SHIT FROM AN OLD NOTEBOOK (1):

• "What you don't know about _______ could fill a book," they told me. Well, by gum, they're absolutely right! Several of them, in fact! Starting next month, Schumann and Shyster are scheduled to begin publishing my series of personall anti-reference books, kicking off with What I Don't Know About Music, followed in short order by What I Don't Know About Movies With Subtitles, What I Don't Know About Satisfying a Woman, and What I Don't Know About the Publishing Industry, which for some reason will be the last in the series.

  
  
  

• (from "Film's Lost Filmers"):
  
  S.W. Poltroon (1872 - 1926), director: Between Edison and Griffith came the man who may have been cinema's very first auteur. A former photographer and painter of still lives, Poltroon seized upon the new medium with great fervor while taking somewhat of a narrow view of its potential. His best-known features - Man Standing Still (1903), Rigor Mortis (1904), The Unadorned Wall (1904), and his magnum opus, Two Men Standing Still (1906), were met with decidely less enthusiasm than expected by audiences, though his famed "baby carriage sitting in one place" shot from 1905's The Idle Pram came to be much imitated, though not by other filmmakers.

  
  
  

• (from "Errata-Ca: Corrections, Clarifications and Retractions from the Ombudsman at Moist Satin Magazine"):
  
  In Ringo Levio's article "Mademoiselle's Eager Uvula" (July), a line was printed which read "My torpid battering ram d'amour pounded against her warm, fleshy resistance, until finally her pliant entryway burst open in a viscous flood of liquid acquiescence." This is a typographical error. The sentence should read, "My darting pit viper of affection smashed frustratingly against the dark bastion of her chastity, at length bashing through the gated folds into the limpid corridors of her weeping love compartment." We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
  
  
  Two illustrations were accidentally transposed during the layout stage of last month's issue. The photos captioned "Erica enjoys the sweetest of all possible paddlings" and "Like an ant, Fernando discovered that he could lift twenty times his own weight - the hard way" should accompany the pieces "Courtesan Smorgasbord" and "Fortnight of the Amputease," respectively, and not the other way around.
  
  
  The "masked supplicant" being "soundly rogered by a succession of feral he-beasts and homunculi" and "roughly penetrated with a variety of makeshift dildos fashioned from sundry junkyard items" was not former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, as noted in the piece "New Federal Tariff Proposal Inspires Catcalls, Rimjobs" last issue. It should be explained that one of our freelancers holds a day job as a stringer for AP and occasionally gets his assignments mixed up. On a similar note, we advise any U.S. News and World Report readers who may be reading this to disregard any recent dispatches attributed to "Lord Roderick Spooge."

  
  
  

• (from "Day of the Locust Meets Night of the Lepus: The Decline and Fall of the Hollywood Empire"):
  
  17 JANUARY: Embarrassment reigns when it is discovered that Fox's Accounts Deceivable and MGM/UA's I.O.U. One Murder are, after extensive rewrites, major recasting and reshoots following poorly-received test screenings, exactly the same film. Despite the studios' best efforts (including ad slogans like "See It Again...With A Different Title!" and "When I Snap My Fingers, You Will Forget You Ever Saw Accounts Deceivable" respectively), both pictures are pulled from distribution within the week.
  
  22 FEBRUARY: The Sundance Film Festival is evacuated and quarantined by authorities after 300 are hospitalized from an outbreak of "bad buzz."
  
  18 MARCH: Pluckin' the Duck, the surprisingly heartwarming and tender story of a group of teens who decide to lose their virginity to various waterfowl, is released. Almost immediately, Minimax is beseiged by picketers from the National Parks Service, who demand the reinstatement of the letter "G" to the film's title, stating, "This is not a subject to be belittled by folksy contractualizing," and by NAMGLA, The North American Man-Goose Love Association, an organization founded both to complain about being misrepresented in the media and to publicize their projected theme restaurant, Honkers. Despite - or because of - the adverse publicity (or vice versa, or perhaps both), the film debuts at number one, unseating the reigning champ, Ron Shelton's hard-hitting docufantasy about America's pastime (baseball) and Nazi Germany's pastime (genocidal race hatred), Designated Hitler.