MY 70 FAVORITE PORN FILMS FROM 1898:

1. American Cavalry Charging with Drawn Swords (1898) 
2. Balancing in the Basket (1898) 
3. Battery B Arriving at Camp (1898) 
3a. Battery B Pitching Camp (1898) 
3b. Battery Charge (1898) 
4. Blanket-Tossing a New Recruit (1898) 
5. Bowery Waiter and the Old Time Ball Player, The (1898) 
6. Cattle Leaving the Corral (1898) 
7. Cholly's First Moustache (1898) 
8. Col. Torrey's Rough Riders and Army Mules (1898) 
9. Come Along Do! (1898) 
10. Dynamite Cruiser 'Vesuvius' (1898) 
11. Cubans Drilling, Manual of Arms (1898) 
12. Doing Her Big Brother's Tricks on the Bar (1898) 
13. Dude's Experience with a Girl on a Tandem, The (1898) 
14. Farces de Jocko, Les (1898) 
15. Folding Beds Are Tricky (1898) 
16. Girls Imitating Firemen (1898) 
17. Mysterious Midgets, The (1898) 
18. Naval Review Spithead (1898) 
19. New York Mounted on Parade (1898) 
20. Off for the Rabbit Chase (1898) 
21. Nursemaid's Surprise, The (1898) 
22. Our New General Servant (1898) 
23. Overful Seat, An (1898) 
24. Overloaded Donkey, An (1898) 
25. Pea-Hulling Machine (1898) 
26. Philadelphia City Troop and a Company of Roosevelt's Rough Riders (1898) 
27. Policeman, the Cook and the Copper, The (1898) 
28. Policemen Play No Favorites (1898) 
29. Poona Races 1898 (1898) 
30. Pope Leo XIII Passing Through Upper Loggia, No. 1 (1898) 
31. Precarious Position, A (1898) 
32. Procession of Mounted Indians and Cowboys (1898) 
33. Relieving the Guard at St. James Palace (1898) 
34. Runaway Knock and the Suffering Milkman, The (1898) 
35. Rushing the Growler (1898) 
36. Shooting the Chutes at Home (1898) 
37. Snowballing the Coasters (1898) 
38. Spanking the Naughty Girl (1898) 
39. Stealing a Ham (1898) 
40. Swift Chappie, A (1898) 
41. They Will Never Do It Again (1898) 
42. They're Not So Warm (1898) 
43. Three Ways of Climbing Over a Chair (1898) 
44. Timid Girls and the Terrible Cow, The (1898) 
45. Tramp Caught a Tartar, The (1898) 
46. Trying to Jump Her Board Bill (1898) 
47. Tug in a Heavy Sea, A (1898) 
48. Two Naughty Boys Teasing the Cobbler (1898) 
48a. Two Naughty Boys Sprinkling the Spoons (1898) 
48b. Two Naughty Boys Upsetting the Spoons (1898) 
49. Uncle Rube's Visit to the Man-o' War (1898) 
50. Unexpected Advent of the School Teacher (1898) 
51. Victorious Squadron Firing Salute (1898) 
52. View of Cramp's Shipyard (1898) 
53. What Demoralized the Barber Shop (1898) 
54. What Our Boys Did at Manila (1898) 
55. When the Clock Strikes Two in the Tenderloin (1898) 
56. When the Organ Played in Front of the Hotel (1898) 
57. Who's Got the Red Ear? (1898) 
58. Winding the Maypole (1898) 
59. Gladys Must Be in Bed Before Ten (1898) 
60. Giving the General a Taste of It (1898) 
61. He Wanted Too Much for His Pies (1898) 
62. Heaving the Log (1898) 
63. How a Bottle of Cocktails Was Smuggled Into Camp (1898) 
64. How Uncle Reuben Missed the Fishing Party (1898) 
65. How She Gets Along Without a Maid (1898) 
66. Idle Hours of the English Coast Guards (1898) 
67. Hungarian Women Plucking Geese (1898) 
68. Joe, the Educated Orangoutang, Undressing (1898) 
69. Jovial Monks in the Refectory, The (1898) 
70. Jumping the Rope After Bed Time (1898)

"DON'T CONFUSE YOURSELF WITH SOMEONE WHO HAS SOMETHING TO SAY...":

So says the man ("Hexen Definitive/Strife Knot," Perverted by Language, 1983), and I can hardly argue with him.  Indeed, I am lacking entirely for words of my own today, but the blog must go on, so allow me to indulge via YouTube embeds of one of the signal figures of my sorry existence, Mark Edward Smith and the mighty Fall...

1) Could this be the greatest music video of all time?  Were it not for Billy Squier's "Rock Me Tonite," I daresay there'd be no contest...

NO ONE HERE GETS IN WITHOUT PAYING:

(an exclusive excerpt from my soon-to-be-remaindered rock memoir)

May 16, 1990, Turmeric Beach: Well, it happened at last.  I passed the audition to be the new lead singer of Nobody In Particular.  Quite a change from delivering Grade-Q meat to junior-high-school cafeterias, but I believe I'm up to the challenge.  It's really funny how the whole thing happened, since I've been a fan of NIP ever since they played the Knights of Akron hall last Thursday.  The power, the charisma, the exemplary posture... their music transported me to a place I haven't been to since I drank from that beaker in tenth-grade chem lab on a dare.  Like then, it was a deeply spiritual and transcendent experience and I couldn't stop throwing up for three days afterwards.  I hung around after they finished their "set" (music lingo), and we hit it off immediately.  I'll never forget the way the bass player affectionately elbowed me in the face when I told him how his solo on "Chicken Lips" reminded me of that really cool Kajagoogoo song.  I pledged right there and then to make this band my life, to follow them everywhere they go, to be in the vanguard of a new breed of fans, "Nobody-In-Particular-heads" as I like to call us.  Well, me anyway.  But soon fate intervened, and suddenly my wildest dream came true.  Okay, perhaps not my wildest dream, which involves Pia Zadora, the Lincoln Tunnel and a three-legged unicorn with an egg beater for a horn, but close enough in its way.

THIS PROBABLY WON'T MEAN SHIT TO CHUCK D. EITHER:

Today marks the 78th anniversary of the birth of one of our greatest cultural referents, pop-cultural icons, and the man who single-handedly rescued the sequin industry, Elvis Aaron Presley.  And, I'm sure you would agree, the only way to properly honor the memory of this titan of American music would be to let one of the lesser members of his entourage run his mouth off for a few minutes.  This long-suppressed recording from the August 16, 2006 Wow & Flutter program features Red Bloostone, a man with intimate knowledge of the King of Rock 'n' Roll as far as anybody can prove in a court of law, interviewed by Robert Ham (no relation) (to Elvis), and includes some heretofore unheard factoids as well as several of the greatest moments in recorded Presliana.  Please, enjoy:

 Red bloostone interview by williamham 

(Gosh, I hope no one notices I just lifted a post from a year ago and presented it as new.  Huh - what does it mean when the red light on the voice-to-text software is on?)

PYTHONIC SIDEBAR #1:

So, apparently last night's episode of Family Guy started like this:

...much to the delight of many members of the comedigeekocracy.  Words like "witty," "brilliant" and "amazing" have been bandied about.  To which I can pretty much only shrug.  (Seriously.  Overwork has worn me out to the point that I have no control of my motor skills below the shoulder.  You would be equal parts impressed and horrified to see how I'm typing this right now.)

OBSCURITY MINUS 14:59 AND COUNTING:

I'm at the tail end of my fifth consecutive 10+ hour workday, and this Ham is fried.  So you will excuse me if I uphold my daily blog-duties by reviving a 15+ year-old piece I wrote, with a number of obsolete references, awkward writing and jokes that would be excised or rewritten if I had the time or the energy.  Not a bad concept, though, and more than one chuckleworthy passage.  Two.  There are two chuckleworthy passages.

I feel ebullient. I feel replenished. In short, I feel like the protagonist of one of the greatest works in the Western literary canon, Dame Judith Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret(the Red Badge of Courage of teen-menstruation novels). In other words, I GOT IT! No, notthat - the experimental ovaries I got were removed weeks ago (remember, do a background check before responding to those "NEED QUICK MONEY?" flyers you find under your windshield wipers), and even if they weren't, whether or not I'm regularly receiving the monthly curse (the original working title for this magazine, by the way) is irrelevant, and beside the point as well. I'm referring to that thing that that pale, short guy with the snap-on toupée promised everybody they'd get eventually. You know what I'm typing about. Don't make me repeat it. Oh, Jesus... you know... how everybody will gain public renown for a duration lasting half of the time it takes "Chihuahua on Fire" to win the $10,000 prize on America's Funniest Home Videos. All right, fuck it, my fifteen minutes of fame. I just buried the needle of the "tired cliché" meter attached to my hard drive (I should probably reconnect it to my computer), so I hope you're pleased with yourselves.

I knew it was coming to me, so I had to do it right. I sprung into action immediately, sustaining only mild facial contusions when I slammed into the wall. Picking up the phone with a grace rarely seen in these parts (a good thing on balance, as I don't believe those other parts should be made to bend that way), I dialed up the Consensus Bureau in San Atorium, CA, to schedule my quarter-hour of renown. This is key - if you don't set it up yourself, you're likely to wake one morning to find you had achieved and lost household word status while you were busy disgorging a beaker's worth of saliva onto your musty C3PO pillowcase. After a long, protracted interval on hold, listening to the piped-in sounds of the latest Tangerine Dream album (or maybe someone had just left the receiver atop the office dehumidifier), the Director of Ephemeral Eclat herself came on the line and told me I was in luck.

WELCOME TO THE MESSIAH COMPLEX (HOURLY RATES AVAILABLE):

(An exclusive excerpt from the posthumous memoirs of an anonymous member of the Turn Righteous at the Light religious cult, whose mass suicide two months ago shocked the world and made them runners-up in Deceased Fanatic's Home Journal's annual lethal cocktail recipe competition.)


By the time you read this, I will have gone on to a better place. Barring that, I will be dead. I am writing these words for the understanding and edification of future generations. And I am writing these words to practice my penmanship. I've been working on my loops. I, in addition to four hundred others of my kind, are holed up here in the Compound of Heavenly Peace and Affordable Hourly Rates (what the heathen would call the Motel 6 just outside of Oxnard), counting down the final hours, awaiting the Rapture. Hope it isn't late like it was yesterday. If I don't get my Rapture by noon, I'm worthless for the rest of the millennium.

They laughed at us, scorned us, and denied us our consolidation loans, but as you read these words, it is we who will have had the last laugh, provided we can get it in before the lethal dose of sinus medication kicks in. We are the Chosen, the remnant spoken of in Scripture, the elite who got their membership fees in before the March 31st deadline. It is we, the few who shall escape the wrath that will come down and lay over this pustulant Earth like a divine plastic couch cover from which the stains of mortal corruption may be wiped clean by the damp cloth of God and a little Formula 409. In just a few minutes, we will take our rightful place beside the throne of God, show Him our laminates, and be ushered into the highly exclusive V.I.P. (Very Immaculate Person) lounge in the heavens, where all is serene and your first two drinks are half-price. Hallepenjo!

It has been a long, arduous road we have travelled these many years (what the unholy would refer to as Interstate 19 out of Tuscon). Every member of the Turn Righteous At The Light flock has their own stories, but since the TV-movie and action figure rights for most of them have been sold, I am only at liberty to recount my own. 

MAKING LOVE TO A MUSKRAT WITH A YACHTSMAN ON MY KNEE:

Repurposed content that I didn't come up with myself (but should have, dammit) counts for something, right?  Good.  Day Four complete.

...well, heck, while I'm at it, why not embed another unusual Saturday Night Live musical guest performance?  This comes from the episode that is widely considered the worst SNL ever (to which I have only two words: Deion Sanders), and this either mitigates or reinforces that contention, depending upon where your tastes lie.  Certainly we're unlikely to see the likes of this on the show these days, or ever again.  So score one for Jean Doumanian.

S.A.D. AS I WANNA BE:

Three days into my blog-post-every-day project, and at least two things have come clear: 1) the necessity of daily content has forced me to be far less precious about the creative process (a welcome development for the kind of guy who has filled entire notebooks - several of them - attempting to analyze a single episode of a forty-three-year-old television show, and has still only gotten about two-thirds of the way into it) and 2) the necessity of daily content has forced me to post material which, were I allowing myself to be even slightly more precious about the creative process, would otherwise be taking a return trip to the drawing board, possibly only on a brief layover while awaiting its connecting flight to the dumper.  The attempted piece of aural humor that follows is not altogether hopeless, I suppose - on paper, it looked like a real corker - but, to my ears, it falls well short of satisfaction.  Chalk it up to my usual haste - instead of spending the hour or so it would have taken to pre-record it ahead of time, I opted to do it live, on-air, near the end of last night's installment of Wow & Flutter without so much as a rehearsal or even a cursory scan of the dialogue in order to determine what words might be hiding in the tangled thickets of my infamously inscrutable handwriting, the same sort of haste that forces me into compound knots of tortured syntax in attempting to introduce said attempted piece of aural humor in a blog post titled with a limp, labored pun because it's six minutes before midnight and I just have to get this thing date-stamped January 3 or I've failed my public, by which I mean the two dozen spambots who facelessly scan this blog and keep trying to sell me trazadone and Ugg boots.  Anyway, my intent is to use this piece in the next episode of my podcast, should that ever surface, so perhaps it will be rewritten, re-edited and re-performed into a truly marvelous piece of audio comedy between now and then.  Or at least I'll use stereo separation to make it clear that I'm supposed to be playing two different people.  So you might look upon this as raw material, a demo version of a future masterpiece, part of the track listing for some future Beatles Anthology of comedy.  Or, more likely, another example of what happens when medium talent meets mediocre execution.  But, hey, it's content.  Even if I'm not.

ONE II:

(sorry about this, i thought you said "three dog fight." i'll change the picture before anyone sees the post.  - art director)

(a little number, in fact a series of them, I hope to perform live one of these days, for singer and increasingly horrified accompanist, who begins by playing a familiar tune:)

One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do

Two can be as lonely as one, it's the loneliest number since the number one

Three is socially inept, he keeps touching people inappropriately when he doesn't even know them

Four weeps uncontrollably when anyone says the words "relationship" or "mother"

Five stays in all weekend sending nude tweets of himself to unsuspecting consonants and ellipses

Six hasn't changed his clothes in over a year and won't be able to leave his house without the jaws of life and some cooking lubricant

Seven ate nine while fourteen and fifteen watched, the video of which got a record number of hits on the numeral-porn website, crunchingnumbers.org, but somebody recognized him and he got fired from his job at the state house - he is now working part-time helping ghostwrite Rick Santorum's memoirs

Ten - well, nobody heard from ten for about a month-and-a-half until one day when the neighbors noticed an ungodly stench coming from his studio apartment and they knocked on the door for half an hour with no response (accompanist stops playing) so finally they broke down the door and found stacks and stacks of unopened mail, takeout containers and soiled underclothes (accompanist walks off in disgust) and the neighbors had to cover their faces with wet washcloths and wandered through the place, tripping over stacks of illegal pornography involving lowercase letters and bizarre artwork sculpted from what they can only assume was his own ordure until they discovered that feral cats had eaten more than half of... (forcibly pulled off stage)  What?  What?  It's all true!  It's all true!!!...

(curtain)

2013: A SPACE-FILLING ODYSSEY:

play this year backwards and you can hear the strains of "Deux Mille Treize, Année érotique." though that's not Jane Birkin singing.  i think it's Depardieu in a dress.

Resolutions aren't my bag.  They never work.  Ever.  So this is not a resolution, nor a plan, nor a project, nor a ephron, just a, lessee, ah, a notion:  to contribute some kind of content of some description to this sad l'il weblog-au-mine every single day this year and presumably beyond.  Whether I have anything worth sharing or not.  Like now.  This counts as content, right?  I believe it does.  Great.  Done.

Of course, I could also share one of my favorite moments of music-on-television, one I come back to regularly just to bask in its infernal glow.  It's a moment that has only gained in infamy over the years, but I don't see the big damned deal - regardless of what the tabloids and the rest of the gutter press said about it, the slamdancers (Ian MacKaye's in there somewhere, as allegedly is John Belushi just out of camera range, a real missed opportunity if you ask me) don't seem all that out of control.  Check out the quick overhead shot during the performance: the audience in the front rows look slightly bemused but hardly terrified at the so-called "riot" taking place mere inches in front of them.  It's all showbiz.  But it is one of the moments that made the first half of the seventh season of Saturday Night Live, the period where Dick Ebersol tried to rescue it from oblivion and Michael O'Donoghue tried to make it burst into flames, such a bracing, unnerving experience, the best moments of which still crackle with tension thirty-plus years later, and it's still a kick to watch.  So here you go - from October 31, 1981, Fear on Saturday Night Live.  The hell with black-eyed peas and red underwear - I'm watching this every January 1 to start the annum right.  Happy New Fear.

WHILE WAITING FOR ME TO WINNOW THE 55 PAGES I WROTE ON THE "MARRIAGE COUNSELOR" SKETCH TO A PARAGRAPH OR TWO...

...why not entertain yourself with something I actually managed to finish?  My brand-new podcast, TO BE ANNOUNCED, has just commenced with its very first episode.  This bi-week, I talk with the insanely brilliant humor writer Ellis Weiner, cannibalize some old material to fill space, and wind up with an elaborate in-joke that only podcast over-enthusiasts will get.  Updates, background info, etc. will be available at the TBA blog - and just this once (unless I decide to do it next time), you can listen to the embedded 'cast itself or download the mp3 below.  Hope you like it...




Download this bastard. (85.5 Mb mp3 file; right-click to save)

PYTHON DISSECTED #1a: NOTICE THEY DO NOT SO MUCH FLY AS PLUMMET.

So here we are at last.  Here beginneth my vivisection of the complete run of Monty Python's Flying Circus.  My modus operandi for this series of reviews is simple: I plan on reviewing, analyzing, critiquing and otherwise squeezing all the fun out of the forty-five half-hour episodes of MPFC, with likely pit stops along the way for other items that appeared during its 1969-74 lifespan (in particular, the two episodes of Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus [which is German for something, I think] that aired in 1972).  I intend to adhere to strict broadcast chronology in these reviews; for the most part, the programs were not aired in the order in which they were produced, and while it might be interesting to trace the show's ebb and flow by following them in production order, a lot of care was taken in ordering the episodes for maximum effectiveness, an arrangement with artistic qualities all its own, and it behooves me to give that artistry the respect and reverence it deserves.

Except for this one time.

PYTHON DISSECTED - Prologue, Part 3: "The Long and Winding Preamble"

I had come here today to finally complete my litany of reasons Why Monty Python Is/Was the Beatles of Comedy and embark on my reviews of every episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and I fully intend to do so.  However, a number of further areas of analysis have recently come to light, and I would be remiss in ignoring or eliding them.  So, once I've finished the first list, I will follow with my comprehensive rundowns of Why Monty Python Is/Was the Sanford-Townsend Band of Comedy, Which Individual Pythons Correspond to Which of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief (and Which Member of Mid-Period Fleetwood Mac the One Left Over Most Closely Resembles Internally), The Five People You Meet in Heaven Who Were Successfully Hit On By Graham Chapman, All the Things You Could Be By Now if Terry Jones in Drag Was Your Mother, Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Carol Cleveland's Ti

All right, all right, all right.

PYTHON DISSECTED - Prologue, Part 2: "The Fellowship of the Thingie"

Right.  Where was I?

Oh yes, the middle of the interminable preface to my alleged project wherein I review and overanalyze all 45 episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus (plus the two German shows and whatever other ancillary nonsense I can dredge up), a preface that started as a quick couple of introductory paragraphs but quickly metastasized into a recap of information which anyone who would bother to read such a thing undoubtedly knew already tied loosely together by a pointless point-by-point defense of my notion that Monty Python are/were the Beatles of Comedy, as if that notion was a) stunningly original and unprecedented and b) really in need of defending in the first place, I mean you may as well mount an impassioned, florid speech in defense of a twenty-shilling parking ticket and have your barrister call a dead person and a professional Cardinal Richeleu impersonator to the stand as character witnesses, I mean what's the point of it all, I think they ought to send them back where they came from, I mean you've got to be cruel to be kind so Mrs. Harris said, so she said, she said, she said, the dead crab she said, she said. Well, her sister's gone to Rhodesia what with her womb and all, and her youngest, her youngest as thin as a filing cabinet, and the goldfish, the goldfish they've got whooping cough they keep spitting water all over their Bratbys, well, they do don't they, I mean you can't, can you, I mean they're not even married or anything, they're not even divorced, and he's in the KGB if you ask me, he says he's a tree surgeon but I don't like the sound of his liver, all that squeaking and banging every night till the small hours, his mother's been much better since she had her head off, yes she has, I said, don't you talk to me about bladders, I said...

Ahem.  Let's crack on, shall we?  Okay, Reasons Monty Python Are/Were the Beatles of Comedy, continued...

PYTHON DISSECTED - Prologue, Part 1: "The Gathering of the Jibes"

Monty Python's Flying Circus debuted, with little fanfare, on BBC-1 on October 5, 1969, nine days after the Beatles released their final studio album, Abbey Road.  I mention this seemingly irrelevant piece of trivia because it's one of those serendipidous bits of timing that no major cultural sea change can exist without.  Much has been made about how the Fab Four's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show - the event that rocketed them to stardom in the U.S. and thus set their subsequent world domination in motion - came scant weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a moment when America (whether it realized it or not) needed a cleansing blast of youthful exuberance.  We'll never know if the Beatles would have been the musical and cultural bellwether they turned out to be had things been different - given the talent and the personalities at hand, it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't have made some sort of splash - but it's hard to deny the power of that particular harmonic convergence.  So, too, with Python.  No less an authority than George Harrison would later claim that the spiritual energy that was fatally draining from his band at that moment transferred cleanly onto this other, (mostly) British combo, and history has borne him out: comedy underwent a revolution of form and function in the seventies every bit the equal of rock in the sixties, and it was Monty Python who fired the opening salvo.  (It's true that the fuse Python lit - if I may mix my revolutionary-weaponry metaphors a bit - was much slower-burning; comedy didn't truly become the new rock 'n' roll until the mid-decade premiere of Saturday Night Live, a show that provided the same tonic for a country traumatized by Watergate and Vietnam that the Beatles did post-Kennedy, and which owed its comic voice as much to the National Lampoon and Second City as it did MPFC.  But heavy strands of Python are in its DNA - reruns aired on Canadian television several years before it made it to America, heavily influencing a struggling writer/comedian named Lorne Michaels; several years later, he stood on line for the world premiere of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where he would meet the man who would become SNL's first breakout star [and probably the main reason the show wasn't cancelled after a few weeks], Chevy Chase.  Which means that it's only a matter of time before some crazed conspiracy theorist fanboy blames Python for Dan Harmon's ouster from Community, but let's keep shtum about that.)

More (much, much more) after the jump:

TEN THINGS I HAVE DISCOVERED NOW THAT I’M IN MY FORTIES:

·        When I try to think back to all the crazy, rebellious things I did as a teenager, and once again come up with nothing beyond “I preferred New Coke,” I can comfort myself with the notion that my memory is starting to fail me.

·        My sexual fantasies are increasingly punctuated by pee breaks.

·        I recognized the look on the face of that barista when I grumbled about the Journey song playing over the coffee shop PA as the same one I gave the sixty-year-old guy at the thrift store when he ranted to me for twenty minutes about “Hanoi Jane.”

·        Nobody laughs at my Steve Martin or Mork from Ork impressions anymore.  Nobody laughed then, either, but now I can rationalize.

·        I have become quite adept at the pubic combover.

·        I found myself lecturing my son that “in my day, we were ignorant of and indifferent to things that really mattered.”

·        I can’t hear a certain song from my adolescence without quietly weeping bittersweet tears about the passage of time, lost innocence, and the myriad squandered promises of youth.  Unfortunately, that song is “Axel F.”

·        I swear that was Macaulay Culkin I saw on the cover of the AARP Bulletin.

·        When people say I remind them of one of the Baldwin brothers, I no longer take it as a compliment.

·        I can stop hoarding now – I’m pretty sure the cassingle isn’t coming back. 

WHERE'S THE FALAFEL? WHITHER THE FILIPINO? WHAT'S THAT FLAKING?:

Gotta take a moment here to further the hype on an event going on this week in Astoria, OR and Seattle, WA (y'all missed the shows in Eugene and Portland - sorry).  The WTF Fest  is a massive, multi-cultural, trans-generational art and provocation festival, with music, poetry, performance art, dancing, videos and a million-volt Tesla coil.  It also features the amazing, legendary John Sinclair, who will also be appearing on my WOW & FLUTTER radio program tonight (4/25/12) at 11 PDT on Coast Community Radio.  I was a part of the festivities in Portland on Monday and shall be again in Astoria this Friday, so the following may be construed as some kind of conflict of interest, but, as they say, what the frak?

A piece I wrote on the event for the latest issue of Hipfish Monthly.

...and an interview with the event's co-proprietors, Shane and Amy Bugbee, from last week's WOW & FLUTTER program:


(Pictured here: Ugly Shyla, one of the many fantastic performers in the Fest.)

FILM'S LOST FILMERS:

(originally published in the November, 2011 issue of Cinematic Completist)

Any person with even a modest interest in cinema can, at the slightest provocation, cite the names of a dozen or more celluloid artistes who, without question, have staked indelible claims on the projection booths of the mass imagination – names like Welles (Citizen Kane), Hitchcock (Rear Window), Spielberg (1941), and Raffill (Mannequin 2: On the Move).  All possessed undeniable talent, perhaps even genius, but there is more to their immortality than that.  Lasting success in such a cutthroat medium must also be attributed to their tenacity, indomitability, and occasional willingness to fellate their superiors when necessary (hence the term “studio head”).  But what of the others, that pale and tragic remnant untouched by fickle Kismet’s hand and unable to suppress the gag reflex so stalwartly?  Surely their contribution, however paltry, to the annals of film history deserves some recognition?  Frankly, no, it doesn’t.  They’re total and abject failures and deserve only to be treated as such.  But a freelance assignment is a freelance assignment.

S.W. Poltroon (1872-1926), director

Between Edison and Griffith came the man who may well have been cinema’s very first auteur.   A former photographer and painter of still lifes, Poltroon seized upon the newborn medium with great fervor while taking a somewhat narrow view of its potential.  His 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 decidedly less enthusiasm than expected, though his famed “baby carriage sitting in one place” shot from his 1905 short subject The Idle Pram came to be much imitated, though not by other filmmakers.

Arvid de Marqeux (1885-??), director/choreographer

A one-time pratfall consultant for Hal Roach Studios, de Marqeux spent all his spare hours and most of his savings pursuing his lifelong obsession – to transfer the thrills and entertainment of the stage shows he’d seen on the Moulin Rouge, Broadway, and Fondulac, Wisconsin (where once somebody danced on a mail crate in the middle of town whistling to himself) to the young medium of film.  After years of cajoling, Roach acquiesced to de Marqeux’s wishes, and, with all present and future salaries put up as collateral, de Marqeux wrote, produced, directed and choreographed Millie’s Terrible Illness! (1915), the world’s first musical.  Sadly, the limitations of the production (mainly that it was produced before the advent of sound in film and de Marqeux failed to secure the rights to any recordings of the show’s music) doomed it to failure after a disastrous opening night at the Pant-au-Lune Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, during which the in-house organist was stoned to death.  Following the success (and technological advances) of The Jazz Singer in 1927, de Marqeux developed a remake, which scarcely got past the script  stage in spite of promises of unprecedented budgets by his main investor, Charles Ponzi.  De Marqeux disappeared shortly thereafter.

Cedric Bauer, Jr. (1926-1961), director/animator

Known by aficionados as “The Father-in-Law, or Great Uncle, or Some Distant Blood Relation of Digital Cinema,” Bauer, Jr. was surely instrumental to the introduction of computer-generated imagery into the marriage-aged medium of film.  Disheartened by his experiences working as an animator for Zyzniak Pictures, who mounted a marginally-successful challenge to Disney with their features Beppo, the Finger-Sniffing Ape (1951) and Princess with a Limp (1952), and visibly excited by then-current innovations like 3-D. CinemaScope, and turning the lights out in the theater before the movie starts, Bauer, Jr. awoke one night with what he described in his journals as “a fully-formed vision – movies made without actors or artists, but by the new breed of supercomputer, programmed by men with malleable foreheads.”  After some professional consultation, he modified his approach slightly, and, with the enthusiastic cooperation of IBM and the siphoning of several hundred thousand dollars from the government’s nascent space program, Bauer, Jr. embarked on this unprecedentedly ambitious project.  Though only 26 seconds in length, requiring several warehouses’ worth of punch cards, and consisting solely of what one critic described as “a cloud or a floating blob or something,” Computer Movie (1954) was an immediate sensation, breaking box-office records nationwide and touching off a national craze that was slotted in at the last minute between goldfish-swallowing and McCarthyism.  Sadly, Bauer, Jr. was unable to capitalize on his sudden success, due to legal troubles stemming from his contract with distributor Bob’s Films which stated that all profits be paid to him in Capri pants.  His projected sequel, Computer Movie Part II: A Larger, Redder Blob, exists only in treatment form.

Barry Trilbo (1935-1978), producer

After several failed entrepreneurial enterprises (like the short-lived Lease-a-Pizza chain), Trilbo drifted into film production in the early 1960s with a single, inspired idea to cut down on development costs – attain the rights to television programs, existing properties with high name recognition that few imagined would have much staying power outside of the small screen, and adapt them for the slightly-balding but still distinguished-looking medium of film.  The first project for Trilbo’s production company, the Trilbo Production Company, was to take one of the most beloved programs of the early days of TV and enlarge it accordingly.  Unfortunately, due to poor communication among Trilbo’s acquisition team and a sense of business acumen that might best be described as “meager” (though “tragic,” “farcical,” and “resembling that of a gnat with severe cortical damage” wouldn’t be totally inaccurate), he wound up paying $3.6 million for Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s Life is Worth Living.  The program, though indeed beloved, consisted solely of gentle theological insights using only a blackboard to illustrate them.  Undaunted by the rather static nature of the source material and the fact that Sheen refused to participate (to cover up the fact, the "Bishop" would be seen only in long shot with a Mexican wrestler’s mask stuck to his head), Trilbo refused to cut his losses and forged ahead with production.  Alas, in spite of his yeoman efforts to “jazz it up” for the big screen (state-of-the-art [for 1962] pyrotechnics, a climactic hydrofoil chase, colored chalk), Life is Worth Living… or Else!! proved an unqualified disaster and was pulled from distribution three minutes into the second reel.  Trilbo’s finances and reputation, such as they were, never recovered, though he was reportedly in negotiations to produce an epic miniseries based on “this really great antacid commercial I saw” before he was eaten by pigs at age 52.

Bix Caracas (1932-1984), writer/director/actor

Presaging the work of brilliant comic conceptualists like Andy Kaufman, Albert Brooks, and Carrot Top, Caracas, after selling out nightclubs and integrity nationwide with a radical stand-up act focused around him remaining seated, followed the lead of fellow carbon-based humorists Mel Brooks and Woody Allen and wrote, directed and starred in a series of groundbreaking comedies unlike anything previously seen in the nearly-retirement-aged and slightly forgetful medium of film.  Starting with The Great Bank Deposit (1972), starring Caracas as a hapless schlub who forgets to sign the back of his paycheck, and running all the way through his final, mature masterpiece, Helen Barkewicz (1972), the bittersweet story of a doomed romance from first date to end-of-first-date, Caracas’ comedies were unprecedented in that, as New York Times-reading critic Stanley Prolix explained, “they weren’t funny.  I mean, I don’t think they were even intended to be funny, that’s how unfunny they were.”  In the years following, Caracas’ films, which have yet to be released on DVD, videocassette or celluloid, have nonetheless garnered a cult following, based mainly in a hastily-built armed compound in Ogden, Utah.  “Caracas’ brilliant pictures are a testament to the filmic transcendence attainable by those rare comic minds brave and brilliant enough to steer audiences gently but firmly away from laughter, mirth, or levity of any kind.  He remains an inspiration to all of us,” said Caracas scholar Percy “the Anointed” Banlonne, shortly before being felled in a hail of Federal bullets.

Part Two, to be published shortly before my gas service is interrupted, will cover other neglected cinematic pioneers, such as Horace Darjeeling, self-styled “King of the Nudie Costume Drama”;  Velma Goat-Tungsten, for many years one of the most amusing names in docudrama; and Bertram L. Kestler, whose valiant effort to “bring back the filmstrip” ended in tragicomedy.

FUNNY 'CAUSE IT'S TRUE (EXCEPT FOR THE PART ABOUT IT BEING TRUE. OR FUNNY):

As the philosopher once said, "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day.  Give that same man free audio-editing software and a Soundcloud account and he'll spend hours excerpting some of his lame-ass radio comedy, leaving you alone to eat your fish in peace."   From the December 14, 2011 edition of Wow & Flutter, I give you "Tips For Broadcasters #912: Updated Guidelines."

 Tips for broadcasters #912 by williamham