After a year of false starts, disappointments and chair-kicking, I am pleased to report that my creative renaissance is, at long last, proceeding apace. Much of it has to do with my co-founding (in a manner of speaking - more like standing there smiling while others do the heavy lifting) a new performance space in Astoria, OR, Pier Pressure Productions (it's a pun, y'all). It's an intimate (read: really freakin' small) venue set up for the purpose of presenting darker, edgier fare than most of the other theatres in the immediate area, and being plugged in to its current has provided me quite the heady jolt. Simply put, having the means of production so close at hand has rendered me utterly inspired, and I can now put theatre alongside broadcast radio on the list of archaic media I am hoping to master. Over the last month, a group of highly talented individuals and myself endeavored to put on what I believe was a very strong staging of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I came up with something special to present on closing night, the script for which I reproduce here. Kinda Parody 101, really, but it has its moments, and the reaction I received from our audience was gratifying to say the least. (It will also figure into another, even more exciting project I'm working on for October, about which more later.) Without any further fucking ado...
ME: I’m glad you all could be here tonight, because I wanted to take this opportunity to share with our closing night audience what I consider a remarkable historical find. David Mamet is, of course, a renowned playwright, author, screenwriter, director and essayist, winner of many awards including the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play you’ve just seen, and I think it’s fair to say that he is one of the preeminent figures in popular entertainment of our time. But everybody has to start somewhere. During my research for this play, I quite accidentally stumbled on what further investigation has revealed to be the very first script that a very young David Mamet wrote for the stage. Though perhaps a little crude compared to his mature work, I feel this scene is significant for two reasons: one can clearly see many of the great themes and motifs that Mamet has explored in all of his subsequent work in embryonic form, and, because of the machinations of an unscrupulous producer, the piece was eventually taken away from him and extensively rewritten, an occurrence that inspired Mamet to insist on full creative control of all further productions of his work in all media. To my knowledge, the following has never been performed in its original form until tonight, so it is with a great deal of pride and the able assistance of my good friend and colleague, Mr. Don Conner, that I present to you, for the first time anywhere, David Mamet’s “The Team.” Thank you.
Two men sit at a table, somewhere in America.
LOU: Bud… Bud… Bud. Okay. Bud. (pause) Bud. I need, I need help. Okay? (pause) I need help. (pause) There are times – now, listen, there are times when a man, wait a second, listen, when a man he finds himself, bottom rung of the ladder, end of his rope… maybe it’s a rope ladder, I don’t fucking know… you see? Do you see? (pause)
BUD: Mmm.
LOU: And that’s where I am now, and that’s what I want… no, fuck that, what I want is not the… what I need is what I want. Now, Bud, listen to me. Bud, listen, I’ve been thinking about this, I know you’re not those sorts of guys and neither am I either, but…
BUD: Lou…
LOU: No. Bud. Listen. You know me, you know me, this is Lou talking to you, right? (pause) Right?
BUD: Right. Lou. Right.
LOU: Goddamned right that’s right. We go, we go back a ways, don’t we? Back a ways. Who came through eight months a row when Mrs. Fields wanted the rent, huh?
BUD: That fucking whore.
LOU: You’re absolutely right, you’re ab… And I’m good for it. I’m coming back, you see? I’m coming back. Look at the books… the Susquehanna Hat Company? Bagel Street? Huh? Didn’t I sell a bunch of that?...
BUD: Look, you blew the…
LOU: Bullshit! Bullshit, Bud! Yeah, that guy broke a lot of my stock every time I mentioned the name of the fucking company, but what didn’t get broke I sold. (pause) I sold. And need you to take me back.
BUD: I can’t do it, Lou. (pause)
LOU: Why?
BUD: Why, I have another job now is why.
LOU: Another job?
BUD: Another job. Yeah. (pause)
LOU: Bullshit, Bud. Fuck you. What job? (pause) What job, Bud?
BUD: I manage a baseball team.
LOU: You manage a baseball team? That’s what you…
BUD: Yes. (pause)
LOU: Well, how is that?
BUD: How is what, the job?
LOU: Yes.
BUD: How is the job?
LOU: Fuck yes, the job, what am I… yes, the job, managing the baseball team, that’s what I’m asking, how is that?
BUD: Do you want me to talk about it?
LOU: I want you to…
BUD: Or do you want me to speak about it?
LOU: Speak, talk, whatever, whatever the fuck it is you do, yes, fuck, do so. (pause) Do so.
BUD: It’s hard. (pause) It’s hard.
LOU: The fuck is hard about it?
BUD: The players, Lou. It’s the fucking players nowadays. Not like when we were coming up. The players, they, I’ll tell you something, I’ll tell you something, I won’t finish this sentence but I’ll tell… You listening? I’ll tell you something: the players nowadays have very peculiar names, very strange… very peculiar names. And it depresses me, I swear that it does, at my age, to see… Like now, this team, you know what we got?
LOU: Do I know?
BUD: What did I just say?
LOU: Yes. (pause) You’ve asked me if I know what you got?
BUD: I did. (pause)
LOU: Well, what have you got?
BUD: I’ve got… Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third. (long pause)
LOU: The fuck is that supposed to mean? Bud? The fuck is that supposed to mean?
BUD: It means what I say. It means Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third.
LOU: That’s what I’m fucking trying to find out here. (pause) Are you the manager?
BUD: Did I tell you that?
LOU: Of the team?
BUD: Did I just say that?
LOU: You know the players?
BUD: Goddamn right I do.
LOU: So who’s the man on first base?
BUD: Yes.
LOU: I mean the fucking guy’s name.
BUD: Who.
LOU: The guy on first. The player.
BUD: Who.
LOU: The fucking first baseman!
BUD: Who! (pause)
LOU: Who?
BUD: That’s what I’m telling you. (pause) As we speak.
LOU: You’re telling me what?
BUD: No, What’s on second.
LOU: I’m not… I’m not fucking asking you who’s on fucking second.
BUD: Are you crazy, Lou? Who is on first.
LOU: I don’t know.
BUD: Third base. (pause)
LOU: Fucking asshole.
BUD: You asked me, I told you. That’s the deal. (long pause)
LOU: All right. All right, Bud, if this is how you… let me say this, if this is what I need to say. (pause) A man. A man stands at a plate. He is alone in this world. Now is the time for what? For individual accomplishment. He knows… he knows there is no “I” in “team” because even a fucking illiterate knows you don’t spell it that way. Is this what makes a man? Standing with a bat looking to hit a ball with a piece of fucking wood in his hand? Is it? I don’t know.
BUD: Third base.
LOU: Shut the fuck up. He’s there, he’s thinking, what does it mean? (pause) Is it the fans, does he do what in that moment makes the most sense, does he adjust his fucking balls and spit out the tobacco in his mouth as he does it? (pause) He sees the pitcher, he’s there on the mound like he’s fucking Christ himself only he’s wearing a cap and Christ never wore cleats according to the Church but fuck that, I’m sticking with the metaphor anyway? (pause) So he winds up, he winds the fuck up and the ball hangs, hangs in the air and the batter, he stands there. (pause) What is he thinking? “My arm’s getting tired?” “I have to, I have to adjust my balls again?” No. He swings. (pause) And he connects. In that one moment he connects. But it’s a pop fly down the middle and though the man runs, he runs toward opportunity, it’s caught by the man, the man standing at first base, he reaches up and he catches it. (pause) He catches it. (pause) And that man is who?
BUD: Now that’s the first thing you’ve said right.
LOU: I DON’T FUCKING KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT! (pause) All right, Bud. All right. You’re right, I don’t know what I… (pause) What? I’m sorry I spoke harshly to you.
BUD: That’s alright.
LOU: All right. (pause) So, what of this…? So the man… the man on second base, let’s talk about him. The man on second… what’s his name?
BUD: Yes.
LOU: What’s his name?
BUD: That’s right.
LOU: Goddammit, what’s his name?
BUD: FUCK YOU, that’s his name! (pause)
LOU: What?
BUD: That’s right. Fuk Hu What. (pause) He’s a Chink, something. (long pause)
LOU: So will you give me a job?
BUD: No.
LOU: You fucking fairy cunt. You’re a shithead, you asshole. (pause)
BUD: What did you say?
LOU: I said, “You fucking fairy cunt. You’re a shithead, you asshole.”
BUD: Oh, that’s our shortstop. (pause)
LOU: What the fuck kind of name is that? (pause)
BUD: It’s hyphenated. (pause)
LOU: Oh God, I hate this scene.
BUD: We’re stuck with it.
LOU: Yeah. (pause) Fuck. (pause) Yeah.
(curtain)
Your one-stop shop for sporadic dribbles of watered-down insight, cringe-worthy factual inaccuracies, fooferaw, jibber-jabber, and inoperative statements packed in a salty preservative brine of defensive egotism and paralyzing self-deprecation. No fatties.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
HACKWERK:
I have several exciting projects I am currently engaged in active procrastination regarding, which I hope to expose to the light of day in the near future. Until then, allow me to hep yez to some of the odd bits of myself that have achieved exposure in recent months.
The latest in Patrick McGilligan's series of interviews with screenwriters, Backstory 5, includes my 1999 interview with a certain recently-deceased teen-angst auteur, which, if you were truly interested, you could find elsewhere on the Internet and save yourself twenty bucks. But you should buy the book anyway, containing as it does some very interesting chats on the craft of celluloid scrivening with the likes of Albert Brooks, Tom Stoppard, and Rudy Wurlitzer. That last interview may be worth the price of admission by itself, if only to discover just what Philip Glass (an old friend of Wurlitzer's) did for a living before becoming the big-shot composer cat he is today.
And speaking of things I wrote circa a decade ago bobbing back to the surface, consider the high flattery of having the two-part exegesis of Lou Reed's perma-infamous Metal Machine Music I wrote in 2001 mined for a quote in the Wall Street Journal - the first time the term "pack-raped" has appeared in that esteemed broadsheet, I'm sure, unless Charles Krauthammer's been lacing his op-eds with threads of autobiography that I'm unaware of.
While I'm at it, I may as well toss in the reviews I've had published so far on the Dagger magazine site, here, for easy access. Some are better than others. In reverse chronological order:
Aarktica
IN SEA
(SILBER)
Rarely has a musical project been as aptly named or titled as Aarktica’s sixth full-length release – the sounds that emerge from In Sea (and yes, the Terry Riley pun is entirely intentional) are long, spacious things extending as far as the stereo field of vision will go, windswept ice floe or endless ocean, with a single figure in the middle distance the only man in view. John De Rosa is that man, responsible for every drawn-out note on display, and Aarktica is his vehicle for broadcasting his isolation to the world. Ten years ago, he suffered near-total hearing loss in his right ear, and since then, he’s been translating the attendant effects to tape, moments of clarity interwoven with sounds both muffled and muzzled, aural ghosts drifting through the blurred soundscape, the air full of circumambient tones for the painfully alone. But an album of depressive drones, fortunately, this is not – while the longest tracks, “A Plague of Frost (In the Guise of Diamonds)” and “Corpse Reviver No. 2,” are nearly unbearable in their quiet, sustained intensity, De Rosa has learned to let select slivers of sunlight in when the mood strikes. In fact, large chunks of In Sea, lacking in forward motion as they are, could even be considered pretty as they rise and fall and bob up and down on waves of phase. There’s even a couple of honest-to-godlessness songs here, which brightens things up considerably. That one of them is a cover of Danzig’s “Am I Demon?,” and De Rosa manages to imbue that rather silly piece of mock-metallic morbidity with a certain non-parodic gravitas, means the whole enterprise ends on a curiously hopeful note, a sense of renewed direction that makes it worth catching his drift.
Sonic Youth
THE ETERNAL
Mission Of Burma
THE SOUND, THE SPEED, THE LIGHT
also “Innermost” b/w “Here It Comes” (single)
(all MATADOR)
Rock is a medium based on planned obsolescence – if it has a creed, it would be play fast, split young and leave a good-sounding corpus. Make your noise, make a splash, but for god’s sake don’t stick around too long, or worse, slink back and let everybody see how badly those leather pants fit these days. And nowhere would that seem to hold more true than with punk and its various offshoots – the whole point of it was to tear down the old strictures, rebuild ‘em in your own zit-speckled images, and get the hell out of the way once the next generation readied their own wrecking balls, right? You do realize how hard it would be to pull off a Mohawk/combover combo, don’t you?
Ah, but rules, like guitar strings and mic stands, are made to be broken, and here we have two of the most sonically adventurous combos to gush forth from the backwash of punk’s first wave, all roughly twice the age they were when they started, obstinately refusing to go gently into that good night and thanks for coming to this all-ages show and by the way does anybody have a floor we can sleep on? Sonic Youth’s new album, The Eternal, their umpteenth release (if I have my calculations right), even brings them, if not full circle, at least a fair distance back around the perimeter – after a couple of decades as Geffen’s favorite loss leader, they’re back on an indie label (albeit one of the biggest around), calling Gerard Cosloy “boss” for the first time since 1985. And their reverence for things past doesn’t stop there; the album includes songs dedicated to a dead Beat poet and a dead punk bawler, the cover painting is by dead acoustic genius John Fahey, there’s a photo of dead Doll Johnny Thunders in the CD booklet and a dedication to dead Stooge Ron Asheton on the back - even the title is kiped from renowned Mancunian dead guy Ian Curtis. Heck, these cats have more dead friends than Patti Smith! Oddly, whether intended or not, this roll-call of the deceased only brings into sharp relief the fact that Sonic Youth are, after three decades in the trenches, almost shockingly vigorous. If anything, they’re as tight as they’ve ever been – most of The Eternal is a master course in concision, full of songs that chug along with focus and a clear-eyed purpose, still driven to wrench as many sounds out of their guitars (three of ‘em these days, now that Kim Gordon has been upgraded from four strings to six and ex-Pavementalist Mark Ibold is left holding up the low end) as possible but largely content to put the skreek in the service of the songs rather than cyclonically rip them apart somewhere around the middle. Which turns out to be a bit of a mixed blessing – there’s little self-indulgence to gum up the works, but constant forward motion robs them of the passages of vertical ascension that provided some of their most exciting moments. Occasionally, you want them to knock a few more holes in the walls or at least deface them a little; every once in a while, you start to wonder if Steve Shelley’s always-solid drumming is grounding or anchoring them. But is that their problem, or ours? After almost thirty years of non-stop work, it’s remarkable how much they still do right. The personalities of the rotating frontpersons have been honed to as fine an edge as their guitars – Gordon sexier than any post-menopausal woman has a right to be (see “Sacred Trickster” and “Malibu Gas Station”), Thurston Moore the trash historian and punk-brat emeritus (“Poison Arrow,” “Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn”), and Lee Ranaldo the poet/seeker/philosopher – that is to say, the acidhead (“What We Know,” “Walkin Blue”). And it’s always an encouraging sign when a record’s strongest tracks are its longest, from the vaguely political (which is about as political as we ever need them to be) “Anti-Orgasm” to the nine-minute closer “Massage the History,” a fine showcase of their ability to meld whispery menace and cracked-crystal beauty like it was second nature. So, no, they may never pull off a Daydream Nation again, but a band capable of wrestling its legacy to a draw every time they step on the mat remains a rare and admirable thing.
The tyranny of raised expectations similarly dogs the third post-reunion release from Boston post-punk titans Mission of Burma. In many ways the 80s equivalent of the Velvet Underground (brief, underheralded existence followed by years of hip music-fan namechecks and younger bands copping every move they ever made), MoB already defied one of rock’s ironclad truisms by coming back after a long dormancy and not thoroughly embarrassing themselves. 2004’s ONoffON picked up precisely where 1982’s vs. left off and 2006’s The Obliterati was, if anything, even more muscular, so if The Sound, The Speed, The Light comes off a mite underwhelming, could it be that they just don’t have anything to prove anymore? Does the fact that the tempos on their raveups aren’t quite as breakneck as before denote an irretrievable loss of potency? Or is it simply too much to ask of any band, much less one whose members are all pushing sixty, to serve up a palate-strafing plate o’ blare every single time? At first, it would seem so – beyond the hysterical Clint Conley opener, “1, 2, 3, Partyy!” (words to live by: “Drink only when drunken to”), there’s little immediacy here, no “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver” or “Ballad of Johnny Burma” to offset their denser passages. And even the denser passages don’t seem nearly as dense as before. But patience, even for this most jangled and jittery of bands, eventually pays off – three or four spins and buried hooks begin coming to the fore, the lack of fist-shaking anthems is made up for with a seemingly paradoxical blend of power and subtlety, and the strength of the unit comes clear even as the movements of its individual parts are thrown into relief. Peter Prescott still smacks his drums like they stole his girlfriend, Roger Miller seems to have every phase of art-rock (psych/prog/proto- and post-punk) coursing through his guitar at all times, Bob Weston saturates every inch of tape (they still use tape, right?) with behind-the-boards manipulations that keep turning up sonic surprises with every listen, and Conley anchors the madness as fluidly as ever – no matter how Burma bends and twists, their spine is his bassline. So the pulse-pounding ambition of its youth may have faded and even their aggression may have assumed a comforting familiarity (if you can’t tell ahead of time exactly when Prescott will emit his first howl from behind the kit, you don’t know Burma), but is that so wrong? The Sound, The Speed, The Light has repeatedly been tarred with the epithet “workmanlike” by numerous reviewers; that may be so, but when these mugs punch the clock, they punch it hard. (And as a sop to the more drooling elements of their fanbase, which should be pretty much all of them at this point, they’ve also whipped out a 7-inch single featuring two outtakes from these sessions. “Innermost,” essentially a showcase for Prescott and Weston, is a tad unfocused; the flipside, “Here It Comes,” Miller’s punful evisceration of inter-religious intolerance, delivers the goods quickly and cleanly.)
The Minus 5
KILLINGSWORTH
(YEP ROC)
Some mellow with age. Others ripen. Scott McCaughey, on the other hand, is all about the rot. Eleven-plus albums and 16 years into his Minus 5 project, continues to find new sloughs of despond to plumb in the name of pop, trucking in subject matter so bleak in the name of cheerful misanthropy it’d give his pal Robyn Hitchcock pause. And as always, he is able to corral a veritable Murder Victim’s Row of alt-luminaries to help illuminate the blackness, from constant compatriots Peter Buck and Ken Stringfellow to chick harmonists the Shee Bee Gees and pretty much the whole of the Decemberists (McCaughey relinquishes the mic to Colin Meloy on “Scott Walker’s Fault” – and call a paean to the dark enigma responsible for The Drift the most life-affirming moment on the album should tell you something). Uptempo numbers like “It Won’t Do You Any Good” dot the landscape like freshly-dripped hemoglobin, but otherwise, it’s country death songs all the way – lotsa pedal steel, banjo pickings and accordion trills, arranged prettily enough to lull you into head-bobbing to songs with lyrics like “your wedding day was so well-planned, like a German occupation” and titles like “The Disembowelers.” This is high-water music with a sinister undertow, sure to slap a happy rictus on your face.
Kurt Vile
CHILDISH PRODIGY
(MATADOR)
It’s hard to believe, but, apart from some possible regional variants I’ve never heard, no one’s really captured the true sound of young America – the noise of maladjusted, hormone-poisoned males bashing out their lonely, inarticulate frustrations from the solitude of their empty bedrooms – to my liking since the Stooges nailed it on their first album four freaking decades ago. I’m not talking subject matter, understand – that’s been one of the wellsprings from which rock/punk/power-pop/Morrissey has drawn its water from day one – but the actual sonic evocation of same. There are a few artists that come close, of course – I’m thinking of Gary Wilson’s infamous 1978 release You Think You Really Know Me – but even there, it’s sublimated under bizarrely bleached-out jazz-funk and vocally/lyrically tipping over into psychosis a little too ripe for even some weirdness enthusiasts. To make the grade here, you need to be capable of a ruckus without catharsis, make the listener feel your boredom, horniness and rage, and do it – and here’s the tall order few can fill at this late date – without a speck of irony. I don’t know how Kurt Vile pulls it off (and before you disqualify him off the bat, he insists that’s his real name), but damned if Childish Prodigy doesn’t do the job. First thing is the sound itself – if it wasn’t recorded in obsessive solo overdubbing sessions on a rec-room four-track, it sure seems like it; cheap-sounding delay effects on the vocals, heavily-saturated guitars, and either cardboardish drums or chintzy rhythm machines predominate. Then come the songs themselves, all seemingly structured in a circular fashion that winds itself ever tighter with every rotation until the tape mangles itself in its own gears or he just fades the thing out arbitrarily. (The best example of this, “Freak Train,” gets steadily crazier and tenser over the course of seven minutes until it sounds like one of Suicide’s more uptempo roundelays rearranged for “real” instruments with a little pseudo-No Wave sax thrown in, crossed with what the Strokes could manage if they weren’t such overprivileged wussy-boys.) In the midst of all this, Vile comes off like the acne-scarred misfit of your worst repressed recollections play-acting at being a scowling street punk. Oh, there’s sensitivity here, too – finger-picked acousticidal reveries like “Blackberry Song” and “Heart Attack,” and even the occasional ethereal female backing voice reminiscent of Liz Fraser’s guest appearances on old Felt albums, which can’t possibly have been intentional. Though the reality is surely quite different (an indie-rock star is a rock star all the same), Vile’s loverman side falls right in line with his snotty, sneering persona elsewhere. Which is to say, I don’t buy a word of it. And good for him.
Jobriath
JOBRIATH/CREATURES OF THE STREET (REISSUES)
(COLLECTORS CHOICE)
The short, sad saga of Jobriath deserves retelling, if only as a cautionary tale to the impressionable youth of our nation about the dangers of unprotected hype. Born Bruce Campbell (and no, not that one), he spent several years as a mere scallop on the fringes of late-60s/early-70s hip culture, a player in the New York and Los Angeles companies of Hair and a member of Pidgeon, one of the many short-lived pop-psych combos seduced and abandoned by the recording industry of the time. And so might he have stayed had Svengali/opportunist Jerry Brandt not been in Columbia Records prez Clive Davis’ office when Brucie’s solo demo tape sailed over the transom. Undeterred by big Clive’s insistence that the artist was “mad, unstructured and destructive to melody,” an enthralled Brandt tucked Jobriath under his wing and began cawing, loudly, to anyone who would listen. Here was the future of rock and roll incarnate, the Fat Man and Little Boy of the transatlantic glam wars, the one who would outlast that poseur David Bowie because, um, he could pirouette and Bowie couldn’t. His biggest hook? At a time when even Elton John was a few years away from coming halfway out of the closet, Jobriath would be the first openly gay rock star; while coy ambisexuality reigned supreme and maybe-gay was the rule of the day, America’s youth were crying out for someone to take them to that next level of depravity, and now, (to quote J.’s own, ceaselessly reiterated words) “a true fairy” shall lead them. Big plans were hatched, Elektra convinced to drop an unheard-of sum (literally so, as no one seems to know just how much) for international recording rights, and a grandiose scheme for world domination mapped out, to culminate in a massive coming-out (oh, brother) event in Paris, climaxing (I know, I know) in a recreation of the final scene of King Kong¸ wherein the Empire State Building would morph into a giant, spurting pee-pee and Jobriath would turn, as would logically follow, into Marlene Dietrich.
Uh-huh.
As you may have guessed, especially given the fact that very of few of you even heard of the cat before his name showed up at the top of this review, the whole scheme was a massive flop. Astute observers may have noticed something was amiss when the Paris concert was cancelled and his debut scaled down to an appearance on NBC’s The Midnight Special, where an obviously distracted Gladys Knight introduced the future of rock ‘n’ roll as “JO-BRATH” and the biggest expense appeared to be the construction of an stage costume comprised mostly of dryer vent hose. And the eventual album, promoted incessantly via billboards and breathless rock-press profiles? It didn’t even chart. Could it be that the record-buying public wasn’t ready for an unabashedly queer rock star? Perhaps. Could they have been turned off by the thick, rank clouds churned out by Jerry Brandt’s hype machine? Quite possibly. Or did they finally get an earful of his music and decide that it kinda blew? Ah, now there’s the rub.
The ultimate result? Jobriath was dropped from Elektra in the middle of his sole American tour, his two albums went out of print with depressing speed, and all concerned performed a thorough disavowal of responsibility and even knowledge of his existence worthy of the most brutally efficient totalitarian government. Elektra’s Jac Holzman confessed his embarrassment at the whole enterprise and quit the label he co-founded soon afterwards, presumably in shame. The mortified music press wrote him off. And even Brandt himself, the guy who proclaimed “it’s Crosby, Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles and Jobriath … no doubt about that,” wound up muttering that the kid was nothing but a worthless alcoholic, and apparently looked to atone for his misdoings by holding the lad to a draconian ten-year contract, effectively keeping him from recording anything for the rest of his life. And Jobriath himself? He retreated to his sanctum in the Chelsea Hotel, emerging only to perform in East Village clubs as lounge singer Cole Berlin, and eventually died a sadly appropriate death by AIDS in 1983. As for a legacy, he basically had none. His albums held no sway even among collectors (the only copy of either I was ever able to track down turned up, not in a used record store, but in a frighteningly skeezy consignment shop) and, with the exception of a bemused writeup in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and a first-place ranking on somethingawful.com’s list of the Ten Worst Rock Stars in History, he warranted scarcely a footnote in music history’s little red book.
And so might it have stayed were it not the shelf-haired hero to the downtrodden, the counselor of camp, the Mancunian candidate (for anti-depression meds) himself – that’s right, friends, Stephen Patrick Morrissey loped forward to rescue Jobriath from oblivion. It started awkwardly – he sought the singer out to open for him on his Your Arsenal tour, unaware that he hadn’t been up to the rigors of touring for the better part of a decade – but Moz was not to be deterred. He curated a 2006 compilation, Lonely Planet Boy (kind of telling that he needed to christen it with a New York Dolls quote, eh?), talked him up in interviews, and inspired a set of Japanese reissues. With the cult heroes’ cult hero in Jobriath’s corner, it was only a matter of time before the resurrection-happy domestic CD market saw fit to follow suit, and thanks to the efforts of Collector’s Choice Records, Jobriath has risen again to “camp” out under the stars.
So, after all this, what do you get when you crack the shrinkwrap on the collected works of the world’s forgotten spaceboy? It’d be immensely gratifying to report that beneath the hype and the record-buying public’s resistance to same lay a lost treasure trove of irresistible glam anthems, but I’m afraid that the record-buying public had pretty much the right idea. Too much of this material sounds forced, imitative and plodding, which is murderous to glam – if you’re gonna be light in the loafers, you’d best be light on your feet. The hooks evidently stopped at the marketing level, and the only groove to be found is the one the makeup people put on his forehead. He does a little better by the ballads – his overwrought vocalizing turns out to be a much better fit with string sections and pianos (the latter played, not badly at all, by Jobriath himself) than with the mock-Ronsonisms of most of the louder material. (As for the lyrics, the less said the better – just know that one of the songs is entitled “Space Clown” and extrapolate from there.) It’s not unlistenable, especially once you stop thinking of it as “real” rock ‘n’ roll and as the soundtrack to an imaginary off-Broadway glamsploitation musical (which makes Jobriath a Hedwig of his time, perhaps), and, oddly, the second album (cobbled together quickly using leftovers from the first) turns out to be the stronger of the two, with more emphasis on ballads and a truly oddball country-and-western-inflected (!) number with the radio-friendly title “Scumbag.” Still and all, it’s hard to imagine who to recommend these discs to. If I were in charge of such things, I’d’ve put it out as a book with a suitable-for-framing “Certificate of Inauthenticity” and relegated the discs to a free-with-purchase bonus (and given the job of writing it to veteran rock archivist Richie Unterberger, whose liner notes tell the tale of Jobriath’s rise and demise economically, while deftly sidestepping the question of whether the damn things are actually worth hearing). In its present form, though, most of you can quite blissfully walk past and not miss a thing. But if you’re a glam completist, a gay-rock historian or a collector of curiosities (and there are precious few pop artifacts that manage to be both historically significant and utterly inconsequential), by all means make way for the homo inferior.
Yo La Tengo
POPULAR SONGS
(MATADOR)
Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley are the Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward of indie-rock (actually, the title should probably go to Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, but I already wrote that review). As such, a new YLT album tends to feel as comfortable as a successful long-term relationship, and Popular Songs is no exception. Not boring, mind you – they’re too skilled at pop pastiche for that – but whether they’re doing the string-driven thing (as on opening track “Here to Fall”), dipping into Farfisafied fuzz-pop (“Nothing To Hide”), Booker T.-ing themselves off with a Monks-ish breakdown (“Periodically Double Or Triple”), whitefacing Motown (“If It’s True”) or stretching out in acoustic languor with dreamy washes of guitar atmospherics (“The Fireside”) , there’s a ease and even a calmness at play (particularly in the vocals, almost always sleepily agreeable even when their instruments are kicking up a little dust) that comes across as reassuring, opting for the nice, straight line of contentment over the impassioned needle-jumps of younger, more hormonal combos. That is, until they finally raise the pulse rate over the fifteen minute span of “And The Glitter Is Gone” (the last of the three extended workouts that conclude the album), where Kaplan wrings some rather impressive, sustained feedback ‘n’ yowling from his axe while Hubley eggs him on from behind her kit. I dunno, maybe they had an argument that day.
(More to come, eventually...)
The latest in Patrick McGilligan's series of interviews with screenwriters, Backstory 5, includes my 1999 interview with a certain recently-deceased teen-angst auteur, which, if you were truly interested, you could find elsewhere on the Internet and save yourself twenty bucks. But you should buy the book anyway, containing as it does some very interesting chats on the craft of celluloid scrivening with the likes of Albert Brooks, Tom Stoppard, and Rudy Wurlitzer. That last interview may be worth the price of admission by itself, if only to discover just what Philip Glass (an old friend of Wurlitzer's) did for a living before becoming the big-shot composer cat he is today.
And speaking of things I wrote circa a decade ago bobbing back to the surface, consider the high flattery of having the two-part exegesis of Lou Reed's perma-infamous Metal Machine Music I wrote in 2001 mined for a quote in the Wall Street Journal - the first time the term "pack-raped" has appeared in that esteemed broadsheet, I'm sure, unless Charles Krauthammer's been lacing his op-eds with threads of autobiography that I'm unaware of.
While I'm at it, I may as well toss in the reviews I've had published so far on the Dagger magazine site, here, for easy access. Some are better than others. In reverse chronological order:
Aarktica
IN SEA
(SILBER)
Rarely has a musical project been as aptly named or titled as Aarktica’s sixth full-length release – the sounds that emerge from In Sea (and yes, the Terry Riley pun is entirely intentional) are long, spacious things extending as far as the stereo field of vision will go, windswept ice floe or endless ocean, with a single figure in the middle distance the only man in view. John De Rosa is that man, responsible for every drawn-out note on display, and Aarktica is his vehicle for broadcasting his isolation to the world. Ten years ago, he suffered near-total hearing loss in his right ear, and since then, he’s been translating the attendant effects to tape, moments of clarity interwoven with sounds both muffled and muzzled, aural ghosts drifting through the blurred soundscape, the air full of circumambient tones for the painfully alone. But an album of depressive drones, fortunately, this is not – while the longest tracks, “A Plague of Frost (In the Guise of Diamonds)” and “Corpse Reviver No. 2,” are nearly unbearable in their quiet, sustained intensity, De Rosa has learned to let select slivers of sunlight in when the mood strikes. In fact, large chunks of In Sea, lacking in forward motion as they are, could even be considered pretty as they rise and fall and bob up and down on waves of phase. There’s even a couple of honest-to-godlessness songs here, which brightens things up considerably. That one of them is a cover of Danzig’s “Am I Demon?,” and De Rosa manages to imbue that rather silly piece of mock-metallic morbidity with a certain non-parodic gravitas, means the whole enterprise ends on a curiously hopeful note, a sense of renewed direction that makes it worth catching his drift.
Sonic Youth
THE ETERNAL
Mission Of Burma
THE SOUND, THE SPEED, THE LIGHT
also “Innermost” b/w “Here It Comes” (single)
(all MATADOR)
Rock is a medium based on planned obsolescence – if it has a creed, it would be play fast, split young and leave a good-sounding corpus. Make your noise, make a splash, but for god’s sake don’t stick around too long, or worse, slink back and let everybody see how badly those leather pants fit these days. And nowhere would that seem to hold more true than with punk and its various offshoots – the whole point of it was to tear down the old strictures, rebuild ‘em in your own zit-speckled images, and get the hell out of the way once the next generation readied their own wrecking balls, right? You do realize how hard it would be to pull off a Mohawk/combover combo, don’t you?
Ah, but rules, like guitar strings and mic stands, are made to be broken, and here we have two of the most sonically adventurous combos to gush forth from the backwash of punk’s first wave, all roughly twice the age they were when they started, obstinately refusing to go gently into that good night and thanks for coming to this all-ages show and by the way does anybody have a floor we can sleep on? Sonic Youth’s new album, The Eternal, their umpteenth release (if I have my calculations right), even brings them, if not full circle, at least a fair distance back around the perimeter – after a couple of decades as Geffen’s favorite loss leader, they’re back on an indie label (albeit one of the biggest around), calling Gerard Cosloy “boss” for the first time since 1985. And their reverence for things past doesn’t stop there; the album includes songs dedicated to a dead Beat poet and a dead punk bawler, the cover painting is by dead acoustic genius John Fahey, there’s a photo of dead Doll Johnny Thunders in the CD booklet and a dedication to dead Stooge Ron Asheton on the back - even the title is kiped from renowned Mancunian dead guy Ian Curtis. Heck, these cats have more dead friends than Patti Smith! Oddly, whether intended or not, this roll-call of the deceased only brings into sharp relief the fact that Sonic Youth are, after three decades in the trenches, almost shockingly vigorous. If anything, they’re as tight as they’ve ever been – most of The Eternal is a master course in concision, full of songs that chug along with focus and a clear-eyed purpose, still driven to wrench as many sounds out of their guitars (three of ‘em these days, now that Kim Gordon has been upgraded from four strings to six and ex-Pavementalist Mark Ibold is left holding up the low end) as possible but largely content to put the skreek in the service of the songs rather than cyclonically rip them apart somewhere around the middle. Which turns out to be a bit of a mixed blessing – there’s little self-indulgence to gum up the works, but constant forward motion robs them of the passages of vertical ascension that provided some of their most exciting moments. Occasionally, you want them to knock a few more holes in the walls or at least deface them a little; every once in a while, you start to wonder if Steve Shelley’s always-solid drumming is grounding or anchoring them. But is that their problem, or ours? After almost thirty years of non-stop work, it’s remarkable how much they still do right. The personalities of the rotating frontpersons have been honed to as fine an edge as their guitars – Gordon sexier than any post-menopausal woman has a right to be (see “Sacred Trickster” and “Malibu Gas Station”), Thurston Moore the trash historian and punk-brat emeritus (“Poison Arrow,” “Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn”), and Lee Ranaldo the poet/seeker/philosopher – that is to say, the acidhead (“What We Know,” “Walkin Blue”). And it’s always an encouraging sign when a record’s strongest tracks are its longest, from the vaguely political (which is about as political as we ever need them to be) “Anti-Orgasm” to the nine-minute closer “Massage the History,” a fine showcase of their ability to meld whispery menace and cracked-crystal beauty like it was second nature. So, no, they may never pull off a Daydream Nation again, but a band capable of wrestling its legacy to a draw every time they step on the mat remains a rare and admirable thing.
The tyranny of raised expectations similarly dogs the third post-reunion release from Boston post-punk titans Mission of Burma. In many ways the 80s equivalent of the Velvet Underground (brief, underheralded existence followed by years of hip music-fan namechecks and younger bands copping every move they ever made), MoB already defied one of rock’s ironclad truisms by coming back after a long dormancy and not thoroughly embarrassing themselves. 2004’s ONoffON picked up precisely where 1982’s vs. left off and 2006’s The Obliterati was, if anything, even more muscular, so if The Sound, The Speed, The Light comes off a mite underwhelming, could it be that they just don’t have anything to prove anymore? Does the fact that the tempos on their raveups aren’t quite as breakneck as before denote an irretrievable loss of potency? Or is it simply too much to ask of any band, much less one whose members are all pushing sixty, to serve up a palate-strafing plate o’ blare every single time? At first, it would seem so – beyond the hysterical Clint Conley opener, “1, 2, 3, Partyy!” (words to live by: “Drink only when drunken to”), there’s little immediacy here, no “That’s When I Reach For My Revolver” or “Ballad of Johnny Burma” to offset their denser passages. And even the denser passages don’t seem nearly as dense as before. But patience, even for this most jangled and jittery of bands, eventually pays off – three or four spins and buried hooks begin coming to the fore, the lack of fist-shaking anthems is made up for with a seemingly paradoxical blend of power and subtlety, and the strength of the unit comes clear even as the movements of its individual parts are thrown into relief. Peter Prescott still smacks his drums like they stole his girlfriend, Roger Miller seems to have every phase of art-rock (psych/prog/proto- and post-punk) coursing through his guitar at all times, Bob Weston saturates every inch of tape (they still use tape, right?) with behind-the-boards manipulations that keep turning up sonic surprises with every listen, and Conley anchors the madness as fluidly as ever – no matter how Burma bends and twists, their spine is his bassline. So the pulse-pounding ambition of its youth may have faded and even their aggression may have assumed a comforting familiarity (if you can’t tell ahead of time exactly when Prescott will emit his first howl from behind the kit, you don’t know Burma), but is that so wrong? The Sound, The Speed, The Light has repeatedly been tarred with the epithet “workmanlike” by numerous reviewers; that may be so, but when these mugs punch the clock, they punch it hard. (And as a sop to the more drooling elements of their fanbase, which should be pretty much all of them at this point, they’ve also whipped out a 7-inch single featuring two outtakes from these sessions. “Innermost,” essentially a showcase for Prescott and Weston, is a tad unfocused; the flipside, “Here It Comes,” Miller’s punful evisceration of inter-religious intolerance, delivers the goods quickly and cleanly.)
The Minus 5
KILLINGSWORTH
(YEP ROC)
Some mellow with age. Others ripen. Scott McCaughey, on the other hand, is all about the rot. Eleven-plus albums and 16 years into his Minus 5 project, continues to find new sloughs of despond to plumb in the name of pop, trucking in subject matter so bleak in the name of cheerful misanthropy it’d give his pal Robyn Hitchcock pause. And as always, he is able to corral a veritable Murder Victim’s Row of alt-luminaries to help illuminate the blackness, from constant compatriots Peter Buck and Ken Stringfellow to chick harmonists the Shee Bee Gees and pretty much the whole of the Decemberists (McCaughey relinquishes the mic to Colin Meloy on “Scott Walker’s Fault” – and call a paean to the dark enigma responsible for The Drift the most life-affirming moment on the album should tell you something). Uptempo numbers like “It Won’t Do You Any Good” dot the landscape like freshly-dripped hemoglobin, but otherwise, it’s country death songs all the way – lotsa pedal steel, banjo pickings and accordion trills, arranged prettily enough to lull you into head-bobbing to songs with lyrics like “your wedding day was so well-planned, like a German occupation” and titles like “The Disembowelers.” This is high-water music with a sinister undertow, sure to slap a happy rictus on your face.
Kurt Vile
CHILDISH PRODIGY
(MATADOR)
It’s hard to believe, but, apart from some possible regional variants I’ve never heard, no one’s really captured the true sound of young America – the noise of maladjusted, hormone-poisoned males bashing out their lonely, inarticulate frustrations from the solitude of their empty bedrooms – to my liking since the Stooges nailed it on their first album four freaking decades ago. I’m not talking subject matter, understand – that’s been one of the wellsprings from which rock/punk/power-pop/Morrissey has drawn its water from day one – but the actual sonic evocation of same. There are a few artists that come close, of course – I’m thinking of Gary Wilson’s infamous 1978 release You Think You Really Know Me – but even there, it’s sublimated under bizarrely bleached-out jazz-funk and vocally/lyrically tipping over into psychosis a little too ripe for even some weirdness enthusiasts. To make the grade here, you need to be capable of a ruckus without catharsis, make the listener feel your boredom, horniness and rage, and do it – and here’s the tall order few can fill at this late date – without a speck of irony. I don’t know how Kurt Vile pulls it off (and before you disqualify him off the bat, he insists that’s his real name), but damned if Childish Prodigy doesn’t do the job. First thing is the sound itself – if it wasn’t recorded in obsessive solo overdubbing sessions on a rec-room four-track, it sure seems like it; cheap-sounding delay effects on the vocals, heavily-saturated guitars, and either cardboardish drums or chintzy rhythm machines predominate. Then come the songs themselves, all seemingly structured in a circular fashion that winds itself ever tighter with every rotation until the tape mangles itself in its own gears or he just fades the thing out arbitrarily. (The best example of this, “Freak Train,” gets steadily crazier and tenser over the course of seven minutes until it sounds like one of Suicide’s more uptempo roundelays rearranged for “real” instruments with a little pseudo-No Wave sax thrown in, crossed with what the Strokes could manage if they weren’t such overprivileged wussy-boys.) In the midst of all this, Vile comes off like the acne-scarred misfit of your worst repressed recollections play-acting at being a scowling street punk. Oh, there’s sensitivity here, too – finger-picked acousticidal reveries like “Blackberry Song” and “Heart Attack,” and even the occasional ethereal female backing voice reminiscent of Liz Fraser’s guest appearances on old Felt albums, which can’t possibly have been intentional. Though the reality is surely quite different (an indie-rock star is a rock star all the same), Vile’s loverman side falls right in line with his snotty, sneering persona elsewhere. Which is to say, I don’t buy a word of it. And good for him.
Jobriath
JOBRIATH/CREATURES OF THE STREET (REISSUES)
(COLLECTORS CHOICE)
The short, sad saga of Jobriath deserves retelling, if only as a cautionary tale to the impressionable youth of our nation about the dangers of unprotected hype. Born Bruce Campbell (and no, not that one), he spent several years as a mere scallop on the fringes of late-60s/early-70s hip culture, a player in the New York and Los Angeles companies of Hair and a member of Pidgeon, one of the many short-lived pop-psych combos seduced and abandoned by the recording industry of the time. And so might he have stayed had Svengali/opportunist Jerry Brandt not been in Columbia Records prez Clive Davis’ office when Brucie’s solo demo tape sailed over the transom. Undeterred by big Clive’s insistence that the artist was “mad, unstructured and destructive to melody,” an enthralled Brandt tucked Jobriath under his wing and began cawing, loudly, to anyone who would listen. Here was the future of rock and roll incarnate, the Fat Man and Little Boy of the transatlantic glam wars, the one who would outlast that poseur David Bowie because, um, he could pirouette and Bowie couldn’t. His biggest hook? At a time when even Elton John was a few years away from coming halfway out of the closet, Jobriath would be the first openly gay rock star; while coy ambisexuality reigned supreme and maybe-gay was the rule of the day, America’s youth were crying out for someone to take them to that next level of depravity, and now, (to quote J.’s own, ceaselessly reiterated words) “a true fairy” shall lead them. Big plans were hatched, Elektra convinced to drop an unheard-of sum (literally so, as no one seems to know just how much) for international recording rights, and a grandiose scheme for world domination mapped out, to culminate in a massive coming-out (oh, brother) event in Paris, climaxing (I know, I know) in a recreation of the final scene of King Kong¸ wherein the Empire State Building would morph into a giant, spurting pee-pee and Jobriath would turn, as would logically follow, into Marlene Dietrich.
Uh-huh.
As you may have guessed, especially given the fact that very of few of you even heard of the cat before his name showed up at the top of this review, the whole scheme was a massive flop. Astute observers may have noticed something was amiss when the Paris concert was cancelled and his debut scaled down to an appearance on NBC’s The Midnight Special, where an obviously distracted Gladys Knight introduced the future of rock ‘n’ roll as “JO-BRATH” and the biggest expense appeared to be the construction of an stage costume comprised mostly of dryer vent hose. And the eventual album, promoted incessantly via billboards and breathless rock-press profiles? It didn’t even chart. Could it be that the record-buying public wasn’t ready for an unabashedly queer rock star? Perhaps. Could they have been turned off by the thick, rank clouds churned out by Jerry Brandt’s hype machine? Quite possibly. Or did they finally get an earful of his music and decide that it kinda blew? Ah, now there’s the rub.
The ultimate result? Jobriath was dropped from Elektra in the middle of his sole American tour, his two albums went out of print with depressing speed, and all concerned performed a thorough disavowal of responsibility and even knowledge of his existence worthy of the most brutally efficient totalitarian government. Elektra’s Jac Holzman confessed his embarrassment at the whole enterprise and quit the label he co-founded soon afterwards, presumably in shame. The mortified music press wrote him off. And even Brandt himself, the guy who proclaimed “it’s Crosby, Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles and Jobriath … no doubt about that,” wound up muttering that the kid was nothing but a worthless alcoholic, and apparently looked to atone for his misdoings by holding the lad to a draconian ten-year contract, effectively keeping him from recording anything for the rest of his life. And Jobriath himself? He retreated to his sanctum in the Chelsea Hotel, emerging only to perform in East Village clubs as lounge singer Cole Berlin, and eventually died a sadly appropriate death by AIDS in 1983. As for a legacy, he basically had none. His albums held no sway even among collectors (the only copy of either I was ever able to track down turned up, not in a used record store, but in a frighteningly skeezy consignment shop) and, with the exception of a bemused writeup in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and a first-place ranking on somethingawful.com’s list of the Ten Worst Rock Stars in History, he warranted scarcely a footnote in music history’s little red book.
And so might it have stayed were it not the shelf-haired hero to the downtrodden, the counselor of camp, the Mancunian candidate (for anti-depression meds) himself – that’s right, friends, Stephen Patrick Morrissey loped forward to rescue Jobriath from oblivion. It started awkwardly – he sought the singer out to open for him on his Your Arsenal tour, unaware that he hadn’t been up to the rigors of touring for the better part of a decade – but Moz was not to be deterred. He curated a 2006 compilation, Lonely Planet Boy (kind of telling that he needed to christen it with a New York Dolls quote, eh?), talked him up in interviews, and inspired a set of Japanese reissues. With the cult heroes’ cult hero in Jobriath’s corner, it was only a matter of time before the resurrection-happy domestic CD market saw fit to follow suit, and thanks to the efforts of Collector’s Choice Records, Jobriath has risen again to “camp” out under the stars.
So, after all this, what do you get when you crack the shrinkwrap on the collected works of the world’s forgotten spaceboy? It’d be immensely gratifying to report that beneath the hype and the record-buying public’s resistance to same lay a lost treasure trove of irresistible glam anthems, but I’m afraid that the record-buying public had pretty much the right idea. Too much of this material sounds forced, imitative and plodding, which is murderous to glam – if you’re gonna be light in the loafers, you’d best be light on your feet. The hooks evidently stopped at the marketing level, and the only groove to be found is the one the makeup people put on his forehead. He does a little better by the ballads – his overwrought vocalizing turns out to be a much better fit with string sections and pianos (the latter played, not badly at all, by Jobriath himself) than with the mock-Ronsonisms of most of the louder material. (As for the lyrics, the less said the better – just know that one of the songs is entitled “Space Clown” and extrapolate from there.) It’s not unlistenable, especially once you stop thinking of it as “real” rock ‘n’ roll and as the soundtrack to an imaginary off-Broadway glamsploitation musical (which makes Jobriath a Hedwig of his time, perhaps), and, oddly, the second album (cobbled together quickly using leftovers from the first) turns out to be the stronger of the two, with more emphasis on ballads and a truly oddball country-and-western-inflected (!) number with the radio-friendly title “Scumbag.” Still and all, it’s hard to imagine who to recommend these discs to. If I were in charge of such things, I’d’ve put it out as a book with a suitable-for-framing “Certificate of Inauthenticity” and relegated the discs to a free-with-purchase bonus (and given the job of writing it to veteran rock archivist Richie Unterberger, whose liner notes tell the tale of Jobriath’s rise and demise economically, while deftly sidestepping the question of whether the damn things are actually worth hearing). In its present form, though, most of you can quite blissfully walk past and not miss a thing. But if you’re a glam completist, a gay-rock historian or a collector of curiosities (and there are precious few pop artifacts that manage to be both historically significant and utterly inconsequential), by all means make way for the homo inferior.
Yo La Tengo
POPULAR SONGS
(MATADOR)
Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley are the Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward of indie-rock (actually, the title should probably go to Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, but I already wrote that review). As such, a new YLT album tends to feel as comfortable as a successful long-term relationship, and Popular Songs is no exception. Not boring, mind you – they’re too skilled at pop pastiche for that – but whether they’re doing the string-driven thing (as on opening track “Here to Fall”), dipping into Farfisafied fuzz-pop (“Nothing To Hide”), Booker T.-ing themselves off with a Monks-ish breakdown (“Periodically Double Or Triple”), whitefacing Motown (“If It’s True”) or stretching out in acoustic languor with dreamy washes of guitar atmospherics (“The Fireside”) , there’s a ease and even a calmness at play (particularly in the vocals, almost always sleepily agreeable even when their instruments are kicking up a little dust) that comes across as reassuring, opting for the nice, straight line of contentment over the impassioned needle-jumps of younger, more hormonal combos. That is, until they finally raise the pulse rate over the fifteen minute span of “And The Glitter Is Gone” (the last of the three extended workouts that conclude the album), where Kaplan wrings some rather impressive, sustained feedback ‘n’ yowling from his axe while Hubley eggs him on from behind her kit. I dunno, maybe they had an argument that day.
(More to come, eventually...)
Sunday, November 01, 2009
HEY! I'M WRITING HERE!:
Not writing as much as I would like, but then that's always been the case. First, I've started contributing reviews and such to Dagger magazine - my first few can be found here - they're the ones what has my name at the end of them.
Also, I'm working out my atrophied creative muscles by enlisting in this year's National Novel Writing Month - not so much a competition as a dance marathon with verbs. I'll be uploading my, um, "novel" as I go here. Check back frequently; just don't expect it to be very good.
Also, I'm working out my atrophied creative muscles by enlisting in this year's National Novel Writing Month - not so much a competition as a dance marathon with verbs. I'll be uploading my, um, "novel" as I go here. Check back frequently; just don't expect it to be very good.
Monday, July 27, 2009
SECOND-HAND TWEETS #2: A MINI-ANTHOLOGY
More of my various contributions to sundry twitmemes or whatever the hell they're called...
#dregsofcriterion:
"Two or Three Things I Left At Her House"
"The Ringtones of Madame de..."
"Le Shower D'Or"
"Wise Phlegm"
"The Man Who Fell Over in His Driveway"
"Last Year at Marion Barry's"
#existentialjokes:
A: Knock knock. B: Who's there? A: (silence) B: All is lost.
A priest, a cowgirl and a penguin walk into a bar. They do not move.*
#binaryjokes:**
00010: 1100010!
100001: 0000000111?
00010: 1!
#badcharities:
Toil for Tots (the #1 outsourcer for the world's sweatshops)
The National Overendowment for the Tarts
Ah'm Nasty International (renowned worldwide for releasing those trapped in the closet)
The Shasta McNasty House
The Glory-Hole-in-the-Wall Gang
Doctors Without Boundaries
The Take-A-Fist Foundation
#unencouragingmoviepitches:
"I've got the rights to 'The Miracle of Morgan's Creek' and I've got the Octomom under contract. You do the math."
"They called him the Nureyev of clog dancing, and this is his tragic story..."
"Four words: 'Steven Seagal IS Pagliacci.'"
"It's 'Day of the Locust' meets 'Night of the Lepus.'"
#hillbillyretail:***
Y'allgreens
Whole Feuds
Targit-R-Done
Supercutoffs
Kay Jewhaters
That Hick Ory's Farm
Victoria's Rickets
Hot Toe-Pick
Race Traitor Joe's
Ratty Ol' Shack
T.G.I.Fried Possum's
#lettersthataren'tr:****
K
#1stdraftmovielines:
"You know how to whistle, don't you? Here, use this whistle."
"Round up the same fellows we pull in at times like this. You know, the real supicious ones."
"Rosehips."
#failedcatchphrases:
"Baby, you're the England Dan to my John Ford Coley."
"That's close enough for professional croquet."
"COLITIS!"
"You ain't just humming the theme from 'Exodus' there, partner."
"You ain't no Gordie Howe, girlfriend."
"Aw, tell it to the phrenologist!"
"Don't serve that watery flan to ME, mister!"
"I'm Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, bitch!"
"That's my dybbuk!"
"Tickle that Serb, Agnes!"
* How many times have I recycled this one? A lot. I may have had only half-a-dozen or so inspired ideas in my life, but damned if I'm letting go of any of them.
** For some reason, this one failed to catch on.
*** I guess some of those are more "#redneckretail" than "#hillbillyretail." So sue me. My Southern relatives are.
**** See **.
#dregsofcriterion:
"Two or Three Things I Left At Her House"
"The Ringtones of Madame de..."
"Le Shower D'Or"
"Wise Phlegm"
"The Man Who Fell Over in His Driveway"
"Last Year at Marion Barry's"
#existentialjokes:
A: Knock knock. B: Who's there? A: (silence) B: All is lost.
A priest, a cowgirl and a penguin walk into a bar. They do not move.*
#binaryjokes:**
00010: 1100010!
100001: 0000000111?
00010: 1!
#badcharities:
Toil for Tots (the #1 outsourcer for the world's sweatshops)
The National Overendowment for the Tarts
Ah'm Nasty International (renowned worldwide for releasing those trapped in the closet)
The Shasta McNasty House
The Glory-Hole-in-the-Wall Gang
Doctors Without Boundaries
The Take-A-Fist Foundation
#unencouragingmoviepitches:
"I've got the rights to 'The Miracle of Morgan's Creek' and I've got the Octomom under contract. You do the math."
"They called him the Nureyev of clog dancing, and this is his tragic story..."
"Four words: 'Steven Seagal IS Pagliacci.'"
"It's 'Day of the Locust' meets 'Night of the Lepus.'"
#hillbillyretail:***
Y'allgreens
Whole Feuds
Targit-R-Done
Supercutoffs
Kay Jewhaters
That Hick Ory's Farm
Victoria's Rickets
Hot Toe-Pick
Race Traitor Joe's
Ratty Ol' Shack
T.G.I.Fried Possum's
#lettersthataren'tr:****
K
#1stdraftmovielines:
"You know how to whistle, don't you? Here, use this whistle."
"Round up the same fellows we pull in at times like this. You know, the real supicious ones."
"Rosehips."
#failedcatchphrases:
"Baby, you're the England Dan to my John Ford Coley."
"That's close enough for professional croquet."
"COLITIS!"
"You ain't just humming the theme from 'Exodus' there, partner."
"You ain't no Gordie Howe, girlfriend."
"Aw, tell it to the phrenologist!"
"Don't serve that watery flan to ME, mister!"
"I'm Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, bitch!"
"That's my dybbuk!"
"Tickle that Serb, Agnes!"
* How many times have I recycled this one? A lot. I may have had only half-a-dozen or so inspired ideas in my life, but damned if I'm letting go of any of them.
** For some reason, this one failed to catch on.
*** I guess some of those are more "#redneckretail" than "#hillbillyretail." So sue me. My Southern relatives are.
**** See **.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
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.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
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.
"Randomly Handing Out Statuettes Since 1997."
page 1:
(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:
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.
Monday, June 22, 2009
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...
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...
Monday, June 15, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
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)
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)
Friday, June 05, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
INSOMNIA, INTERNET ACCESS AND ANTI-SOCIAL TENDENCIES MAKE AN INTERESTING COMBINATION:
My first works using the new, text-to-movie website xtranormal.com:
Sunday, February 22, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, June 23, 2008
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!
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!
Saturday, May 31, 2008
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.
Monday, May 19, 2008
"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)?
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)?
Monday, April 28, 2008
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.
So, hey, enjoy.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
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...
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...
Thursday, January 10, 2008
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
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
Don't Let Your Son Go Down On Me
I Saw Mommy Gassing Santa Claus
North Pole Terminus: The Santa Klaus Barbie StoryThe 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:
Sunday, October 28, 2007
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.
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.
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