SECOND-HAND TWEETS #1: TRUE FACTS ABOUT CANADA

Never one to let a good gag go to waste, much less a dozen or so mediocre ones, I am herewith re-posting the #truecanadafacts I composed on Twitter this afternoon (in honor of Canada Day), interspersed with a couple of old gags on the subject from an article I wrote a long time ago. And later, I'm going to use them as inter-set filler on my radio show! So they're disposable and recyclable! If they were only funny, it'd be perfect!

• Canadian interrogators have been suspected of subjecting enemy combatants to the horrors of snowboarding.



• Recently released census data confirms that Canadians are the nationality most likely to use the expression "oh, geez."



• Canadian pornography is widely recognized as the most apologetic in the Northern Hemisphere.



• Toronto's CN Tower is the third-largest man-made structure in the world no one gives a shit about.



• Despite its name, "Canadian bacon" is actually a mineral.



• Canada has been available in color since 1971.



• Though popularly known as "Prime Minister," the official title of Canada's govermental leader is "Mr. Dressup."



• Chief exports: paper, rebar, mild embarrassment, resignation, Loverboy.



• The province of Alberta mysteriously disappeared in 1987, though no one noticed until this past March.



• Canada has more "Gordon"s per capita than any country in the industrialized world.



• To confuse and bewilder interlopers, many "Canadians" have been known to lapse without warning into a bizarre and incomprehensible patois known in some circles as "French."



• The official facial expression of Canada is the bemused smirk.



• Effective January 1, 2012, the Canadian national anthem will revert from "O Canada" to "something by April Wine."



• Their inhabitants emit a noxious liquid when threatened (Winnipeg only).



• Even they don't understand curling.

GEOCITIES IN DUST (AND NOT A WORD ABOUT MICHAEL JACKSON, EITHER):

Back in 2003, I was rather an angry fellow. My personal life had unceremoniously cratered, I was deeply frustrated about the cul-de-sac my creative efforts had wound up in, and I probably had a couple of really painful zits on my back that kept rubbing up against my shirt. It was in that state that, in a fit of concentrated pique, I started (and briefly maintained) a blog whose sole purpose and function was to mock and irritate a rather pompous individual who frequented one of the message boards I regularly visited. I don't look upon the effort with any particular pride - not that the guy didn't deserve a little tweaking, but I'm a little shocked at how vicious the whole thing reads today - but I will say that my contempt for the fellow did result in a rather amusing burst of creativity. See, in the first entry on said blog (wherein the "author" pretentiously detailed his myriad "achievements"), I linked the phrase "my award-winning book" to a two-page site I hashed together in about half an hour, utilizing some rudimentary Dreamweaver skills, and posted online via GeoCities. The only reason I'm posting its content here is that, with the imminent death of Yahoo!'s free-website-hosting project, it'll soon be gone and I don't want to deprive myself or my fans (for which, read also "myself") of the few chuckles I was able to whip up in the twenty minutes or so it took me to come up with it (and, unlike the blog - which you'll notice I'm not linking to - it's not more mean than funny). Plus, it's content, and that fools me yet again into thinking that I'm keeping this blog a vibrant and ongoing proposition and that I'm not leagues more pathetic than anybody I've ever sneered at. (And I realize now that the Ventures did record a few songs with vocals, so that kind of ruins one of the jokes below, but fuggit.)

INTERNATIONAL AWARDS SURPLUS WAREHOUSE
"Randomly Handing Out Statuettes Since 1997."

page 1:

Winners of the Maxwell H. Zendorkingham Award for Basic Competency in the Field of Music and/or Media Journalism, Book Division
(continued...)

572. Farley Juxt, Jr., The Gene Rayburn Story, Part 3: Young, Gifted and _______

573. Paul Dvorak, Jim Nabors - He's Dead, Right?

574. Nick Harcourt, New Mexico is Now! - The Taos Free Jazz Scene

575. Dicks Mole, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Etc.: An Inquiry into Values As Seen Through the Ears of a Modern American Genius "Rock Critic" Reflecting on His Times As Only He Can

576. Bat Narwhal, ed., How to Tackle the TV Guide Crossword Puzzle in Under Six Days!

577. Damon Errantstain, Heterosexuals in Hollywood: I Found One!

588. Pete Maws, Sherman, Goldsboro, Gentry: The Great Bobbies of Early 70s Rock

589. Georgio Pillock, The Ventures: The Annotated Lyrics

590. Moloch O'Herlihy, The Complete Guide to Pro-Life Death Metal

591. Gabriel Melgar, Jr., I'm With the Parking Attendant: True Stories of Clueless Groupiedom

592. Anne Hedonya, Helvetica: Font of the Damned

593. Jojo Krumbumb, Here's Your Friggin' Book, Mr. Publisher. Happy Now?

page 2:

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Maxwell H. Zendorkingham Award?

The Maxwell H. Zendorkingham Award was established in 1995 by Maxwell H. Zendorkingham, a philanthropist and Swiss cheese plugger in order to pay tribute to the hard-working men and women around the world who harvest parsley to garnish the dishes of restaurant patrons worldwide. Unfortunately, due to a clerical error (carried out by a clumsy priest who dabbled in inventory management), the expected shipment of 30 award statuettes accidentally turned out to be 30,000. Happily, owing to his generosity of spirit and The Award Hut's iron-clad "No Returns" policy, Zendorkingham decided to expand the award to honor notables in many different walks of life.

Such as?

Excellence in Millipede Neutering, Aptitude in Skipping Yet Somehow Not Coming Off Gay, Best Individuals Named Doug Shaftesbury in or Around Fort Wayne, Indiana, Most Cheerful Rental Car Agent, Basic Competency in the Field of Music and/or Media Journalism (Book Division), Least Whiny Female Yodeler, Individual Most Inured to Being "The Ugly One" in a Boy Band, Outstanding Achievement in Gyno-Ventriloquism, and Basic Competency in the Field of Music and/or Media Journalism (Handbill/Post-It Note Division).

How does one qualify for a Maxwell H. Zendorkingham Award?

Through a lengthy and torturous nomination/ratification process, including the testimony of at least five non-relatives as to your skill in the relevant category, your non-Jewishness, and your ability to uphold the level of excellence and the attendant responsibilities of your specific craft for four to six years after receiving the award. Or you can send $3.95 and two Proofs of Purchase from a box of Wheat Chex to Free Awards Thing, PO Box 5868, Skirmish Lake, MI (zip code withheld by request).

Are you standing on my foot?

Oh, is that your foot? Terribly sorry. Here, have a Maxwell H. Zendorkingham Award.

Why does the Maxwell H. Zendorkingham Award look exactly the same as the Peter N. Khakky Award for Ability to Make Exact Change From a Fifty?

It's not. Tommy soldered on a rosette or something. It's there. Unless it fell off.

FLUFF FOR NUTTERS:

A couple of links and an embed or two while I crack my knuckles and attempt to resume regular narrowcasting:

Jonathan Franzen reads and discusses two classic "casuals" from the New Yorker archives, "Love Trouble is My Business" by Veronica Geng and "Coyote v. Acme" by Ian Frazier here, a podcast that makes me feel anew as if my limp efforts in their respective directions are like trying to read Proust while strapped to a rocket sled with the corpse of Mr. Reagan harnessed to my back like a proto-neo-conservative parachute.

ABC is presently engaged in an odd variation on the time-honored tradition of Summer Burn-Off Theater, in which the low-rated show whose unaired episodes they're filling the dead, dancing-and/or-dating-show-deprived weeks of June, July and August with hasn't been cancelled yet. The show in question is Better Off Ted, which I watched for the first time today via abc.com's new and evidently improved online viewer. And once past the groansome show title, the omnipresent wacky-sitcom music-cues (the hey-morons!-this-is-where-you're-supposed-to-laugh imposition that has increasingly replaced the laugh track for single-camera network sitcoms) and my ambivalence towards its titular hero (who has grown on me already over the course of the three episodes I've seen so far, but I have to ask in light of both this and How I Met Your Mother, what is it with sitcoms with stellar supporting casts and bland-unto-irritating protagonists named Ted?), it turns out to be pretty damned hilarious in the vein of Victor Fresco's previous TV excursion, Andy Richter Controls the Universe. So I encourage you to throw your support behind BOT before it goes the way of that other worthy effort, and once you've exhausted your laughter, you can use the beta player to mourn the passing of the smug comedy geek's shorthand for lame, soulless laugh-hackery. But dry your eyes, fellow yuk-snobs; we'll always have Dane Cook.

The following is very low-quality and not otherwise particularly substantive, but kinda interesting-unto-surreal all the same: watch, if you dare, as one-half of Monty Python (and their female foil, Carol Cleveland) shares a stage (and, in one case, a lap) with one of the oddest assortments of mid-seventies celebrities you're ever likely to see, from a 1976 installment of The Mike Douglas Show. (Full disclosure: this posting is mainly here to win the coveted title of Most Blog Posts Featuring Bizarre Talk Show Appearances by David Soul, sponsored by Which One Was Starsky Again? magazine.)



They don't make talk shows like that anymore, I'll tell you what. In fact, I'm increasingly convinced that they shouldn't make talk shows at all anymore, at least not the bits where the host actually talks to people. Other than the occasions when David Letterman has a guest that either interests, irritates or slightly frightens him, what passes for conversation on these shows is mostly just so much canned airtime. Oh, you get some decent, ephemeral amusement with reasonable frequency, but man, what I'd give for one of these guys to engage their guests for real, get into scraps or scuffles that can't be explained away as publicity stunts, rip the skins off at least some of their guests and let us take a good, hard look at the machinery underneath. Or just get them the hell out of their comfort zones, publicists and pre-interviews be damned. How much more interesting would, I dunno, Shia LeBoeuf be if he were questioned about his personal traumas while being waterboarded? Yeah, you're right, probably not that much more interesting. Failing that, then, why can't we just enlist Robert Smigel's right arm and simply unleash a nightly torrent of anthropormorphized abuse on all and sundry? Don't even give the fuckers a chance to answer. Wouldn't you rather see a vulgar, cigar-chomping puppet mutt like this poking up behind a desk night after night? I know I would...

DEAD AIR:

The silly brilliance (silliance, if you will) of Peter Serafinowicz and Robert Popper never fails to tickle me in those hard-to-reach places. Look Around You ranks with the first series of I'm Alan Partridge and the whole of The Day Today as one of the landmarks of recent British comedy - their combination of the meticulous and the ridiculous vaults them into the top rank of parodists (and I will stand tall in defense of LAY's unfairly maligned second series). Check it out (it's been running on [adult swim] for the last few months and it's readily available on YouTube). I bring 'em up because they've been adding to their legend online lately with their website on their brand-flagellatingly-new religion, Tarvuism (a taster for a forthcoming TV series) and the premiere radio station of the afterlife. Gut-busters both; enjoy.

And here's their "Birds of Britain" film, similar to but almost wholly different from the one from the final episode of LAY. Silly bee.

TONIGHT ON PUBLIC DOMAIN MOVIE CLASSICS:

7:30 PM - Hell is for Texans and Certain Oklahomans (1937). Ill-fated attempt to make a star out of Rex Knipper, "the Singeing Cowboy." Knipper plays George "Wild Bill" Hochfliesch, a Sheriff enlisted to clean up the lawless town of Cordwood. Keeping a promise he made to his wife on her father's deathbed, he vows to do the job without killing anybody. Instead, he shoots with undeadly accuracy and burns the ends of his enemies' eyebrows and facial hair instead, making them so crazy from the smell that they leave town. Bart Herckmann directs with his usual flair, keeping the camera pointed at whoever is speaking at the moment three out of five times. (78m, b/w)

8:50 PM - Short Film: Hollywood's Golden Goiters! (7m, b/w)

9 PM - Freak-Off! (1968). Exploitation master Rod Cowper (Deathsponge '70, Schwinn Sadists) sent Damiel Flelm (The Dampening) to San Francisco to research, write and direct the definitive cinematic exposé on the then-burgeoning "peace and love" generation. Despite being 47, slightly deaf and cursed with inadequate handwriting, Flelm delivered the goods as only he could. Wide-eyed innocent Joanie Edswiller (Gertie Whettnap) heads across country in search of her runaway sister and quickly finds herself right at the intersection of Hake and Ashburger, where she falls in with a band of pet-smoking, antacid-eating youngsters whose motto is "tune up, turn over and drop it." An ASPCA letter-writing campaign and a protracted lawsuit from Tums kept this film out of circulation for years, but it remains a worthy artifact, with strong-smelling performances from G. David Schine Jr., Huntz Hall III, and, as the charasmatic "Dr. Drug Supplier," Christine Jorgensen, not to mention its shockingly accurate depiction of the horrors of cat-smoking. The haunting theme song ("Psycho Deli [Meat Platter of the Mind]") is by the Banana Split Infinitives. (97m, color)

10:40 PM - Documentary Short: Cold Remedies of the Incans (16m, color)

11 PM - The Glorious Event (1953). Seventy different full-scale sets spanning six continents, a shooting schedule topping 36 months, a screenplay co-written by John Steinbeck, Eugene O'Neill and Evelyn Waugh, and the largest international cast assembled in motion pictures to that time came together to produce this four-hour CinemaScope epic about Len Paltrow (Eddie Bracken), inventor of the dickey. (235m, color)

2:55 AM - Profiles in Celluloid - Myrna Loy: Christ, What a Whore (35m)

3:30 AM - We're Discussing Movies Over Here with Bendix Cratt (a PDMC original). This week, Cratt discusses the art of film with director L.N. McKittrick (Flaming Chiropodists, A Gilded Cyst, Cats Have Strokes Too). As McKittrick died six years ago, he does both parts. We didn't think anything of it until afterwards. (60m; last show of the series)

MEGA-TWEET #1:

(first in a series of musings too bloated for Twitter but not substantive enough for a paragraph)

The template for every biography I've read over the last few years: troubled youth/flash of genius/success/excess/alienation/alcoholism/bloating/attempted cleanup-slash-renaissance/relapse/lonely, pathetic death. Either I need to switch genres or find a better class of role models.

INSOMNIA, INTERNET ACCESS AND ANTI-SOCIAL TENDENCIES MAKE AN INTERESTING COMBINATION:

My first works using the new, text-to-movie website xtranormal.com:

33 1/3 WON'T DO:

In an attempt to defibrillate this blog back to life and open myself up to the kind of public humiliation that is the hallmark of any failed writer, I herewith present my rejected proposal for Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series of books on notable rock elpees (or ceedees or empeethrees or whatever you want to call them these days). All two fans of my writing will note the projected contributions of two of my favorite nom de roche-auteur multiple personalities, and a prize to be determined will be forwarded to the reader who comes up with the most accurate tally of good reasons why it was merde-canned, rounded down to the nearest hundred.

This Nation’s Saving Grace, by William Ham
Or:
The Persecution and Self-Negation of Nik Rainey, Semi-Hemi-Demi-Professional Rock Critic as Performed by the Members of the Fall Circa 1985 Under the Direction of Mark E. Smith

What really went on there?
We only have this excerpt…
- “Cruisers Creek,” the Fall

From the introduction by editor McChesney Duntz:

“Nik Rainey has disappeared. For most of you, that fact won’t mean a great deal. But for me, a well-respected cultural critic and mentor to literally eight of the nascent pen-pushers in the verdant if heavily-mined field of music criticism, this news has struck me like a medicine ball of grief to the solar plexus of my very being. For it was I who, in my position as Reviews, Margins and Kerning Editor of the late, lamented bi-weekly The Shredded Cone (formerly Blown Tweeter until we discovered that we shared that name with a quarterly journal devoted to budgerigar porn), plucked Rainey out of the cul-de-sac of obscurity following the receipt of an over-the-transom packet of vital, scabrous submissions demonstrating, in admittedly raw form, a passion for the music unseen since the heyday of that one gentleman whose name eludes me for the moment…

…But from passion too often comes estrangement (and from that restraining orders, though that’s a story for another day, presumably one following the expiration of the statute of limitations). Rainey’s work became more infrequent and less coherent, though his exegesis on Andrew Ridgeley (“Does God Walk Among Us, or Merely Behind and to the Left of Us?,” The Plainsville Shopper, July, 2003) remains a minor classic. Finally, he stopped contributing pieces altogether and retreated to a cramped studio apartment in the small Northwest fishing village and methedrine clearing station of Port Winestain, Washington (town motto: “Well, We Tried”). As his mentor, I spoke with him frequently on the phone (my calls invariably greeted with a languid, drawn-out sigh of pleasure and the joyous salutation “Oh, it’s you again”), and gradually came to realize that Rainey was depressed, disillusioned and utterly estranged from the object of the only true desire he ever had – music itself. His conversation came to mirror the downward trajectory of his writing, becoming more halting and less articulate (and given to deep and frequent belching, something rarely utilized in his prose), ultimately ceasing entirely in July, 2006. Wet with concern, I caught the first AirJitney to the coast and tracked down the sanctum of his exile, only to be greeted by the saddest, most stomach-churning sight since the ill-advised sauna I took with Jann Wenner in ’87. Rainey had methodically destroyed his entire collection of rare promos, the priceless memorabilia from a thousand label-sponsored junkets, and every review, interview and free-form haiku he had ever committed to paper. Well… almost. One piece remained. There, soaking up the last of the memory of his wizened old Apple IIC computer, was a single, almost-finished WordPerfect document, an epic screed regarding what he called “the only record I can still listen to with anything resembling enjoyment,” the tenth album by Manchester, England’s long-running post-punk combo The Fall, This Nation’s Saving Grace. Admittedly, I was unfamiliar with this album and, indeed, the band itself (my personal tastes of late running to Perez Prado, Andre Kostelanetz and Phillip Michael Thomas), but, in his mysterious absence, I felt it my duty to rescue what may well be his final message to the world, clean it up a touch for public consumption, and retain the ensuing residuals in the event that he should someday return.

The results have been stringently edited and annotated where necessary by yours truly (me) in the manner of all great “lost” documents. (As it was written on a computer, it sadly lacked some of the qualities of most such documents, a failing I took the liberty of rectifying by printing it out, crumpling several pages, subjecting several more to smoke and/or water damage and losing a few key passages by writing phone numbers or notes to myself on the other side of them and tearing the corners off to put in my wallet, the same wallet which I then arranged to have stolen by an acquaintance of mine, thus approximating its rough authenticity. I fervently believe that is what Nik would have wanted, had he thought about it.)"

Not much to add to that… other than the fact that McChesney Duntz is as delusional as he is arrogant, has his facts wrong 50% of the time and is matched in his misreadings of rock history only by his misapprehensions of personal history. My approach to This Nation’s Saving Grace, perhaps the greatest of the many, many albums released under the Fall banner, can be best synopsized as “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung meets Pale Fire.” You know the drill: young(ish), doomed talent leaves behind unfinished opus; older, fading talent acquires opus and imposes his own agenda upon it. Writing through the character of Nik Rainey (whose biography is a somewhat exaggerated version of my own), I intend to delve deep into the sustained brilliance of the album, its anomalous place in both the pop world of its moment (proposed chapter title: “1985 – It Was the Best of Times, Oh No It Fucking Wasn’t”) and the career of the Fall itself (never before nor since had they produced an album that balanced accessibility and eccentricity so adroitly), and the utter slipperiness of the work in question. This last is key to the structure and design of this book. I am using the differing takes of two fictional rock critics as my vehicle because a) the Fall are commonly thought of as a “critics’ band,” favored above all by that most fervent species of arch-fan, and b) because no two Fall fans can seem to agree on what, exactly, Mark E. Smith is on about most of the time. Cryptic allusions are strewn around their songs like discarded fag-ends (Google, for example, the term “Thule Group” from this album’s “Gut of the Quantifier” and half-a-dozen eye-popping possibilities jump out!), the English language is twisted, muttered and muffled, and the whole enterprise is overlaid with what could be called “sarcastic surrealism” – and yet, somehow, the best of it makes perfect sense. Trying to articulate what it means and why it means so much to certain of us, well, therein lies the challenge.

Like the protagonist of this story, TNSG arrived in my life during a particularly rough patch of my adolescence, served as that clichéd-but-still-powerful beacon of musical and creative inspiration, made me hear and see things differently. As the years passed (and lord, have they passed), it came clear that it represented the same thing in the continuum of the Fall’s recorded output as it did the moment of my life that it first came to my attention – that delicious moment when raw, shambling materials began to coalesce into something skilled and powerful, when suddenly one is able to walk it like you talk it with a purposeful stride; a moment which becomes all the more important once you realize that it’s bound not to last. Favored bands, like people, are built for decline. The Fall went from this apex to a slicker, simpler sound, made a couple of swipes at commercial success, then began lurching wildly in all manner of willfully perverse directions, still capable of brilliance but often lapsing into a comic/pathetic caricature of its younger, better self. And sadly, I (and, by extension, Nik Rainey) can relate all too well. McChesney Duntz would too, if he dismounted his quasi-intellectual high horse long enough to take a long, hard look at the landscape.

All of which sounds a mite depressing, I admit. Which is why it behooves me to emphasize that (as I hope the italicized fragment above demonstrates) the main adjective I want this book to be is funny. A satirical probe of the rock critics’ (plural) mind, the silliness that goes hand in hand with the joys and epiphanies of loving music, and the self-effacing chuckles that any right-thinking music writer must feel when he looks back at some of his wilder swings and misses. Every inflated moment of pretension in the tale is there to be deflated with a well-placed pinprick. This is what the Fall do best when they’re firing on all cylinders as they do here, and this is what I hope to approximate and pay tribute to in the writing of this book.

The structure: sixteen chapters, one for each of the eleven tracks on the original U.K. release, in order, and five more (corresponding to the contemporaneous single and EP tracks that have been appended to the currently-available CD) interspersed throughout. As TNSG is as well-structured as any album in the Fall’s catalogue (complete with opening and closing theme), the progression and internal musical/lyrical content of the songs correspond to the progression and gradual disintegration of the “author” (and the constant annotations and interpolations by the “editor” throughout wind up telling its own story). Briefly and sketchily: “Mansion” (intro); “Bombast” (statement of intent – the author rails against his foes and lessers); “Barmy” (the author as teenage eccentric); “Petty (Thief) Lout” (interlude #1 – portrait of the author as a half-hearted suburban delinquent); “What You Need” (the author reflects on his ambitions); “Couldn’t Get Ahead” (interlude #2 – frustrations); “Spoilt Victorian Child” (a journey through the dystopian wonderland of mid-80s British pop fandom); “L.A.” (the first taste of success, with all the excess that implies); “Cruisers Creek” (interlude #3 – the worst party ever attended); “Gut of the Quantifier” (the first strains of disillusionment); “Vixen” (interlude #4 – female trouble); “My New House” (domesticity briefly achieved); “Rollin’ Dany” (interlude #5 – losing the plot, the author as [damaged] man about [the wrong] town); “Paint Work” (collapse – dream/hallucination sequence); “I Am Damo Suzuki” (the ultimate personality crisis); “To Nkroachment: Yarbles” (the end[?] of the story, the author resigning himself to his fate, which remains in question, since, as in Pale Fire, the last line remains unwritten).

There’s more, of course (and at 25-35,000 words, there damn well better be), but I’m coming dangerously close to my 2,000-word limit here, so I’ll cut this short. I think this book would fit in well with some of the more fictionally-oriented volumes in the 33 1/3 series (Joe Pernice’s and John Darnielle’s come to mind), but with a structure and a tone unique to the project. I have been gathering up background materials for some time to add depth to these examinations, and am even starting to put out feelers for access to the then-members of the band, including (fingers crossed) Mark E. Smith himself (and if you’re at all familiar with Dave Simpson’s book The Fallen, you can imagine what a daunting task all that can be). I would certainly be willing to do whatever it takes to get the word out about the book (readings, interviews, tireless self-promotion in any available venue, skywriting) should the opportunity arise. And if you’re somehow intrigued and want to hear more, I’d be happy to rabbit on at length about it.

BYE, GEORGE...

George Carlin was one of the formative influences of my youth, largely because, as with most formative influences, he happened to be there at the time. My father, the guy I get my sense of humor from (so blame him), had a pretty decent collection of comedy LPs back in the seventies. One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of standing frozen with horror in the bathtub listening to Tony Hendra's imitation of John Lennon's primal scream shrieks (as conceived by Michael O'Donoghue) as Dad played the first National Lampoon album, Radio Dinner, in the next room. As I got a little older, I used to sneak that record, along with the first few Cheech & Chong albums, out after school before the folks got home and giggle surreptitiously at all the drug and sex jokes I barely understood and smirk pseudo-knowingly at the political stuff I understood even less. (In fact, I listened to Radio Dinner again not long ago and I still don't quite get "Profiles in Chrome.") Later on came the Steve Martin albums that Mom dutifully bought him every Christmas, which were great gateway drugs for my nascent comic sensibilities - goofy and silly enough for an eight-year-old to appreciate, with a detatched, ironic undertow that gradually revealed the machinery underneath as I got older. And then there was that trio of records with that slightly crazed-looking longhair on the cover, contorting himself in wacky poses, looking out at me with a glazed, goofball gaze, and simulating sticking his middle finger deep into his nose shirtlessly seated in front of a blackboard. Those three releases - FM & AM (1972), Occupation: Foole (1973), and especially the one that came between them, Class Clown (1972) - were the first stand-up comedy records I ever heard (though I think we had a stray Bill Cosby collection floating around somewhere, too), and it's safe to say they warped my mind and got into my bloodstream with insensate speed.

The big hook, of course, was the final track on the second side of Class Clown, the bit advertised with a big red mock-disclaimer on the cover: "Warning: This Record Contains Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television. Hearing It Could Infect Your Mind, Curve Your Spine And Lose The War For The Allies." Again, I didn't entirely grasp the whole message - I looked in my atlas and couldn't figure out what country these "Allies" come from - but I knew there was a big, overhanging branch full of forbidden fruit in those grooves, in the form of naughty words, and what eight- or nine-year-old could resist that particular allure? Heck, the word "poop" still sent me into convulsive giggles. And I just knew this crazy guy was playing with much heavier artillery than that. So, one afternoon when there was no one else in the house, I carefully removed Class Clown from the wire rack underneath the Sears Silvertone (noting its position among the Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Lind and Neil Diamond records so I could return it without getting nabbed), set the volume knob just under "one," gingerly lowered it onto the turntable, dropped the stylus onto the appropriate groove, and, trembling slightly in dry-mouthed, transgressive glee cut with loads of apprehension, crouched down and put my ear to the woofer in the giant right speaker. I hear a slightly spacy preamble about words, thoughts being fluid, whatever, c'mon, man, get to the swearing before Mom gets home! Then, heading into the subject at last:

"There are four hundred thousand words in the English language... and there are seven of them you can't say on television. What a ratio that is! Three hundred and ninety three thousand, nine hundred and ninety three... to seven. They must reeeeallllly be bad. They'd have to be outRAGEous! To be separated from a group that large!"

Yes, yes, they are! Get to them already!

"Ya know the seven, don't you, that you can't say on television?"

Well, I'm pretty sure I know three or four of them... Okay, deep breath, here they come...

"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits!"

YES!!! I exploded! Shivering with goose-bumptious joy! Shoulders shaking! Trying to hold back that geyser of giggles that started gushing out, for fear that one of the neighbors, or maybe the teacher who had driven by the house one night and busted me to my folks the next day for having the TV on in my room after ten watching a show I didn't really understand either but I could tell was pretty naughty itself called Monty Python's Flying Circus (something faintly ribald about its very name to my unformed mind), would happen by and overhear, after which I'd get sent to some institution for pre-teen miscreants where I'd have my mouth washed out with Irish Spring every hour on the hour and cane-whipped twice a day and wind up ceremonially immolating my 35-cent Alfred E. Neuman poster until I straightened up and flew right. It wasn't just the words themselves - well, no, it was the words themselves, as I could only say with authority what the first two of them actually meant and I had a vague but growing suspicion about the last one, but it was also the beautifully arranged, rhythmic manner of their speaking, so musical, the scat at the root of scatology. Such a wonderful, even joyous, sense of release there, unleashing that current of taboo syllables! And once the initial thrill wore off, a further realization - what's the big deal? I played it again immediately afterwards and soaked in the message, spelled out as clear as the day I had closed the rec-room curtains to hide from: "(There are) no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And words!"

Well...yeah! Right! Words are...just words! An epiphany! My first of the week! (My second was a day or two later, when I tried to put my newfound understanding into practice and got disabused of it in no uncertain terms by my dad, the very guy whose stash I'd purloined it from. He never hit me; he never had to. His look was enough to send me, cringing, to my room to hide for the rest of the day. The gap between idealism and reality was delineated then, and that right quick.)

I kept coming back to those records frequently after that, reveling in not just the "strong" language but the language itself, the absurdity of phrases we all take for granted ("'jumbo shrimp' - like 'military intelligence,' the words don't go together, man"), the torrents of meaningless cliches and non-sequiturs rushing by us in mainstream discourse (his game show, DJ and newsman parodies), a rich vein of observational humor that extended to the silly rules and rituals we grow up with (his epic reminiscence about growing up Irish Catholic on Class Clown being one of the best examples) and even to something as insignificant as the sound you make when you swallow.

He even led to my first comedy performance - I found a promotional 45 of one of his news routines (the one that kicks off 1975's An Evening with Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo), memorized it, and stole it more or less in toto for my 4th grade talent show to huge response. I even somehow managed to pass Carlin's work off as my own, though in retrospect I'm sure my teachers had to have been a trifle dubious that a ten-year-old came up with lines like "Terrorists blow up Central America and leave a note."

From then on, Carlin remained a comedic eminence grise, even if I wound up drifting away from him in favor of his own influences (Lenny, Mort) and delving into the harder, rawer stuff proffered by both contemporaries (Pryor) and followers (Hicks). I even, sadly, found myself taking the man for granted. Oh, I happily parked in front of the set for his tri-annual-or-so live HBO specials, appreciated his thoughtful, articulate talk-show appearances and print interviews, and smiled at his periodic movie cameos (perhaps the only non-cringeworthy thing in Kevin Smith's Dogma - where he, appropriately, played a short-tempered, foul-mouthed cardinal - was his growling delivery of the line "All right - mistakes were made"). Heck, I think I even watched his Fox sitcom once. But for too long, Carlin seemed to be just there, a weathered landmark on the landscape, a usually amusing but hardly revolutionary figure given to more and more insignificant observations delivered in a querilous, burned-out singsong. (Rick Moranis' impression of him on SCTV captured - somewhat meanly, but not inaccurately - this wheel-spinning image of the man.)

Silly me, really. I barely noticed how, once he cleaned up his coke habit and started his comeback in the 80s, he gradually, even subtely, started interlacing his act with more barbed social commentary, to the point that, by the turn of the millenium, he resembled nothing so much as a hyper-curmudgeonly prophet of doom, stalking the stage clad in black and delivering more concentrated venom at a stretch than a busload full of Bill Hickseses. (His 1999 HBO special, You Are All Diseased, all but singed my eyebrows.) He mellowed slightly after that, but still kept the skeptic's faith up to the end - his "Modern Man" bit from a few years back showed that he lost none of his ability to process the vagaries of contemporary jargon into a dazzling crazy-quilt ("I'm a hot-wired, heat-seeking, warm-hearted cool customer; voice-activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database; my database is in cyberspace; so I'm interactive, I'm hyperactive, and from time to time I'm radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin' the wave, dodgin' the bullet, pushin' the envelope..."), and his last special, It's Bad for Ya, though not quite as scorched-earth as before, ranks with some of his best work.

And now he's gone, at age 71. Sad, certainly, but not tragic - he leaves behind the most full-bodied testament to the art of stand-up; a varied, variable, but always forthright and honest path through the thickets of contemporary society, untempered by commercial considerations and the sickening bugaboos of timidity and political correctness. Comedy fans and comedy creators owe an immense debt to the man - he's certainly been an inspiration to me (I mean, Christ, look how long this fucking blog post has become!) and, if I feel sad right now, it's mostly because, as everything spirals ever faster around the drain, I have the strong feeling that he'd regret missing the show. Rest in shitting, pissing, fucking, cunting, cocksuckering, motherfucking, titting peace, good sir.

The obligatory YouTube embeds - first, the early but still-hilarious "Wonderful WINO" routine, as performed by a clean-shaven, short-haired Carlin on The Hollywood Palace in 1966 (hosted by Jimmy Durante!):



Next, Carlin doing his "God" routine on The Mike Douglas Show - interestingly, more or less the same routine that got SNL its very first outraged phone calls when he performed it on its debut a few months later, but presumably didn't raise many housewife's eyebrows when he did it in the middle of the day:



And finally, a more-or-less random ten minute chunk of You Are All Diseased. Safety glasses recommended:



* * * *

On the brighter side of things, I'm happy to announce that my pal and colleague Hayden Childs' entry in the oft-excellent 33-1/3 series of books, Shoot Out the Lights, is out now. It's great; you should get it. And hey, my name's in it, too! Thanks, buddy!

PIT-TAY PAR-TAYY!!!:

Oh, lordy, am I depressed. I'm stuck in this go-nowhere, do-nothing area (geographical and otherwise) for the forseeable future with little money and precious few prospects of getting out of this miserable job I have that's causing me constant lower back pain along with the pre-existing agita. I'm creeping ever-closer to forty, my longtime deadline for making something of myself (should I add a "485 Days Until I Give Up" countdown clock to this blog? That'd be fun, right?). I'm seething with barely-suppressed rage all the fucking time anymore. And I'm going on four straight years of being pretty well and truly creatively blocked. Reading those Bill Murray divorce allegations didn't help (though, having already heard some unpleasant rumors and second-hand accounts that suggested the man isn't the all-around swellster us fans rather hoped he was didn't tarnish a hero irreparably the way the Woody Allen Incident did back in '92 - well, not irreparably, exactly; I wound up getting over it just in time for his movies to start to suck), nor did the message from the person I won some vintage humor mags from on eBay stating that she can't send the goods off right away because her 18-year-old daughter had just been fatally stabbed. And this fucking chest cold won't go away. So, I'm forced to exercise my nuclear option, the only thing that cheers me up regardless of circumstances, and I hope it may serve the same function for you in your own individual midnight hour.

"You can do euthanasia on a dog, but this old woman? I'd be sent to prison. Where's the justice in that?":

A great find here: the original pilot for Chris Morris' brilliant British satire series Brass Eye (here called Torque TV), containing about five minutes of material that never made it to the first broadcast episode, "Animals."



And hey, if you like that, why not try another twisted brainwrong from this one-off man mental, epsiode one of the peerless news parody The Day Today (also featuring the oft-great Steve Coogan and Patrick Marber, the guy who wrote Closer and Notes on a Scandal)?

Driven by the desire to be as trendy as possible, I've uploaded a set of tunes to Muxtape.com. (Originally, it was going to be a collection of my homemade mash-'em-ups and primitive comedy bits, but for some reason, they'd only allow me to upload one.) Like the world really cares, right? As if anybody's even checking this fucking never-was's fucking fucking blog to see if he's re-fucking-learned to write a fucking sentence, much less decided to fucking share a portion of his out-of-fucking-touch peaked-in-'8fucking8 musical taste with .000000000000000001% of the fucking fucking fucking entropy-ridden fucking planet?

So, hey, enjoy.

WHAT'S ON TV RIGHT NOW:

(The following is the text for the "bit" [a little radio jargon there; consult your dictionary] I "performed" on this past evening's Wow & Flutter program. Probably more humorous spoken than read, and the very last entry was a desperation move in search of an ending written approximately thirty seconds before I went to air with it, but it's content, and that's what matters.)

In the interests of full disclosure, Wow & Flutter grudgingly presents "What's on TV Right Now."

The Ohhh! Channel's True Crime series continues with "Heartbeat, It's a Lovebeat in the Kneecaps with a Fungo Bat If You Don't Pay Your Vig," the story of the bloody reign of Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco Crime Family. That's followed by another edition of the popular game show "Who Wants a Piece of Me?"

On Cinemax, "The Pleasure Siphon" presents a unique two-parter combining recent political history with simulated intercourse. First up, what might have happened if Watergate co-consipirator John Dean were a lusty, busty co-ed in "Moist Ambition," then an S&M-flavored romp through the Ford administration with "Whip Ignatius Now."

Sucker, the kid's network for adults only, presents Skippy Keitel in Bad Crossing Guard.

On channel 7 right now, a repeat of "American Gladiolas," featuring another exciting evening of competition featuring a variety of muscle-bound, leotard-wearing athletes beating the crap out of one another with flowers.

Public Domain Movie Classics brings you part three of its series, "Sam Peckinpah: the Lost Years," spotlighting work the famed director did during his exile from Hollywood in the late 1970's. Tonight, an episode of his little-known Saturday-morning cartoon "Straw Puppies" and the commercial he directed for the then-new fast-food restaurant Wendy's, complete with the short-lived slogan suggested by the director, "Hot and Juicy...Like a Mexican Whore."

And finally, on the Paranoia Channel, there's someone - wait, just act natural, pretend like you're looking for your remote, god, no, he's looking right at you, oh, Jesus, he...

HEY, CHECK IT OUT...

As I continue my slow, gout-ridden-snail-like journey towards regaining my writerly mojo and having something to show for it, I found a whole list of bad (and rather outdated) song/book/movie/ movie-based-on-book-adapted-from-song titles to share with the (lower) class. Endure.

Don't Let Your Son Go Down On Me

I Saw Mommy Gassing Santa Claus

North Pole Terminus: The Santa Klaus Barbie Story

The Executioner's Free-Form Spoken Word Piece With Atonal Saxophone Accompaniment

E-Manuel: The Loves of a Computer-Generated Mexican

The Dogs of War Take Gainesburger Hill

The Hills Have Conjunctivitis

The Texas Chain Letter Massacre ("This fall, postage... is due. ")

Crouching Tiger, Smitten Drag Queen

Consummating the Annulment

Superfly DOA

The Importance of Being Ernest, starring Jim Varney, with Gailard Sartain as Algernon "Vern" Moncrieff

Matrix Reassigned

...and God Prorated Woman

Al Czervik and Judge Smails Fistfight in Heaven

Leading With My Nose: The Michael Jackson Story

The Art of Massage by Moulty

Get in the Van by d. boon

The Rise to Prominence of the Dave Matthews Band, or When Cooler-Heads Prevail

BLACK ARMBAND TIME...

Dave Day of the Monks has died. Damn. An on-air tribute will be in order next week. And perhaps we will have the answer to the question, "Does the bald spot from a tonsure grow back after death?" Through your tears, dig:

ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, HERE'S SOMETHING AT LEAST:

RADIO PSA (:60)

FADE UP on easy-listening instrumental, voices overlaid.

VOICE #1: I like softcore.

VOICE #2: I won Robert Conrad's autograph on eBay.

VOICE #3: I've seen Krull seven times.

VOICE #4: I lasted almost eight minutes once.

VOICE #5: A girl smiled at me on the commuter rail one morning.

VOICE #6: I've had a letter published in Maxim.

VOICE #7: Most dogs seem to like me.

MARTIN SHEEN:* They're our country's overlooked majority. Scarcely remarked upon because they're so unremarkable. They're the slightly below-average men of America. And without them, society would be a somewhat similar place. They're your hardware store assistant managers, your sports drink enthusiasts, your Hyundai owners. They're the people who keep "According to Jim" on the air. And they're tired of being ignored, but really rather resigned to it. For mere pennies a day, you can help them maintain that extra fifteen pounds around their waist, pay for the upkeep of their moderate amount of back hair, keep them saying things like "How's it hangin'?" and "Boy, that Bill Engvall sure is funny." Your support can help. But don't worry if you can't. They're not all that concerned about it. The painfully average men of America - they're not going anywhere.

ANNOUNCER: Paid for by three guys nicknamed "Buddy."

* Note - he's probably not available, so call his brother Joe. You can probably get him when Zombiegeddon II is finished filming.

OKAY, THEN...

Trying to get back into the habit of posting on my blog(s) here - chipping away at my debilitating writer's block bit by excruciating bit. (I am once again shamed/pleased to note the arrival of the latest issue of The High Hat, which, once again, I had less than nothing to do with, though the editorial board has kindly allowed my name to remain on the masthead for the nonce. I'm actually trying to write a piece or two for the next full issue as we speak, and fully intend to have it/them drafted before I even pitch them to avoid the repeated embarrassments I've suffered previously, but not a word to the eskimos. Anyway, read it, it's good.) But oh, agh, whelp, not much of gravity or import to impart here yet again, so another bizarre YouTube clip will have to suffice in lieu of content. Did you ever wonder what it would be like if David Soul and Paul Ryder (Happy Mondays) had collaborated with a man in puppet drag on one of the Fall's greatest "hits"? Well, frenz, wonder no longer...

CAN - YOU DIG IT?:

Awright, if I can't quite bring myself to type a few coherent sentences to re-establish this long-dormant blog, I can at least start back up by more currently-popular means: embedding YouTube videos to make up for lack of anything to actually, y'know, say. Starting here.

REBOOT (TO THE GROIN, MAYHAP):

All right, goddammit, I've let this blog (and virtually everything, writing-wise) lay dormant and frustrated for a good eighteen months now, months that have been noteworthy for internal and external vacillations best typified as an emotional roller-coaster inside a psychological Tilt-a-Whirl overlooking a physiological, um, guy who guesses your weight or something. Anyway, enough of that. I'm serving notice as of now that today marks the rebirth of Logonorrhea!!!, as a receptacle for sundry musings, mutterings and meanderings, and perhaps even the occasional opinion, should I have one. Let the cyberspatial blogospherical webiverse ring out with my gloriously strangled cries!

But, ehhh, not just now. I'll get to it later...

HIPLY TRANGRESSIVE NOVEL OF THE MONTH* CLUB UPCOMING SELECTIONS:

BELCH, by Trip Albacore
Henry (he has no last name - or does he?), a faceless corporate drone for a company of unspecified purpose in a city known simply as City, suffers from malaise of indeterminate origin. All he knows is that his ankles hurt, he feels like he just swallowed an enormous raisin and he can't whistle anymore. One day, while waiting for a bus (what number bus? Wouldn't you like to know?), he meets a charismatic, mysterious 12-year-old, also named Henry (this may well turn out to be significant), who proposes the ideal solution to his problem: a belching contest. What happens next, we can't say, but here's a hint: people end up getting mutilated humorously and the one female character in the book sleeps with everybody until her namesake, the author's junior-year high-school girlfriend, gets an injunction and those parts are edited from the book. "Nihilicious." - Made-Up-Words Montheekly

DRAINED, by Gad Burlinghame
That house the jaded, thirtyish grad school dropout, would-be writer and chilblains sufferer is renting for the summer - there's something wrong with it. Something in the walls. Something that fills the halls with the stench of total societal breakdown. And bleach. Which may or may not itself be symbolic, but Christ, I hate that smell. I mean, he does. The protagonist. Who is not me.

CRIMP, by Nikk Jiggerhammerer
Jaundiced bibliophile Mr. Ex, aimless and more than a little psuedonymous, drifts into a darkly seductive subculture of people who eat stuff that probably shouldn't be eaten. Liberated at first, Mr. Ex's distanced, ironic sense of elation is shattered when, in a climactic scene almost worth putting at the end of the book, he discovers that the cult's charismatic, mysterious leader is not a figment of his fevered imagination or a projection of the dark underbelly of post-millennial America, but just a balding guy named Morris who wants his money.

VESTED, by Gyp Mercatorus
Furry, adorable little animals are turning up in abandoned shirt factories throughout the more washed-out, recessive regions of the U.S. And they're dead. And if you cut them open, you'll find cute, defenseless little babies in there. They're dead, too. Maybe they have something awful written on their foreheads as well. It'd have to be pretty shocking, whatever it is. I'll get back to you on that.

REMAINDER, by Tick Vulgarimminan
Mr. Teacher, a prematurely jaded substitute teacher at an unnamed middle school in a nondescript locale, finds himself drawn into a temptingly dusky netherworld of mathematical madness when he discovers a set of truly improper fractions that, when said aloud, cause innocent, archetypal people to do the sort of horrifying, edgy things that go on in modern America if you really wanted to look for them. Nothing sexual, though, as that's kinda icky. The story takes a number of dark, sinister and potentially very cinematic turns, leading to the shockingly ironic denouement where thirty copies of the hardcover mysteriously, charismatically turn up on the CLEARANCE table at every Buck-A-Book in post-9/11 America.

GRUMBLE, by Clunt Erasmuscatallion
Purports to be the newly-unearthed journal of an anonymous, possibly psychotic loner descending into delusions and eventually madness, but is really an old text on corn removal with photos of deformed cattle and quotes from old Skinny Puppy records interpolated at random. Don't tell anyone.

*Books may arrive every three weeks, every five, or occasionally almost a month and a half after the previous one. That's just how we are. We can't help ourselves.