Stay Glued To Your TV Set

2007-05-01T13:21:00.001-07:00

2007-04-30T09:19:00.000-07:00

2007-04-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

2005-07-27T11:50:00.000-07:00

On June 5, my Grandpa Sundin passed away. A little more than a week later, I delivered this eulogy at his service:

I rarely get the opportunity to talk about my Grandpa Sundin. Basically, as far as I'm concerned, he's God's blueprint for grandpas. His eyes twinkled, and the twinkles danced. He had an infectious smile you couldn't help but throw right back at him. The most indelible image I have of him is the jet-black hair, and the pipe that jutted from his lip as he hunched over a piece of wood and turned it into a woodshed, or a house, or a small country. The hair eventually went gray, and the pipe disappeared, but the sweetness stayed behind, even near the end.
(At this point I ad-libbed a story about what Grandpa did the day I was born. I was his first grandson, so you could imagine his jubilation. He scotch-taped a proclamation to his front door--which I still have--announcing my birth, and that I was born with a full head of teeth and a one-word vocabulary. No points for guessing what that word was.)

All my life I've been in awe of him. When I was really young, he was my favorite person in the world. The sweet Swede. A soft touch. Sometimes an easy mark for an enterprising, semimischievous oldest grandson, but not very often. I remember him coming over to our house one morning, when we still lived in Whittier, to wake me up for school. I must have been about five. He shook me awake, and I looked at him and said, very seriously, "No, Grandpa, school is closed today." He played along with me, until I pretty much gave myself away, ending a promising career as a professional sleeper.

Going to my grandparents' house was like a trip to a magic shop. The smells that greeted you were a mix of sweet tobacco and love. Grandma would open the door and always seem delighted and surprised to see you. "Well! Hello, sweetheart!"--a greeting that hasn't changed. Grandpa'd get up from the couch and shake your hand, and you'd literally feel the importance of family traveling from his body to yours. He'd join you in games, he'd be interested in everything you said and did--he was a little kid's dream.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see him much after our family moved to Oregon in 1979. But he and Grandma typically came every summer, or we'd head down to Whittier for holidays. Either way was fine with me, because it was just a joy to be with them. If the Sundins were supposed to arrive on a Friday, Friday never came soon enough. And when Friday came, the hour never came soon enough. And after they DID arrive, it never seemed like they stayed long enough. As a funny aside, our pets went absolutely nuts whenever Grandpa came. They'd sense him, or hear him in the yard and demand immediate affection, immediate attention, which I always thought was remarkable: They only saw him once a year or so; how in the world could they remember him? But the second he showed up, we had to fight our dogs for the right to say hello. It was like he was their grandpa too. And when we'd go to California to visit them (much to our dogs' dismay), my brother and I would always sleep as long as we could, in hopes that the distance would be covered in an eyeblink, and that we'd wake up as the car made its way down Redman and turned into the driveway of the little green house. Whether they came to us or us to them, it didn't matter. The feeling of anticipation and home was always the same.

I always associate the word "home" with Grandpa. Even as a little kid, I knew that carpentry was the perfect occupation for him, because he carried within him all the qualities necessary for a successful home. The drywall, the sheetrock, the hammer and nail are only the medium. A house is nothing without warmth and joy. A spiritual roof is just as necessary as the physical one. Throughout the city of Whittier are such monuments, and there exist very few of us who have not benefited from his craftsmanship.

There was something magical about who he was and what he did. In one of the scrapbooks assembled for my grandparents' 50th anniversary in 1996, among the well-wishers and ruminations about cabins and trips and water-skiing, is a letter I sent to him--not to commemorate the anniversary; it was actually in response to something that had happened to him, something that had put him in the hospital. It shook me up, a verification that despite what I thought of him, Grandpa Sundin was a mortal man. He could be hurt. And even at the age of 23, that idea was unsettling. I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but I told him that, as Grandpa Sundin, it was his job to live forever. He responded with a very sweet hand-written letter that thanked me, said he didn't really feel he deserved all the nice things I said about him, but that he appreciated them, and also: "I can't guarantee that I'll live forever, but I'll give it a try." It was very tongue-in-cheek, but as far as I'm concerned, he kept his promise.

So in closing, I'd just like to say that it warms my heart to see all of you here. He touched all of our lives in ways that none of us, including him, will ever understand. It's amazing to think how simple it seems: Grandpa met Grandma, and here we are. Two kids became two parents and five grandchildren, and the family only continues to grow, under the roof he built for us all. And as long as we're here, as long as we remember every twinkle, every smile, every kind word, every laugh, every handshake, every hug, every sweet smell and sound, every moment shared and private, every scrap of memory in which he lives, Grandpa Sundin's house will always stand, and he will always be home.

2005-06-24T09:51:00.000-07:00

"There's a cold wind blowin' in my soul

And I think I'm growin' old."

--Pink Floyd, "Wot's...Uh, The Deal"

I must apologize for my long-term absence. It wasn't for lack of interest, but of time--a commodity we seem to have so little of these days.

I've reached another crossroad in my life. Every morning I look in the mirror and have no idea who's staring back at me, but I can tell from his scowl that he knows how I feel: Lost. Unhappy. Bored. Like a rat lingering as the shattered vessel creeps deeper into an oceanic grave. Desperate for new challenges, and perhaps some old ones that need revisiting.

It dawned on me recently that I'll be 33 this November. It's the oldest I've ever been, oldest I've ever felt. I don't have much more time to indulge in frivolous livelihoods. It was OK when I was 18 and nine years was pocket change, but I no longer have the luxury of dropping decades at whim and ignoring that nagging urge to leave. I want to get back to the Pacific Northwest. I want to be around my family and old friends again. I want to reward my lungs for keeping me alive this long by sucking down some relatively pure air again. I want the days to pass languidly again, where the years feel like years. I want the comfort of home, home, home. I've done the L.A. trip--it's nice, it's exciting, it's fun, but it's also crowded, noisy, and sickening. I came here to prove myself. I did. Confidence rebuilt, need sated: mission accomplished. Time to take my lessons and build on them somewhere else.

2004-12-31T11:10:00.000-08:00

Three names you go by:

Frye
C.J.
Jagoff

Three screennames you have:

fryeness
fryegod
fryelicious

Three things you like about yourself:

Humor
The fact I'm still alive
That I had the balls to change my life

Three things you hate/dislike about yourself:

My face
My body
The fact that I dwell on those things

Three parts of your heritage:

Cherokee
Irish
German

Three things that scare you:

Empty bank account
Dying alone
Loss of friends

Three of your everyday essentials:

Dr. Pepper
Los Angeles Times
Music

Three things you are wearing right now:

Jacket
Jeans
Button-down shirt

Three of your favorite bands/artists (at the moment):

Amp
Explosions In The Sky
Isis

Three of your favorite songs at present:

Mike Watt, "Pissbags And Tubin'"
Faces, "Flying"
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, "Babe, You Turn Me On"

Three new things you want to try in the next 12 months:

Seven additional sexual positions
Finishing a novel
Finding a third thing to try

Three things you want in a relationship (love is a given):

Trust
Mutual admiration
Someone to talk with until morning

Two truths and a lie:

I have brownish black hair.
I've been known to enjoy The Godz' Last Testament.
I'm confident in the future of this country.

Three physical things about the opposite sex (or same) that appeal to you:

Sense of humor
Intellect
Their willingness to kick me in the ass when necessary

Three things you just can't do:

Play drums
Win an i-Pod
Lie to writers

Three of your favorite hobbies:

Writing
Watching movies
Imagining myself on The Charlie Rose Show, reflecting on an illustrious career.

Three things you want to do really badly right now:

Go home
Be done with this project
Savor a moment

Three careers you're considering:

Writer
Nic Harcourt's doppleganger
Exotic dancer

Three places you want to go on vacation:

London
Belfast
Toronto

Three kids' names:

Danny
C.J.
Honeybear

Three things you want to do before you die:

Be the subject of an in-depth interview.
Produce a television documentary.
Save a woman from a tiger.

Three people who have to take this quiz now:

Becky
Jeff
Steve

2004-12-07T13:01:00.000-08:00

INFECTIOUS LISTEN OF THE DAY: De La Soul, "A Roller Skating Jam Named 'Saturdays'," from De La Soul Is Dead (Tommy Boy, 1991)

WHY IT RULES: The skippity scratches, the nostalgia with a light disco roll--it hurls you headlong into the strobe 'n' swirl of a '70s-era skating rink. De La Soul at their finest.

BEST PART: "No need to talk--look who just walked in!", followed by the opening horns of "Grease." Oh, Mr. Sprinkler!

2004-12-02T13:18:00.000-08:00

It took very little effort, but I exhumed my Guy Code column on "Grandpa Scurv," which ran in the June 5, 2001, issue of the online mag:

Grandpa Scurv passed on two years ago last month, and I find myself thinking about him more and more. He died shortly after his 72nd birthday, a milestone he was barely cogent enough to observe. We had his birthday party mostly without him; he stayed awake long enough to open a few presents–slow and methodically this year–then marched to bed with apologies. He was tired. So tired. All he wanted or needed was rest, rest. A tall glass of chocolate milk and his day was over. The man who once railed for hours against the modern world with lust and fire was now of few words. Then silence, as the light began to fade.

We were there, at his home, the day he died. The minutes passed wordlessly among us all, the medicinal air of his bedroom was iron in our lungs. We could barely breathe or speak; all we could do was watch, hold his hand, pep-talk him into the Great Beyond, where other family members waited with lemonade on a spectral porch with the grandest view of all. He finally joined them shortly after 9 p.m., May 3, 1999, as the Oregon rain smashed against the window like nails.

The things I miss most
But Grandpa can speak now. I know this for a fact. Oh, how he can talk. After being liberated from the mortal coil, I can imagine a pounding rush of verbiage swelling from his mouth, beginning with his timeless opener: "DO YOUUUU MEAN TO TELL MEEEE?" as he bemoaned to his fellow spirits the decline of public schools and government. I can hear him now: "Frank, I humored you with this whole ‘writer’ nonsense, but here you got something called The Guy Code and all this jazz about being ‘guys,’ but where’s the ultimate guy–The Grandpa?" And, as always (even when he predicted that "bag of crap" superintendent wouldn’t last another term), he’s right. There’s no relationship like a boy and his grandpa. Dads are the epitome of boyhood fantasy, but grandpa-hood seems like the toppermost, almost divine, privilege. Here was a guy older than your dad (if you could fathom such a thing), who spanked your dad, who taught your dad what he knows, which is everything. And grandpas know even more–they were bred someplace special and came into existence with pepper hair and wrinkles and all the time in the world to go fishing. It’s not until later when you discover the awful truth: They were once children, just like you.

A man's man from the old school
Grandpa Scurv was hardscrabble and stoic–so old fashioned he was literally monochrome, but sturdy. They definitely don’t build men like that generation anymore. He survived polio when no vaccine existed. He fathered three children. He escaped the Watts riots in one piece (one of his favorite stories). He was a milkman, a laundry man, a workingman who worked and worked until the only power that could take him finally did. Modern contraptions and blinking doohickeys weren’t his style; he was content with his perfectly running outdated automobiles and his stories about everything you could buy for a quarter at a West Covina corner store in 1936. He didn’t fret too much about finances or social stature; his philosophy was simple: FAMILY–they made you happy. And men, men were sired to WORK. And that’s WORK with the largest, hardest all-caps you got, with maybe some bold italic underlined punctuation: WORK!@#*. Well, maybe if you thrashed the keys hard enough to lose blood, or rocketed your fingers through the desk entirely and cut a huge chunk out of your feet below–or better yet, just whacked both suckers off entirely, sutured your own stumps, and continued the column without shedding a tear WORK!@#* was not candy asses on plum office chairs. It was sucking pollution and flames and metal into your system while transporting something heavier than your heart

Writing isn't work
I remember telling Grandpa I wanted to be a writer. At first he thought I meant the rodeo, and he looked at me like I’d handed my mind to a bloodhound. When I clarified it for him, he looked at me like the bloodhound had handed it back. I watched his face kick into a grin as a laugh crawled up his gullet. "Sheeeyit," he exhaled. "A writer?" He clamped a hand to my shoulder, seared holes into my eyes and asked, "Frank, do you like girls?" "Of course, Grandpa," I replied. "I’m the most heterosexual man alive." Satisfied, he patted he on the back and said, "Good luck. But remember: there’s lots of good jobs in factories, boy." Then he walked off in an amused daze, probably to see if he could trade me for the bloodhound.

But Grandpa came around, as he always did, when he saw I was serious. He’d clip my articles out of the local paper, and he took great pride that one of his grandsons was a newspaperman. It wasn’t the same as operating heavy, rusting machinery (that’s for the boys in the pressroom), but he fancied me out somewhere, bangin’ a beat and plying sources with scotch in exchange for sordid city-hall scandals. When we’d talk, he’d ask about "my" paper. It wasn’t "his" paper, or "the" paper–somehow it belonged to me. "Your paper didn’t come today," he’d complain in that gruff growl I miss so much. "What the hell’s wrong with it?" "So I hear your paper’s going to Sundays now," he said to me shortly before he disappeared. "Can you get me a deal so they don’t try to gouge me on the bill?" Or "I can’t buh-leeve what your paper ran on the front page on Monday. You tell that reporter that I said he’s full of shit." He was a feisty, foxy, colorful man. But loving. Very loving.

His last gift?
The year before he died, he gathered all his immediate Pacific Northwest-based relatives (except for my great-aunt and uncle, whom my grandmother wasn’t on speaking terms with at the time) and hauled us out to Salem for a family photo. It was the first time we’d been together in one frame since 1986. There was the usual preliminary waiting and posing and hair mussing (with Grandpa amiably agreeing to every suggestion in his usual low, "Alllll right" as he shifted his body into whatever position required), but when the flash went off, everything was perfect. When I look at those shots now, my eye always wanders to Grandpa, his permanent crewcut belying an advancing age, right in the center. The smile on his face is genuine, almost beatific. He is PROUD.

And we wonder if he knew, even then. That maybe on some spiritual level, this was his final material gift. Because he soon began to disappear, piece by piece. First he wasn’t holding his own in conversations anymore, letting other family members dominate them. Then he started acting erratically. He’d get lost while driving but–like every man–refuse to ask for directions: "I know where I’m going. I’ve been driving this route for years." Finally, he had to admit that he didn’t, turn around, go home, and try again another day, when he was feeling better. And those days happened with less and less frequency. We had to go see him. And after he drove his riding lawnmower into a row of bushes, the family dragged him, protesting all the way, to his doctor. The prognosis was ominous: Brain Cancer. It was the one obstacle in his hard-fought life that he couldn’t overcome. We naturally clung to the best of hopes, but the proof was disconcerting. His eyes were bloodshot and sometimes lost. He’d stare at his own furniture with a child’s curiosity. Instead of his usual sing-song "Hellooooo, young man" when I’d enter a room, there was just musty air and a glance upward at me. "Do you recognize him!" Grandma would shout in his ear. Then the vacancy would disappear and he’d shoot her the same look he once gave me when I uttered the word "writer." "Yeah," he’d reply instantly, in shorthand tone for Woman, are you outta your mind?

It was difficult to watch his strength waste away. Death had never hit us so close before. The last major family tragedy came some 11 years before when my great-grandmother–his mother–passed away on Thanksgiving. But she was in her mid-90s by then; it was only a matter of time. Grandpa seemed unstoppable. He’d outlive us all, we said. After Armageddon and all the survivors were whisked off to some distant planet, he’d be our only namesake left. I could see him on the surface of Mars, contemplating a bevy of nubile women. "Well," he’d say, as he slipped into his space gear, "I guess it’s up to me." But something as unforeseen as cancer came. Shut his mouth. Lashed him to a bed. Allowed him to make his reparations. Then took him away and left us to face the sudden hollowness of life.

The lesson, learned
"Nawwww," I can hear Grandpa say. "You just don’t realize how great life is." Right again, old son. I remember his wake, which was more of a celebration, release, and rebirth. Family members we’d been estranged from for years showed up, and old vexations and grudges were buried. I saw my grandmother embrace my great-aunt, who actually spoke at the podium. She’d written her own speech, something my grandma couldn’t have done. Not only that, she injected a copious amount of humor to break the immense weight hanging above the room. Soon we were laughing through our sob-streaked faces. Then I got up and went off the cuff, and the laughter continued. In a way, we brought Grandpa back–we didn’t mourn his loss; we celebrated his memory. And I peered off into this sea and realized that this was his last gift: to reintroduce us to each other, to strengthen a bond once frayed and tearing, to bring us together. As family. Ow! Did someone just thump me on the back of my head?

Yeah, I see you smilin’ up there, you old coot. It took us a while, but we finally got the message. Thanks. For everything.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome back to 2004.

Memories of the last time I saw Grandpa Frye:

That day I was at the Albany Democrat-Herald office, roosting at a desk I commandeered because, goddammit, it was about time I had a desk of my own. 'Twas a modest slab compared to the ergonomical paradise my arms rest upon at this very moment, but I felt like royalty. The phone even bore my name on its digital screen. The first four paragraphs of my next Video Pit, a semiregular feature I scribed sporadically for The Entertainer, the weekly shits 'n' giggles supplement offered as an afterthought in both the Herald and Corvallis Gazette-Times, sat motionless, museless on a vapid computer screen. I was desperately trying to use the lyrics to Lou Reed's "Satellite Of Love" as an epigraph for a critique of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. Finally I slashed the white with "I watched it for a little while/I love to watch things on TV," dolloped it up top like a cherry on a sundae, and lumbered forward. Little did I know that later today I'd have to muster enough psyche-out in myself to drop the "-30-" on something even slightly amusing.

The phone rang. Dad. Distant. Maybe trapped in the phone itself. "Uh, we're going over to your grandparents'," he said, which usually meant a shit-shooting session and dinner but not anymore--the sentence droned like a fugue. "Your grandpa's, uhhhh, he's not doing well, and I think you should see him."

The ride to Lebanon was excruciating. We might as well have walked for all the rusted moments that thudded along, wheezing exhausted with each revolution. Nobody spoke. You could barely see through the air to the front seat; each molecule was visible and alive. Even the whir of the tires below were hushed in solemnity. With about two miles left I happened to stare down a gravel driveway, where a dog was sunning itself before springing to attention at the sight of passing strangers and going into full protector mode. "Heh," I said to no one in particular. "Looks like the dog's saying 'wussup.'" Somehow this was funny. My brother started laughing, then my dad, then my future stepmother. The tension broke. It was just an incredibly ludicrous observation. Even today the "wussup" dog gets a chuckle, because if there was ever a perfect example of a dog saying, "wussup," the four of us were privileged enough to see it.

I don't really wanna go into the specifics of what happened that night when I was there (or what happened after we all left), but it was dark when I got back to the office to finish my poppy, peppy, friendly joyboy jaunt through the rapier quippery of Tom Servo, Crow, Mike, et al. A pall with the density of cement bore down on my shoulders, then got worse when the phone rang. When a relative is dying and the phone rings at night, you don't have to be psychic to spot-on guess. The receiver came up like a tombstone, and there was my Aunt Nancy. The few moments of silence between "Hello" and "Cory?" were very telling. The news was final. He was gone.

But, Grandpa's not a guy you could keep down for long. Within a week I'd already had my first GP dream, where he surfaced rather suddenly at a family reunion to revive an old argument with my grandma over--get this--cupakes vs. muffins. I swear it's true: those two could never reach a mutual decision on what made a cupcake a cupcake, and a muffin a muffin. It happened during a drive to Utah in the summer of '83. My cousin Lisa and I were their audience. Beginning innocently enough as a innocuous question about lunch, it quickly exploded into Bisqik warfare.

Grandma: It came in the little wrapping. It's a cupcake.

Grandpa: No, that was a muffin if I ever saw one.

Grandma: I know what a muffin looks like; I wasn't born yesterday.

Grandpa: I'll bet you that if we went back there and looked at the menu it'd say muffin.

Grandma: Honey, it was too small to be a muffin!

Grandpa: No, it wasn't. A muffin can be any size.

And honestly, I don't know which one of us even had the muffin/cupcake, or which one it actually was, but every now and then, just to get them riled up, we'd bring it up for discussion again. And it resurfaced in the GP dream, which Grandma finally ended by saying, "Oh, just shut up." But, of course, he didn't. He's still talking somewhere right now. If it rains pastries tomorrow, I'll know for sure.

2004-12-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

I spent Thanksgiving with my aunt, my uncle, my youngest cousin, and my grandmother in Whittier, California, where a much-younger version of me once roamed. Ever since I moved back in 2000, Whittier's had a rather surreal quality in my life, being both a part of my distant past and foreseeable future. There are patches of memories scattered about, spread like shiny winks of glass against a busy backdrop of litter and progress: I'll occasionally find myself in familiar territory, but it's not familiar enough for me to associate it with anything specific, just the breath-long blur of a passing thought. About two years ago I was riding with my uncle through a part of town where certain things--the grooves of a fence, the shape of a rooftop, the space between stoplights--at once leapt out at me, somehow fitting perfectly a jutted outline that had always seemed to be part of me, a subconscious committal to memory. "Why is it," I asked my uncle, "that I know this place?" "Because," he replied, "I think your old house is about three blocks from here."

This Thanksgiving was a somewhat bittersweet affair for us all. It was our first without my Grandpa Sundin, who could not make it this year because he did not know it was Thanksgiving, he did not know it was Thursday, and he does not know who any of us are. He's in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's, a cruel, lingering disease that's slowly been eating away at everything he once held dear or took for granted. When I first moved to California four years ago, he was fine--he could still drive a car and ask me about my job and tell me he was proud. The last time I saw him he had to be introduced to me. "This is your grandson!" my grandmother told him. "Grand-SAHN?" he asked tentatively, trying to wrap his slipping grasp around the word and what it might mean. Then it seemed to register, and the tears came slow but sure. He shook my hand like we hadn't seen each other in years, and might never meet again.

This is really difficult for me. He's my last grandpa. My Grandpa Frye died of brain cancer in 1999, and it hurts that one day I will only be able to use the word "grandpa" in the past tense. There's something very magical about the word ("grandfather" just sounds too pretentious): it evokes wisdom, cantankerousness, sweetness, mentor, teacher, friend. I wrote about my Grandpa Frye for the now-extinct online mag, The Guy Code, slipping him the moniker "Grandpa Scurv" to associate him with my nom de plum, Francis L. Scurvy, but the man in those paragraphs was definitely "Bud," as he preferred to be called. He was gruff but lovable, and even now I can hear his gritty windpipe railing about the decaying school systems and corruption of politics. My favorite Grandpa story is of the time I told him I wanted to be a writer. His response was "You do like girls, don't you?" Imagine a collision of Archie Bunker and Fred Sanford (add an anchor arm tattoo), and that was my Grandpa Frye: old world, old school, and damn proud of it.

Grandpa Sundin, on the other hand, could hardly be described as curmudgeonly. He had a gentle demeanor, the softer side of Mr. Rogers without the pandering. He was a brilliant, unassuming man who could take an armful of boards and transform it into a playhouse, a backyard deck, a woodshed, an intricate folding table with cabinet, a birdfeeder, or a separate building entirely. He was a carpenter by trade, and many of the neighborhoods in the city of Whittier are his handiwork. He built the house he still lives in shortly after he married my grandma, and it's difficult for her, because every inch of every room bears his stamp. Some of the walls still bear his many accolades, many of which eventually had to be removed because as his condition worsened he'd knock them off as he passed them by.

He's led an enriched, fulfilling life, and he can't remember any of it. As strange luck would have it, however, about 12 years ago he began compiling his "memoirs," hunt-and-pecking his legacy--not as an exercise in vanity, but to give us a little piece of him and a link to our own history. The final draft, which he completed in 1995, was an impressive document, thick with photographs, maps, letters, military memos, and yellowed newspaper excerpts that followed him from birth through World War II to the present day. I met his mother and father and cat, I saw the house where he lived, I learned how he and my grandma met, I matched faces to names that had previously existed solely in family lore, and though he often dismissed his own skills as a writer, the Grandpa Sundin I know and love leaps fully-formed from the page.

I'm amazed that I've been able to write this much about him, because until I moved to California in 2000, I saw him roughly once a year when he and my grandma would come to Oregon for visits and holidays, or when we'd make the trip to California. I remember the weeks leading up to their arrival, the anticipation. Four more days, two more days, they'll be here tomorrow--how can I sleep? Even our pets sensed they were getting closer. That's another thing about my Grandpa Sundin: animals loved him. Our dog, Zuma, would hear his voice and go crazy, no matter how much time had passed since Grandpa had last patted his head. Our other dog, Meika (my mom's dog, a family Christmas gift circa 1966, so man and beast went way back), was right behind, and they'd often encircle him like a wagon train, perhaps to keep him around. Our cat, Trader, would always be around vying for his attention. They adored the man. He was practically their grandpa too.

So I have very few memories of him, growing up. A fishing trip here, a basketball game there, building this and that. But those memories are treasured ones. There was the day at Knott's Berry Farm, probably around 1987-88, when I learned he'd slipped a $20 to some guy in a booth to announce my name through a statue in an Old West prison cell. I'll never forget that: walking cooly around the makeshift town, passing the edifice, and hearing the inanimate prisoner say, "Hello, Cory. How's the weather in Albany, Oregon?" Then there was the time, when I was young enough to still be living in California, when he woke me up one morning to take me to school (usually my parents' task; this is the only instance I recollect of my grandpa doing this) and I tried to convince him there was no school that day. He actually had the sense to play along with me for a while.

Oh! I just remembered the snowy days before Christmas 1980, and the momentous summit of grandparents, where all four of them were in the same room. I don't know about your interfamily relationships, but my grandparental sets seldom crossed paths. Grandma and Grandpa Sundin lived in Whittier, Grandma and Grandpa Frye lived in Lebanon, Oregon. Although I'm sure they'd met on a number of occasions when everyone was still in California, it was still probably only a handful of meetings, and this was the first and only time I ever saw them all together. I don't recall any of the conversations, but I know it was a pleasant experience, with hugs and tears and hearty handshakes, with everyone catching up on what must've been a millennia of good and bad, because I heard them talking long through the night, longer than I thought most grandparents were allowed to stay up.

Ah, but, as much I hate to leave, back we must trudge to 2004. Grandpa Frye is gone, a unique voice silenced. Grandpa Sundin is going, a unique voice silenced. But I am with family, and I am home, and we will all get through this together. Earlier today my grandpa was taken to an assisted care facility near my uncle, a mere three corners from my grandma. It's a difficult day for her, but that woman is strong. We finally convinced her to attend a support group for Alzheimer's widows, and she seems to be doing well. "In the end, I can't complain," she told me. "He gave me 58 wonderful years."

Last night I dreamed about him. We were driving down a familiar road. He watched the passing scenery from his window, then turned to me, perplexed. "Why is it," he asked, "that I seem to know this place?" "Because," I replied, "your house is about three blocks from here."

2004-11-29T09:35:00.000-08:00

I'm back. Hope your Thanksgiving was swell. I'll talk about mine later.

Sunday afternoon I saw the deathless swill that was Alexander. I don't know what's happened to Oliver Stone; he used to be such an interesting filmmaker. Even when his movies were terrible, you couldn't avert your gaze from the violent colors and swirling cinematography: you were stunned into narcotic bliss. Even a movie as godawful as Natural Born Killers, shot as it was alternately through Jell-O and LSD-induced creative fits, was a mindbending, suicidal hell no auteur would dare touch. Alexander, however, is a tamed marvel, with the requisite breathtaking vistas and soaring pans--nothing more evocative than an unedited Hallmark movie for the Lifetime network.

Anyway, hooo-weeee, what a load. Two handsful. And I ain't talkin' 'bout laundry.

1. Was Angelina Jolie's accent supposed to be Greek? Because she sounded like the Count on Sesame Street ("Philip cannot have two heirs to the throne! Two heirs! A ha ha ha ha ha!") or a waitress at a Transylvanian truck stop (where no waitresses resemble Nicole Kidman), or Maria Ospenskaya in The Wolf Man dishing out some anguished Shakespearean Method tongue. Every time her lippy puss surfaced on screen, usually coiled in snakes and sneering through gnashed teeth, I had to supress about 17 years of laughter climbing up my throat. She was fucking terrible. And why was she the only one with that particular patois? Her son had a nancy lilt and her husband spoke with the cadence of a West Hollywood car salesman.

2. Were the Dionysian parallels just coincidental, what with Val Kilmer prancing drunkedly around his kingdom with the stumblebum efficiency of a certain Lizard King we all once knew? At one point I expected him to address his subjects, flagon waving, "YER ALL A BUNCHA FUCKIN' SLAVES! LITTLE GIRL, SUCK MY COCK!"

3. My friend surmised that Alexander was trailed by a hawk (or was that an eagle) because the American Indian myth, one of Oliver Stone's favorite intellectual peyote placebos, did not exist at that time, so it would've looked silly for Colin Farrell to dive into battle with the spirit of a sage Cherokee warrior at his side.

4. The Persians were the ones with heavy eyeliner, with the exception of Jared Leto, whose longing deer-eyed looks were enhanced by heavy dark rings painted around his soulful orbs.

5. I never got the impression that Alexander was any great shakes as a leader of men, primarily because I could never tell what the fuck was going on in ANY of the battle scenes. The confusion and chaos of war works in a Vietnam picture, but not when you're trying to show an audience how a battallion of 40,000 troops can take down 250,000. I STILL don't understand how that happened. How was Alexander as a warrior? From what I gathered, lucky. His main trait seemed to be the ability to ride nostril-to-nostril up to an enemy commander without risk of injury.

6. Rosario Dawson, Rosario Dawson, Rosario Dawson. Congratulations, kid, on participating in a love scene that rivals the Elizabeth Berkeley/Kyle McLachlan writhe-about in Showgirls in utter hilarity. Colin hisses, she growls, they pound the crap out of each other, she pulls a knife, they rut like rabid beasts. This is to signify the carnality of their love. However, this is a movie about men for men, so she quickly gets criminally shuttled aside; Alexander doesn't give a shit about her, neither, apparently, does Oliver (Angelina Jolie, the film's other woman, is closer to a man in Oliver's world, so she gets a little more screen time, though inevitably she's thrown into the Ralph Macchio "Stay gold, Pony Boy" role as voiceover in correspondence to her wandering child). He'd rather shoot Colin and Jared coming this close to fucking, but never going further than warm compadre hugs, or Colin whispering words of encouragement to his horse before engaging in battle.

7. Oliver always draws parallels between his subjects and himself, and this is no exception. Though I would go even further and say Alexander's Babylon was Oliver's Platoon, and his India was Oliver's Natural Born Killers, with a sign of U-Turn in the initial Persian skirmish. Hopefully, he'll now have the sense, like Alexander, to go back home and die.

In other news, Robert Downey Jr. has recorded an album. That's right. And you have to buy it because I said so. What does it sound like? Imagine Peter Gabriel after an automobile accident that destroyed more than half his mind being dragged into a studio by a despotic Bruce Hornsby maniacally determined to record a jazz album reminiscent of those "cutting edge" "contemporary" numbers cut by "with-it" producers back in the 1980s. Robert does a version of Yes' "Your Move" that'll turn your stomach sideways.

2004-11-03T09:49:00.000-08:00

Fuck!

2004-10-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the prolonged absence from this thingamablog, but I've been fairly busy, and last week I was on vacation, so there.

I have something to get off my chest. A lot of you have commented on my recent and very public performance on a certain television show that, for legal reasons, shall remain nameless. My real fans are bolstered by the knowledge that it wasn't my fault, and once I've explained the situation to you in great detail, I trust you will come to the only conclusion--that I am merely a victim of circumstance, of fame, and of those jealous hos (just follow the odor below, M.C. Blowfish) who will stop at nothing to destroy me and deny the world-at-large my considerable talents as vocalist and it-real-keeping songwriter.

I arrived at this nameless studio for a sound check promptly at 7:15 p.m. Eastern, a good 10 minutes before schedule. In fact, I treated my driver to a lavish Starbucks scone as a reward, which, without a second thought, I dissected into 17 perfect sections so that he could feed his family that night. I did this without complaint. I even let him pick the station, since he was driving. It was the working-class thing to do, behavior most of my devotees experience every day. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I got to the studio, blah, blah, blah, greeted the producers, hello, hello, hello, swiped a handful of complimentary finger sandwiches, munch, munch, munch, and took my place center stage, within the "X" so thoughtfully taped to the floor beneath my feet. The floor had some scattered crumbs on it and what looked like a fossilized roach in repose, yet I did not complain, though you can be sure I will write a stern letter to the network's maintenance division, but I will begin the letter nicely with "HI!"

The band and I rolled through the motions, plying two singles from my most recent album, which shall remain nameless for legal reasons. I was tight as usual, but my backing musicians left something to be desired. However, I did not sense there would be trouble, even when my lead guitarist, who apparently went to school or something, came in a half-second late on the hook, and you could've raised a family in the spaces between the drummer's catatonic fills. And don't even get me started on the bass player. He was wearing a fucking green turtleneck with merlot corduroys, for Christ's sake, and that was just the least of his problems. Of course, my manager, who shall remain nameless for legal reasons in 14 states, went booku ballistic on all three of them, and rightfully so. It's their job to make me hella tight--I'm the focus, I'm the focus--so that I may broadcast my natural abilities like a satellite to the worldwideliest audience possible. My breasts detonate on this drumbeat, my ass tips 40 degrees north on this authoritative bass-plunk, and when the deejay is hot my personal-trainer-flattened abs glisten with post-coital glory, right on cue. I mean, I just knew the live show would be, like, slaughterhouse ass. What the fizzo.

The first song goes OK. I'm up there singing, "Oh, honey, when my lips excite/two hearts ignite/cool down with Sprite/first things first/obey your thirst/your thirst for me," and I'm thinking it's going well. The band actually stumbles into place, like they managed to find the beat without resorting to consulting the map or stopping at a gas station in their brains, and they're rightfully ecstatic. Afterward, the lead guitarist, who shall remain nameless because fuck him, said, "That little flamenco flourish you showed me backstage did the trick." "I learned it from Jimmy Page," I said, a little flustered from working my tail off up there while the rest of those lazy pricks plunked and banged, and having to save the whole performance by improvising a few more swivels than my manager and I'd initially choreographed. "Hey," he yawned with a dumb idea, "why don't you do a solo of your own? I mean, you obviously play the damn instrument better than me, and I look stupid out there knowing of your power." "Right," I said. "Leave me to do more than I already do, which is pump out paychecks for your low-life by-the-hour asses while I dazzle the universe with my vocal virtuosity." "Whaddayamean?" he barked. "You're lip-synching to a pre-recorded vocal track, you cocksucking bitch!" Then he tried to lick my neck and apologize, going, "Ohmmmm, ohmmmm, make me dirty, make me wet, lip the drip you won't forget," a nod to my rival, Britney Spears, which only infuriated me further. Little did I know that he was trying to plan my downfall, and that I would be an unknowing naif in his pathetic headlights.

So a few more sketches go by, and then the host, who shall remain nameless because he hasn't been in anything I've seen, comes up on the stage and he's like, "Once again, Cory Frye!" and the response from the audience could make a deaf man so deaf that the very sight of another deaf man would make his head explode. This was my night. The comedy wasn't pretty, the host wasn't helping, so everyone was relying on me, ME, Cory Frye, teen savior of the known cosmos, to salvage this sinking barge with a hot blast of Awesome. I was ready for this close-up. My breasts were perfect. My ass was like a half-donut on cracked pheasant. My abs could've demolished a BMX, killed its rider, and left no trace of either. I was at the peak of my power. The very apex. The very zenith. The very thesauritical summit. My brunette tresses tumbled suicidally down my back. The force of a thousand generations of pop stars pushed against my back, egging me on. I felt the ghost of Sinatra in my armpits, passing the sceptre from one great performer to another. The spirit of the late Harry Connick, Jr. enveloped my soul, then backed off when it realized I was waaaaay better. My training was complete. My time was now.

Then I noticed the lead guitarist smirking evilly at me. Not even my spirit guide Temuculah and his thousand horsehooves of hotcha-wedgie apocalypse could've stopped what was coming next. He deliberately began playing the opening riff of Gryphon's "Second Spasm," which threw me way the hell off because I was expecting the deft theft of the bass lick "Don't Stand So Close To Me" that typically begins my second hit single, "Don't Stand So Far Away From Me." And once that happened, anything went. I stood there dumbfounded by this betrayal when suddenly my own voice came through the speaker--all of this set up by my detractors, my band, those who will perish in a house fire next April if I have anything to say about it. I could do nothing but dance my way out of it, and I did. The audience response was tremendous, and I tiptoed offstage, triumphant, making a mental note to destroy my backup minions. The fury has begun.

Once i can get in contact with the webmaster, everythings getting deleted. It doesn't matter anyway, there's too many important people behind my career to stop it now.

2004-10-11T11:04:00.000-07:00

Well, looks like Richard Linklater's getting some blasts from the past.

I was wondering what some of you fellow writers thought about this brief news item below, and what message it sends to friends and associates who might find fragments of themselves, or shared experiences, in a work of fiction. Should they have approval over the final draft, whether it be screenplay or novel, and if so, what level of involvement should they have? Should they have veto power over character names (or, in Linklater's case, surnames) and reactions?

I ask this because I just finished a novel in which a primary character is based on one specific person from my past, and many of the novel's events were indeed based on shit that really happened. I did go to her early on, when I was preparing the first draft, told her what I was going to do, and asked for her blessing. She was flattered but had one stipulation, which I honored, because it was important to her. Other than that, she's been very supportive. A number of the other "cast members" are composites of myself and people I've known, though some of my friends are sure to recognize specific incidents. I'd hate to imagine them at some point lashing back with lawyers demanding "creative input" or maybe nailing me with some odd classification of plagiarism charge for nabbing something from real life and setting it down on paper without their--the other "creators'"--consent.

Obviously, the DAZED AND CONFUSED incident is a matter of three people on a free-cash publicity hunt. I mean, come on--if they were REALLY suffering ridicule because of this film, wouldn't taking it public nationally make it worse? Wouldn't it draw MORE regional attention to Bob Wooderson, Andy Slater, and Richard "Pink" Floyd, who might otherwise have lived fairly humdrum lives, where they were occasionally recognized as the templates for the film? And honestly, how often does it REALLY happen to them? "Pink" Floyd I can imagine, but the others have such average surnames that even the most ardent DAZED AND CONFUSED fan might not make that connection, unless they knew the trio's Linklater connection existed in the first place. And even if THAT were the case, doesn't that connection exist primarily because Floyd, Wooderson, Slater et al, at some point in the past, capitalized on it?

Thoughts?

Classmates Sue Over 'Dazed and Confused'
The Associated Press

SANTA FE, N.M. - Three former high school classmates of "Dazed and Confused" director Richard Linklater have filed a lawsuit claiming they have suffered embarrassment and ridicule because of characters based on them in the movie.

The men--Bobby Wooderson, Andy Slater and Richard "Pink" Floyd--say Linklater did not get their permission before creating three characters in the 1993 cult classic sharing their surnames and likenesses. The suit was filed Thursday in Santa Fe against Universal Studios, which released the film.

The movie follows the drug- and alcohol-fueled hijinks of teenagers on the last day of school in May 1976. The men said the negative characterizations in the film have made their lives miserable and caused their neighbors to think poorly of them.

"We had fun in high school, but there is nothing true about that movie. Yet, I am having to deal with it all the time," said Floyd, who works at a car dealership in Huntsville, Texas, where the men went to high school.

Ernest Freeman, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys, said Slater has also had problems because people make assumptions that he takes illegal drugs.

Slater runs a construction and remodeling company and Wooderson works in the technology sector. Both men also still live in Huntsville.

Linklater's agent did not immediately return a message Saturday seeking comment.

The suit was filed in New Mexico because it has a longer statute of limitations than other states for claims of defamation and false light, attorneys said.

2004-10-04T09:14:00.000-07:00

"So I'm lyin' here, just starin' at the ceilin' tile

and I'm thinkin' about oh, what to think about

Just sittin' here listenin' and relistenin' to Smiley Smile

And I'm wonderin' if this is some kind of creative drought."

--Barenaked Ladies, "Brian Wilson"

Brian Wilson's Smile finally saw release last Tuesday after 37 years of aimless wandering in a scattered wilderness, the Holy Grail of Great Lost Albums. Up until last week, three generations of musicphiles have woven bootlegged snippets into their own vision of the final cut had Brian completed the record (the legend, of course, is that during the recording of what would become "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow"--a disturbingly harmonic paen to the Chicago fires--a number of infernos broke out around Los Angeles, causing Brian to draw psychic parallels between the events and his music; he shelved the project altogether due to "bad vibes"), had Mike Love not been such an almighty prick, and had Capitol ignored its corporate misgivings and unleashed Smile upon a very unsuspecting world.

For once, the hype is deserved: Smile 2004 is a spectral wonderland of intricate harmony and symphonic triumph, the fragmented forefather of everything it unknowingly spawned and was unknowingly spawned by it. Had it been released in 1967, The Beatles couldn't have produced a worthy rebuttal. This is not to dismiss The Beatles in any way; it's just that an album like Smile would've never occurred to them. Despite their occasional jaunts into trippy-dippy psychedelic throwoffs (see "Tomorrow Never Knows," from Revolver, or the later "Revolution No. 9," from the "White" album), the foursome always adhered to a rigid pop form favored in the marketplace, delectable songs with obvious openings and conclusions within a four-minute span. Even Sgt. Pepper's, arguably the band's "concept" album (though the "concept" is almost an afterthought: a beloved quartet namechecked twice, once at the beginning and once, hurriedly, near the end, like someone said, "Oh, shit! We gotta bring these guys back!" while the remaining grooves are reserved for historic, evolving Beatles pop), can't match Smile's freeform majesty--it's like a "concept" album devoted to the very idea of conceptualism: It flows with the fluidity and malleability of human thought, gathering, dropping, and repeating impulses at will, magnified by the languid beauty of Wilson's carefully structured harmonies (interpreted here by technology and The Wondermints) and steered by Van Dyke Parks' impenetrable lyrics that somehow slide smoothly off the tongue.

Obviously, Smile's only drawback is its lack of flesh-n-bone Beach Boys, specifically the youthful vigor of a Carl or Dennis Wilson, or even a smirky Mike Love and Al Jardine. "Good Vibrations" is a jarring experience, even without the alternate lyrics, primarily because of the contemporary pillow-soft harmonies. There was something about that trademark, forceful Beach Boys stab, where "ooos" jolted from within, almost in mid-"ooo," like Brian, in the editing chamber with only a razor blade and his muse, couldn't catch them at the exact moment they were breathed into a microphone--and sliced the air, as opposed to being poured quietly, pillow-soft, into an empty glass.

The Cult Of Brian

In the winter of 2001 I saw this girl, probably in her early 20s, hair trimmed very fashionably, sleek emo uniform clinging to her body, wielding a copy of Mojo magazine with Brian Wilson on the cover. She excitedly showed it to her friend, announced, "This man stands for everything great about music," then pressed her lipsticked lips to his flat paper cheek. I was both fascinated and repulsed--fascinated because Brian had transcended all the "loony" sandbox, bedridden, hermetic legends to resurface as an object of affection to a much younger generation, who probably had no initial concept of The Beach Boys as anything but those faceless/nameless senior citizens singing "Kokomo"; repulsed, unjustly, because I'm a fucking grizzled-before-my-time snob bitterly thinking, You're too young to REALLY care about him or understand what he's done--Brian Wilson is a secret that belongs to ME.

When exactly did Brian Wilson become hip again? The Once-Boy Genius, restored? Was it the mid-'90s, late-'90s? Fifteen years ago, shortly after Bri's full-yet-shaky return to recording and sobriety, his name had been forgotten by all but the most ardent supporters, most of them well over 35. Rock critics hailed his 1988 self-titled comeback, his first real solo album, as a welcome return, but in a time of synth-rock and vaccuum-sealed beermetal, who the fuck bought it other than tiny patches of secret lovers and devotees sneezed across the world? I picked it up, but only because of the adoring review in Rolling Stone (it compared "Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long" to the wistful "Caroline No," a song I had yet to hear because Pet Sounds had yet to be reissued) and my dad's Beach Boys zealotry fueled my own; in fact, the first piece of music I ever remember hearing was the Holland LP--not exactly the most preferable introduction to a group best known for "California Girls" and "Good Vibrations," but one I've never forgotten. When I relayed this nugget to Ricky Fataar, who played on the Holland sessions, four years ago, he was quite taken aback. "I haven't thought about that album in a looooooooong time," he sighed. Some of its cuts have become "classic" long after the fact, specifically "Trader" and "Sail On Sailor," both of which were resuscitated as part of a campaign to reintroduce the long-dormant--and unfairly maligned--'70s Beach Boys output, on Capitol's Greatest Hits Vol. 3, the first essential Beach Boys compilation in centuries, generously giving "Surf's Up," "Long Promised Road," "Good Timin'," and "'Til I Die" to the digital age for the first time. The blitz received a considerable boost when Cameron Crowe featured "Feel Flows" (curiously absent from V3) in Almost Famous (2000), first as a sneaky emotional cue in William Miller's initial backstage exchange with Penny Lane, then as the nostalgic, Polaroid-enhanced end theme.

Well, I'm exhausted. And I've got work to do. So I'll cut out early and piss you off. Maybe I'll come back later; I dunno. But in the meantime I am interested in theories on the Cult of Brian and its emergence. Any thoughts? Suppositions? Hypotheses?

2004-09-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. I've been so busy! I've been working all day at my second job, which is cleaning mansions for ridiculous amounts of money. Today I worked at the Thomas Macy house. Macy, as in Macy's. No, I am not kidding.

My friend Matt tells me I failed to mention that my other job is serving at a restaurant called 56 Union. I like it there very much. It serves global cuisine, which means the usual filet, halibut, salmon and tuna with Asian and/or Caribbean flare. Pretty much all the restaurants here are the same. But more on that later.

Tonight is my friend Sara's birthday, and I have to run home and get pretty. A group of us are going to dinner at a restaurant called Black-eyed Susan's. I'm hungry. And the librarian is kicking me out.

More soon.

xo

2004-09-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

"Everybody can steal another's idea, manufacture it, clone it, or whatever. But it's hard to just create. It's the hardest thing of all. You gotta remember, these guys didn't have blueprints. . . . The last thing that makes Wolf so magical is that you see a person create a whole genre of music through just their mind, and you ain't supposed to do it. You're supposed to have a sheet of paper, a desk, a quiet room, you're supposed to think and concentrate. And here's a guy using just his ego, creating lyrics in a room full of smoke, alcohol, four-letter words, and intimidating individuals--and yet he still creates. And that's the magic."

--Vaan Shaw, on Howlin' Wolf

Finished James Segrest and Mark Hoffman's Moanin' At Midnight: The Life And Times Of Howlin' Wolf, a long-overdue appraisal of one of the last century's most accomplished blues masters. Not that I'm a far-ranging blues authority or even the most ardent aficionado of the form (I have maybe 20 blues recordings, mostly from the lonesome, long-distance honey-acoustic wail of Mississippi John Hurt and a more contemporary embrace of the elderly R.L. Burnside), but the Wolf has always been a dear figure to me, and it's about time he received his post-Millennium due, with this carefully compiled, painstakingly researched tour of his jagged yet ultimately satisfying life. Even some 20 years after his death, his scorched legend thundered into the suburbs (or the "suboibs," as he would've called them), leveled contemporary popular music with an indignant elbow, and propelled me to Happy Trails in Corvallis, Oregon, to whet a sudden appetite for blues. I was 17 years old, an age where you can't get enough of anything. Only a dearth of funds kept me from relieving the store's bins of their thick, juicy vinyl, voices hollering from a cruel harscrabble past that not even my grandfather was old enough to remember. That day I bought Vols. 1 and 2 of The Chess Records Story, and when I dropped my last bones on a single-artist compilation, that single artist was the one and only tail-dragger hisself: Howlin' Wolf, his wide-open maw unleashing hellhounds from the moon. That day I bathed in "Evil," "Spoonful" (far heavier and more incendiary than the Doors version I remembered, with a bassline to cut you), "Back Door Man" (ditto; the Lizard King don't know, but the little girls understand), "Little Red Rooster," and that wild-ass "Three Hundred Pounds Of Joy." Wolf didn't exactly have an affinity for the electric blues, and after combing through his life and rollicking through some of his music this morning as I sit here trying to find a way to conclude this entry, I can see why: The man didn't need no help from Thomas Edison; he was an abundant current of flesh and bone. So check out the book or the masterful DVD The Howlin' Wolf Story: The Secret History Of Rock 'N' Roll and suck on that juice for a while. Also, if you got the time, check out the official Web site, maintained by Segrest and Hoffman. Talk about dedication to a subject.

Rest in peace, Chester B. But howl with all your heart.

2004-08-31T16:06:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to say today, but here's a photo of John McCain doing the Roger.

2004-08-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

Hail, Hail, Freedonia!

Thursday night I get an excited phone call from the Reverend Speats, who's always tapped into a Higher Power. "I have had The Vision," he gasped. "God spaketh to me last night through the pages of the L.A. Times, His Word set in Times Roman Font No. 12. The New Beverly Cinema, which layeth in the bountiful holy harvest one block south of La Brea and Beverly in West Los Angeles, near the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, is showing one--nay, two--Marx Bros. classics that the Lord has seen fit to bequeath the holy titles Animal Crackers and Duck Soup! Praised be the moviegoer!"

"Holy shit!" I screamed. "God is good!"

"Nay," corrected the Reverend. "Groucho is good. I have yet to forgive the Creator for unleashing the infidel Murry Wilson and his plague of Many Moods."

The Sabbath rolls around, but unfortunately the Rev is called away on matters most holy. He leaves me with these parting words via cellphone: "Tell Groucho I sent you." So I leave my home of four years and board the Montebello 10 to the corner of Goodrich and Whittier, transfer to the Rapid Red Line bound for Santa Monica via Wilshire Boulevard, disembark at the corner of Wilshire and La Brea, and trod my path up La Brea to Beverly and turn left, where salvation awaits one block west: the New Beverly Cinema, a modest building of blue with noble marquee announcing a triple bill of Animal Crackers, followed by Duck Soup, then the sodden W.C. Fields anarchy of The Bank Dick, for which, sadly, I do not linger, in observance of my unyielding weekend schedule. But I've seen Bank Dick a trillion times anyway. I've seen the other movies a trillion times too, but never on the big screen, and I can hardly squander the opportunity for a communal experience with like-minded folks.

I pay my six bucks (six bucks for two movies! I haven't paid prices like that since 1987!), then relinquish $2.50 ($2.50!) for a large (large!) Cherry Coke, and take my seat in the theater's guts, two rows back from the screen, which has been modified by a half-drawn curtain to accommodate the frame/scope of 1930s films. The place is about half-full, tiny pockets of life sprinkled throughout. A few people have brought their kids. Small kids. A number of elderly folks too. A threesome drops down along the row in front of me: A large man with his friend and said friend's significant other. The girlfriend, who's English, is being indoctrinated into the Marxian world. They're excitedly double-teaming her on the brothers' finer points as the lights fade overhead.

Previews: "Lowurrrd...won'tcha bah me...a Mursaydees Benz...." Janis, an interesting looking documentary on Janis Joplin with footage of the candid personality interspersed with the performer caterwauling the electrified Holding Company shit out of "Ball And Chain." Another film from the director of Ringu, this one involving a dead boy. Uma Thurman promising to kill Bill (the New Beverly will screen both volumes back-to-back in September). Then fanfare. The feature attraction is about to begin. The dump goes nuts.

While I love Animal Crackers, I only love certain scenes, which are threaded together with the barest hint of anything. The subplot involving the Beauregard painting has never interested me, and aside from the brothers' interaction, "Hooray For Captain Spaulding," the "fish/flask/flash" scene, the card game, and Margaret Dumont, there's really nothing else to watch. Most of the performances are wooden and careful in the new sound era though, thanks to the big screen, I gain a finer appreciation for Lillian Roth, who gamely soldiers through her thankless sawdust ingenue young lover role, but has the most interesting facial tics and expressions on her button-cute puss--it's a jazzbaby lark--and she has one of the finest shades-of-Groucho lines spoken by any of the industry-standard starcrossed fair Marx damsels, when she tells her loverboy, "...then we can get married and divorced in no time!" This showing of Crackers is marred by two instances of film breakage and one of those "ohmygodigottachangethereel!" realizations of the human projectionist, but other than that it goes off without a hitch, and the print looks great. To think this sucker was once forgotten for 30-40 years until ardent fan campaigning in the '70s brought it back into moviehouse circulation, for which Groucho was happily alive to see. And nothing's changed in those 30 years from the 1930s from--what the fuck--all time: The Marx Bros. are funny. Timelessly so. The audience went nuts.

After the movie I amble up the aisle for some air. I pass an elderly woman with a beatific grin. She gently covers my hand with hers as I pass and she says, "I saw this movie when I was a little girl in Europe 70 years ago--I'm 85 now--and it still works!"

Ten minutes later the second feature begins. Duck Soup. The place is PACKED. Not only did I lose my seat by getting up, I lost my entire row. Where did all these people come from? I find an empty spot in the front row. I barely hear the movie. The sound is fine (great, even, especially during the very loud scene where Harpo and Chico have to creep around Dumont's house at night to look for Freedonia's war plans), but everyone around me is literally on the floor, shaking the walls--and I'm one of them. Little kids in the group go apeshit whenever Harpo even threatens to enter the camera frame (I marvel at how genius the Marx Bros. were at adapting to every age level: when you're a child you go for Harpo, but as you get older, you learn, on an intellectual level, to appreciate the other brothers while retaining your undying love for the mischievous cherub); this is true even upon their first introduction to him. He doesn't even have to engage in tomfoolery--the second he surfaces there's something in his eyes that gets 'em every time. They're immediately drawn to him upon first sight.

Duck Soup must be seen on the big screen. The laughs are amplified that much more, and that musical number ("To war! To war! To war we're gonna go!/A hidey-hidey-hidey-hidey-hidey-hidey-ho!" and the medley of "Oh, Susannah" and "All God's Chillun Got Wings") exploding from nowhere, effectively ending the treason trial of Chicolini (Chico), does a masterful job at both skewering and embracing the pompous MGM style. It's quite a marvelous set piece, ending on the perfect note: an arresting shot of the boys in colonial gear, preparing for battle. One if by land, two if by sea! Groucho: "They've double-crossed us; they're coming by land AND sea!" Anarchy at its finest that never lets up, even at the final frame, where the brothers pelt Margaret Dumont with fruit. Who needs a cohesive storyline when chaos is your umbrella?

Next month: Horse Feathers and Monkey Business. Right the fuck on.

2004-08-26T10:15:00.000-07:00

I have declared Thursday "Loud Music From My Office Day," and it's a righteous day to be alive. We're starting with a two-fisted sonic assault from Husker Du--the barrage of New Day Rising (1985), their last blaze on Greg Ginn's SST label, followed by the record that blew my seventh-grade skull to shrapnel, Zen Arcade (1984), a throbbing, pulsating, seething slab of scorched-earth, pissed-off alienation that'll turn your speakers into a crumbling inferno. I discovered it back around 1985 during a visit to Audio Addict in Albany, Oregon, a record dealer tucked like a shameful secret into a crevice behind a carpet warehouse. That's the way Albany was then and probably is today: Carpet is bountiful, but loud music is for jackoffs and creeps. No matter. They couldn't hide it from me. I stormed that store with babysitting money and found me a vinyl copy of Zen, two whole records for 10 whole bucks. Couldn't beat that. 'Twas my first double-LP. I felt very grown-up. Zen Arcade took a few songs to settle into a malleable groove (the whole thing was decadent to ears trained to admit nothing more eccentric than Murray Head's "One Night In Bangkok"); but by the rolling guitar skronk of "Chartered Trips" I was lipsticked, fucked, bought, and sold. I can't say I abandoned Top 40 forever, but a few doors of perception got kicked to kindling.

Zen Arcade will be followed by Isis' Celestial (2000). I saw 'em live, opening for the Melvins at the Troubadour back in March. They literally turned the air to sweat, playing for their very lives. Then a sentimental favorite, King Missile, and their latest offering, The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life (2003); they'll never top the sweetness of "Cheesecake Truck" and "Jesus Was Way Cool," but they'll die trying, and I give 'em props for that. Everyday's a little toothless, but I'm gonna gauge reactions to the track "The President," three-four minutes of "Fuck you" and "scumbag." Then it'll be time to cool my hot ass out with Sparks' No. 1 In Heaven.

Today's gonna be a fuckarow, baby.

2004-08-25T10:41:00.000-07:00

NEXT on CINEMAX....a direct-to-video remake of From Here To Eternity.

2004-08-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

It's been a hectic day, and I'm gonna phone this sumbitch in. Here's my entry from March 18:

ORIGINAL AIR DATE: March 9, 1951

GEORGE FENNEMAN (VO): Ladies and gentlemen, the National Broadcasting Company and the DeSoto-Plymouth Dealers of America present the one, the only--

CROWD: Groucho!

GROUCHO: Really?

GEORGE FENNEMAN (VO): You Bet Your Life!

(Music theme; applause)

GROUCHO: Thank you, thank you, your checks are in the mail. They're not being sent to you, but they're in the mail anyway, and that's called hitting the mail on the bread. There's a joke in there somewhere, but you might need a flashlight to find it. Or a periscope, depending on the depths to which you're willing to sink. Did you hear that sentence, George? Wasn't that classy?

GEORGE: Very well put, Groucho.

GROUCHO: So are you, George. And so's Ava Gardner, though I'm sure you're the better dancer. And if Ava were here, I'd tell you to hoof it somewhere else. Oh, where's Ava? I'm surrounded by vagabonds and Stanford graduates, which is redundant if you think about it. And speaking of redundant, let's get to today's secret word...

(Duck plummets down, the word RATIONAL around its neck)

GROUCHO: Rational. R-A-T-I-O-N-A-L. Bye bye, duckie.

(Duck rises out of camera range)

GROUCHO: George, did you know "ducky" is an English term meaning "peachy"?

GEORGE: I think I did hear that, Grouch.

GROUCHO: They've got their meats mixed up with their fruits out there in England, which explains why that country's in such a state. Or why that state's in such a country. In any case, it's incontinent. But crossing the Atlantic and getting back to our show, if one of our couples says the secret word, the duck will come down and award them 100 smackers, which is an old English term for dollars, which buys you a lot sausage. And speaking of sausage, George, why don't we get this monkey show on the road and bring out our first hot dogs.

GEORGE: Certainly, Groucho. Before the show we asked our audience to select two future talking-head pundits, one a child, the other as-yet unborn. They've selected Mr. William O'Reilly and Ms. Ann Coulter. Folks, come on out and meet ... Groucho Marx!

(Applause)

GROUCHO: Hello and welcome to You Bet Your Life. Say the secret word, and the duck will come down and give you a hundred dollars. It's a common word, something you use around the house. William O'Reilly and Ann Coulter--O'Reilly. A little Irish fella, eh? Where do you hail from, Darby O'Gill?

WILLIAM: Bill.

GROUCHO: Bill. Where's Bill? Under your hat? Under your duck?

WILLIAM: No, I'M Bill.

GROUCHO: You're awfully young to be a whole city. What's your curfew?

WILLIAM: I'm from the Westbury section of Levittown, New York.

GROUCHO: Where?

WILLIAM: Levittown.

GROUCHO: Is the town on an incline?

WILLIAM: No, LEVITtown, not LEVELtown.

GROUCHO: On a sharp decline, at least.

WILLIAM: I live in the Westbury section.

GROUCHO: No, I think they're two different cities.

WILLIAM: No.

GROUCHO: In fact, we played a wonderful theater out in Westbury many years ago, a little show called I'll Say She Is. It's a very nice area, if I recall.

WILLIAM: Actually, it's lower-middle class.

GROUCHO: Lower-middle, eh? So are you saying it's an abdominal existence? That joke's too old for you, Bill. It's almost too old for me. In fact, it delivered my father. So did my mother. Marked him HANDLE WITH CARE right into matrimony. Are you a married man?

WILLIAM: No, I'm only two years old.

GROUCHO: So what--you're never too young to be miserable. Soon as you're out of diapers, you're a marked man. And when you're in diapers, you're a messy man. You just can't win, Bill, so you might as well not even try. Which reminds me of an old joke about your last name. You wanna hear it?

WILLIAM: No.

GROUCHO: When an Irishman gets a headache, how does he take his pills?

WILLIAM: I don't know.

GROUCHO: O'Reilly. Now, wasn't that worth the wait?

WILLIAM: I guess.

GROUCHO: Save the guessing for the quiz portion, Bill. Is this your wife?

WILLIAM: No, she's just some lady they gave me backstage.

GROUCHO: They're giving away ladies backstage? George, you're the host now--I quit. I'll try my luck as a contestant. Ask me who's buried in Grant's tomb.

GEORGE: All right, who's buried in Grant's tomb?

GROUCHO: Who cares? Where are the women? Do I still have a sponsor?

(GROUCHO scampers to the front of the podium, where a placard still reads "DeSoto-Plymouth.")

GROUCHO: All right, Bill, take five. I'm gonna make time with your partner here. What's your name again, miss?

ANN: Ann Coulter.

GROUCHO: No, but I'm wearing a jacket.

ANN: No, my name is Ann COULTER.

GROUCHO: Any relation to Ann Arbor?

ANN: No.

GROUCHO: Good. We've done this before, so let's not go through Michigan.

ANN: I don't get it.

GROUCHO: We call that "reaching." A better joke would be: A crosseyed man with a lisp was taking target practice in Detroit, but he wasn't doing very well. So he put on a pair of corrective glasses and stepped closer to the target and said, "I'm not taking any chances; I don't want to Michigan."

ANN: Oh, brother.

GROUCHO: I've got four more of those if you're tired of me, but you can only exchange me for merchandise already in stock. Though it's only fair to warn you I stole those jokes from Chico. Did anyone ever tell you you're the spitting image of Francis the Talking Mule? Before you answer that with a belt across the mouth, let's play You Bet Your Life. Fenneman here'll explain the rules. Then someone'll come out and explain Fenneman.

GEORGE: Each couple starts off with $10. Groucho will ask you three questions, and you can bet as much of that $10 as you'd like. The couple earning the most money by the end of the show gets a shot at $1,000.

GROUCHO: That buys a lot of horse feed, Ann.

ANN: Heh.

GEORGE: The topic our couple has chosen, Groucho, is "Politics of the Future."

GROUCHO: Fine with me. OK. "Politics of the Future." How much do you lovebirds wanna bet on the first question?

(The couple confers.)

BILL: We'll go with five.

GROUCHO: Five it is. First question: Who won the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida? Oh, this should be interesting. I don't know this one myself.

BILL: We're going to go with George W. Bush?

GROUCHO: No, I'm sorry. That's incorrect. It's Al Gore. Al Gore. Sounds like tuna. There's probably something fishy in there, anyway, and I'm working without a net. How much do they have left, George?

GEORGE: Five dollars, Grouch.

GROUCHO: That's OK. You kids are still in the running. How much are you willing to wager on the second question?

(The couple confers)

ANN: $4.75?

WILLIAM: Yeah. $4.75.

GROUCHO: What was the title of the most reviled book of 2003?

(The couple confers.)

WILLIAM: Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them?

GROUCHO: Is that your final answer?

O'REILLY: Definitely.

GROUCHO: I'm sorry, but that's not correct. It's Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On Terrorism. Sounds like a heavy read. Tough break, kids. You're not doing very well at this game. You can't have much left at this point; how much sixpence they got, Fenneman?

GEORGE: Just a second.

GROUCHO: Look at that Stanford education in action. Notice the steam rising from his collar. When he leans down he pours hot tea.

GEORGE: A quarter, Grouch.

GROUCHO: Well, kids, you can almost afford Fenneman's suit. If you get the answer to this one, you can walk away with the pants too. A surge of cash for a serge suit. Did you know my father was a tailor? Lousiest tailor in New York, but let's not drag the New Testament into this. How much are you willing to wager on Question No. 3?

(The couple confers)

ANN: We'll shoot the works, Groucho.

GROUCHO: If you get this wrong, you can always go collecting cans for the needy: yourselves. What was George W. Bush's justification for going to war with Iraq in 2003?

(The couple confers.)

GROUCHO: Take your time. Fenneman doesn't have to shill DeSotos for another 10 minutes.

(The couple continues to confer.)

ANN: That would be to force the dismantling of Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction program?

GROUCHO: No, I'm sorry, that's incorrect. As a matter of fact, the card's blank. Good gracious, THIS nonsense is the Politics of the Future? I'm glad I'll be dead for that little jaunt. It seems like none of you are gonna have a rational bone in your--

(Trumpets blare and the duck comes down. Groucho takes the money.)

GROUCHO: Well, looks like I've said the secret word. About time you showed up. And it's just as well; Fenneman and I'll be using this cash to get loaded and weep for the future. But because this is You Bet Your Life, we can't let you go away empty-handed, though you will leave empty-headed, and you'll have a tougher time walking than me and George in about two hours. So here's the freebie question: Who's buried in Grant's tomb?

(The couple confers.)

WILLIAM: That would be General Grant.

GROUCHO: No, I'm sorry. The correct answer is America. Thank you, and lots of luck from your DeSoto-Plymouth dealer. You're gonna need it.

2004-08-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

You know, I'm not really all that sure about The Allman Brothers Band's new look. Won't it alienate their core audience?

2004-08-19T08:19:00.000-07:00

Another fuzzy Thursday in Burbank. Mood: wistful. Melancholy. Meltdown at Communist Farm. Just one of those days where even oxygen seems to provoke you, slash your tires, rip hope from you. Well, enough about that.

DeAnn's post yesterday brought back a lot of memories of the MTA, going through West Hollywood into downtown L.A., and the riffraff that scraped together enough change for a ticket to ride. I'll share now some of those moments with you:

Let's start with the top two:

1. Drunk Hispanic man gets on somewhere around La Cienega and Santa Monica after a trip to Monaco Liquors, where Jim Morrison once had a tab. This guy, however, was no Lizard King--I'd rate him somewhere below Whipped Gekko. He was carrying that familiar-shaped paper bag and aimed for the back, where he could retire from a grueling day with a six-pack and his thoughts. Around North Hollywood he got to feeling pretty good, singing to himself, chatting up pretty girls, jokingly passing empties to the infirm.

At some point a black drag queen came aboard. Common sight, actually. This one was dressed to force an envious whistle from Flip Wilson. He was slathered in neon orange, with citrus lipstick and a fiery red wig. He joined us in the back, finding a seat next to the wasted, gingerly nodding hellos before staring off into safe space, like the rest of us.

Well, the bright colors immediately attracted the drunk, who cut short a chorus of the Eagles' "Desperado" (actually, I made that up; I think all drunks sing Eagles songs) to train all his conversational might on this new visitor. He opened with "Zaddanu dress?" The drag queen said no. The dialogue then progressed to hair and makeup, then on to something the two of them had in common: they were both recovering alcoholics who regularly attended AA meetings. In fact, the drunk was on his way to a meeting in Silverlake, but he was scared. So he got loaded. "I dunno," he said. "I need someone in my corner to help me through this." The drag queen accepted a proffered beer and nobly said, "I'll be there for you." And the two of them got off in Silverlake, but not before the drag queen accidentally spilled part of his beer on another passenger. "Oops," he said. "Sorry."

**********************

2. One night going home I was reading a copy of Nick Tosches' The Devil And Sonny Liston. The guy sitting next to me, in nasal Bronx tough guy: "Good book." I turned to him and replied, "Yeah." He goes, "I love Tosches. He's great. I knew him back in New Yawk." "Oh," I said, scooching a little further away. "That's cool."

"Meltzah, too," said the guy. "Lestah. All them guys. They dug our band. We all used to hang out."

"Wait a minute. You knew Richard Meltzer and Lester Bangs?"

"Oh, yeah."

"What was the name of your band?"

"The Dictators."

"The Dictators? You mean THE Dictators? Handsome Dick and all that shit? No fuckin' way!"

"Serious, man. I'm Scott."

Scott Kempner. Jesus Christ. I was on the bus with a certi-goddamn-fiable punk legend on his way home from work--which happened to be the Rhino store ("on Wethwood Boulevard," though further down from its original location, in a much larger building), where he pulled shifts for kicks because he loved being around music. I saw him there the following week, and he pointed me right to the bookshelf where sat the new Nick Tosches. Great guy.

**********************

Honorable mention:

--The loopy, lanky Spanish kid shakin' his ass in the aisles and singing, "East Side gaaaaang, baby, I did your mom in the pooter and you ate it toooooo." Or something like that. It wasn't very catchy. He needed to concentrate on a better chorus and an irresistable hook.

--The homeless man (or one of those professional con homeless men you see around L.A.) furtively counting assorted bills in a seat all by himself. I saw at least $400 in twenties, tens, and fives.

--The other homeless man who'd limp on board, stand in the center, weathered McDonald's cup outstretched in an arthritic hand, and unroll (in Spanish) a long, woeful story about his dying wife and family, collect money, then get off. I've seen him a few times over the last couple years, and his ritual is always the same.

--Having to scoop some insane motherfucker from another bus because that driver was tired of lugging the passenger around. So instead WE were treated to five blocks of this dude ducking below the windows, going, "Drive faster! They can see me! They can see you! Goddammit, if you don't speed up, they're gonna kill us all!" Fun times.

--Some drunk white guy challenging a black driver to a fistfight. Might I add that the driver was much bigger and more than eager to oblige: "You roll with me downtown, then we'll see what's up."

--And last but certainly not least, the occasional drug deal.

I love L.A.

But I'm feeling better now: Brian Wilson's coming in November!

2004-08-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

Excuse me while I rant a while about feeling old. Yesterday I asked this kid what exactly the significance was of the askew ballcap, popularized, I suppose, by that corporate shill Avril Lavigne and her heart-of-Skittles Sk8erboi. He looked at me and said very matter-of-factly, "It's punk." That sent me reeling, because to me it looked more like Mickey Mantle and Fred Durst reached a stalemate in the peace negotiations and walked away. I longed for the halcyon days of hair abuse and self-mutilation, when being punk meant fucking yourself up--and if you weren't up to the task, someone else would be more than delighted to assist you by pummeling your brains out with a bicycle chain and spitting "faggot" in your face (ah, the '80s--you know, the real decade, not the VH1 revisionism). But now, I guess, all it requires is a half-assed attempt to put on your hat. Wish I'd known that in 1984; would've saved me a trip to Fistovia behind my junior high: "No, fellas, I don't really listen to punk rock. I was interrupted while adjusting my hat. But now that I have the time, I will return the bill to its rightful position parallel to my brow. I do not know who scribbled MINOR THREAT on my shirt, but he looks a lot like that motherfucker over there across the street." But now, of course, Minor Threat are cool, the Ramones are cooler, I saw a middle-aged woman in hospital scrubs walk out of a building with a Germs T-shirt, you can go into Wal-Mart and buy Husker Du's Land Speed Record digitally remastered with bonus tracks and liner notes by Dr. Phil, if Darby Crash were alive today he'd be teaching his kids how to drive the family minivan, and if you get your ass kicked after school these days you can sue your assailants for damages and certain cliques for defamation of character.

Plus, have you ever noticed that as you get older, old school gets younger? I was at Target on Sunday and saw a T-shirt that read "Know Your Roots." Hovering o'er this was a Nintendo controller. It bummed me out because I was too old. If I wore it, it would be a lie. My roots dug deeper. I think the Nintendo system came around when I was a sophomore or junior in high school, and we ended up with a Sega anyway (where I learned that as great a baseball player Reggie Jackson actually was, he didn't have interesting shit to say after you lost 10-3 to the computer). But prior to that, I was well-versed in the ways of Intellivision, Colecovision, and Atari. If you wanted to challenge me to Activision's Stampede, I would kick your ass, easy and advanced, ropin' black bulls like a motherfuck while you sat there like a mouth-open bitch. So if there was a "Know Your Roots" T-shirt for me, it would have a joystick, a tennis paddle, a complimentary Combat cartridge, and a roll of quarters. But that isn't even official old school anymore. Old school in 2004 covers everything that happened after 1988; anything before that is worthless ancient uncool history. I might as well be playing Frogger with Thomas Jefferson.

Hello. This is what the Latins call an "addendum," which means I have come in at some point in the future (which will be the recent past by the time you read this) and altered this post, but because I believe in purity, I left the above stuff alone, returning simply to add more beneath it. So for those of you who have read this post previously, here's a little something extra. This is a shout-out to my boy, Reverend Speats. I was at Borders a couple nights ago and saw the honkin' ad for Ray Charles' Genius Loves Company, Ray's mouth open, choppers exposed, ready to swallow the unsuspecting cashier. The Reverend is responsible for that title, and there's no more apt an epitaph for an artist of Ray's caliber. Goodbye again, Ray, and thank you, Rev.

2004-08-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

Hey, hey! Now that I'm all about cookie destruction (thank you, DeAnn) and robbing little cookies of their parents and bloodlines, I can post to my blog more often and say just as little. Like, Saturday afternoon I basked in the fecality that was Alien Vs. Predator, which wasn't even half as fun as Freddy Vs. Jason but somehow made a lot more sense even while being completely incomprehensible. So the alien and the Predator are ancient adversaries, with the latter species enslaving humans to be hosts for the enemy spawn during their hunting seasons? "Huhsaywha?" I begged of my popcorn. My popcorn, much like Phil Collins, had no reply at all. I wept over the misuse of the great Lance Henriksen, wearily collecting a paycheck over arcing spigots of fanboy spooge: "He's the link to the Alien franchise, goahdbsndshfhblllxxxeee!" His appearance was the half-assed, dog-eared Good Housekeeping Seal of Geek-Chic Approval affixed to a cinematic blunder doomed to blow. I know the battle has its roots in a comic-book series and a video game beloved by those peers I chose to avoid eye contact with at the 7-Eleven, but it still remains a stupid, ridiculous pairing of two franchises that overstayed their welcome more than a decade ago; Predator was pushing it at Predator 2, with its Rastafalien cutting down L.A. gangsta stereotypes ("Noooo stoppin' what can't be stopped; nooooo killin' what can't be killed"; it was more menacing as a sound bite on an Ice Cube album than it was with visual effects and a storyline) and turning Danny Glover into a whore. "Whoever wins, we lose." Nooooo shit.

I also saw the trailer for Papparazzi, producer Mel Gibson's wet fantasy of an action star murdering dirtbag photographers, starring Cole Hauser in the Mel Gibson role. Cole Hauser, son of Wings, struck career paydirt as treacherous slime (from Higher Learning through Pitch Black to 2 Fast 2 Furious), so it'll be nice to see him branch out and be on the other side of the fist. Sadly, to me, Cole Hauser will always be Dazed And Confused's Benny, chasing Mitch Kramer in his pickup and trying to keep his beer down. In any case, the whole thing looks fuckin' disturbing as hell, a Death Wish for Generation Z.

This weekend I observed that cats are way cuter than dogs when you wake them up for no reason. Cats regard you with their eyes mooshed shut like, "Dude, what the fuck? Seriously, this'd better involve some treats, or it's your ass," whereas a dog explodes into action: "YESIMHEREHELLO!"

2004-08-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

After a three-year absence from the White Void, I have returned to column writing with a regular slot on this here

Web site. Read on, and ignore the ham-face. Photography is not currently my medium, and proper personal grooming never was. I grew up among apes. See y'all after I finish fasting for about 64 months and locate a razor.

2004-08-11T13:28:00.000-07:00

"Do you eat, sleep, do you breathe me anymore?"
--Lisa Loeb, 1995

"Oh, when I turned five I got a piece of cake,

the corner with the rose.

I leaned in close,

and I told him that I loved him, and he ran."

--Lisa Loeb, 2004

Last night I dreamed of Lisa Loeb. Bad news for Lisa Loeb. Lisa Loeb and I are in a stopped rownboat on a languid lake. Lisa Loeb is dressed smartly in a black turtleneck and skirt, with her legs encased in black vinyl knee-high boots--an ensemble that declares business sensibility and a convivial nature. Her once-luxuriant brunette strips have been trimmed into what could best be described as Farrah Fawcett, her spirit exploding with freedom, stomping her foot on the gas pedal of a cherry-red Mustang convertible with the top down, carroming down rustic country lanes: a mixture of frazzle and dazzle. Lisa Loeb is wearing her glasses. Lisa Loeb, consequently, is fetching.

Lisa Loeb waits patiently for me to speak. So I do. "Lisa Loeb," I begin, "though I've been a fan of yours now for many years, I've never been sure of the pronunciation of your last name. There are days when it rains and my shoulders are hunched in melancholy, so I reach into my CD collection for some sad fare by Lisa LEEB. But on the days where my heart bursts with sunshine and there is fulfillment in my soul, you are known to me as Lisa LOBE." Lisa Loeb twinkles her nose. A delicate hand drifts like a blanket upon mine. It is Lisa Loeb's hand, which is attached to an arm which is attached to a shoulder which is attached to a neck which is attached to a head whose mouth purrs softly in a voice that tiptoes like a child around china, breathy and sage: "Always trust your soul." I sheepishly ask Lisa Loeb if she will autograph my copy of Hello, Lisa. Lisa Loeb giggles and says she will do so with delight. Because this is a dream, Lisa Loeb writes, "dhweuirfhfkdosdoughnuts, Lisa." Also because this is a dream, I do not question her words; they are gospel to me. "Lisa, I must," I start to say, but a "Stay (I Missed You)" ringtone cuts me off. It emanates from Lisa Loeb's Kate Spade handbag. Lisa Loeb lifts a forefinger to poke the air and says, "Hold that thought," and I do. She reaches into her purse and returns with a Hello Kitty cellphone not yet available in the United States. It bleats and mews until she pops open the feline in hugging pose. "Yes," she tells Hello Kitty--or, more likely, the voice of the person on the other end. "Yes, this is Lisa. Oh, hi. Yes. Yes." Suddenly Lisa Loeb's face turns crimson and she bellows down the circuitry, "MASHED POTATOES!" which I soon learn is the Loeb equivalent of "Goddammit," because Lisa Loeb does not curse. She calms down. "No, I didn't mean to shout at you. Look, can I call you back? I'm right in the middle of a rowboat in a dream." She rocks Hello Kitty back to sleep, where it remains for the remainder of the paragraph. "Now," she smiles, "what were you saying?"

I continue saying that I love all of her albums equally--even the one she did for children--but the new one, The Way It Really Is, speaks to me like no other. It has not left my player. It will not leave my player. It drew blood from me when I tried. Lisa Loeb nods and tells me this is typical technological behavior for her discs; they have minds of their own. Fans have written to her about their copies of Cake And Pie stealing away while they sleep, to sneak into neighbors' CD players, where they spin for hours to their digital hearts' content. On tour she often sees homeless prints of Firecracker hitch-hiking between towns. "It's a little special something I put into the mix," she teases. When I press her for more information, she declines and plucks a bass from the river, kisses it softly, pats its head, then drops it back.

I confess to Lisa Loeb that there is an unknown quality to The Way It Really Is that will keep me awake at night. What it is, exactly, I can only surmise in stunted academic prose. It is a confident adult work, the victory of an artist who continues to mature long after physical puberty has ended her ascent. Unlike a number of her contemporaries--Liz Phair and Jewel in particular, though I will admit a love for the former's last record, in spite of the sharpened barbs of a fat, grizzled music press--Lisa Loeb shies from adorning her melodies with funky mixes and whistles that will one day date the recording, long after this dazzling young demographic has aged into plump hams, Dockers complacency, and weepy jaded motel-fucks. What she presents is pure and literate, a 37-minute life portrait that bares little but tells everything, and leaves enough mystery for us to chase her into the next chapter. The simple "Window Shopping" is double-entendre librarian raunch with playful guitars; "Hand-Me-Downs," with its assured delivery, should easily become the Great Kiss-Off Anthem of the post-Bush Millennium ("So you'll lie yourself to sleep tonight/but you won't think of me/'Cause your world revolves around you/Or so it seems, so it seems...You speak to the weak/An old picture of me/Everybody says they want to be free/So I am leaving"); "Probably" manages to be both fearful of love and committed to it ("I probably want to hold your hand/I probably want to kiss you/You'll probably misunderstand/I'll probably miss you"...."I probably love you/Grass is probably green/the sky is probably blue/I'd probably do anything for you"), and "Accident" captures our innate human masochism and light taste for the macabre ("We crowd around the accident/we want to see the worst...we want to see what hurts...We think, 'I'm glad it wasn't me.'/and turn up the TV/and squeeze our eyes shut/and leave a space to see"). For a Lisa Loeb fan like myself, this is the sonic moment I've anticipated since Tails in 1995, her otherwise shaky debut of 12 songs cowed and intimidated by the shadow of (and lashed to) the reluctant generational zeitgeist of "Stay." The difference between them is astounding. It's an easy comparison, but I think back to 1994 and the image of the young Lisa Loeb in a summer dress, wandering like a lost little girl through an apartment, dodging Ethan Hawke's cat, nervously biting her young lower lip, twirling her young right foot, her bespectacled young face troubled by the question, Am I ready yet for this ride? This Lisa Loeb said yes, and she loves it to the hilt. There is something inherently comfortable about a Lisa Loeb record; it's like a generation visiting a mirror and accepting what stares back, grays, lines, and all, and welcoming the adventures to come.

"I like most of what you say," Lisa tells me, "and the faux academic way you say it." We stare at each other for awhile, our silences warm and friendly. In the distance a rainbow spears the sky. Lisa Loeb notices it first and tugs excitedly at my sleeve. "Forward ho!" she cries, grabbing an oar. "I hear there is magic in rainbows. Answers. Riddles. Perhaps even love." At that last breath Lisa Loeb throws me a fastball wink and a coy grin, ordering me to paddle. And as we near the rainbow, and the rainbow giggles and skips like a child just out of reach, I know we'll be friends for life.

2004-08-05T13:20:00.000-07:00

"It was gooood, living with you, wah-oh
It was gooood, living with you, wah-oh
It was gooood, living with you, wah-oh
It was gooood, living with you, wah-oh
It was gooood, living with you, wah-oh
It was gooood, living with you, wah-oh
It was gooood, living with you, wah-oh
It was gooood, living with you, wah-oh."
--Better Than Ezra, on skipping vinyl

Something comically embarrassing happened to me yesterday. See, about three-four weeks ago, I bought this keychain, which is attached to a base that emits a piercing alarm when separated from the keys. The best way to describe the sound is--well, attach a microphone to a hamster on a sugar high, then run him across a cheesegrater about 72 times. I didn't discover this until one night, while I was being very dapper and twirling my keychain on my forefinger in the privacy of my own apartment, the keys went free, and the base sailed squealing and screeching toward the sliver between my bed and the wall. No one was hurt in the freak accident, though it was slightly uncomfortable for me, having to leap onto my bed and dig my arm down into a void of magazines frantically trying to find the goddamn thing. There've been no incidents since, until....

Last night I'm coming home from work on the bus. My earphones are plastered to my head, blasting a work project. The crowd is quiet, contemplative perhaps. It's a very peaceful public benzo roll. Then suddenly, during a feedback lull, I detect a peculiar chirping within my pants. People are turning their heads, their brows digging into their eyelids. What the fuck is that noise? The earphones are immediately ripped free, then my right hand digs into my right pocket in a frantic attempt at being inconspicuous. I'm going to reunite base and keys right then and there, no frills, no thrills. This proves to be a problem because the base is very unpredictable and sensitive, and responds to even the slightest touch, so I have to very gingerly turn it in my fingers and muffle whatever cranky wails it decides to produce, using my forefinger and thumb to insert the key pin into a tiny hole, which is difficult because A.) I can't see what I'm doing; B.) I'm trying to appear nonchalant, like nothing's going on; and C.) I'm working in a very limited space, where my work ID card also happens to be. For a few minutes I sweat it out while my fellow commuters think I'm suffocating a dying bird, then finally I announce, "OK, this is gonna be really, like, loud, OK?" Out comes the base like a squalling baby from the womb, and it's all over within seconds.

Let this be a lesson to you all: Keep your keychains simple, and you won't end up like Mr. Chirpypants.

2004-07-30T13:24:00.000-07:00

Away so long for years and years
Probably thought or even wished that I was dead.
--Sting, "Fortress Around Your Heart"

Ah, Sting. I remember when you mattered. When you were urbane and droll. That was a long time ago. The last decent album you made was Ten Summoners' Tales, the apex of a literate and creative solo string that began with The Dream Of The Blue Turtles in 1985. 1985! That means Lindsay Lohan and the Olsen twins have never known a world where you weren't hawking expensive European automobiles or devolving into the dusty-bookshelf Rod Stewart. "Fortress Around Your Heart" was one of my favorites of yours, as well as the entire ...Nothing Like The Sun record. That's Shakespeare, you know. You taught me that: "My mistress' eyes/are nothing like the sun." You also taught me about Quentin Crisp ("Englishman In New York"). That if I wanted to keep something precious, I gotta lock it up and throw away the key--sort-of an upbeat update of your stalker anthem, "Every Breath You Take." (We let that one go, since you were in a group called The Police and we assumed you had the matter well in hand.) But then you always had at least one whimsical-sounding handful of steed-doo on all your albums ("We'll Be Together," from ...Nothing immediately comes to mind, along with that video of you in the back of a limo, playing sensitively with your thinning hair), and I forgave you because it was a minor slip, like a tiny nip of Coke for the diabetic. Today I'd just as easily find you extolling the virtues of Tostitos through a megaphone. Verily, the crunch is the thing.

But enough about you, Sting. Thanks for the epigraph. Some of you may have noticed I've been away for a while. Some of you might even be reading this. Well, I have no excuse other than the shit's been thudding hard-core around these parts, and this is the first moment I've had to breathe in a few weeks. Work's a roiling chaos spilling into life, and all I can do is cling to the sides while the vortex inches closer. Deadlines. Suddenly materializing female friends. More on this subject later; in about a half-hour I'm diving back under the recording-industry blood, then I'm going home for a well-deserved weekend of silence basking in the first season of Millennium, now available on DVD. Lance Henriksen is the bizzomb, and not only that--he's the best profiler the FBI ever had! He also shares the same Right-All-The-Time gene with Perry Mason, though Perry was never quite as cryptic or vague. Still, I love the show.

I had a weird dream last night, dig: I'm forced to return to the Corvallis Gazette-Times, because my "temporary" gig (after four years, not likely) has ended in California (it's related in a way to a series of dreams where I divide my time between California and Oregon). But I'm used to the good life, right, and I have to take this massive pay cut, and I wind up in a huge shouting match with G-T managing editor Rob Priewe, who I call a "bilious thighbone" before I chuck a computer monitor at his papier-mache skull. Freaky stuff.

2004-07-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

I'm torturing my compatriots with this as I end this sentence. God bless Rush and their decision to do an all-covers EP! Bliss, I tell you! BLISS!

2004-06-29T11:41:00.000-07:00

Let's lighten things up here. I'm doing a column, and I need an answer to the following question:

Pop, or soda?

2004-06-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

I saw it Sunday morning in, of all places, Downey, California, the onetime home of Richard and Karen Carpenter, whose legacy still resonates down the quiet ivy boulevards (truly--I went for a walk in a residential district before the movie started and passed two apartment complexes across the street from one another, one called "Only Just Begun," the other, "Close To You," but, oddly enough, no birds suddenly appeared). I arrived extra too-early, thinking there'd be an excruciating queue; alas, I bought my ticket slick and sweet, no hassle, no waiting. So I passed the time roaming about the quaint little hamlet, with its gazillion churches and old storefronts. It's so cute and sensible that the high school, city library, city hall, chamber of commerce, police department, and community theater are all on the same block.

I stopped in at the new CVS Pharmacy, so brand new that the clerks are still chipper and helpful. "We opened our doors last Wednesday, and we had our grand opening yesterday," said the teenaged girl behind the counter. "How do you like it?" "It's pretty cool," I said, dropping some bones for a paperback edition of Stephen King's On Writing.

"What are you up to today? Just shopping?"

"No, actually, I'm going to a movie."

"Oh, really! Which one?"

"Fahrenheit 9/11."

"Oh." Her voice dropped slightly; she'd heard of it. "Have you seen White Chicks yet? That's supposed to be really funny."

I wonder what Karen Carpenter would think of Downey now.

About a half-hour before showtime I came back, bought a tepid Dr. Pepper, and joined a packed house of mostly sympathetic patrons. Only one person walked out, right before the end, but he doesn't count: he was coming out of the mens room when I was going in. He'd been crying.

It's been a long time since I've left a movie that angry. While I hesitate to call Fahrenheit 9/11 the best documentary of all time, I do think it's the most important of our generation. Yes, it's propaganda (so's Hoop Dreams, if you wanna get technical), but you know what? I was convinced. I mean, it's one thing to read the charges of commiserating with Saudis in cold, dead print, but to see actual fucking photos and moving images of the Bushes embracing this murderous prick, shaking hands with that rat bastard, breaking bread with those bloody-handed assholes, it's infuriating, proving that if we DO bring George W. Bush back for another term, the terrorists win.

It's amazing that the year 2000 seems like lifetimes ago. I'd forgotten about the protesters blocking the faux president's path to his swearing-in. I'd forgotten about Al Gore following cold protocol while representatives pleaded with him to wrong an injustice. It was weird to again see the major three networks backing off their Florida predictions while Fox galloped in on the Dubya horse. It seems like something my parents' generation experienced, not me. The talking heads of the right can bellow all they want about "living in the past," but one look at the past tells the story: we wuz robbed, and we went into the Bush years kicking and screaming.

My only complaints are Moore's occasional smarminess--sometimes it was funny, sometimes it was off-putting; the Britney Spears footage, which seemed unnecessary except to broadside an easy, naive, simpleminded target; and--this is minor--Moore's tendency to return to Flint, Michigan, and its rapid decay, which grows more alarming with each visit. Man, I don't wanna go to Flint again; next Moore doc it's gonna be a hole in the ground covered by a tattered tarp. If I lived in Flint I'd feel like, "Oh, here comes Mike and his crew to rub our faces in our neverending economic Depression some more." But I must admit a lot of info came of that trip: We learned that for poor kids, the military is often the only escape from poverty (at least for a while), and scenes of the desperate Marine recruiters blindsiding kids in mall parking lots with car-salesman zeal (didn't one say, "You go this way, I'll go that way, and we'll corner him"?) were particularly gross. We learned that a mother's steadfast belief in the American way of sacrifice for freedom can be damaged permanently when one of her own children doesn't make it home, and whose last letter was disillusionment incarnate. We learned that the last four years were just fucked up for everybody everywhere.

Gotta admit I didn't like Bush when I walked into the theater, and I don't like him now. Not only should he not be reelected, he should be impeached. And not only should he be impeached, he and his associates should spend the rest of their days trapped in courtrooms from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., every day, fighting for every fucking dime in their bank accounts, in neverending litigation. Jail's too good for them; it gives those bastards a place to rest.

We are Americans. This is our house. And it's about time we told our drunken, stumblebum, halfwitted, black-hearted guests to pack up; they've overstayed their welcome.

2004-06-23T10:05:00.000-07:00

INFECTIOUS SONG OF THE WEEK: As if "Somebody Told Me" wasn't catchy enough, The Killers' "Smile Like You Mean It," with its whirring Cars-soaked-synth chorus, is easy fodder for my repeat function. The whole album is a hoot. Buy it or I'm not gonna talk to you for a week until you come crawling back like the craven beauhunk you are.

EASY READ OF THE WEEK: Jay Mohr's (yes, that Jay Mohr) Gasping For Airtime, an anorexic volume chronicling his two seasons as a featured player on Saturday Night Live. How's his prose? A bit stilted and fat with cliches, but it's not completely distracting. Is he bitter? Occasionally, but overall he's grateful for the experience. A few things I learned:

1.) Jay Mohr wrestled Chris Farley three times in one day and beat him twice, the last in front of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger.

2.) David Spade loved fucking supermodels and occasionally begged off appearing in sketches for the express purpose of fucking them.

3.) On a $100 dare, Chris Farley actually took a shit out of an NBC window.

4.) Speaking of shit, Norm Macdonald got food poisoning once and ran around New York, shitting his pants and puking his brains off, trying to convince people on the street he needed help and wasn't a homeless crack addict shitting and puking all over the place.

5.) Jay Mohr asked Dave Grohl, then of Nirvana, if he wanted to spark a doob, right in front of Dave's older relatives.

6.) Rob Schneider was a dick sometimes.

7.) Adam Sandler was a cool guy, though they nearly came to blows offstage once while dressed as Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith.

8.) Jay Mohr's dressing room in the second season was a hastily renovated elevator shaft.

9.) Ellen Cleghorne was a stuck-up bitch who got schooled by Sally Field.

10.) Al Franken on musical guest UB40: "I feel like I'm watching the lounge band at a Dublin Holiday Inn."

11.) Jim Downey was obsessed with his old high school's basketball team, forcing the other writers to watch endless videotapes of their games.

12.) In a dress rehearsal for a Ben-Hur sketch with Charlton Heston, Chris Farley actually whipped out his dick and began masturbating until Heston told him to knock it off.

13.) Jay Mohr suffered from panic attacks and once ran 40 blocks.

14.) Mike Myers was a pretty nice guy. So was the unflappable Lorne Michaels, who Jay witnessed losing his cool once, when Skid Row's Sebastian Bach announced on-air, "We're Skid Row, and this is live, motherfuckers!" Apparently, Lorne's Amstel Light moved an inch and he very calmly said, "Cut their second number."

15.) Being in a sketch with Chris Farley was bad news if he was in a malicious mood--or decked out as Matt Foley. He'd relentlessly work at his fellow actors until they had no choice but to break character and succumb to laughing jags.

16.) Jay Mohr actually thinks the Welcome Back Kotter sketch with John Travolta was the apex of comic SNL glory instead of a liquid pile.

17.) Jay Mohr seems like a pretty cool dude.

18.) Phil Hartman was one of the greatest men who ever lived.

2004-06-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

I did nothing this weekend. Nothing. I accomplished nothing (well, I had to go to work on Sunday to work on some things). I was holed up with DVDs. I ordered in pizza. I didn't shave. My hygiene was rudimentary, enough for a pocket-change romp in Bangkok. There were days of cathodic comedy ahead of me.

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON: More great stuff from the mind of Larry David. My favorite episode is the one where Larry inadvertently destroys his sister-in-law's romantic life--again (you'll recall the first season's deadly "c/aunt" episode where Larry's advice to her pig of a boyfriend inspired him to dump her during the aunt's funeral)--this time by disrupting her Jewish fiance's baptism into the Christian faith. Of course, this makes him a hero to the fiance's kin ("We Jews gotta stick together. That was a great thing you did!") but doesn't score any points with his wife's shrill family. It's a great all-around half-hour with a hilarious B story: Richard Lewis explodes over Larry's answering machine message, which he swears Larry's stolen from him. Larry attempts to change it ("I'll be the man here, OK?"), but he ends up deleting it instead and missing a slew of phone calls--including one from a homeless person who'd inherited one of his old coats, which happened to have the Davids' plane tickets to Monterey. The season's thread is a "series pitch" Larry makes to both Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, who are finding post-Seinfeld life difficult. The first collaboration dissolves when Jason and Larry part ways over where to hold their meetings; with Julia, Larry makes it through a number of cable and network meetings, then systematically ruins every tenuous relationship at those companies.

My only complaint is the complete dearth of special features. At least the first season had commentary (premiere episode only) and a Bob Costas interview. With ten episodes on two discs, it's a hearty meal with no dessert menu: you have just enough room for a nosh of cheesecake, but the waiter is nowhere to be found. In Larry David's universe, that's reason enough to avoid tipping either maitre'd OR "captain."

THE THIN BLUE LINE: THE COMPLETE LINE-UP: I'm still not sure what it is about this British series, but I just flat-out loved it. Back when I lived in Albany and had nothing to do all day except be poor, I'd withstand PBS' Saturday night Britcom lineup of Keeping Up Appearances and Goodnight Sweetheart to reward myself with this Ben Elton gem, steered by the comedic prowess of Rowan Atkinson and a sterling cast somewhat kinda sorta recognizable to those who pay attention to British actors: James Dreyfus, Mina Anwar (gorgeous), Serena Evans, Mark Addy (who got his big break Stateside in The Full Monty, then squandered it by playing Fred Flintstone in a direct-to-video sham), and David Hague (you might remember him from Four Weddings And A Funeral). The Thin Blue Line follows the misadventures of the Gasforth Police Department; Atkinson is the hoity-toity (an epithet literally branded on David Hague's tongue), broomstick-up-the-butt, rules-and-regulations Chief Inspector Fowler, who commands the uniformed troops (the airbrained Constable Goody [Dreyfus], the young and liberal Maggie Habib [Anwar], the veteran Constable Gladstone [Rudolph Walker], and desk sergeant/lover Patricia Dawkins [Evans]), and contends with the uppity plainsclothesmen of CID, overseen by the overexcitedly inept Detective Inspector Derek Grim (Hague). The show's tone is delightfully silly, though it often tackles more grim subjects (racism and child abandonment, in the same half-hour), replete with double entendres and Ben Elton's learned, thesauritical ear for comedic dialogue. Not as great or memorable as Monty Python's Flying Circus, the Blackadder anthology, or The Young Ones, but eons beyond Are You Being Served? or Noel's House Party--cute in its own way.

Happy Monday. Buy American. Failing that, take it home to mother and make it your wife.

2004-06-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

Can you remember
Remember my name
As I flow through your life
A thousand oceans I have flown
And cold spirits of ice
All my life
I am the echo of your past
...
And if you hear me talking on the wind
You've got to understand
We must remain
Perfect Strangers
--Deep Purple

The Stepford Wives is The Stepford Wives in spirit only, with a few nods to its thriller past and gleefully clubbing viewers over the skull with its satire. Obviously, most everyone knows the story by now, and we're apparently so jaded and jaundiced that everything bores us, so director Frank Oz and crack pensman Paul Rudnick (he of Libby Gelman Waxner fame, one of the best things about Premiere magazine) have jettisoned the original film's slow, foreboding crawl, punctuated with comic elements endemic to its time, and push Stepford's dark secret out of the way early to make way for a faster pace and catty dialogue. In lesser hands, this is a recipe for disaster; here, the souffle doesn't collapse until the final reels, when writer, director, and studio are dumping in extra helpings of climax in search of the Thump.

Briefly, let's compare the two films (SW1 [not to be confused with SWV or the S1W] and SW2):

SW1: Joanna Eberhard (Katharine Rowwrrrrrr--I mean, Ross), a young housewife and aspiring photographer, and her husband Walter (Peter Masterston), a '70s husband but with rapidly developing old-fashioned sensibilities, move with their two daughters (one played by Peter's real-life daughter, Mary Stuart) from a primo Manhattan apartment to the Stepford enclave, where everything is impossibly perfect. The husbands are successful and content, their wives immaculately coiffed, eager to please socially and sexually, and strangely, inhumanly nice. For a former Women's Lib activist like Joanna, this is a mite too eerie. She feels out of place until being discovered by the equally desperate Bobbie Markoe (Paula Prentiss), a fellow free spirit. The duo converge upon the neighborhood's third free thinker, Charmaine Wimperis (a post-Gilligan's Island Tina Louise), and conspire to transform the Stepford women from mousy servants into trusted friends (and possible co-conspirators). Their plans are thwarted first by the Stepford wives themselves, who won't discuss their feelings beyond household chores, then by Charmaine, who turns from Betty Friedan into Betty Crocker literally overnight, ordering the removal of her backyard tennis court at her husband's behest. She also answers the door in a long dress and apron, spitting sunny platitudes all day long. At the center of the movie, of course, is the Men's Association, run by Dale Coba (Patrick O'Neal). It's an organization adherent to bullishly outdated thinking that Walter finds himself more and more in agreement with, ultimately with tragic results.

SW2: This is just balls-out, over-the-top social satire. Joanna Eberhard (Nicole Kidman) is an Ice Bitch TV executive, and her latest reality show (which I'm surprised hasn't been pitched to FOX yet: I Can Do Better!, where a happily married couple is separated, then sequestered for a week and bombarded with sex) is so much of a murderous fiasco that she gets canned. Her husband, Walter Kresby (Matthew Broderick), is more the John Gray-type: a network vice-president, he quits his job in support, then suggests they find a change of pace from the cutthroat world of television. Off they go to Stepford. That there's something wrong with the wives this time is painfully obvious, especially after the old-fashioned barn dance. Joanna still doesn't fit in, but she gives it the old college try. She befriends Bobbie Markowitz (Bette Midler), the successful author of I Love You, But Please Die and waaaay beyond Paula Prentiss in the free-spirit department. Tina Louise's Charmaine has been replaced by flamboyant architect Roger Bannister (Roger Bart); we know his ass is manicured Stepford grass because his life partner is a Republican. We experience the same basic event chain, albeit with modern twists and an eye for the droll. The villain this time--and we know he's the villain, because it's Christopher Goddamn Walken; as his popularity has increased thanks to Saturday Night Live, he's taken a more tongue-in-cheek approach to his roles, virtually doing a less and less nuanced impersonation of himself--is Mike Wellington, married to the Stepford ideal, Claire (Glenn Close). Mike runs the Men's Association and welcomes Walter into the fold. Unlike the original Stepford, this time the viewer's allowed inside the thick walls, where strange things are indeed afoot, yet none of the men seem to mind that on command a negligee'd woman can materialize from nowhere and pump out singles like an ATM. Also, unlike the original Stepford, the tone is so different that it can't have the same ending. In fact, this Stepford has about three or four; you can practically hear typing fingers pull muscles hunting for a new twist on the ancient one (Sadly, the new twist renders a couple of earlier scenes incomprehensible). After a couple belly laughs, it finally bows out with that studio chestnut, the Where Are They Now? coda, where the main characters sit in a television studio yukking it up and recounting their stories and current whereabouts (we learn Bobbie has written a new book of poetry dedicated to her husband, Wait Till He Falls Asleep, Then Cut It Off)--here to Larry King, so we know everything's OK. I won't spoil anything else for you if you haven't seen this Stepford Wives, but keep this in mind: The husband is played by Matthew Broderick. Matthew. Broderick. Got it?

If you loved the first Stepford, there's enough here to keep things interesting until that implosion at the end, where all plothole hell breaks loose. The script is smart, though sometimes overreaching (Rudnick had big shoes to fill: the buttery prose of William Goldman, who wrote then disowned the 1975 film because of the casting and look of the women, which was vastly different from the imagery in Ira Levin's novel). However, if you're looking for a faithful remake, slide the original into your DVD player and close your eyes. "Stepford" is such a part of the vernacular--after a torrid dalliance with "trophy wife"--that it's impossible to successfully and effectively get away with the same movie twice. In order to be enjoyed on their own levels, the two films must remain perfect strangers in the filmgoer's mind: one, the echo of a long-distant past; the other, a modern reverberation.

Deep Purple & The Rock Snobster
Keen Stepford orbs will note Bette Midler's brash display of a 1984-vintage Deep Purple Perfect Strangers T-shirt. I don't know whether this was a costumer's choice or from Bette's own stash, but I will propose marriage to either costumer or stash. Deep Purple are one of my all-time loves, one of the few bands I discovered in my adolescence that: a) still records today, or b) that I still follow religiously. Most people regard them as tired relics of the cock-rock school, but I think that, although they're not quite as vivacious as they once were (they'll never top Machine Head, even if they continue to record in innumerable permutations 'til they all drop dead), today, as a recording act (TODAY, let me stress again), they matter way more than contemporaries The Rolling Stones, and they can still be coerced into some nasty rock 'n' roll--more refined, of course, now that they're older. The hard reality is that vocalist Ian Gillan is pushing 60 and more resembles a genial family dentist than the long-tressed monster who once beltorgasmed legendary, piercing "awwwwwwwwwwww"s into the stratosphere like he was calling God out to kick His ass. But to his credit, he's aging more gracefully than he was during the woebegone Ritchie Blackmore Reunion II days of The Battle Rages On (1992), when he ignored the passage of time by stubbornly dyeing his long hair black and squeezing his rock-weathered frame into leather pants, a Dionysian prune. Today he looks almost dignified in short hair and khakis.

Despite his long association with the Purp, Gillan is not an original founding member. The only one of those left in the lineup today is drummer Ian Paice; Jon Lord bowed out gracefully after Abandon (1998), yet his Hammond (the vital nucleus of the DP sound) remains a ghostly presence on Bananas, a chore ably handled by Don Airey. Gillan's joined by bassist Roger Glover, with whom he joined the band back in Jurassic (pre-me) times; and guitarist Steve Morse, who signed on about ten years ago, after the umpteenth departure of Ritchie Blackmore. While his riffs and solos lack Blackmore's charming Baby Huey flair (Steve is more the precision/franticfingers Joe Satriani/Steve Vai kind of guy; he's old buddies with Eddie Van Halen), I can't knock the man for helping revive the Purp.

But to be fair, none of them have really remained "faithful," all having split and returned, split and returned, split and returned. Both Gillan and Glover left back in the '70s in a post-Who Do We Think We Are (their 1973 follow-up to the obscenely huge Machine Head) huff, and were replaced by future Whitesnake mastermind leader David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes, respectively. Original guitarist Blackmore lasted another two records before taking off; in his stead came the late Tommy Bolin for the unctuous Come Taste The Band (1975), and...

Well, let's cut the rockumentary short. The Lord/Paice/Glover/Blackmore/Gillan roster eventually reunited for the album pictured way up there, the one depicted on Midler's shirt: Perfect Strangers (1984). It's notable in retrospect for its attempts to reconcile quaint, old-school heavy metal with a musical landscape quickly being consumed by synthesizers. Jon Lord's Hammond is relegated to a supporting role while he dabbles with noises. This is evident on the first ("Knocking At Your Back Door") and title tracks, with their digital "string" stabs commanding center stage with Blackmore's too-sleek guitar. Meanwhile, the wheezing Hammond lurks in the background as a rhythm blanket, except on "Perfect Strangers" where it's allowed to intro before stepping aside. Otherwise, Gillan's voice fitted the period like a leather glove--after all, he provided inspiration for many of the decade's metal superstars, and the album overall was a competent comeback (today it's been augmented by the extended Blackmore solo "Son Of Alerik"). A welcome introduction for a boy like me, who bonded with his Baby Boomer pops over Machine Head, Fireball, In Rock, and Gillan's Messianic turn in Jesus Christ Superstar, thus initiated into the DP universe.

The reunion didn't last. Gillan survived the lifeless House Of Blue Light (1987), an album with no redeeming qualities other than "Mitzi Dupree," an ode to "the queen of the ping-pong," laureled not for her expertise with a paddle, then left, seemingly for good. Blackmore bailed after 1990's Slaves & Masters. But everybody made up kissy-kissy two years later for The Battle Rages On, then Blackmore bailed again. Purp forged on with new guitarist Steve Morse, releasing Purpendicular (1996), the mighty Abandon (1998), and Bananas (2003). The Reverend Speats and I had the opportunity to see this lineup earlier this year, but our plans fell apart at the last minute. We'll get 'em next time!

I wasn't planning on breathless hagiography, but I think I've reached my point. There was a time I would've been embarrased to admit my undying admiration for Deep Purple. Why? Obviously, because outside of Machine Head they ain't considered cool--and even THAT is borderline cool/suckage, because most of those tracks became staples of the Classic Rock format ("Highway Star," "Smoke On The Water," "Space Truckin'") and, consequently, oversaturated. Couple that with the fact they're still a working band, still producing new albums long after their spotlight in popular/critical favor has faded, still practicing a rock formula some consider outdated, and they're very easy to ignore.

But I can't help myself. I love Deep Purple. I think they're fucking great. They were great in '72, they can still produce the goods in '04.

Guilty As Charged...And I'd Do It Again

I recently came to the realization that I don't believe in the "guilty pleasure" anymore. Think about it: What you're saying, in essence, is that you should KNOW BETTER than to like this, that usually you have BETTER TASTE. Like a lot of people, I'd qualify it with "Yeah, there's something lovable about Air Supply, but I also like [insert Hip album here, like Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music or MC5's High Time, or anything by Fantomas]," but now I think, Why apologize for enjoying something? Why do I have to justify some of my records I own with, "Oh, I got that when I was 15" or "Yeah, um, my mom bought me that for my birthday"? Why do I consider Supertramp's Breakfast In America a guilty pleasure, when I don't feel guilty listening to it? Hell, I crank it up! If you wanna locate anyone who isn't moved to smile when they hear "Breakfast In America," "The Logical Song," "Take The Long Way Home," or "Goodbye Stranger," I suggest your local cemetery. Breakfast In America is beyond awesome. It's a perfect pop record. So's Styx's The Grand Illusion. Air Supply's Lost In Love? Like sucking down a cold glass of lemonade on the hottest summer day. Bat Out Of Hell's pretty sweet too, as is Aerosmith's "You See Me Cryin'," the ballad tossed on the back end of the smashing Toys In The Attic. And I don't mean in an ironic way. These are brilliant, timeless works of art.

As far as I'm concerned, from now on, the "guilty pleasure" is the province of the Music Snob. More on him tomorrow.

2004-06-16T15:20:00.000-07:00

Hi! Hello! You might remember me from such blog entries as "Boy, I hate people with cell phones" and "Wow, the Melvins are cool." Well, I'm back for a few seconds. Yes, folks, I am alive and well and tanned like a leather wristband in middle-school shop class.

What have I been up to?

Well, I've finally discovered Curb Your Enthusiasm. I was at Borders last weekend and, on a whim, bought the complete first season, knowing that the second-season set was on its way (it became mine last night after overtures and currency exchange). My God, what a phenomenal fucking show! Laugh if you must, but I'd never seen it! Heard plenty from coworkers over the last three-four years, but I finally checked it out. FOR MYSELF. That's right. It's all about MY enjoyment. The rest of you can fuck right off, because only I understand the accidental, nuanced genius of this series. I love how Larry David starts with a basic problem, then it's accelerated through logical circumstances (paired with general L.A. wishy-washiness), and then there are these tiny little subplots and side journeys, and then it all explodes at the end. When Larry and Richard were fistfighting in front of the jewelry store, I was on the floor and out the window. I can't wait to watch Season 2. Then maybe I'll get cable. But probably not.

My own Larry Davidism: It gets on my nerves when you're standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the light to change, and another pedestrian joins you at the corner and punches the button for the "walk" signal. Look: I'm a fully functioning adult. I'm a high school graduate. I'm a competent professional. Did it ever occur to you that MAAAAAAYBE I pressed the little button before you arrived? Have you designated yourself corner captain? Are you trying to assert your superiority? Or do you not feel like a complete person until you feel you've contributed to our wait, even though your stupid little move was totally superfluous? Or when I get to the corner, press the button, the someone whisks in behind me within ten seconds, and does the same thing. Now, obviously this person has seen me press the button, but it's not enough. I apparently lack sufficient pull with this signal, but the "walk" button knows his touch and will respond accordingly. In these situations, I press the button again with a firm finality: OK, jackass, now it's official.

And THEN, not only does this person press the little button, he (or she) jiggles it several times, like he's (or she's) trying to dupe the system--that somewhere in Traffic Control Central someone's going, "HOLY SHIT! THERE ARE 72 PEOPLE STANDING AT THE CORNER OF VERDUGO AND HOLLYWOOD WAY! MAKE THAT FUCKING LIGHT YELLOW, OR YOU'RE FIRED!" If that's the case, why not just have an intercom system that patches you directly: "Yeah, ummm...I really gotta take a piss, and the 7-Eleven's across the street. I can't stress how urgent this is, but could you please change the signal now? I'll send you a check."

In other news, Ronald Reagan is gone. The first President I ever truly "knew" (I vaguely remember Carter, Ford not at all). I still have mixed feelings about his passing; People're lionizing him a bit too much, but I'm certainly not dancing on his grave. To a kid growing up in the '80s (unlike my older friends), Ronald Reagan seemed almost a benign, grandfatherly type; he kinda looked like a Lions Club treasurer--or a Buick salesman--from the late 1960s who happened to make high office, in his shoeblack hair. You almost expected him to produce a quarter from a pocket and tell you to go buy some candy. As I got older I began to despise him--especially during the Iran-Contra hearings, which somehow made a hero out of that stone crooked fuck Oliver North--but I don't HATE him. Goodbye, Ron: Off to that great Hellcats Of The Navy set in the sky. If you come back for a spectral visit, please kick our current President off a cliff or at the very least pants him on television.

Tomorrow: a dissertation on The Music Snob...plus, my thoughts on the new Stepford Wives.

2004-05-28T10:45:00.000-07:00

Ominous half-day before an overdue three-day respite. I'm waiting for a downpour of work hell. Here's where my brain wanders during such inactivity . . .

BAND NAMES I JUST THOUGHT UP
Upchuck Cheerios
Maggot Whore
Waitin' On Eddie
Bill Murray
Eggorgasm
Steel Teat
Zippersaw
Andy Griffith Sez Let's Get It On

and my personal favorite:

Our Band Could Kick Your Ass

2004-05-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Nelson of Nantucket asks: "Could you take a moment to ponder the careers of Kurt, Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid? Thanks."

Thanks for your question, Jennifer.

I wasn't sure which Kurt you're referring to, since there are lots of Kurts here in Hollywood. We've already tackled the easy greatness of Kurt Russell (much like Kurt himself was in the Robin Williams football vehicle The Best Of Times), so I assume you mean character actor Kurt Fuller, an old hand at weasely, spineless men-pigs with receding hairlines, shifty peepers, and extending guts. He enjoyed a prolific run through the 1980s and early '90s, peaking as Rob Lowe's righthand jackal in Wayne's World. He was still playing to that type into the New Millennium, dabbing liberal layers of slime to the role he was born to play: Karl Rove, in Trey Parker and Matt Stone's short-lived That's My Bush!. You might've also caught him mimicking Werner Klemperer's slow burn ("Hoooooooogan!") opposite Greg Kinnear's Bob Crane in Auto Focus.

Dennis Quaid: Likable, affable chap with the frame and look of a veteran minor-league baseball player. He first came to my attention as Gordo Cooper in 1983's The Right Stuff, though he'd been knocking about on celluloid at least four years prior in Jackie Earle Hayley's Breaking Away, which I still have yet to see in its entirety (I always manage to catch it during the climactic bike race). He was even married for a time to the cute-as-a-button P.J. Soles of Rock 'N' Roll High School/Carrie/Halloween/Stripes fame.

After holding his own on the same widescreen with the likes of Sam "Chuck Yeager" Shepard, Scott "Alan Sheperd" Glenn, Fred "Virgil I. 'Gus' Grissom" Ward, and Ed "John Glenn" Harris (though Ed Harris at the time was a two-bit scene-chewer previously seen in the spine-tingling opening story of Creepshow: "Where's my cake, Bedelia?!"), Dennis Quaid spat buillion. He ruled the late '80s with his laconic charm, even melted the heart of Meg Ryan, then fresh from Top Gun and her stint as Anthony Edwards' real-life main squeeze--she was just a ho in training pants then. Everywhere he turned that cleft chin lived a top-of-the-bill hit (financially, not critically): D.O.A., Inner Space, Suspect, and the hot-n-heavy Big Easy, where his thespian chops were tested to the hilt as a man crazy enough to think Ellen Barkin was fuckably hot. The first misstep came with Everybody's All American (its only saving grace is Jessica Lange at the full flower of her insane sex appeal); Great Balls Of Fire proved to be the cliff dive. We didn't really see much of poor Dennis until he made an astonishing comeback a few years ago as Jesus Christ's dad in Frequency. There was the smallish role as Stephen Bauer's backstabbing confidante in the acclaimed Traffic, then a memorable turn as a sourpussed Sam Houston framed by a pair of black fright fuzzychops in The Alamo. The jury's still out on Dennis Quaid, but, as in Suspect, he holds all the clues. That last sentence didn't make sense, but fuck it.

Kevin Costner: Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. Kevin. Where did you go so wrong so long? You think he would've learned after wasting most of his actory youth in crappy nudie beach flicks. The trouble began with Silverado (an epic but rather ordinary Western where no cliche is left unexposed to the prairie sun), where the young upstart woohooed and ran circles around his more accomplished brethren. Quite a feat on a call sheet with Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, and Sheriff John Cleese. He seemed like a really cool guy. One of my favorite Kevin Costner stories from the period (aside from his turn as a corpse in The Big Chill) centers around an audition for an Apple (or IBM, I can't recall; not important) computer commercial. Costner was dismissed after ad-libbing the line "Honey, I can't get this fucking computer to work" over a prop phone. But after stealing Silverado and getting some choice roles his way, his range seemed to mellow, even atrophy. His facial expressions were limited to bored or miffed. Even when he smiled, his eyes seemed to say, "Eat shit." That look served him well as Field Of Dream's Ray Kinsella, but there were traces of actual chops in that final scene when he calls out in a breaking voice, "Dad? You wanna play catch?" Two years later he won Best Director and Best Motion Picture for the heavy-handed Dances With Wolves, a trial run for Waterworld and The Postman, the cinematic equivalent of microwave pork rinds, executed long after the general public stopped giving a hoot about Kevin and his arrogant Message Pictures and Messianic Complex. A glimmer of hope in Oliver Stone's JFK (watch his closing arguments as Jim Garrison) faded into a decade of half-assed bullshit. His torpid Wyatt Earp had the misfortune of playing theaters shortly after Kurt Russell's (Kurt!) Tombstone bulldozed triumphantly through moviehouses, with the advantage of three Everyman stars: Russell, Sam Elliott, and Bill Paxton as the Earp brothers, and one Method freak, Mr. Val Kilmer, whose droll Doc Holliday ("Ah'm yo huckleberry") provides some of that movie's--already cracklin' with peppy zip--greatest moments. All Wyatt had was the tired Costner bolstered by Dennis Quaid's last-legs Doc Holliday in a weathered cinematic color awash in gloom and defeat.

I had no hope for Kevin. I have very little hope for Kevin today. I think he's too far gone. I lost the faith after 3 Thousand Miles To Graceland. Its trailer lied like a fly with a booger in its eye. Finally, I says to myself, I says, Finally, Kevin's been humbled. With Kurt Russell in tow, I thought it was gonna be spectacular, especially with Costner playing a goddamn bad guy! Who believed he was the blood of Elvis! How in the fah-HUUUUUUUUCK could you possibly go wrong? It did, in oh, so many ways. In fact, in ways that I'd never dreamed existed. Costner was his usual dud self, and after the casino heist, as far as I was concerned, the movie was over. The rest was boring-ass chases and the eventual showdown. Its only highlight was the end-credit sequence, where Costner actually looked like a living person enjoying himself. If you looked hard enough, squinted 'til you got a headache, you could see the smile that once lived on his face, way back in Silverado. We won't even get into Thirteen Days, an otherwise decent flicker that would've benefitted immensely from his complete absence and phony New England accent, or Dragonfly, a low-rent M. Night ripoff that should've been rerouted to Saturn where it wouldn't bother a soul. Let's see if anything comes of the momentum from the Western Open Range, his single-best movie in at least 10 years. In other words, he's come full circle, the older, wiser kid who once loped down the streets of Silverado with open ears. Let's hope he's learned something.

2004-05-26T15:49:00.001-07:00

Hello. I've changed my blog title because I'm currently in the throes of a retro-Wire kick. And in keeping with the Wire tradition (is Rob Gotobed not the greatest name in rock 'n' roll history?), this entry will be short. Bye.

2004-05-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

Ahhh! Finally! A spare moment. What have I done this week? Oh, yes, I'd like to talk about the movie Miracle, if I may, and specifically the career of one of the greatest soul brothers in all of show business, Mr. Kurt Russell. I LOOOOVE Kurt Russell with every heterosexual scintilla in my body. I don't care if the rest of the movie's tinted stock footage of sheep taking rain-soaked dumps in a landfill of roiling vomit (the plotline of 3 Thousand Miles To Graceland), as long as Kurt Russell peeks around a corner within camera range, Mr. and Mrs. Hollywood, my seven bucks is yours.

I like Kurt because he reminds me of my dad, the kinda permanent-smiled dude who float-bops around creation in tanktops and shorts, digs the sky, digs the trees, digs the people, and is just happy to be alive. You could probably call him "Kurt" to his face. He gives the impression that he'd share a beer with you--maybe even match you--and waste an afternoon on your porch just shooting the shit. What makes this impression all the more remarkable is that Kurt's been in showbiz now for, what, over 40 years or something! He was a child actor! The guy probably can't remember a minute when he wasn't standing in front of a camera or poring over a script, and, with a few rough patches here and there, has somehow sustained this career with ease, weathering puberty, wild-in-the-streets youth, and middle age, and is still a bankable name. And despite having maintained a successful adult career since at least 1981, he remains grateful to those who've shaped his legend. Did he need to do Escape From L.A., John Carpenter's geek-awaited sequel to the 1981 classic, Escape From New York? Fuck, no. But he did. Why? Because he loved Snake Plissken, and John's an old running buddy who helped him make that transition from punk kid to badass cat in gems like Elvis, Escape, The Thing (which outclasses the awesome original, in my opinion), and the ever-beloved Big Trouble In Little China. If you ever chance to hear the Carpenter/Russell exchanges on any DVD commentary, you're in for a treat:

CARPENTER: Kurt, you remember doin' tequila shots between takes?
RUSSELL: Do I! Get all warm and fuzzy inside, sure was cold up there, wadn't it? HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH!
CARPENTER: That stuntman flyin' the helicopter used to be your brother-in-law.
RUSSELL: Yeah, talked to ol' Jack last week. He's doin' good. Sends his regards. Boy, he sure looks younger there. More hair! HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH!
CARPENTER: We ALL had more hair then.
RUSSELL: HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH HEH!

Now, I'm not mimicking these commentaries to ridicule Mr. Russell. Au contraire; I find it more refreshing to hear two lifelong buddies riffing nostalgic over old good times than the boring gracious gentlemanly gladhanding that usually occupies that precious layer. You can actually turn the movie off and just listen to them and it's like they're in your living room for a couple hours, sippin' the white man's elixir and chuffin' on nature's habit, where at any given moment the conversation threatens to splinter into recollections of high school and Friday nights under the lights and nobody deigns to talk about movies at all--AND YOU DON'T CARE. Because you're in the presence of greatness--not in a sense of genius or social accomplishments, but of survived years and prosperity in spite of life's usual bullshit, with good-natured spirit intact. The old "Why fret if life be sweet?" trip.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, yes: Miracle. A righteous dose of schmaltz with two things going for it:

1.) Kurt Russell (see above)
2.) 1980 U.S. gold-medal hockey team

I'm not much of a sports fan anymore, but for some reason, I love sports-themed movies. Bull Durham, Eight Men Out, Bang The Drum Slowly, North Dallas Forty, The Longest Yard, Field Of Dreams, Hoosiers (Hoop Dreams remains in a class alone, with the added intoxicating drama of real life in an already gripping, can't-stand-it American tale), the original Angels In The Outfield, The Sandlot--the list is endless. Never been able to enjoy hockey films, though, unless you count the sans Chris Kline/LL Cool J Rollerball, which was more roller derby with a murderous bent. The only hockey movies I can think of offhand are the Rob Lowe vanity vehicle Youngblood, Outsiders-lite, with Patrick Swayze and Lowe preening in small-town Aqua Net angst; Slap Shot, which was far too enamored of its own verbal depravity to succeed as a movie; and the Mighty Ducks franchise that spawned a real-life team and earned Emilio Estevez a couple nice paychecks.

But I've always felt a kinship with the story behind Miracle. I was eight years old in the winter of 1980, when the U.S. hockey team shocked the world by clinging to a tenuous lead by their bleeding gums and upsetting the unbeatable Russians, that diabolical Communist superpower still very much a villainous shadow in the American mindset. I caught that game; I had the fever. Me and my dad cheered them on and whooped as one when the chromakeyed clock in the upper lefthand corner of our family television screen hit naught for the last time. It made such an impact on me that 20 years later, when I wrote the timeline for Rhino's '80s pop culture box, I gave that entry a little extra play, augmenting it with names and figures. So Mike Eruzione, wherever you are, there's a 7-CD set with your name in it forever. And Kajagoogoo.

There were so many ways you could fuck it up: Look at Remember The Titans, hamhanded product slathered in buttered syrup poured by the blind. After leaving the theater your breath smelled like waffles. But with Miracle you're in the confident hands of professional schmaltz dealers who understand the moviegoer's individual limits and keep the truculent string crapola to a relieving minimum, and only to propel the story to its happy ending. What's so great is that it's all mostly true, tailor-made for the Disney treatment. You have a main character, Herb Brooks (K.R., as I call him), who as a young hockey player was cut before the 1960 Olympics and was haunted by its spectre deep into his legendary coaching career, and who did employ unorthodox methods to whip a ragtag buncha New England scrappers no one believed in into modern-day miracle workers and national heroes. You have a player, Jack O'Callahan, who was injured during the astonishing medal run and who was cleared for the Big Game. You have a team that did get their collective buttcheeks ripped from their bodies and handed back to them on their own ice 10-3 by the "Bad Guys," only to emerge victorious against them later in a rally for the history books. Yet there's a depth to this film missing from the other odes to rah-rah; the players seem fully formed human beings with their own histories, not rusted components of a crumbling formula slaving to support the pursuits of a possessed, virtuous protagonist.

And Kurt--Kurt is majestic here. Easily his best performance ever, trumping even his troubled L.A. cop in 2003's Dark Blue, where he has a final scene so powerful I turned it off. He had to play a man who can't believe he's confessing his transgressions, every vile, corrupt, thuggish act he's committed under the pretense of law. But circumstances and tragedy have forced every inflammatory accusation through his lips and into public record, charges that will topple not only his department but also destroy what precious little remains of his own empty life. In Miracle, Kurt vanishes into Herb Brooks, combing his impressive hair into a sensible, late-'70s Steve Garvey 'do and disappearing behind a lifetime of another man's letdowns and jowls, and speaking in that other man's voice. His countenance is otherwise concrete, but every now and then his eyes twinkle with hope and a tiny grin curls haphazardly across his puss like it's peeking around a corner. Even a scene as simple as the one near the end, when Herb gathers his troops and makes them listen to the crowd chanting "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" is beyond magical. He huddles them and says in barely controlled glee (well, as barely controlled as Herb can muster), "You heyur dat? ... We can BEAT dese guys!" And you know it too. You want it. You believe it. And that sugary lump, the one you get when something great's about to go down, climbs happily up your throat.

Call me a sap, but, yes, Al Michaels, I do believe in miracles.

2004-05-18T11:24:00.001-07:00

Well, it's one of those days. I started with the Swans' Public Castration Is A Good Idea, a great record if, like me, you have a secret masochistic love for epic-length industrial monotones with an occasional shouted lyric like "FLESH!" or "MONEY!" or "DIE!" The Swans, of course, are best known for their classic "Cop," immortalized on one of Henry Rollins' best spoken-word albums, whose name currently escapes me (Was it Human Butt?). The lyrics: "Nothing beats you...like a cop...in jail!" Hell, yeah. That was followed by a sojourn through the careful blooz of Jimmy Reed. If I'm feeling a little better this afternoon, maybe I'll whip out the new Ween live album.

Tony Randall is gone! Jack Lemmon...Walter Matthau...Jack Klugman...The Odd Couple will have its Heavenly run forever. Wait 'til Neil Simon gets up there and writes a new script. But Tony--man, was he not the most likeable guy in show business? To be a beloved face for five generations of fans, not to mention a new father at 77, is quite an accomplishment. Bravo, Tony. We loved you.

Last night I rewatched The War Room. It was like watching life on a distant planet. God, were we ever that hopeful for the future? Also, can we please have a charismatic Democratic frontrunner at least one more time before the world ends? As much as I'm going to vote for him with all my heart, John Kerry's pulse lies somewhere between Chuck Robb (watch A Perfect Candidate, and if you're not asleep by the time his mouth drops open to harrumph his stentorian gobbledegook, you must be heavily caffeinated) and Helen Hayes--and he doesn't even have the hot-daughter factor working in his favor, like Al Gore. Oh, sweet Karenna! Sue! Don't be jealous! Karenna! Don't go!

Sigh. I'll never be in love again.

2004-05-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a whole week. What's there to talk about? Hmmm. Well, let's start with Donald Rumsfeld's pathetic public performance last week. His calm, diplomatic facade faded quickly (apparently he either doesn't like or is not accustomed to being questioned), vanishing entirely once the gladhanding was over and John McCain got on the mic and old-school-freestyled him into sucka MCdom. Ted Kennedy offered no shelter. Rumsfeld was a cornered hyena, teeth bared, hair on end, flustered, frightened, puddling 'neath his paws--hardly the sturdy rock of Condi Rice. He devolved to his usual petulant-child syndrome, sneering and condescending, his voice tinged with a freeroaming contempt. It was a sight to behold. No one was impressed. This administration's going down not in flames but in bountiful buckets of shit, and they're oblivious to the Reaper's call. The Bush gang is similar to the Nixon regime (or early-'70s Vegas): a collection of cancerous growths flailing in vain against the dying light and the coming dawn of another, highly anticipated world. Yet I feel more exhausted than celebratory. These last four years--the last two, in particular, and the last week, definitely--have been sickening. The photos of Iraqi prison abuse. The beheading of Nicolas Berg. An otherwise indifferent White House still playing Secret Boys Club. I flash back to all my history classes, where I read about wartime atrocities, subterfuge, and corruption from the safety of what I naively believed was a civilized age. It's only the further, stinging reverberation of that old chestnut: History will teach us nothing. Humanity is just the same old horrors in different clothes.

On to a lighter subject a little closer and very near/dear to my heavy heart: Pop culture, and how it applies to decades. I'm not a proponent of the VH1 approach (no offense to my friends at VH1), where you take everything and whip it all up into a frothy, vapid concoction for starry-eyed 16-year-olds (just so they can envy those of us who survived), and give it a touch of merengue-flavored cynicism, where you embrace the decade and rise above it at the same time. You see the trend with those various-artist compilations that I've always thought were assembled rather haphazardly and cruelly: "Hey, remember all that stupid crap we used to think was cool? Well, here it is, in an exciting new suit!" This basically defined the '80s, which, in my opinion, was a dull, oppressive period rife with social sadism--where Bush Mach 2 would've flourished as President--but, according to the popsters and hipsters, was actually a mucho-cheeso fun-fucking ride down a happy, Rubiks Cube-lined trail of angeldust and drum machines. I saw a teenaged girl recently with an "I'm an '80s Kid!" t-shirt and I wanted to drop-kick her to Venus. First of all, being born in the '80s does not make you an '80s kid; being a kid IN THE DECADE ITSELF, with ACTUAL MEMORIES OF THE DECADE, does. Second of all, '80s kids would not go around bragging about being an '80s kid. Fuck the '80s. There. I said it. Fuck 'em with the broomstick NWA was saving for Ice Cube. You wanna throw your legwarmers around the decade of Reaganomics, Capri Sun, and greed, go for it. I got better things to do. Like laundry.

That said, these same popsters and funsters and jivesters have now set their sights on doing the same thing to the '90s. THIS MUST NOT HAPPEN. I'm already seeing the various-artist compilations, now with the buxom, o-mouthed blonde in flannel as opposed to big-booty-hotpants, under ever-so-laughable titles like The Alternative '90s and Alternative Classics. If you've ever seen the movie Hype (1995), there's a parody commercial before the opening credits that pokes fun at this very thing. Sad fact is, now it's come to pass. We now have that track roll over shots of Gen Xers in love. Soon there'll be '90s parties, where women will wear paste-on Van Dykes and graying businessmen will wield 40-oz. Chardonnays while whoot-whooting to Right Said Fred. And everything that was beautiful about the decade will be lost, reduced to sound bites and ol' standards like "Rico Suave," a world where Juliana Hatfield and Velocity Girl will have long been forgotten by even the most blue-blooded gazer of shoe.

I'm doing my part. Stay tuned.....

2004-05-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

If man is five, if man is five, if man is five...God, I'd forgotten how much I loved the Pixies.

2004-05-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

Hey, whaddaya know, it's morning in America. Yesterday Bush said he found the treatment of prisoners of war "abhorrent," which means someone had to write that word down for him and spend six-seven hours teaching him to say it phonetically.

2004-05-05T13:04:00.000-07:00

Random thought for a lunchtime:

Can you believe someone actually got paid for submitting the "I'm Lovin' It!" campaign to McDonald's, and that McDonald's went ahead and trademarked the phrase? First off, it should be illegal to copyright a vapid, slimy exclamation that's been part of the social lexicon for, oh, at least 30 years. It's not even regionally exclusive (though I must admit I've heard it a million more times in Los Angeles meeting rooms than I ever did in Oregon). That's like claiming ownership of "Hello, how are you?" or "Looks like rain." Secondly, if you're going to trademark something, it should be clever--BY LAW. How can you possibly be proud of masterminding "I'm Lovin' It!" when there are so many brilliant turns of phrase orphaned in the wind, flashing their gams in an attempt to capture an enterprising copywriter's attention? Why couldn't you give it just six more minutes, then burst into the Golden Arches conference room and say, "You know, I can't think of a goddamn thing to sell your crappy food. What was wrong with You Deserve A Break Today? Not hip-hop enough for Grimace? Why don't you just drape Mayor McCheese in a Kangol pajama suit, slap a Sprite into his bling-blinged paws, and have him say, 'I got me a QP Deuce-Deuce and some Macked-Out Fries, and I'm lovin' it like a pimp loves a bitch who knows when to shut the fuck up and get me my Benjizzos' and have Yellowcard do the 'two all-beef patties' bit, except make the 'patties' a reference to big booties and have the lead singer go wink-wink when you get to the 'special sauce' part, and Ronald really needs a wifebeater and bleached, spiky-red hair."

2004-05-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

Now is the winter of our discotheque. Last night I finished Simon Louvish's Keystone, chronicling the rise, fall, and eventual demise of Mack Sennett, a most tragic Hollywood figure once revolutionary then rendered mediocre by the passing of time--a fate that befell many of his silent-film contemporaries. For those not familiar with the name, Mack Sennett was one of American cinema's first successful comedy producers/directors, and certainly the most prolific of his time. His Sennett Studios launched the Keystone Cops, the Sennett Bathing Beauties, and the film careers of Charles Chaplin, Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin, and Mabel Normand (who herself was the victim of scandal then neglect, then early death). Sadly, his juvenile slapstick irreverence proved no match for evolving tastes, and by the sound era, he was finished. Add to that an unrequited love for Ms. Normand (a character trait Louvish disputes), and you've got the standard tear-wrencher, meticulously researched. For added entertainment I heartily recommend Sennett's own memoirs: short on truth, long on fantasy, but with a flow like Chardonnay and a punch like Pabst Blue Ribbon.

One question I was left with after Keystone is: What is this strange preoccupation British biographers have with sexual orientation? Last year I read Kenneth Lynn's Charles Chaplin And His Times, and I swear ta God the author couldn't get enough of weighing the evidence. Chaplin? Gay? Hello? Where have you been? The dude's heterosexuality has been well documented not only in interviews but also in frikkin' FBI files and court transcripts! The man was a sexual beast; no barely legal pigtail was safe once it bobbed past his crosshairs. He lived in a world fascinated by the scandalous adventures of his aging dick. Simon Louvish is no different, contemplating Mack Sennett's peccadiloes, all unproven (Mack is not known to have ever lived with a woman other than his mother, though he was witnessed squiring actresses about town) or mere teases made ambiguous by the passing of almost a century and the cattiness of the anonymous storyteller's tongue. Louvish devotes the book's entire coda to an exploration of Mack's sexuality. Did he really love Mabel Normand, as he repeated often in his own memoirs, where even the contemporary reader can feel the aching of his heart, or was it just an interesting chip that he added to his legend, to mask the fact that he loved the cock? Lovish's conclusion: Who cares? Exactly. Who cares? Why the hell give it a whole chapter?

There's something seriously wrong with the English. Except Sue Ellicott. She wouldn't judge Mack Sennett too, would she?

2004-05-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

Who could hang a name on a day like today? Had an interesting weekend. I was talking with a friend and told her about this odd dream I'd had about her a few nights before. She's a waitress, so quite naturally we fade in (or iris--I've always been a proponent of the iris; that poor camera trick gets such short shrift in the post-silent era) at a restaurant where I, typically, played the oh-so-important role of First-Person Customer. I don't remember specific details; somehow we ended up leaving the restaurant together, and she said, "I have to stop off at my place to get some stuff." Her "place" turned out to be a towering, almost Gothic inn, replete with palatial dining area, oak-kissed walls, and endless corridors of doors and rooms. "Wow," I gaped as we stood in the lobby. "You live here?" "Yes," she beamed proudly, "and all the rooms are mine."

Needless to say, she immediately plunged head-first into the gutter. "Man," she giggled, fanning herself. "That sounds really provocative, Cory! Whew!" You'll probably call me a liar (or--even worse--naive), but somehow, that never occurred to me. If it had, I certainly wouldn't have been blabbing about it. What did it mean? I have no idea, but eroticism was the furthest thing from my mind; the dream's events would hardly lend themselves to sexual interpretation, unless it's rampant with Freudian complexities and associative imagery I don't have the time to investigate.

Anyway, in conculsion, be advised to stay out of my dreams. They're a hotbed of debauchery.

2004-04-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

All I gotta say is, hooray, Joel Stein!

2004-04-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

Well, it's lunchtime, so I guess I can spare a few to scribble some random doodaddery. First off, why is everybody so jubilant over the ouster of Michael Eisner? I may be the only one, but I think it's a mistake. Comcast ain't gonna save 'em--they're just another in a neverending succession of trophy-hunting companies with a media monopolization jones--and Roy Disney may have been blessed with the name, but he isn't worth the street value of a Donald Duck comic book. People hate Michael Eisner because he's rich and powerful, the now-evergreen figure of the Evil Corporate Elite, but keep in mind that Eisner saved Disney's rodential ass in the early '80s when the studio was completely lost at sea, pumping out bad animated features, dismal adventure epics, and--well--Popeye, where the power came from cocaine, not spinach, and certainly not a coherent script. The Mouse House desperately wanted to be a Hollywood contender again, not an abandoned Cannery Row of stale kiddie flicks flirting on the PG periphery, and Michael Eisner helped them make that leap. He rescued them from the Reaper. And this is how they repay him? He's responsible for the very ivory seats their very Brooks Brothersed asses occupy. They wanted power. He got them power. For years and years he shoved fistfuls of it down their accepting gullets. He did what he was supposed to do. And now, because he stands in the way of a lucrative Comcast offer, it's suddenly time for him to go?

I'll admit that I have little love for Michael Eisner, and a regime change was inevitable. But he deserves a better sendoff than this, and under better circumstances. These guys, their corporate greed disguised as homespun horse sense (the Common ManTM was patented years ago; he no longer exists except to solicit public sympathy and evoke memories of the Good Old Days(R), brought to you by Country Time Lemonade), have dropped him dead center into their war zone without a hand pistol. His captors cackle with unrestrained bloodlust, responding to his escape attempts with just enough retaliatory gunfire to drive him to his knees.

Oh, and there was a plane circling NBC earlier, its banner pleading the studio's lunching executives to keep Ed on the air.

2004-04-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

This weekend--uneventful. Saw The Alamo on Saturday and enjoyed it a little more than I thought I would. Still a bit treacly, but this time the syrup's applied with a pen-point and not a paintgun--it's more like a squeeze bottle than a screwcap-topped Mrs. Butterworth. There's also, you know, the whole glorifying-the-eventually-successful-defense-of-blood-soaked-land-from-its-original-inhabitants thang, but I think it was handled fairly--well, at the very least, OKallright. Billy Bob Thornton is now my new favorite celluloid Davy Crockett, capturing the perfect balance between an unassuming "aw shucks, fellers" frontier politician persona of the Jackson era, a fierce warrior when the shitfires come, and a man contending with his own overblown legend, which, in some cases, is tragically inaccurate. Historians may argue over his Alamo fate for the rest of eternity, but I'd like to think it happened just like in the movie (I'll concede that maybe his last words weren't "I gotta warn you boys: I'm a screamer.").

I also discovered I can burn CDs on my new computer. In my excitement I threw together the following various-artist funk/soul collection, Funky Soul Fries, Vol. 1 (...and the ketchup pitched a bitch!):

1. DOWN HOME GIRL – The Coasters
2. CHICKEN – Sly & The Family Stone
3. WHAT IT IS? – The Undisputed Truth
4. BROTHER ON THE RUN (OPENING) – Johnny Pate & Adam Wade
5. END TITLES (THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE) – David Shire
6. ARE YOU MAN ENOUGH? – The Four Tops
7. DOWN & OUT IN NEW YORK CITY – James Brown
8. LOVE CAN BE ANYTHING (CAN’T NOTHING BE LOVE BUT LOVE) – The Temptations
9. TELL IT TO MY FACE - Bloodstone
[Note: Shit cuts off at the end.]
10. HIJACKIN’ (aka I’M GONNA HI-JACK YA, KIDNAP YA, TAKE WHAT I WANT) (Long Version) – Holland-Dozier-Holland
11. WHAT AM I WAITING FOR – The O’Jays
12. I’M GONNA KEEP ON LOVING YOU – Johnnie Taylor
13. WHEN DID YOU STOP LOVING ME, WHEN DID I STOP LOVING YOU – Marvin Gaye
14. JAWS – Johnny Otis
15. THE JAM – Graham Central Station
16. MISS LUCIFER’S LOVE - Funkadelic

In retrospect, I should've clipped "Miss Lucifer's Love"; "The Jam" is the more appropriate coda: the loose vamping, the breakneck train-wreck flow no one can quite believe they're surviving, but you know that shit is tight. I wanted a Funkadelic song, though, and the one I reallyreallyREALLY wanted, "I Call My Baby Pussycat," bleeds for about 10 seconds into the following track on America Eats Its Young, so I couldn't use it, because it cuts off at a rather inopportune moment (the dreaded cut-off, however, didn't stop me from jettisoning Bloodstone's "Tell It To My Face" because of its missing half-second--now THERE's a jarring transition). All my other Funkadelic albums are at work or cry for liberation from my dad's CD collection, augmented by a thousand albums that used to belong to me. And, yeah: maybe the Johnnie Taylor wasn't right; Eargasm is a terribly limp record lost in dated disco and could hardly be considered funky or entirely soulful, but, again, my Johnnie Taylor best-of (with classics like "Jody"--that jive-ass homewrecker!) is back with Pops, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, I couldn't resist the juxtaposition of "I'm Gonna Keep On Loving You" and "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You"--a broken-vowed trail we often follow in affairs of the heart; incidentally, the latter is taken from the classic Here, My Dear, a worthwhile concept addition to any collection; rarely do records get this personal. The Reverend might ask me, "Where's 'Hell Up In Harlem'?" but dude'll have to wait for Volume 2, which should have Funkadelic's "Red Hot Mama," Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man," something from Funky Nassau that isn't "Funky Nassau," and a host of others.

2004-04-22T09:16:00.000-07:00

OK, like, so I bought Eats, Shoots & Leaves last night. Now I'm reveling in its and it's as contraction and possessive (but never in the latter instance), explanations all rendered in the loveliest, fiestiest, most piquant English, and I've never been happier. I've been haunted most of my life by the "Oxford comma" (adding a comma before the "and" in a sequential list). All through school I was taught to use it, then in the early 1990s, when I got into newspapers, I had to unlearn it, only to be required to add it back almost a decade later when I changed jobs.

The flexibility of the language is fun. Admissions like this will keep me from kissing a girl this year.

2004-04-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

Ah, the hell with Bob Woodward. This is the book I gotta get. I don't know why, but stuff on the history of punctuation and sentence structure just fascinates the tea out of me.

2004-04-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

Well, hello. In the midst of doing melodic research for a project, and I'm constantly amazed at how great Temple Of The Dog actually were. My God. Too bad they were a one-shot deal, a Seattle supergroup (crafted from the remnants of Mother Love Bone after Andy Wood's tragic death, with Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, and Jeff Ament mere nanoseconds from forming Pearl Jam with background vocalist Eddie Vedder; Soundgarden's Chris Cornell screeches and scorches like the god he is. Then you've got Matt Cameron, who kitted for both Soundgarden and Pearl Jam--it was all one big, happy family) kickin' much ass between stints in future myths. I might have to spin this bitch one more time.

2004-04-20T10:17:00.000-07:00

I'm on the fence about buying the new Bob Woodward book. On the one hand, its reportage should be sterling. On the other, it's Bob Woodward, and that turkey-headed shitbagger couldn't write crackling prose if Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ben Hecht, and Mark Leyner crawled inside his body for a Bacchanalian orgy and spawned a race of super scribes who each took turns possessing his typing fingers.

2004-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:00

Man, don't y'all hate it when your days are both exhilarating and shitty? It's like crashing a helicopter into Hooters, but it turns out that it's closed, although Uma Thurman just happens to stop by and announces that she'll give her body and soul for a cigarette lighter, but you don't smoke, so she walks away, but she falls off a cliff, but you save her, but you're both confronted and partially devoured by mountain lions, but they're chased off by a herd of wild moose before they reach any vital organs or appendages, but the moose eat your shoes off, and there's nothing but lava rock for miles.

My day's been like that.

2004-04-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

Kill Bill, Vol. 2 this weekend at the movies. Please support DeAnn's patriotic Harvey Weinstein boycott by refusing to purchase any bare-bones editions of this future contender for Star Wars greatness. Speaking of Harvey, I'm sure his bathroom door is locked this weekend after Kill Bill, Vol. 1's sales burst.

Don't know what to say about The Punisher. It was always one of those rags my buddy Aaron always tried to get me to read when we were kids. This was back in the mid-to-late-1980s, when, thanks to the successful Platoon and its Hamburger Hill spawn, literally every character in Stan Lee's blessed Marvel canon became a Vietnam War vet with psychological issues. Hell, they even launched a comic-book series called The Nam (also known as The Shit), where readers who weren't thrown by its almost cartoonish drawing style, learned all about sucking chest wounds and sucking in general. Rest assured my love affair with comics was short-lived; I was back to Mort Drucker and Mad magazine in no time.

Reading Helter Skelter I'd forgotten just how flat-out wacky Manson's interpretation of The Beatles' White Album was--lotta stretching involved there and not enough Tae Bo (could you imagine Squeaky Fromme's Aerobics?). I've decided that The Flaming Lips' Soft Bulletin record is actually a wake-up call for the rebirth of the Nazi party, a rallying cry that only I may heed. The title itself is a harsh indictment of the master race's slothful, ambivalent nature (soft), with the word "bulletin" representing either the record as a dossier--or "bulletin" being a combination of "bullet" and "in," as in "I put a bullet in some lip-flapping pig. Helter Skelter's coming down fast!" I haven't quite decided which interpretation is true--whichever scores me the most looped, hot, easily impressionable hippie chicks. Then you got the songs, right? "Waiting For Superman." Obviously, the song's directed at me. "Cory," Wayne is saying, "we need you to lead us." Either that or he's saying, "Cory, could you return that copy of Action Comics #65 I loaned to you back in '97?" But I ruled that out because it involves common courtesy, not the offing of pigs. "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate" is the triumphant anthem of our New World Order, which we'll warble annually in beer halls while toasting the successful destruction of the prior ruling class. Of course, "The Gash," with its accusatory lyrics ("Is that gash/in your leg/really why/you must stop/'Cause I've noticed/all the others/though they're gashed/they're still going"), condemns all who would oppose me, or who would dare surrender in the heat of battle. There's no room for pussies in Zaireeka Nation.

2004-04-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

My resolve to manage the world's finest blog eroded this morning when I noticed that Morning Sedition still hasn't returned to my radio, thanks to some shady corporate underhandedness. Air America's been all-Spanish since yesterday, with no Sue Ellicott to beam from the heavens and make my dawns crackle with her sultry English timbre. Sue, if you're out there, please hear my call and belt my name from the mountaintops. El mundo is muy frio without you.

2004-04-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

Just got word from an informed source that the Tears For Fears record has been pushed back to May. Mehhhh...

2004-04-14T09:38:00.000-07:00

Well, last night's checklist was a bust. I bought two new pairs of jeans, then walked over to the Borders to complete it all in one fell swoop. I knew something was up when I saw suspiciously empty DVD shelf space in four New Releases bins and the "K"s were literally wiped clean from Action/Adventure. My fears were confirmed by the ubercool and uberapologetic clerk: "Oh, hell, yes. We got those in this morning, and they were all gone by lunch. It was scary!" I shoulda guessed that in a town where Scarface is king, Kill Bill Vol. 1 didn't stand a chance. But then, DeAnn tells me to wait, so I must wait. So stock all the damn Kill Bills you want, you nasty Borders, because I'm not fingering Uma's exquisite form laid flat under plastic until it's adorned by the Special Edition band. I found solace, however, in a consolation grab of one of my favorites, The Sunshine Boys, with Walter Matthau, George Burns, and Richard Benjamin.

The Borders didn't have the new Tears For Fears either (OR the They Might Be Giants EP), but that's OK. I'm typing this blather to the tune of The New Pornographers, who kinda remind me of The Move ca. "Fire Brigade," but with digital equipment and without lines about "lesbian rage." But can the Pornos singe my mind with something as exquisite as "Blackberry Way"? It shall be seen.

And yes, Tears For Fears are freakin' old. But what y'all gotta remember is that I'm pretty old myself. Why, I remember when Andy Kaufman and John Belushi were still alive. I remember when Richard Pryor did stand-up comedy. I remember teenaged girls bringing Air Supply records to school. I can recollect most of the 1970s in random bursts of color, beginning with my father (then about 10 years younger than I am now) telling me that the nasal "Hi" uttered at the crackling outset of The Beach Boys' "The Trader" (from the notorious Holland LP, my rather auspicious introduction to the Wilson Gang) came from a little boy who lived in the speakers. The 1980s I can remember in stoopid-dope clarity, especially the years 1985-1986, when a certain masterpiece by the name of Songs From The Big Chair kept my heart warm with new teenaged lub. I can't hear "Head Over Heels" without remembering Heather Bass absent-mindedly twirling a black lock of her hair while reading a magazine, a simple, innocent quirk that turned my brain into cotton candy. "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" finds me in Home Ec, enjoying the countdown to summer freedom. "Working Hour," "Shout," Listen," "Broken"--can't nail a dud. The duo of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith followed a few years later, long after everyone'd approved their application for the One-Timers Club, with the brilliant Sowing The Seeds Of Love, then Curt left, and everything got fucked, then Roland left (though he dropped a decent solo record a couple years ago), and the Tears and Fears and everything that was once good and pure trickled through the openings of the pop-culture manhole and ran like tainted blood into VH1. Gone was the focus on their melodic sharpness and symphonic majesty, and--ah, fuck it. In any case, Curt is BACK, Tears For Fears are BACK, Heather Bass is probably twirling her hair somewhere, the new album is called Everybody Loves A Happy Ending, and I'm a sentimental old cuss with disposable cash. BRING IT!

2004-04-13T16:53:00.000-07:00

Reminder to self for 04/13:

--KILL BILL, VOL. 1
--New Tears For Fears
--Jeans

2004-04-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

I just had an argument with a so-called "friend." He insisted that "Boddhisatva" is the best song on Steely Dan's Countdown To Ecstasy. I told him "Pearl Of The Quarter" is. He called me a sentimentalist, I shot him in the head.

2004-04-13T09:20:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the month again. Like clockwork, George W. Bush emerges from the Oval Inferno tonight for one of his innumerable press conferences, where he soothes our national qualms and calmly responds--in soft, dulcet tones reminiscent of his father--to reporters' questions with the clarity and commitment we've come to expect from this administration. My sources in the White House have confirmed that he intends to take the intelligence community to task for their reports, and will make an impassioned plea to his global audience to spring for his advanced Hooked On Phonics workbooks so he can finally determine what the hell's actually going on, what with all the fancypants words everybody uses in government documents to come off like big shots.

2004-04-12T16:10:00.000-07:00

I went to Subway at lunch today and discovered an offshoot of the now-infamous shitbricking Play-Doh brained oblivious gleeful assholed suckers of sock (a classification now recognized by the Poynter Institute): the Cellphoned Dickear. I'm talking about those waddling creatures who use the wonder of technology to piss total strangers off, those beasts who bounce rhythmically from foot to foot while taking complicated food orders from some other asshole who couldn't be bothered to accompany Cellphoned Dickear to the physical restaurant, those ripple-breathed swine who go to strenuous lengths to make sure the overall connection is terrible and that they have to repeat everything more than six times to both caller and "sandwich specialist" before anyone knows what the fuck's going on. The conversation usually goes like this.

SANDWICH DUDE: (unconvincingly) Welcome to Subway. Can I help you?
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: Yeah, uh, lemme, uh, lemme have like a, a fuckin' footlong meatball on, uh, honey oregano, and, uh, just a minute...
(punches in phone number, oblivious to the howls of protest)
CELLPHONED DICKEAR (finally making a connection): Yeah, fool, I'm at the Subway. What you want? Uh-huh. (looks at menu) Uh-huh. (looks some more) Do they even have that? I don't see it up here. (to SANDWICH DUDE) You guys have, like, a, uh...a, uh...a, uh...you know, like, a thing of soup?
SANDWICH DUDE: Yeah, we got soup.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: I don't see it up there.
SANDWICH DUDE: Kinda soup.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: (back on phone) Kinda soup? (to SANDWICH DUDE) Kinda soup you got?
SANDWICH DUDE: Today it's broccoli cream or green beans and pomegranate.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: (back on phone) Yeah, you get that? (to SANDWICH DUDE) What's the soups again?
SANDWICH DUDE: Broccoli cream...
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: (on phone) Broccoli cream...
SANDWICH DUDE: Green beans 'n' pomegranate.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: (on phone) Green beans 'n' pomegranate.
(pause.)
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: Naw, he don't want no soup. Well, whatchoo want, fool, hurry up, I got a line behind me. (to SANDWICH DUDE) What's the special?
SANDWICH DUDE: Uh, right now we got a pastrami extract meal for $3.99.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: (on phone) Pastrami extract meal for $3.99. (to SANDWICH DUDE) What comes with that?
SANDWICH DUDE: Uh, medium drink, chips, and a cookie.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: What kinda chips?
SANDWICH DUDE: Uh, any kinda you want.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: (on phone) You get that? OK. (to SANDWICH DUDE) Hey, man, you got any, like, sandwiches that taste like a Bacon Double Cheeseburger?
SANDWICH DUDE: Well, you can put bacon and cheese on... whatever.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: Naw, I mean, like, the meat--like, can you take a whole bunch of meatballs and smash them into, like, a real long hamburger patty or some shit, you know, and just wipe off the sauce?
SANDWICH DUDE: No.
CELLPHONED DICKEAR: (back on phone) Can't do that, man. OK. (to SANDWICH DUDE) Nah, he don't want nothin'.

2004-04-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I completed 20 new pages of a first draft I began in 1994; I'm in unexplored territory now, splashing in the void sans waterwings. It's an interesting experience, this attempt to jump-start vibes and emotions now 10 years gone, and make the transition like a smooth piece of film--the happy, content 31-year-old masquerading as the gloomy, pessimistic 21-year-old who thought he was doomed to an existence on the periphery. In order to pull this off, I usually have to psych myself out from within, kinda pile the world's weight on my brain, close my eyes, and let my fingers go crazy, snatching every remembered scrap of bullshit and desperation from every corner and breathing into it a sorta sad-sack glory.

The hardest part has proven to be the dialogue. I hate writing dialogue in fiction, because inevitably every character winds up sounding like the writer, speaking in a stupendously literate voice they couldn't have possibly mustered had they been real people. To me, it's always a copout when you pick up a book, and there's, like, an eight-year-old character, and he's way too wry and lucid for his age, leaning on a fanciful polysyllabicism like a wrought-iron crutch. But then, on the other hand, if you opt for realism, how do you make the conversations between characters in their early 20s interesting, when on paper they seem so banal? Stay tuned...

In other news, I was at the bookstore on Saturday and impulsively bought a copy of Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, which I hadn't read since the eighth grade. Amazing how the story has more resonance when you actually live in Southern California and are familiar with the grounds the Family once trod. "Wow, the LaBiancas lived near Griffith Park? I go through that park every day!" "Hey, I've been to a party on Cielo Drive!" "The Manson Girls squatted at the corner of Temple and Broadway, right outside the Hall of Justice? Dude, I walk over that spot every night!" It's an extra jolt of terror, to know that you blithely brush past the almost phantasmic presence of one of California's darkest chapters.

Listening to the new Modest Mouse. Great shit.

2004-04-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

Attention to all the fine ladies I've crushed on since roughly 1977, beginning with Mary Shae Brickamoore, to whom I made the sweetest of honeyed Bat Out Of Hell love in the back of my parent's Chevy Nova, and the fiery-tressed Debbie Provost, the greatest babysitter to ever work at the Whittier Kentucky Fried Chicken:

You have been replaced in my heart by Sue Ellicott on Air America's Morning Sedition. That's right. Don't cry. Don't succumb to the medicine cabinet's hypnotic gaze. Please don't barrage her with hate e-mail, please don't call her names, please don't parade through the streets outside her studio unless you're in a hearty throng shouting, "Cory Frye is the sweetest guy who ever lived, and you should give it all up for him!" She's English, so she can't help that she's automatically cute and smart. They're just born that way--'cept Tony Blair, and I have it on good authority that his baby bum was first swatted by a Wisconsin doctor. I'm a native Californian, so I can't help that I'm on drugs--in this case, the deadly SWOONENOL. Oh, Sue!

2004-04-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the esteemed Mannogod Reverend Speats, who's performed legendary humanitarian work in Denmark and Turkey without ever leaving the bathhouse, sounded off on a certain genus very dear to my heart: Shitbricking Playdoh-brained oblivious gleeful assholed suckers of cock--specifically, shitbricking Playdoh-brained oblivious gleeful assholed suckers of cock who occupy too much precious vinyl space on Los Angeles transit buses. I've felt the squeeze from both ends, where you have to either splay your pretzel-configured arms and eyeteeth against a grimy window where someone's etched HILL ST TRESE 01, using the fossilized gum to dot his I, followed by a list of said firm's (like The Firm, as in Foxxy Brown's "We the firm, baby!") board of directors; or experience the spinal jolt of half-cheek, where you're kinda sorta in the seat, kinda sorta sitting on oxygen. Why? Because you're forced to share with the Human Scissors, who's performing a bored form of the splits while either sleeping or just in general exercising his birthright as a shitbricking Playdoh-brained oblivious gleeful assholed sucker of cock, which is akin to being asleep forever, occasionally disrupting your slumber with a series of excited grunts, lethargic gasps, and gaseous bursts of numbing nothingness. If they're wearing earphones, they're usually listening to Nelly. If there's a cellphone anywhere on their girth, chances are it'll bleat a happy cucharacha or the first six notes of "Dre Day" at least 12 times during the ride, followed by 17-minute conversations that begin "Sup, fool? Yeah. Yeah. Ah told that bitch ah be there 'round six. She trippin'. What Alexa say? What Alexa say? I say what Alexa say? OH, SHIT! OH SHIIITDAWG! Later. Ican'talkrightnowahmonthebus. What? Naw, man, what? OH SHIT! DAAAAAYUM!" And if you're lucky, it'll be one of those fashionably ire-rousing two-way walkie-talkie jobs where you can feast heartily upon both ends of the ass.

2004-04-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

BURNING DOWN MY MASTERS HOUSE: MY LIFE AT THE NEW YORK TIMES is probably the most difficult book I've ever had to read--not because of the subject matter, but because after literally every paragraph I fought the urge to book a flight to New York to kick Jayson Blair's ham-fisted ass up and down about nine blocks of brownstone. He has learned NOTHING from his experience at the New York Times, inadvertently painting an unflattering picture of a porcelain-ego'd, emotionally retarded coward who, despite his passable if unremarkably mediocre linguistic flair, was given the journalistic opportunity of a lifetime and responded by taking an ungrateful shit on everyone who backed him, and who astonishingly continued to support him even as the allegations accumulated. I closed the book with the same questions I had when I saw his self-righteous puss on the cover: Why did he manufacture quotes and lift descriptive passages wholesale from other writers' pieces (and if you ever read this book, you'll wonder if perhaps the most potent verbiage in his Times ouevre were, in fact, cribbed)? Why did he deceive an entire newsroom? What purpose did that serve? Why did he pretend to file stories from other states when in reality he was sitting in his Brooklyn apartment, surfing the Web or watching television? He offers no explanations. The promise of "I lied and I lied--and then I lied some more" is quickly undone by mountains of excuses and attacks. That sentence is about as candid as he gets.

Highlights:

--A newsroom stripling outraged that a veteran editor would dare disagree with him.

--A man who claims that because of his skin color, he had to work twice as hard and log twice as many hours as a white reporter to get noticed, but apparently his old-fashioned work ethic doesn't extend to--you know--WRITING HIS OWN SENTENCES AND DOING HIS OWN LEGWORK. In fact, there's a deliciously brilliant passage early on when he learns that a paragraph he's hijacked came from an AP story written by someone he actually knows. Jayson has the audacity in book form to express confusion when this woman speaks curtly to him on the phone.

--A man who claims a hardscrabble life growing up black in the white South (I've never been to the South, but I'm kinda sure there are some black people hiding around there somewhere, maybe even living in houses, paying taxes, and going to school), yet never cites a single personal incident during his childhood where his race came into play.

--A man bitching that he gets no respect upon his Times arrival, a man oblivious to the fact that there are hierarchies in newspapers. Editors are largely and legendarily oblivious to new faces; maybe they'll eventually notice you, but you gotta PROVE YOURSELF. CONSISTENTLY. Especially at that level. But dude fires daggers at anyone who isn't shoveling heaps of accolades onto his ego the second he enters their crosshairs.

--All the women in the book call him "honey" or "sweetheart" and cry every time he opens his mouth. Some even fuck him.

--He hints at sexual abuse. Never explains it, but he wears it like a badge and flashes it every so often when he feels the sympathy pendulum swinging away. He just throws it out there, like an explosive tossed by a man losing an argument.

--The most vivid paragraph in the book covers his attempt to hang himself with his belt in a coffeehouse bathroom. It literally resonates (or percolates) with narcissistic melodrama.

--He checks himself into a psychiatric ward for a few days, and HE LEARNS SO MUCH WOTTA SURVIVOR. Plus, all the patients admire him; one even says, "You have been so important to me."

--Which brings up his recollection of other people's quotes. In Jayson Blair's world, everyone speaks in the same stunted bursts and exposition, even when excited, like "Here's the deal. We are not sure what the hell caused this. KeySpan is at the scene over there checking to see if it was a problem with one of their lines. We got one dead, an older gay guy, and the elderly couple who owns the house is dead. The gay guy's lover, who also lived in the house, has been taken to the precint just so he can calm down, so everyone can make sure he is okay. ... The mayor's en route, and we are hoping to have some answers by the time he arrives. He's planning on touring the scene and giving a press conference at ten. ... I got to go, Jayson, but let's talk soon."

--Four years at a newspaper does not constitute a "life." May feel like it, but it's an insignificant period, a mere signpost, in a professional career.

At one point in this tale of fear and sniveling, he throws out the theory that there are reporters, and there are writers. They're two different beasts. I agree, and can only hope that Jayson realizes someday that he was decent at one, hopeless at another, and doesn't deserve another chance to be either.

2004-03-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

Hey there. Recently started reading Jim DeRogatis' Turn On Your Mind: Four Decades Of Great Psychedelic Rock. Mr. DeRogatis, a trusted moniker you might have espied mothering Let It Blurt and Milk It! into decent books, posits that psychedelic music has never left us; it's only mutated and entwined itself in the networks of progressive rock (the most obvious example of this being Yes, which matured in the tiny spaces between three albums from airy psychedelica into what became the prog-rock template) and eventually the mopey rock of The Cure and My Bloody Valentine. So far it's a great read; I'm learning a lot about LSD. In fact, I ate about four paragraphs in the introduction about two hours ago and have come to realize that the world is but an earthly blanket laying soothingly over the ohhhmmmmm of a global harmony which man cannot know at the conscious, human level, and that I love each and every one of you.

2004-03-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

ORIGINAL AIR DATE: March 9, 1951

GEORGE FENNEMAN (VO): Ladies and gentlemen, the National Broadcasting Company and the DeSoto-Plymouth Dealers of America present the one, the only--

CROWD: Groucho!

GROUCHO: Really?

GEORGE FENNEMAN (VO): You Bet Your Life!

(Music theme; applause)

GROUCHO: Thank you, thank you, your checks are in the mail. They're not being sent to you, but they're in the mail anyway, and that's called hitting the mail on the bread. There's a joke in there somewhere, but you might need a flashlight to find it. Or a periscope, depending on the depths to which you're willing to sink. Did you hear that sentence, George? Wasn't that classy?

GEORGE: Very well put, Groucho.

GROUCHO: So are you, George. And so's Ava Gardner, though I'm sure you're the better dancer. And if Ava were here, I'd tell you to hoof it somewhere else. Oh, where's Ava? I'm surrounded by vagabonds and Stanford graduates, which is redundant if you think about it. And speaking of redundant, let's get to today's secret word...

(Duck plummets down, the word RATIONAL around its neck)

GROUCHO: Rational. R-A-T-I-O-N-A-L. Bye bye, duckie.

(Duck rises out of camera range)

GROUCHO: George, did you know "ducky" is an English term meaning "peachy"?

GEORGE: I think I did hear that, Grouch.

GROUCHO: They've got their meats mixed up with their fruits out there in England, which explains why that country's in such a state. Or why that state's in such a country. In any case, it's incontinent. But crossing the Atlantic and getting back to our show, if one of our couples says the secret word, the duck will come down and award them 100 smackers, which is an old English term for dollars, which buys you a lot sausage. And speaking of sausage, George, why don't we get this monkey show on the road and bring out our first hot dogs.

GEORGE: Certainly, Groucho. Before the show we asked our audience to select two future talking-head pundits, one a child, the other as-yet unborn. They've selected Mr. William O'Reilly and Ms. Ann Coulter. Folks, come on out and meet ... Groucho Marx!

(Applause)

GROUCHO: Hello and welcome to You Bet Your Life. Say the secret word, and the duck will come down and give you a hundred dollars. It's a common word, something you use around the house. William O'Reilly and Ann Coulter--O'Reilly. A little Irish fella, eh? Where do you hail from, Darby O'Gill?

WILLIAM: Bill.

GROUCHO: Bill. Where's Bill? Under your hat? Under your duck?

WILLIAM: No, I'M Bill.

GROUCHO: You're awfully young to be a whole city. What's your curfew?

WILLIAM: I'm from the Westbury section of Levittown, New York.

GROUCHO: Where?

WILLIAM: Levittown.

GROUCHO: Is the town on an incline?

WILLIAM: No, LEVITtown, not LEVELtown.

GROUCHO: On a sharp decline, at least.

WILLIAM: I live in the Westbury section.

GROUCHO: No, I think they're two different cities.

WILLIAM: No.

GROUCHO: In fact, we played a wonderful theater out in Westbury many years ago, a little show called I'll Say She Is. It's a very nice area, if I recall.

WILLIAM: Actually, it's lower-middle class.

GROUCHO: Lower-middle, eh? So are you saying it's an abdominal existence? That joke's too old for you, Bill. It's almost too old for me. In fact, it delivered my father. So did my mother. Marked him HANDLE WITH CARE right into matrimony. Are you a married man?

WILLIAM: No, I'm only two years old.

GROUCHO: So what--you're never too young to be miserable. Soon as you're out of diapers, you're a marked man. And when you're in diapers, you're a messy man. You just can't win, Bill, so you might as well not even try. Which reminds me of an old joke about your last name. You wanna hear it?

WILLIAM: No.

GROUCHO: When an Irishman gets a headache, how does he take his pills?

WILLIAM: I don't know.

GROUCHO: O'Reilly. Now, wasn't that worth the wait?

WILLIAM: I guess.

GROUCHO: Save the guessing for the quiz portion, Bill. Is this your wife?

WILLIAM: No, she's just some lady they gave me backstage.

GROUCHO: They're giving away ladies backstage? George, you're the host now--I quit. I'll try my luck as a contestant. Ask me who's buried in Grant's tomb.

GEORGE: All right, who's buried in Grant's tomb?

GROUCHO: Who cares? Where are the women? Do I still have a sponsor?

(GROUCHO scampers to the front of the podium, where a placard still reads "DeSoto-Plymouth.")

GROUCHO: All right, Bill, take five. I'm gonna make time with your partner here. What's your name again, miss?

ANN: Ann Coulter.

GROUCHO: No, but I'm wearing a jacket.

ANN: No, my name is Ann COULTER.

GROUCHO: Any relation to Ann Arbor?

ANN: No.

GROUCHO: Good. We've done this before, so let's not go through Michigan.

ANN: I don't get it.

GROUCHO: We call that "reaching." A better joke would be: A crosseyed man with a lisp was taking target practice in Detroit, but he wasn't doing very well. So he put on a pair of corrective glasses and stepped closer to the target and said, "I'm not taking any chances; I don't want to Michigan."

ANN: Oh, brother.

GROUCHO: I've got four more of those if you're tired of me, but you can only exchange me for merchandise already in stock. Though it's only fair to warn you I stole those jokes from Chico. Did anyone ever tell you you're the spitting image of Francis the Talking Mule? Before you answer that with a belt across the mouth, let's play You Bet Your Life. Fenneman here'll explain the rules. Then someone'll come out and explain Fenneman.

GEORGE: Each couple starts off with $10. Groucho will ask you three questions, and you can bet as much of that $10 as you'd like. The couple earning the most money by the end of the show gets a shot at $1,000.

GROUCHO: That buys a lot of horse feed, Ann.

ANN: Heh.

GEORGE: The topic our couple has chosen, Groucho, is "Politics of the Future."

GROUCHO: Fine with me. OK. "Politics of the Future." How much do you lovebirds wanna bet on the first question?

(The couple confers.)

BILL: We'll go with five.

GROUCHO: Five it is. First question: Who won the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida? Oh, this should be interesting. I don't know this one myself.

BILL: We're going to go with George W. Bush?

GROUCHO: No, I'm sorry. That's incorrect. It's Al Gore. Al Gore. Sounds like tuna. There's probably something fishy in there, anyway, and I'm working without a net. How much do they have left, George?

GEORGE: Five dollars, Grouch.

GROUCHO: That's OK. You kids are still in the running. How much are you willing to wager on the second question?

(The couple confers)

ANN: $4.75.

WILLIAM: Yeah. $4.75.

GROUCHO: What was the title of the most reviled book of 2003?

(The couple confers.)

WILLIAM: Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them?

GROUCHO: Is that your final answer?

O'REILLY: Definitely.

GROUCHO: I'm sorry, but that's not correct. It's Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On Terrorism. Sounds like a heavy read. Tough break, kids. You're not doing very well at this game. You can't have much left at this point; how much sixpence they got, Fenneman?

GEORGE: Just a second.

GROUCHO: Look at that Stanford education in action. Notice the steam rising from his collar. When he leans down he pours hot tea.

GEORGE: A quarter, Grouch.

GROUCHO: Well, kids, you can almost afford Fenneman's suit. If you get the answer to this one, you can walk away with the pants too. A surge of cash for a serge suit. Did you know my father was a tailor? Lousiest tailor in New York, but let's not drag the New Testament into this. How much are you willing to wager on Question No. 3?

(The couple confers)

ANN: We'll shoot the works, Groucho.

GROUCHO: If you get this wrong, you can always go collecting cans for the needy: yourselves. What was George W. Bush's justification for going to war with Iraq in 2003?

(The couple confers.)

GROUCHO: Take your time. Fenneman doesn't have to shill DeSotos for another 10 minutes.

(The couple continues to confer.)

ANN: That would be to force the dismantling of Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction program?

GROUCHO: No, I'm sorry, that's incorrect. As a matter of fact, the card's blank. Good gracious, THIS nonsense is the Politics of the Future? I'm glad I'll be dead for that little jaunt. It seems like none of you are gonna have a rational bone in your--

(Trumpets blare and the duck comes down. Groucho takes the money.)

GROUCHO: Well, looks like I've said the secret word. About time you showed up. And it's just as well; Fenneman and I'll be using this cash to get loaded and weep for the future. But because this is You Bet Your Life, we can't let you go away empty-handed, though you will leave empty-headed, and you'll have a tougher time walking than me and George in about two hours. So here's the freebie question: Who's buried in Grant's tomb?

(The couple confers.)

WILLIAM: That would be General Grant.

GROUCHO: No, I'm sorry. The correct answer is America. Thank you, and lots of luck from your DeSoto-Plymouth dealer. You're gonna need it.

2004-03-17T09:11:00.000-08:00

This morning I decided that should I ever develop the proper rudimentary musical chops or come across willing coconspirators, I'd love to do a concept album centered around testosteronal "you can do it" anthems from mid-'80s film soundtracks. You know the ones: guttural vocals in the barbecued spirit of John Parr, faux-sinewy guitar solos and structural riffs with frenetic arpeggios to distract you from the drum machines, and delectably simple lyrics expressing platitudes 'bout lonely streets of dreams and fighting your way to the top.

My track list:

1. "There's No Easy Way Out" - Robert Tepper (from ROCKY IV)
2. "Never Say Die (Iron Eagle)" - King Kobra (from IRON EAGLE)
3. "Invincible" - Pat Benetar (from THE LEGEND OF BILLIE JEAN)
4. "Highway To The Danger Zone" - Kenny Loggins (from TOP GUN)
5. "Over The Top" - Sammy Hagar (from OVER THE TOP)
6. "You're The Best (Around)" - Joe Esposito (from THE KARATE KID)
7. "Deeper And Deeper" - The Fixx (from STREETS OF FIRE)
8. "Father Time" - Shark Island (from BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE)
9. "We Fight For Love" - Power Station (from COMMANDO)
10. "Cry Little Sister" - Gerard McCann (from THE LOST BOYS)
11. "Stressed Out (Close To The Edge)" - Airplay (from ST. ELMO'S FIRE)
12. "Shakedown" - Bob Seger (from BEVERLY HILLS COP II)*

* = I would extend this beyond 15 minutes, with a jazzy improvisational interlude reminiscent of Iron Butterfly crossbred with Genesis.

2004-03-15T09:21:00.000-08:00

Whotta show. Sold out. Three bands--well, two and-a-half bands; the other was a novelty act most likely courtesy of Mr. Patton or someone with a similarly sick, twisted love--for the pauper's sum of 15 bones. Isis was fucking UNBELIEVABLE, exploding with a scorched-earth dissonance that easily bettered what I've heard of their studio output (this also includes OCEANIC, which I bought on Tom's recommendation), with domineering riffs that could've lasted for the next 15 years without a single soul leaving the Troubadour to get on with their lives. They were that captivating and commanding a presence. Every note sweltered with metallic brimstone.

The Melvins established permanent residence in the House of Awesome with a set perfect for display in hotpants. I hadn't seen them since the STAG-HONKY years, and I must admit it was disconcerting to see the pepper coils sprouting from King Buzzo's awe-inspiring 'do. But this WAS their 20th anniversary tour, and it HAD been at LEAST six-seven years since we'd last breathed the same air, and I've been a Melvins fan since at LEAST 1991, so time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future. Buzz was resplendent in a medieval gown, a red cross painted across his chest and a sludgy Sabs git-tar that bellowed for blood. Dale Crover must have the greatest drum set in all of rock; he's the only drummer I know of who's given center stage. If I were his kit I would've sued for abuse years ago--the man is a savage. All the better for us. Kevin Rutmanis, one of the Melvins' 43634736221 bassists over the years, was quite the sight himself, coaxing squalling melodic feedback from his snarling beast and offering it as sacrifice to the Hendrix gods.

The highlight, of course, was when the Melvins went into some Dead Kennedys song--I couldn't tell you what it was, the show was that damn loud, and I only have one Dead Kennedys album (BEDTIME FOR DEMOCRACY). But who should come bounding down the stage stairs (the cool thing about the Troubadour is that the VIP room overlooks the stage, so the audience and the band can see one another) but Mr. Jello Biafra himself, resplendent in blue jeans, bowling shoes, leather vest, and FUCK THE WAR T-shirt. He primped and vamped and shimmied and Jaggered and warbled, much to the delight of everyone--one person even shouted, "I DON'T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS!", as if this were the punchline to the greatest dream ever. And maybe it was.

The only down note is that I think I'm getting too old to be knocked about by slamdancers. I've lost patience with the whole thing. I go to a show to see the band and absorb their music, not to say, "Excuse me" and "Sorry" to the people I'm inadverently shoved in to by some wild-eyed Bornean white boy in the throes of adulation practically humping my back to get that much closer to Buzz Osbourne, the object of his dangerous fantasies. The upside, of course, is that, through no maneuvering of my own, by the fourth song in the Melvins' set, I was at the foot of the stage, my view of the fuzzbucket rockout unimpeded by head or arm.

Great show, good weekend.

Sunday I went to see SPARTAN. Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri weren't particularly funny. But the girl at the box-office was reading Franz Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS. I asked her if she was reading that for kicks. She shot me the look that killed Socrates.

2004-02-27T16:28:00.001-08:00

GENE SISKEL INTERVIEWS AN ANVIL

GS: Hello, I'm Gene Siskel of the Limbo Tribune. Tonight I examine the angst-ridden existence of the once-mighty anvil. What practical applications does it have in these modern times? Has it outlived its necessity outside of its frequent use as a cartoon weapon? Does it even qualify as a paperweight or bookend? Where are all the blacksmiths hiding these days?

But first, some history: The anvil was developed in ancient Burbank, California, specifically for use by Jack Warner during contract negotiations with the more volatile personalities of Warner Bros.' vast talent stable. After an unsatisfactory salary discussion with the vitriolic studio head nearly left him paralyzed from the right nostril down, animator Chuck Jones was struck by inspiration: The anvil would be perfect for the ongoing Road Runner series. Risking life and limb, he broke into Warner's main office one night, "borrowed" the anvil, whisked it to the studio for a quick photo session, and returned it to its rightful place before Jack even awoke from his euphoric casting-couch stupor on his conference-room floor. When Jack later saw his precious anvil on the big screen braining Wile E. Coyote to oblivion, he laughed uproariously, while his nervous associates ran for cover. According to studio lore, Jack Warner leapt to his feet after the screening and announced plans to install a cliff near Soundstage 7, where he hoped to lure Sam Goldwyn to his anvil-capped death. The anvil soon became a popular tool in mainstream America, resulting in a crime wave unprecedented in our history. Today, the anvil enjoys a cult following in S&M and bondage circuits. (to Anvil) Welcome.

ANVIL: ...

GS: Now, let's talk about those early years in the movie industry. How would you compare the use of anvils in Hollywood's so-called "golden age" with the use of anvils in contemporary motion pictures?

ANVIL: ...

GS: I'll rephrase the question: Hollywood--how is it different?

ANVIL: ...

GS: Uh, is there any truth to the rumor that you were seen last week squiring Eva Mendez, and that she's turned to you for solace after the dismal second-week performance of 2 Fast 2 Furious?

ANVIL: (falls on Gene's foot)

GS: OW! Good Bingo-Long golly, that hurt!

ANVIL: ...

GS: You've made more movies than Vin Diesel. What would you attribute to your timeless appeal?

ANVIL: ...

GS: Fair enough. Our next guest is Shemp Howard, the second of the Three Stooges to perish by autoasphyxiation and the only Stooge besides Curly to wind up here, in limbo. Welcome, Shemp.

SHEMP: ...

GS: We've all heard stories about the notorious Ted Healy and his capacity for violence. Could you elaborate on that relationship, and possibly separate the legend from the fact?

SHEMP: There is no life, no death, no reality on this plane of consciousness--only the Matrix. The Matrix is a system, Gene. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand: most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

GS: Could you tell us a little more about Curly? He's a fascinating character, a man-child in James Coco's body.

SHEMP: What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

GS: What the hell are you talking about?

SHEMP: Dude, haven't you seen "The Matrix"?

GS: When the sign ahead says "Keanu Reeves," I make an immediate left into a brick wall. Anyway, that's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank my two guests, the anvil--

ANVIL: ...

GS: and Shemp Howard--

SHEMP: I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future.

GS: Maybe not, but I do. Coming up in the next hour: The All-New Lucy Show. Tonight Lucy gets a visit from an old flame; their reunion date goes smoothly until Lucy realizes she's been hotglued to a lamppost. Musical guest: Lynyrd Skynyrd. Should be fun. Until next time, I'm Gene Siskel, and I'm saving a balcony seat for all y'all motherfuckers.

2004-02-27T16:28:00.000-08:00

GENE SISKEL INTERVIEWS AN ANVIL

GS: Hello, I'm Gene Siskel of the Limbo Tribune. Tonight I examine the angst-ridden existence of the once-mighty anvil. What practical applications does it have in these modern times? Has it outlived its necessity outside of its frequent use as a cartoon weapon? Does it even qualify as a paperweight or bookend? Where are all the blacksmiths hiding these days?

But first, some history: The anvil was developed in ancient Burbank, California, specifically for use by Jack Warner during contract negotiations with the more volatile personalities of Warner Bros.' vast talent stable. After an unsatisfactory salary discussion with the vitriolic studio head nearly left him paralyzed from the right nostril down, animator Chuck Jones was struck by inspiration: The anvil would be perfect for the ongoing Road Runner series. Risking life and limb, he broke into Warner's main office one night, "borrowed" the anvil, whisked it to the studio for a quick photo session, and returned it to its rightful place before Jack even awoke from his euphoric casting-couch stupor on his conference-room floor. When Jack later saw his precious anvil on the big screen braining Wile E. Coyote to oblivion, he laughed uproariously, while his nervous associates ran for cover. According to studio lore, Jack Warner leapt to his feet after the screening and announced plans to install a cliff near Soundstage 7, where he hoped to lure Sam Goldwyn to his anvil-capped death. The anvil soon became a popular tool in mainstream America, resulting in a crime wave unprecedented in our history. Today, the anvil enjoys a cult following in S&M and bondage circuits. (to Anvil) Welcome.

ANVIL: ...

GS: Now, let's talk about those early years in the movie industry. How would you compare the use of anvils in Hollywood's so-called "golden age" with the use of anvils in contemporary motion pictures?

ANVIL: ...

GS: I'll rephrase the question: Hollywood--how is it different?

ANVIL: ...

GS: Uh, is there any truth to the rumor that you were seen last week squiring Eva Mendez, and that she's turned to you for solace after the dismal second-week performance of "2 Fast 2 Furious"?

ANVIL: (falls on Gene's foot)

GS: OW! Good Bingo-Long golly, that hurt!

ANVIL: ...

GS: You've made more movies than Vin Diesel. What would you attribute to your timeless appeal?

ANVIL: ...

GS: Fair enough. Our next guest is Shemp Howard, the second of the Three Stooges to perish by autoasphyxiation and the only Stooge besides Curly to wind up here, in limbo. Welcome, Shemp.

SHEMP: ...

GS: We've all heard stories about the notorious Ted Healy and his capacity for violence. Could you elaborate on that relationship, and possibly separate the legend from the fact?

SHEMP: There is no life, no death, no reality on this plane of consciousness--only the Matrix. The Matrix is a system, Gene. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand: most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

GS: Could you tell us a little more about Curly? He's a fascinating character, a man-child in James Coco's body.

SHEMP: What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

GS: What the hell are you talking about?

SHEMP: Dude, haven't you seen "The Matrix"?

GS: When the sign ahead says "Keanu Reeves," I make an immediate left into a brick wall. Anyway, that's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank my two guests, the anvil--

ANVIL: ...

GS: and Shemp Howard--

SHEMP: I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid... afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future.

GS: Maybe not, but I do. Coming up in the next hour: "The All-New Lucy Show." Tonight Lucy gets a visit from an old flame; their reunion date goes smoothly until Lucy realizes she's been hotglued to a lamppost. Musical guest: Lynyrd Skynyrd. Should be fun. Until next time, I'm Gene Siskel, and I'm saving a balcony seat for all y'all motherfuckers.

2004-02-27T12:01:00.000-08:00

I really don't know what to say, except for hello.