just curious what you thought about it.  You have--those tests you took?  They suggested you had a very analytic mind.  And significantly above-average intelligence, but you already knew that, didn't you?"

"Why...Why would I know that?"

She picks up the notepad she'd sat down when we started talking and rustles through the pages.  "You're eighteen?"

"Yeah.  Nineteen in--God, what is this, April?  A month?  How intelligent can I be?  I don't even know what day it is."

"You're not fooling anyone, you know.  But listen, we'll talk more tomorrow.  Until then, rest, relax, do whatever makes you feel comfortable.  If you don't feel like going out to the day room, that's fine.  We're not going to change you overnight."

"We?  Who's we?  And what am I changing into?"

She stands.  "You, me, whoever gets your case.  And what you change into--well, that's up to you."

As she exits, she leaves the door slightly ajar, and I hear the click click click of her boots down the industrial hallway, hear her voice talking to someone else, then mingling with other voices.  I sit in the earth-toned blandness of my room, looking at the books I'd requested Mom bring me.  Naked Lunch?  Seriously?  Do I want to intentionally feed the very depression that landed me here in the first place?

They've got books in the day room, bland, out-of-date best sellers, Judith Krantz and shit like that.  Maybe that's what I need.  Something uninteresting.  I can sit out there surrounded by people, talking, watching TV, reading the same thing average people read, and maybe I'll start to feel what it must be like to be normal.

SHOW BIZ KIDS

Since no sentient being has cared one way or another about the private lives of Jim Carrey or Jenny McCarthy, their five-year relationship has been remarkably free of coverage in the tabloids.  Or so I assume, since I haven't seen their faces, separately or together, staring out at me from grocery store check-out lanes.

But since this was a union of celebrities, it was bound to come to an end, and it did so with all the class you would expect: They announced their breakup on Twitter.

I wouldn't bother mentioning this at all, but for the fact that, in making her announcement, McCarthy claimed she "will always keep Jim as a leading man in my heart."  Such phrasing makes me think a) I'm glad Carrey's got a gig as a leading man somewhere, because he sure as hell hasn't had a successful big screen role in awhile, and b) "leading man in my heart" may well be the stupidest thing ever said (or Tweeted) by anybody, anywhere.  I realize McCarthy is famous solely for being blond and having enormous fake tits, but you'd think she'd have some sense of shame.

Then I remember that she spent five years living with Jim Carrey, and realize she likely has no concept of shame.

THE BUSY WORLD WAS NOT FOR ME

Easter was such a strange holiday when I was a kid.  I would describe my upbringing as secular, except that word somehow implies that my parents deliberately raised me in a non-spiritual fashion, but that wouldn't be accurate.  My siblings, all older than me, had some vague religious underpinnings to their childhood, and the family as a whole used to attend church on some kind of regular basis.  But by the time I came along, that was all in the past.  No particular reason, it just sort of happened.  There were bibles on various shelves throughout the house, but no one ever got them down.

As a result, I had no concept of the resurrection, or even who Jesus was.  Such ignorance of the religious significance of a holiday did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for Christmas, which I accepted as a general mid-winter festival of good will.  Plus, Christmas involved presents.  But Easter?  Eh, it was just sort of there, and there were no presents involved, only dyed eggs and an odd fixation on bunnies and...not much else.  Sure, there were chocolate eggs, but Mom wasn't exactly stingy when it came to handing out candy the rest of the year, so this was nothing unusual.

Thus, my memories of Easter are pretty much non-existent.  Except for one: Easter morning of 1974.  I was eight, and since most of my brothers and sisters still lived at home, I had no room to call my own.  I slept on the couch in the living room, my small territory marked by a pile of comic books and tablets behind my makeshift bed.  I'd fall asleep every night to whatever was on TV, and usually wake up before anyone else, the drone of early morning DJs a faint sound from Mom and Dad's bedroom.

So it was on this particular morning as well, except there seemed to be something beside me, something I could only half-see in the dark.  My hand fumbled, and I felt the legs of the TV tray that I used to eat all my meals.  But I never had that beside me as I slept.  What was going on?

I turned on the light, and there on top of the tray sat a variety of candy, some gaudily-colored eggs and--as a centerpiece--the latest issue of my favorite comic book at the time, The Shadow.  Mom had bought me the previous issues out of the blue; I was strictly into war comics and westerns, and this avenging hero stuff wasn't really my thing.  But The Shadow was a different kind of hero--he shot guys and killed them.  I was instantly hooked, and Mom must have noticed how I carried those two issues around obsessively, and reread them constantly.  So when she saw the latest issue in the grocery store, she must have figured it would make the ideal Easter present.

How right she was.  I couldn't tell you what I did for the rest of that day, but that small, perfect moment is something that has stayed with me for nearly four decades.  A mysterious, fedora-wearing figure taking out a cruise ship full of neo-Nazis probably doesn't figure into many people's Easter memories, but it will always be the happiest part of mine.

SO LET IT BE WRITTEN, SO LET IT BE DONE!

I'm watching ABC's annual telecast of Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 epic The Ten Commandments as I write this.  (I briefly thought of doing a full-fledged live blog, commenting on the awful time-compressed video, commercial breaks and everything else about the broadcast itself...but that seemed like a lot of work.)

This is a movie that, a little over a decade ago, seemed to have aged terribly.  But some funny things happened since then.  The notoriously awful rear projection and matte work looks uncannily like the bad digital compositing common in almost every movie now.  DeMille's clumsy blocking, essentially a series of stagy tableaux, resembles the equally non-cinematic staging of comic book-crazy contemporary directors like Zack Snyder, who utilize actors as mere props in front of a green screen.

The difference, of course, is that so many of today's filmmakers use their digital tools as ends in themselves, conjuring blatantly artificial CGI landscapes solely to wallow in their own awesomeness.  DeMille utilized spectacle in service of a story.  However campy the dialogue ("Your tongue will dig your grave, Memnet!") and overwrought the performances (compared to most of the cast, Charlton Heston--of all people!--gives the most subtle performance), the director certainly knows how to spin a yarn, even if he lays on the Hollywood piety a bit thick.

It wasn't exactly a good movie when it was made, and it hasn't improved with age.  But it is supremely watchable, and certainly entertaining, and if its one-time liabilities now make it seem oddly contemporary, stylistically, maybe it will show audiences what they're missing in our digital age: A good story, told well.

THE PICTURE THAT WILL PUT YOU IN TRACTION!

What can I tell you?  Sometimes you just need a little Dolemite.



This is what a movie trailer should be.  Not only does it make you want to see the movie, it makes you want to see it RIGHT THIS MINUTE.  It also makes you want to tell your friends about it, and figure out ways to work the phrase "Fuckin' up motherfuckers is my game" into everyday conversation.  (Even better in that respect is the follow-up to Dolemite, The Human Tornado, which gave us the timeless catch phrase, "Bitch, are you for real?"  I say it to the cat all the time!)

If a movie like this even got made these days, it would be...wait, what am I saying?  There's no way a movie like this would get made these days.  Not when there are CGI dog movies to crank out.



Well. I've just lost the will to live, and if you watched that horrible trailer, you most likely have as well. You're welcome!

AND LEAVE YOU ON THE ROLLING RIVER SHORES OF CHANGES

Since my last post went on and on about what a wonderful cat Delmar is, I would be remiss if I didn't say a few words about my other feline housemate, Monika.

True, she's no longer here in corporeal form, having passed away several months ago. But she's still here in spirit, much missed but no less beloved. I had only lived in this house for about a month before she died, but as far as I'm concerned, she will always be a part of this place, and always have a home here.

She's been invading my dreams lately, too. They don't specifically focus on her, but whatever is going on in the dream, Monika is always there, a lovely, benign presence, her wide face and dignified mien suggesting a wisdom she never quite chooses to share. She's sweet and loving and unfailingly decent, but always reserved and just a tiny bit remote.

Which is pretty much what she was like in real life. When compared to a crazy force of nature like Delmar, Monika's quiet nature could fade into the background. It was easy to take her for granted, and sometimes I did, but she'd always reassert herself, remind me of why I loved her in the first place. Periodically she'd abandon all dignity and tear about like a kitten, or climb on my shoulder for no apparent reason, or use her patented James Coburn Zen Cool to display her superiority to lesser four-legged beings. (Poor Del was putty in her paws, but Monika could quietly intimidate anyone. She once calmly punched--not scratched or clawed, but punched, using her paw balled into a workable fist--my mom's large dog, who thereafter ran from her in fear.) She was just short of her sixteenth birthday when she died, but in all that time, I never did quite figure her out.

I'm not a spiritual person in any way, and I have no use for New Agey crap or messages from beyond or that sort of thing. Still, I like to think of these dreams as Monika's way of saying hello, letting me know she's still out there in the ether, fuzzy, gray and inscrutable as ever, and eternally awesome.

KIND OF LIKE AN ARCTIC MINDBATH

He trails me as he always does, following my every move, ready to pounce, to purr, to bite, whatever he has to do to remind me of his presence, whatever will get a reaction. Maybe I'll yell at him, or scoot him away, or pick him up and hug him. Or maybe--his favorite--I'll just sit down and he can leap onto my lap, where he'll curl up, his powerful hind legs kicking at my chest, his teeth nibbling gently on my arm.

Delmar is a very strange cat.

He was born into a litter of adorable, bouncing kittens, most of them fuzzy and gray. They wrestled gently with each other, curled up together at nap time, and followed their mother around, models of obedience. But there was among their number a wiry, unruly little thing, black and white with half his tail missing, always a step or two behind, who seemed lost and out of place and a little bit angry. I could have chosen any of these kittens to take home with me, but of course, there was only one choice.

Oh, but did I choose Delmar, or did he choose me? Sometimes I think he lucked into finding the only person in the world who would not only tolerate his anger, his mood swings, his sometimes irrational behavior, but celebrate it. I've known sweet and loving cats, and cold, indifferent cats, but I've never known any creature, on four legs or two, quite like Del. It's not always easy living with him, but he's taught me to be patient, to accept him on his own terms. And those terms are as basic as the elements: Love me, and I'll love you back.

For he is, curiously, the most loving cat I've ever known. He greets me at the door whenever I come home, his long body stretching to meet me, to hold me, to claim me as his own. Even before I can remove my coat or set down my keys, he demands a hug, and he receives it, his head burrowing into my arm pit, his purr so loud it makes my own body tremble. Then he squirms, and starts to bite. The session is over.

One of my little rituals is to give him a hug anytime I'm heading out the door. In case I don't make it back, I want his last memory of me to be a pleasant one. With most cats, that would be a meaningless act; the feline brain has no short-term memory. But Delmar's no normal cat, and his brain is wired in a different way. He remembers, all right. He knows.

IF I ACTUALLY COULD THINK OF ANY FALL OUT BOY LYRICS, I'D USE THEM HERE

Concert-goers here in Des Moines have had a bounty: Bret Michaels and Black-Eyed Peas have both played here this week, so if you have too much money to spend and no taste whatsoever, it's been good news!

I originally intended to use this post as an excuse to mock skanky, relentlessly auto-tuned Peas chanteuse Fergie, to essentially use her as a metaphor for everything that's wrong with pop culture today...but then the good folks at Reuters came along with a new interview with Pete Wentz, which rekindled my absolute and somewhat inexplicable hatred for Fall Out Boy and, well, there you go.

The thing is, this interview with Wentz--I'd provide a link, but honestly, it's so not worth it--is essentially the same as the one the AP did a month or so ago, and which I duly commented on at this very site. And my point is the same: Who gives a sweet shit?

I mean, it's Pete Fucking Wentz. The guy was in Fall Out Boy, a band so relentlessly mediocre that one of their claims to fame was discovering Panic! At The Disco. Plus, he's married to Ashlee Simpson. The fact that she's back to billing herself as Ashlee Simpson after a brief go-round as Ashlee Simpson-Wentz suggests that even she doesn't care about her husband.

But Reuters does. Evidently. Why else would they publish an interview with a guy who, instead of making crappy music, is now peddling a crappy clothing line. Wow! That puts him up there with Jaclyn Smith and Kathy Ireland, though presumably Wentz considers his clothing line more, you know, edgy. Kind of like that noxious cognac Ludacris slapped his name on.

(Actually, to be honest, I'm surprised I haven't picked up a bottle of Ludacris' cognac. Not because I would expect it to be any good--Lord, no--but simply for ironic novelty value. I once bought a bottle of James Darren's spaghetti sauce, for crying out loud.)

Anyway, the main point of the article seems to be that Wentz is doing fine not making music, which is good, because the citizens of Planet Earth are doing fine not listening to his music. The only odd thing is, there's no mention of an inevitable upcoming project. I mean, he's a self-absorbed, personality-free ex-rock star married to a moderately attractive woman with no talent whatsoever, right?

He's a VH1 reality show waiting to happen.

YUMPIN' YIMINY, OR: SOMETIMES, EVEN I DON'T UNDERSTAND MY OBSESSIONS

Today's my day off, which means I have more time than usual to write. I figured I'd probably post something about the odd series of dreams I've been having lately, or perhaps some musings on the blatant efforts of the Republican party to exploit the latent racism of the American people, or maybe say a word or two about the passing of actor Robert Culp.

Then I discovered El Brendel was born 110 years ago today, and that was that.

Okay, I can't really explain my El Brendel thing, but I can tell you it started almost exactly thirty years ago. The Science Center in Des Moines used to have an annual all-night science fiction movie festival (the films projected in glorious 16mm in those pre-video days), and in spring of 1980 the line-up included When Worlds Collide, Alien, Starcrash (!), The Day The Earth Stood Still...and Just Imagine.

I knew of Just Imagine from a passing reference in Jeff Rovin's A Pictorial History Of Science Fiction Films--a book that was practically my bible, and man, what a hopeless geek I was--but I didn't really know what it was about. The stills in Rovin's book showed a fantastic futuristic New York City clearly influenced by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but it was barely mentioned at all in the text.

So watching the movie was pretty much a voyage into the unknown. It was about midnight, and all of us in the packed screening room were getting a little punchy. It wouldn't have taken much to entertain us, to make us laugh. But once Just Imagine started, and we realized it was nothing more than a vehicle for a punishingly unfunny comedian nobody had ever heard of, merely sitting through it became one of the cruelest slogs imaginable. It actually hurt to watch.

Naturally, for my brother and me, the fact that we endured this became something of a point of pride. And, in the form of El Brendel, it gave us a new reference standard for unfunny. So, for instance, we might greet the appearance of a new Rob Schneider movie by asking, Is it merely bad, or El Brendel bad?

Rob Schneider, incidentally, is the closest I can come to a contemporary version of Brendel; that is, someone so profoundly, obviously unamusing you can't believe anyone ever put him in front of a movie camera. But Schneider keeps getting work--although at this point, it only seems to be due to his friendship with Adam Sandler--and Brendel, well, evidently somebody used to find him funny.

Because way back when, people seemed to think he was, as the kids say, the shit. His fake Swedish accent and prop bow tie had 'em rolling in the aisles of vaudeville theaters, and he was popular enough that Hollywood came calling. He did character parts for William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Preston Sturges, had a few leads in the early talkie days, and his own series of two-reelers for Columbia, occasionally teamed up with Shemp Howard.

And in all that time, he was never funny.

I realize fashions change, sensibilities change, things that were once popular are inevitably forgotten. But funny is funny, and I refuse to believe anyone, anywhere, ever ever found this guy even faintly amusing. Still, hey, judge for yourself. Here he is with his wife, Flo Bert, performing a portion of their vaudeville act. This appearance comes from an episode of the fifties show You Asked For It, and I must say, I find that title a bit of a misnomer. Nobody ever asked for El Brendel.

MY MESSAGE IS THAT IT'S OK TO RELAX

1) Yes, boys and girls, the unusually positive title of this post is yet another quote from Larry King, signifying yet another Random Thoughts entry. I don't claim to understand the rules, self-invented though they may be, I just play by them.

2) Woo-hoo! The utterly emasculated, essentially meaningless health care bill passed. It will be quickly signed into law, but Republicans are vowing all manner of legal challenges and...who cares, really? It's such a messy, complicated piece of work that it's unlikely to make much of a difference in most people's lives. But fine, better that it passed than not, I guess.

A couple things worth mentioning about the whole run-up to the vote, however. First of all, all those deals that had to be cut and language that had to be altered to placate anti-abortion Democrats--um, maybe I'm wrong about this, but abortion is still legal in this country, right? Sure, there are those who find it morally repugnant, but it is the right of every woman to obtain the procedure--why are so many lawmakers so casually willing to circumvent the law?

The other thing is: Democrats, look to the Republicans. This is how it's done. Next time a Republican president nominates a far-right nutjob to a position of great power or tries to slam through some bit of legislation that mocks the founding fathers' intent, you don't have to vote for it. All of you band together and just refuse to play. Stop offering half-hearted objections, then going ahead and voting in favor. Show some spine, for God's sake.

3) Anyone who knows me, even if only through this site, may well be wondering why I didn't write anything about the sudden, terrible death of Alex Chilton. Fact is, when I first heard about it, I was too busy reeling from the shock to say anything more coherent than, "Fuck no!" And even when I tried to organize my thoughts, I really didn't know what to say.

Fortunately, Paul Westerberg offered a lovely tribute to his friend and hero in yesterday's New York Times. I can only add my sincere belief that everyone reading this should run out and buy Rhino's recent Big Star boxed set, as essential a musical purchase as anyone could make. After that, you'll want to hear everything Chilton ever did, and it will all be worthwhile.

4) I spent about two hours Friday night on YouTube, helplessly watching intros and promos for various TV shows from the late seventies. I kept telling myself this was research for an upcoming piece I intend to write, and maybe it is, but about the time I got to this--



--I was horrified by the fact that I actually remembered this show's existence, and only mildly relieved to remember that I never actually watched it. Ask me to name all the U.S. presidents, you'll have a long wait. Ask me what that TV show was that Marc McClure did right after he first played Jimmy Olsen, and the answer's easy: California Fever.

What the hell's wrong with me?

5) Finally, Delmar: He's taken to curling up on my lap and actually staying there for lengthy periods, purring until he falls asleep. Sure, he bites and scratches furiously once he wakes up, but until then, he's almost normal, barely a psychokitty at all these days.

Oh, he still rips my flesh until I bleed sometimes, but old habits die hard...

THE PIPES, THE PIPES ARE CALLING, OR SOME DAMN THING

Yeah,I know: Another clip job. What can I say? Things have been kinda touch-and-go here in the real world, in areas that don't need to be discussed in this space, and, well, who doesn't love music? I know I do! (He said with all the fake enthusiasm he could muster.)

Yesterday, as I threatened to geek out over all things John Williams-related to a friend of mine, she brought me up short by saying, "I think everything he does sounds alike." Well, sure, when he's in full blockbuster mode--even I have to admit his score for Superman is one of the laziest things ever written.

But there's always Star Wars, dammit. The soundtrack for the 1977 original is probably the most-played album I've ever owned in my life. It was a gateway drug to me, to the world of classical music, but also to contemporary film scores. Without it, I'd never have discovered Ennio Morricone, and my life would be meaningless.

But back to John Williams--Star Wars aside, there's his hilarious score for Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, his intentional self-parody for 1941, his atypically jazzy music for Catch Me If You Can...and this, my favorite Williams score, for Brian DePalma's irresistably trashy The Fury. This was another LP I wore out the grooves on.



Speaking of things that can make me geek out: Marshall Crenshaw, ladies and gentlemen!



Finally, it is of course St. Patrick's Day, and I figure I should do something to acknowledge it. Honestly, though, why aren't people of Irish descent loudly complaining about how we celebrate the holiday? Here's how we pay tribute to your culture, Ireland: By wearing green and getting piss drunk. You're welcome.

Anyway, if you must celebrate, you should do so by reading James Joyce's The Dead, nothing less than the greatest story ever written in the English language. Or you could just watch The Swedish Chef, Animal and Beaker sing Danny Boy. This clip from The Muppet Show makes the rounds every year around this time, and no matter how many times I see it, I still laugh. Loudly.

DON'T WALK AWAY

The predictably terrible reviews greeting Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber's incredibly unnecessary sequel to his last major commercial hit, The Phantom Of The Opera, serve as a reminder that there's nothing quite like a bad musical. No form of entertainment demands more from its creators--if they can't build a convincing artifice, if they can't make us believe in a world in which people burst into song, the whole enterprise falls apart and becomes impossible to salvage.

Love Never Dies, of course, is a stage musical, so theoretically it needn't try so hard--the audience is aware it is sitting in a theater, watching performers on a stage, who will most likely react to applause and cheers. We understand going in that they are artificial constructs; they can be well done or poorly done, but we accept what they are. Movies, on the other hand, are (or at least seem) more realistic by nature, so to convince us of the heightened reality the musical form demands, they have to work harder. When the elements gel, you get Love Me Tonight or Meet Me In St. Louis or Singin' In The Rain. When they don't...well, let's take a look.

We'll begin with the gold standard for terrible musicals, 1980's Xanadu, starring Olivia Newton-John, the withered remains of Gene Kelly and the charisma vacuum Michael Beck. This is a movie that fails to convince from the very first frame, when it tries to convince us that Beck is some kind of brooding artistic type. The plot--involving ancient mythology and a plan to open a roller disco!--is unbelievably stupid, but this scene is the point where the movie goes completely off the rails. It's a basic rule of movie-making: Never turn your leads into cartoon fish. Sure, the only movies dumb enough to do such a thing were this and The Incredible Mr. Limpett, but isn't that enough?



Incidentally, to give you an idea of how misguided Xanadu is, how utterly unaware of the basic mechanics of moviemaking: Why did anyone involved think that a moody, downbeat Jeff Lynne ballad was the perfect accompaniment to scenes of its protagonists cavorting as, you know, cartoon characters? Maybe something lighter and more, I dunno, romantic?

Just because characters can start singing doesn't mean they should. This is the lesson to be learned from the first wave of musicals of the sound era. The thinking was, if audiences were still impressed by a technology that allowed them to hear characters speak on screen, they'd be even more impressed to hear people burst into song. So studios cranked out a lot of movies with gratuitous musical numbers grafted onto stories that were already grotesque hybrids.

Like, say, science fiction comedies starring refugees from the vaudeville stage. Just Imagine, a 1930 vehicle for jaw-droppingly unfunny comedian El Brendel, is elaborately-produced piffle that probably didn't play well at the time, and is utterly unwatchable today. I'll spare you Brendel's big number--you're welcome--and bring you instead Frank Albertson and Margaret White performing that timeless ditty Never Swat A Fly.



Two big problems with this number. First off, even in the context of a largely plotless variety show like Just Imagine, this song comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with anything. It's a cute enough song--if this movie had been made at Warner Brothers, it probably would have become a favorite of Carl Stalling's--but it just goes on and on. And then they start dancing!

Which brings us to the other problem, with this song and the whole movie: Director David Butler pretty much nails down the camera and has the performers do their thing in front of it, showing no imagination or understanding of how to stage and film a production number. Admittedly, this is partly to do with the crudity of early sound recording techniques, but Butler made a number of early musicals at Fox--Sunny Side Up, Delicious--and they're all equally painful. He became a little more proficient later on--his Betty Grable vehicles were indistinguishable from Walter Lang's, and his Doris Day vehicles were about equal to what a declining Michael Curtiz was then cranking out--but he never showed any flair, or even any real talent.

In that sense, he was kind of like Charles Jarrot, the hapless functionary in nominal charge of Ross Hunter's allegedly expensive (but incredibly cheap looking) Lost Horizon. Here are Sally Kellerman and Olivia Hussey, singin' and dancin' to arguably the worst song Burt Bacharach ever wrote.



Finally, the trailer for by far the worst musical of the twenty-first century, which had after all already seen the release of From Justin To Kelly and Joel Schumacher's overripe adaptation of The Phantom Of The Opera.



How to make a musical the Rob Marshall way: Keep paying tribute to Bob Fosse, even when it makes no sense to do so, and edit, edit, edit. That way, nobody can even tell that you have no idea what to do with a camera, or how uninspired your choreography is.

Genius!

YOU THINK YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE

I come home from work and find my neighbor wielding a rake and a hoe, taking care of her lawn. She asks me how my car is running, since her husband did some work on it, and I tell her it's doing fine. We talk awhile, then I go inside, change my clothes and start picking up my own lawn, removing dead branches that have until now been covered with snow, remnants of this long, punishing winter.

Back inside, I head immediately for the basement. With all the snow finally melting, and several days of rain, water is seeping into my basement. I deploy my large, formidable wetvac, sucking up what I can, and sweeping the rest to the drain. The water will be a constant for the next few days, given the forecast and the shape my basement is in. That's fine; I'll take care of it.

A quick meal, some time wasted on the computer, then I decide to wrap up this lazy evening by watching a movie. But before hitting Play, I wait for a minute, turning the volume down on the TV. Traffic is heavy on my busy street, and the pavement is wet, and I love hearing the SWUSH SWUSH SWUSH of the tires. There's something about it I find inexplicably relaxing, and somehow it gives me a measure of comfort.

Then again, I'm finding comfort in the strangest places lately. However cruel this winter has been, it has been consistently reassuring to come back to this battered old house, greet my cat, check my mail, enact familiar rituals, much like I've doing right now. Maybe this will all grow tiresome, but for now, I am content. This doesn't feel like a routine, it feels warm and cozy, something I've wanted but never had before.

It feels like home.

RIDING THE CREST OF A WAVE BREAKING JUST WEST OF HOLLYWOOD

Yeah, it's Academy Awards night. Am I supposed to care?

Because I don't, not even a little. I mean, I've never given a rat's ass about the awards themselves, and I don't think anyone who cares about the art or science of film ever has. But the presentation, the ceremony itself, always used to have some guaranteed camp value, or something, but now it's just this pointless, outdated ritual enacted by the elite for their own amusement, and holy crap, that last part almost sounded like it could have been spit out by a pundit at Fox News, so why don't I stop right now?

But, to continue just a bit longer, is the movie business even worth celebrating these days? Because this week, when Hollywood is presumably trying to put its best foot forward and pretend that it routinely makes stuff that is even halfway watchable, some major studios and one big-time producer announced a series of projects that, uh, well...

Gilligan's Island? Seriously? A remake of Police Academy? A movie version of the vintage arcade game Space Invaders? All three of these terrible ideas come from the vast Time Warner empire, which is about a third of Hollywood right there. Paramount chimed in with the comparatively only mildly terrible notion of reworking Pet Sematary.

But hey, you want everything wrong with the movie business in a nutshell? Consider the fact that Gary Marshall--storied producer of Blansky's Beauties and auteur of The Other Sister--is planning to remake Frank Capra's State Of The Union. The original starred Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn; Marshall hopes to cast Richard Gere and Jessica Biel.

So no, I don't feel like the American movie business deserves any kind of celebration tonight. Hell, I don't even think it deserves saving.

HOT LICKS AND RHETORIC DON'T COUNT MUCH FOR NOTHING

Here's my ritual: Though I set my alarm clock for a certain time each morning, I am always, always always awake at least an hour before it goes off. This allows me time to take a nice, relaxing bath, go for a short walk and, theoretically, have time to write something here.

Of course, I realize I've been lax in that last department lately, and appy polly logies for that, but honestly, as I drifted off to sleep last night, I looked forward to getting up in the morning and getting to it, because I had a swell idea for a new post. But what do you know? I slept until the alarm went off, and there's no time to write.

But hey, in the meantime, there's this, an incredibly uninteresting explanation of why there's no new material here today. Not that this explains why whole weeks can go by without new content appearing here...Let's just say I've been busy. I haven't been, particularly, but it sounds good.

The point is, I'll be writing again soon. Probably.

TOMORROWS FALL IN NUMBER

It wasn't fair that Rudy Larriva's very name would become a joke among animation fans, but that's what happened. Larriva, who passed away last week at the age of 94, had the misfortune to direct a series of Road Runner cartoons sub-contracted by Warner Bros. for theatrical release in the sixties. These are a far cry from Chuck Jones' original creations; these were low-rent time-killers, rightly regarded as some of the worst dreck ever distributed to theaters.

Larriva did absolutely nothing to distinguish these efforts, but really, how could he? The scripts were terrible, the budgets non-existent; there was no time, money or talent to emulate Jones' exquisite timing and characterization. Besides, it's not like Larriva was alone in turning out this crap. At the same time, Warners released a series of Daffy Duck/Speedy Gonzales cartoons directed by WB veteran Robert McKimson. No one uses this series as representative of McKimson's work, mostly because he'd done better things once. But then again, so had Larriva.

He started in the business as an animator for Jones himself, toiling away on several Sniffles The Mouse outings as well as the proto-Bugs Bunny entry Elmer's Pet Rabbit. He jumped ship to Disney, where he would be one of the army of animators credited on Song Of The South, the animated sequences of which remain some of the finest things the studio ever did.

His time there was short, but he was fortunate to find himself at the storied United Productions Of America, where he landed an animating gig on their first theatrical shorts, Robin Hoodlum and The Magic Fluke, both directed by the great John Hubley. Larriva served as an animator on Hubley's Ragtime Bear, the first Mr. Magoo cartoon, and would become a mainstay at the studio for several years, earning his first directing credits on later (and sadly, far less distinguished) Magoo cartoons.

This, then, was a fine career. Larriva had worked with some of the best, and they had relied on his solid professionalism. He wasn't a great animator, in the Ken Harris/Bill Tytla/Frank Thomas sense, but he could get the job done, and many great directors obviously respected him. How many people could say they worked with Chuck Jones and John Hubley? Rudy Larriva could!

So, as far as those Road Runner cartoons go, yeah, they're every bit as bad as their reputation. But work was hard to find for old studio hands in the sixties, when even Disney laid off many of its second-stringers. Larriva did the best he could under incredibly dire circumstances. And in any event, far worse was yet to come: In the seventies and eighties, he'd find himself employed by the likes of Filmation, Hanna-Barbera and Ruby-Spears, helping to crank out the likes of The New Adventures Of Gilligan, The Scooby And Scrappy-Doo Puppy Hour, Rubik The Amazing Cube and It's Punky Brewster. Nothing to be proud of, artistically, but at least he kept working in the medium to which he'd devoted his life.

Of course he did. Rudy Larriva was, above all, a professional.

IN WHICH YOU LEARN MORE ABOUT MY PRE-ADOLESCENT LUSTS THAN YOU COULD EVER WANT TO KNOW

I was surprised to find that someone had posted the entire 1973 TV movie Linda on YouTube. Here are the first ten minutes; if you're interested, you can easily find the rest.



This is a fine example of a typical seventies Movie Of The Week. It wasn't a "prestige" effort, and unlike some telefilms from the era (Duel, most obviously, but also such well-remembered gems as Dying Room Only or Night Chase), it has been almost completely forgotten even by hardcore cultists. Still, it is efficiently made, has a reasonably involving plot and is overall a worthwhile sampling of the much-missed workmanlike qualities of the era's TV product.

Yeah, yeah, which is great and all, but who am I trying to kid? I remember this movie very well, not because I watched it, but because its original broadcast was heralded by a full-page ad in TV Guide featuring a bikini-clad Stella Stevens smiling knowingly at the viewer. Since it was the sight of Stella traipsing through the otherwise dire comedy Arnold in her underwear earlier that year that caused my previously-inactive seven-year-old loins to, uh, do what they do, that ad prompted a similar warm feeling in my pants. And, by the next week, that particular TV Guide had been spirited away to a secret location (a long-abandoned chicken coop, and dear Lord, that sounds positively Ed Gein-like) where I used it to, shall we say, explore my nascent libido.

What's interesting--to me, at least--is, given that my first stirrings of lust were entirely due to Stella Stevens (and seriously, I sat through a lot of bad TV movies just because she was in them), in subsequent years, I've never had a thing for blondes. Since my initial concept of feminine allure were formed by a platinum-tressed goddess, you'd think there'd be some trace amounts of that long-ago longing in what I've been attracted to since, but that hasn't been the case.

Or maybe my feelings for Stella Stevens had nothing to do with her hair...

ALTHOUGH I MIGHT LIKE IT FOR ONE AFTERNOON, I DON'T WANT TO LIVE ON THE MOON

This date is locked forever in my memory.

I don't remember when Dad died, exactly, or Keith, not the exact days. But with you, it was different. When Ann called me with the news, I stood for a minute staring out the window, at the ice and snow falling, the streets and houses five stories below so gray and cheerless, the whole world drained of color. Then, turning and looking around the apartment, my eyes stopped on the EC Comics calender on the wall. I grabbed a pen and circled February 16th, my hand pressing down harder and harder, the lines of ink so erratic they finally covered the number. I never wanted to forget this date, but I wanted to erase it at the same time.

How could I live without you, I wondered. Literally, how could I live? Was it worth it to continue? Should I just jump out the window, say the Big Adios? How could I function without the person who gave me life and would always give me strength?

You were, after all, the person I talked to the most, the keeper of my secrets, the one who knew me better than I knew myself. You were the one that bought me all those Big Chief tablets and encouraged me to fill them with whatever was in my head. You were the one that bought me that first issue of The Shadow. You took me to The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad, and listened to me talk about it all the way home, and allowed me to remain under its spell. You gave me not only The Catcher In The Rye but also Nine Stories, and you knew where that would lead.

And you were always there, whatever would befall me in my life, and you always listened and pointed the way. Whatever may have happened, I knew I could get out of it, because you would always be there, to give me a push, to say the right words, to make it better.

Then...you weren't there. I kept staring at the calender, at the window, the ground so far below. And the pictures on the wall, and the clock, and the bed, these surroundings that now seemed so meaningless. How would I make sense of all this now? Who would tell me everything was okay?

The moment passed, and the next one. They kept passing, until now: Four years have gone by. I miss you, but not so much, not anymore. Life, well, it really does go on, and there have been some wonderfully unexpected destinations. And the whole journey has been weird because it seems as though I've discovered a strength inside myself, a resiliency I've never known. Maybe your passing was the very thing I needed. In your very absence, you still point the way.

BE MORE FUNNY!

There's a great book to be written about The Simpsons, about the disparate group of personalities who created the show, how they achieved an amazingly consistent run of quality for several years, and how one by one its greatest creative talents exited, and the sad slide of a once-great show into continuing mediocrity.

John Ortved's The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History is most certainly not that book.

The most obvious mistake Ortved made when writing this was to tell the story as an oral history. Why? When examining the genesis and influence of a particular creative work, a singular voice is needed, a critical independent mind, someone capable of sifting through the agendas of various former staffers and arriving at some sort of truth, and a writer well-versed enough in TV history to analyze the impact The Simpsons may or may not have had on the medium.

Instead, Ortved mostly just talked to a bunch of people--some only tangentially connected to the show--and cobbled their conversations together in the most arbitrary manner imaginable. True, Tom Wolfe did a guest voice on a late-period episode, but how are his comments even vaguely relevant?

More damagingly, Ortved couldn't get interviews with the key creative personnel--Matt Groening, James L. Brooks or Sam Simon--and tries to make do with interviews they'd conducted elsewhere. (Except for Simon, who's never given an interview about his time on the show, and whose absence seriously undermines the wisdom of the whole oral history concept.) But since these interviews often seem to be taken out of context, what they have to say is often made to look bad. (Ortved seems to have a particular dislike for Brooks.)

In fact, there are no fresh interviews with any of the best-known writers from the show's heyday--George Meyer, John Swartzwelder and Jon Vitti are only heard from second-hand. Ortved's biggest "get" is Conan O'Brien, whose tenure with the show was relatively brief, and has little of interest to say. (Probably not O'Brien's fault; given everything else wrong with the book, I suspect he simply wasn't asked the right questions.) But hey, we spend lots of time talking to various execs from Fox, and learn all about how the show got on the air--as if that's the story anybody wants to hear.

The absolute worst parts of the book, though, are when Ortved's own voice emerges to try to supply some kind of connective tissue. Simply put, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He has absolutely no knowledge of animation history--which would be useful when writing about a cartoon show--and the things he presents as Absolute Truths about TV history are wrong, wrong, wrong.

He claims The Simpsons was unique in sitcom history for its caustic worldview, though everything from Sgt. Bilko to Buffalo Bill prove otherwise. He wants us to believe that the show appeared fully-formed in a sea of prime time mediocrity, though its first season was wobbly and the network landscape already included Cheers, Roseanne, The Wonder Years and an early incarnation of Seinfeld. (True, none of these shows were as good as The Simpsons at its best, but they weren't chopped liver.) He seems convinced that The Simpsons single-handedly ushered in a new wave of series driven primarily by their writing staffs, although that's pretty much the whole history of TV ever.

That last point is particularly laughable. At one point, Ortved implies that The Sopranos and The West Wing were somehow made possible by The Simpsons, that it alone made TV a respectable medium for writers. Leaving aside such well-respected Golden Age scribes as Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling--Ortved would consider such names ancient history--what about MASH, which was clearly Larry Gelbart's show, or Jay Tarses' Days And Nights Of Molly Dodd...or Taxi, with a staff of writers that included James L. Brooks and Sam Simon?

In fact, the evidence of Ortved's own book shows that writers weren't particularly respected at any point in the history of The Simpsons, since every script would be punched up a string of gagmen, and the credited author often had nothing to do with the final episode. No one voice could ever emerge, no one individual would ever be considered the auteur of the show. It's not the only way to do a show, but it worked just fine for many, many years. Just how it managed to work is a story that fans have been waiting to hear.

And thanks to Ortved, they're still waiting.

THE DREAM IS OVER

I know, psychologically, how this dream was formed. I did my taxes last night, for the first time as a home buyer, which meant I found myself poring over all the details of when I bought the house, and reliving in my mind the anxiety of those months when it was never certain whether financing would actually come through.

So in the dream, I attempted to buy a house. It was located in a small Iowa town--Casey, apparently, based on the layout--which improbably contained an Indian restaurant, a Milio's sandwich shop and a sprawling indie bookstore with a large film section, but was otherwise a typical Midwestern burg, well-stocked with overall-wearing farmers.

One of which was my real-estate agent, portrayed by a straw-hatted Slim Pickens, who explained to me that, yes, I would almost certainly acquire the property, but there was a waiting period before I could take possession. In the meantime, he showed me the temporary housing he'd located for me: A shack. More specifically, the crawlspace under a shack, which was itself located inside a squirrel-infested corn crib. "There's no electricity, but yuh can see okay durin' the day. Yuh ain't claustrophobic, are yuh?"

The next day, I returned to the shack, accompanied by Mom, who was helping me move. As soon as we got to the shack, we noticed it, the corn crib and indeed the entire town plastered with Old Timey Wanted posters. "Hobos and Vagrants will be SHOT ON SIGHT," the posters claimed, and at the bottom was a crude line drawing of me.

Mom noticed my real estate agent had left me with a week's worth of entertainment during my stay--a box full of Max Brand novels!--then made ready to leave. "But Mom," I said, "don't you feel weird leaving me here? I may be killed."

"Nature takes its course," she shrugged, and walked slowly away. I watched her until she simply vanished, and I realized I was no longer in a corn crib in an unfamiliar town. I stood in the shallow ditch beside the rutted lane of the farm where I was raised. A familiar engine sounded in the distance: The school bus. My dog Spinner ran to greet it. I heard it slowing down.

I knew I was about to see myself, clad in a sweatshirt and striped pants, happy and romping with Spinner. I knew this would overwhelm me, either with joy or despair. Either extreme seemed too much to bear.

So I opened my eyes, and heard Delmar's paws clunking in the other room, and I knew I was awake. I stayed in bed several minutes more, listening to cars on the snow-coated streets, their tires hissing, hissing.

DID ANYONE ASK FOR THIS?

Does anybody, anywhere, have any interest at all in another Mission: Impossible movie?

Probably not, but we're getting one anyway. While it may be true that, as Paramount's press release notes, the first three entries in the franchise have made well over a billion dollars worldwide, they are textbook examples of the kind of blockbuster entertainment nobody really likes. Audiences, primed by pricey and seemingly endless marketing blitzes, show up, sit in the theater for two hours and go home, remembering not a single thing about the experience.

They're not bad movies, but they hew to the action movie template so closely, with explosions, chases and love scenes arriving at exactly the expected moments, that in all three previous outings they have yet to fashion any kind of identity, as a brand name or even as Tom Cruise vehicles. The first in the series remains the least interesting thing Brian DePalma has ever directed, the second offered proof that John Woo's American career was going nowhere, while the third--oh, who the hell cares? I've seen the damned thing, and I can't remember a single thing about it.

I doubt anybody could. But the suits in Hollywood don't care. If there are a few dollars to be squeezed out of a franchise nobody likes, they'll squeeze like there's no tomorrow. It's so much easier than being, you know, creative.

TROUBLE MAN

She sits cross-legged on the bed, crying softly. I sit on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor, arms to my side, making no move to comfort her. I'm the reason she's crying, after all.

It's been a difficult day for her, emotionally. I understand that. It's the anniversary of her husband's death, her emotionally and physically abusive husband, and this day must have brought more demons to the surface than usual, especially since she received a phone call before I arrived from one of her now near-adult children, a kid taken away from her long ago when she was declared an unfit mother.

So maybe it wasn't the best day for me to tell her I had no interest in continuing our relationship. Friends, sure, but nothing more than that. But she'd kind of forced my hand, as we spent the long afternoon visiting the gravesites of her husband, her father, assorted cousins and seemingly anyone she'd ever known, and she spent the time talking of all the mistakes she'd made, and how things would be better in the future, and how that future would include me.

"How could you say that?" she says at last, her voice raw and low from crying. "How could you say this today?"

"I wanted to be honest. You think there's a future for us, and...there's not."

"How do you know that? How do you know there couldn't be?"

"There are...reasons. Don't make me say them, not now. They'll just upset you more. I don't want to hurt you."

"You don't?" She whips around, her legs suddenly uncurled, and looks as though she might fling me off the bed. "The fuck you don't. Why the fuck else would you say this to me, today of all days?"

"Because all day long you've been talking about how things will somehow be better for you because of this magical entity of us together, and I've been trying to think of a nice way of saying there is us, there is no future. But there's no nice way to say it, so instead of letting you down easy, I went ahead and let you down rough. And I'm sorry. For everything."

"But I love you, Edward--"

"No, you don't. You love your idea of me, and you love that I'm there for you and I listen to you, and you want someone in your life so bad you've built this image of me in your mind, but it's not me. You can't love me, not really. You don't even know me."

"I know you better than you think."

"Yeah?"

She curls back up on the bed, no longer angry or sad, her voice full of resignation. "I knew you'd do this."

THANK YOU, ASSOCIATED PRESS, FOR DARING TO BRING US THE NEWS THAT REALLY MATTERS

Though the world was thrown into a state of almost terminal indifference earlier this week with the news that Fall Out Boy might be breaking up, the scrappy, ink-stained scribes at the Associated Press have managed to score an interview with the deeply uninteresting band's barely-sentient bassist, pretty boy and Joe Simpson son-in-law Pete Wentz, who is eager to point out that FOB isn't necessarily breaking up so much as...Well, let's let Pete have his say:

"I'm OK if Fall Out Boy comes back or doesn't come back. Like, if it's fun for everyone to do again, we're going to do it...I just want it to be authentic when we come back."

Yeah. Authentic. Because if there's one thing Fall Out Boy stands for, it's authenticity. Their pledge to, like, get their fans moving, or whatever, is something Wentz and his faceless bandmates take, you know, seriously. But not so serious that it's, like, whatever. You know?

I should point out here that people have made me aware of my tendency to use the words "Fall Out Boy" as a synonym for "shitty band", and that I seem to hate them out of all proportion to their actual non-worth. But that's just it--they're not even interesting enough to be bad. They're proudly, solidly mediocre, crafting product, not art, and they're not even particularly skilled artisans. In that sense, they're a contemporary version of REO Speedwagon or Kansas, doomed to a future of playing some Aughts Nostalgia Circuit.

Meanwhile, I'll start using 30 Seconds To Mars as my shorthand reference to a shitty band.

CATS AND DOGS FIGHTING LIKE, I DUNNO, CATS AND DOGS

Ive been dog-sitting again, and while I could try to describe how the presence of an adorable, rambunctious canine turns poor Delmar's world upside down, I'll just post another Chuck Jones cartoon to give you a rough approximation. As always with Jones, the keenly accurate observation of character traits makes this soar: Yes, dogs are that cute, and yes, cats are scheming bastards. (Well, not all cats, but if you knew Delmar...)