Ludic Despair

Riverdale Media

2012-01-23T20:31:00.000-06:00

Spoil Everything Now

2012-01-20T18:20:00.000-06:00

How many times has this happened to you? It’s the day after a big episode of television show X. You’re standing around at the copy machine or water cooler with some co-workers. “Did you see what happened on television show X last night?” you say to the group, knowing that most everyone in this circle watches and enjoys television show X. “Yes!” exclaims a co-worker, “I couldn’t believe it when….”

“STOP!” yells another in the circle, seemingly in a state of panic. “It’s on the DVR but I haven’t watched it yet.”

The conversation grinds to a halt. Everyone sighs and stares listlessly into the swirling galaxy of creamer in their coffees, or mechanically shuffles papers in silence to put in the copier. “Nice weather we’re having,” someone offers.

How did this state of affairs come to exist? How is it that those of us who simply watch television as television ended up deferring so quickly and definitively to the TV-tardy generation? As TiVO and then more generic forms of DVR technology spread through the marketplace, why did the broadcast generation so eagerly accommodate those who prefer to watch their programs in weekend marathons of digitized fast-forwarding? Why is it impolite to "spoil" a show by revealing plot information, and yet not impolite to force a larger group of people to clam up during a spontaneous discussion of said plot?

These are perplexing questions, to be sure. At first this deference was perhaps simply techno-intimidation. In its earliest days, TiVO marketing (and TiVO owners) enjoyed making the non-time-shifted feel as though they were slaves to the manipulative agenda of network puppeteers. To watch broadcast television when it was actually broadcast was to admit you had nothing better to do, that you let television rule over your life rather than taking charge of the technology itself.

As the years have passed, however, we can now see that this was an utterly ridiculous proposition. Who is more enslaved by television: the person who tries to make it home in time for Modern Family, but if he misses it just does something else with his time; or the person who loads up a brace of Modern Family’s that have to be “cleared” from the DVR, maybe over Thanksgiving or after the spring finale? For me, there is no sadder sight than an otherwise young and healthy individual hunched over a laptop watching something like The Jersey Shore, trying to “catch up” with a program that God intended us to watch by accident while channel-surfing from the comfort of the couch.

I suppose this impulse can be defended in those who watch serial narratives, an audience that would be devastated to miss even a second of the complete storyline (unlike viewers of old who, if they missed an episode, caught up in the first five minutes of the next installment and simply carried on). Like so much of what has gone wrong with contemporary television, we can blame much of this on Twin Peaks, the series that probably did more than any other to ensure that the college educated would feel an obligation to view every moment of every single program and somehow still think they were smarter than the cathode tractor-beam that had just transfixed them for upscale target practice.

Many are happy that television is now often afforded the status of “art” in the same way as the cinema. But I’m not so sure this has been a good development inasmuch as it has destroyed the pleasures of quotidian disposability that were so long a part of the medium (like being able to engage in casual day-after conversation about an episode without someone freaking out that you’re about to read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy aloud before they’ve had a chance to buy their copy of Ulysses).

The “artification” of television has gone hand-in-hand, of course, with the industry’s amazing success in convincing otherwise intelligent people that they should buy multi-disc DVD/Blu-Ray copies of a television series in its totality. Sure, Captain DVR has disrupted the imperious power of the network schedule—only to then get ensnared through appeals to art, quality, and archival depth so as to drop a few twenties on a deluxe boxed-set. All the old NBC wanted was my time and eyeballs—but the new Comcast/NBC/Universal wants me to think I have a responsibility to own the complete run of Heroes, neatly filed away alongside hours and hours of other forgettable shows that in an ideal world would remain elusive and ephemeral. Why anyone (other than a media teacher, of course) would go to the trouble of brushing off a box set of The Simpsons in order to watch a specific episode rather than simply allow Homer, et al. to pop up as a welcome surprise during unfocused leisure time is a true mystery. It’s rather like keeping bottles of tap water in fancy bottles even though the faucet remains completely functional.

Some might argue the box set is a good way to catch up with an important series one has missed—but even here, I would suggest it is enough to know that Series X will undoubtedly return, like a comet, and that arriving at that welcome rendez-vous in an unspecified future will make the eventual viewing of the series much more pleasurable than burning through it in an obligatory 22 hour marathon. I can’t think of anything currently on TV, or indeed that has ever been on TV, that I would absolutely HAVE to see RIGHT NOW.

This stockpiling of episodes—either on DVD or on the DVR-- is especially nonsensical and even a bit depressing when it involves programs that were designed to be wholly disposable in the first place, shows like Storage Wars, Kendra, Hoarders, and House Hunters that work best as random encounters with sporadic time-killing. Indeed, if you like a particular show in one of these formats, wouldn’t it be better to keep a few in the quiver? That is, rather than systematically make sure that each and every episode has been accounted for in the DVR queue, wouldn’t it be more rewarding to allow for a few strays to escape as breeding stock so that they might unexpectedly return sometime in the future? Incredibly, I actually encountered an episode of Seinfeld the other day that I had somehow never seen before. It was a profound, moving, and even magical experience, akin to necromancy or time-travel, and a pleasure that the DVR’s mandatory efficiency in consumption makes increasingly rare.

Many have bemoaned how cable (along with an armada of other technologies) has led to a balkanization of public culture and the centripetal hardening of “egocasting” as the new media sensibility. This fragmentation is inevitable, no doubt, and I am certainly not nostalgic for the days of 3-Network pseudo-consensus broadcasting. But, in a world where increasingly you only share film, television, and music choices with a very narrow cross-section of your demographic, how frustrating is it when one slothful DVR-owner can singlehandedly bring a discussion to a halt?

Here’s a good rule of thumb in television: if you can’t be bothered to make the time to watch a show on the day it actually airs, if the idea of watching a particular show isn’t something you actually look forward to enough to plan your precious leisure time around it, then it probably isn’t all that important to you in the first place. Television is so relentlessly of the present and moving ever onward into the future, why would anyone go back in time to resurrect an experience so demonstrably unimportant?

That’s why I think those who still have affection for the flows and rhythms of broadcasting as broadcasting should quit being so deferent and polite in this conflict. I’m tired of feeling like a public masturbator simply because I bothered to sit down and watch Revenge on the night it was actually airing. If you feel the same, then take the vow to discuss whatever you want, whenever you want, and let the TV-tardy assume the responsibility of shunning human company until they feel “caught up” enough to contribute to the basic social cement of televisual “small talk.” After all, we never had a vote on which way this social convention was supposed to go.

"Brian's Song" Subjected to Withering Critique by Snot-Nosed Punk Armed with Blue Ball-Point Pen

2012-01-14T18:59:00.000-06:00

North Korean Upfronts

2011-12-28T10:26:00.000-06:00

Diabolical Codyism

2011-12-27T21:38:00.005-06:00

As I see it, Young Adult (2011) and Juno (2007) are the exact same film. They may differ slightly in tone and emphasis, but do not be deceived, they are the exact same film. To prove this, I will employ an old friend from the era of structural film analysis--the "semiotic square." Briefly explained, the "semiotic square" allows us to examine how a fundamental opposition informs a given text. When applied to Diablo Cody's Young Adult (2011) and Juno (2007), the semiotic square will reveal the underlying ideological foundations of what we will now call the "Codyverse."

Before proceeding, however, we must first delineate the three basic questions that inform the narrative progression of both films:

1. Why are there no "normal adults" anymore?

2. What is the proper relationship for a "normal adult" to have with popular culture?

3. Who shall and shall not be granted proximity to a precious, precious baby?

All of these questions stem from the great REGRESSION crisis currently bedeviling the western democracies, a mass and now multi-generational stagnation in adolescence largely engineered and sustained by a culture industry that needs all of us to remain fixated on the products and fantasies we consumed when we were fourteen. The promo art for Young Adult announces this crisis as its central theme: "Everyone grows old. Not everyone grows up."

Before unpacking Young Adult, however, we must first revisit Juno. Below, the semiotic square illustrates how the four main characters embody positions derived from the film's structuring opposition of ADULT - CHILD.

JUNO (2007)

Before proceeding with the individual characters, it should be noted that the "semiotic square" typically does not have a baby at its center. I have added one, however, because it is the precious, precious baby that provides the bedrock of the Codyverse. Indeed, one could argue that both Juno and Young Adult are primarily concerned with arriving at the appropriate answer for Question 3 above: "Who shall and shall not be granted proximity to the precious baby?"

Juno herself, of course, assumes the "contrary" position at the top of the square, a wise-cracking teen who, though she seems mature beyond her years, must learn important lessons on the path to true adulthood. As the only fully functional "adult" in the story, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) will assume the Adult/Non-child position. I will assign Paulie (Micheal Cerra) the "neutral" term at the bottom of the square as he is caught in a limbo between adulthood and childhood and is thus neither (as opposed to Juno's more forceful transition from Child to Adult). But the crucial term here is on the right side of the square: Mark (Jason Bateman) in the position of Child--Not Adult. While Juno is about "Juno," obviously, its main ideological task is to punish Mark for his transgressive regression so that he might be expelled from the text and kept as far away as possible from the precious baby.

Mark's transgressions are these: 1). he still enjoys "punk rock" and "horror movies;" 2). he shares his expertise in these forms with a teenage girl; 3). he verbalizes his attraction to this same teenage girl, probably because she also likes punk rock and horror movies; 4). he bitches about how marriage forced him to renounce his ambitions to be a "rock star"; 5). he expresses a desire to live in a loft downtown; 6). he expresses some degree of hesitation over coming into proximity with the precious Juno-baby. It's very straightforward, really. Mark is the regressed male who, unlike Steve Carrell in The 40 Year Old Virgin, does not have a hip and patient Catherine Keener to save him from wallowing in perpetual adolescence. Juno ends "happily" to the extent that Mark is exposed as a creep and must leave the world of wholesome suburban reproduction.

Now, let us move on to the even more diabolical case of Young Adult:

YOUNG ADULT (2011)

In this case, we will put Mark (Patton Oswald) at the top of the square. Taking a page from Planet Apatow, Cody uses the narrative shorthand of a superhero figurine collection to signify Matt's regressed status. And yet, Matt remains the only adult "conscience" in the film, consistently trying to talk Mavis (Charlize Theron) out of her ridiculous scheme to win back her old boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson). Buddy is for the most part a cipher, but as a seemingly committed husband and enthusiastic father, he fills out the necessary position of Adult--Non-Child.

Now, you might think Cody was somewhat harsh with Mark in Juno for punishing him so excessively just for enjoying the rock 'n' roll music and finding a witty teenager attractive. Thus the genius of Nipple Confusion. By placing Buddy's wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), in a cover band made up entirely of new moms, Cody finds a more nuanced strategy for engaging question #2: "What is the proper relationship for a "normal adult" to have with popular culture?" While Juno addresses this question in its most general form, Young Adult provides a much more focused analysis of the spectrum of regression by asking, "What is the appropriate relationship for a 'normal adult' to have with Teenage Bandwagon?"

Recall that during the opening sequence, we witness Mavis obsessively rewinding and re-listening to the first verse of Teenage Bandwagon's song, "the Concept"--included on a now 17 year old mix-tape that Buddy made for Mavis when they were dating. Mavis' fixation on repeating a moment of pop epiphany (crucially, she only wants to listen to the first verse/chorus over and over again) suggests that her relationship with Teenage Bandwagon is profoundly regressed and thus wholly dysfunctional. Mavis' rewinding of the tape is offered, initially at least, as a playfully regressive memory for any audience member old enough to remember the courtship and technical protocols attending analog "mix-tapes"--but as the story proceeds, her fixation on "The Concept" retroactively becomes a sonic marker of Mavis having become "stuck" in the past. She therefore has an "inappropriate" relationship with Teenage Fanclub.

As the drummer in Nipple Confusion, however, Buddy's wife Beth demonstrates a healthy and non-regressed relationship to Teenage Bandwagon. This is because Beth, unlike Mavis, enjoys Teenage Bandwagon within the context of successful marriage and reproduction. Indeed, Nipple Confusion is "cool" precisely because they have the "proper" perspective on life by virtue of their marriages and collective motherhood. Single and without children, Mavis foolishly regards "The Concept" as a powerful anthem of romantic affect and possibility; Beth has the higher knowledge that the song is simply a quaint curio of their generation's heritage in '90s indie-rock culture. Thus Mavis' profound horror when she discovers that Buddy has shared "their song" with obstacle-wife.

Which brings us to Mavis, who we see occupies the same position as Mark in Juno: CHILD--NOT ADULT. And, also like Mark, the ideological work of Young Adult is to ensure that Mavis be kept as far away as possible from the precious, precious baby. Taken together, the two films demonstrate just how profoundly invested the Codyverse is in maintaining rigorous moral parameters related to proper suburban breeding.

Young Adult, however, is a much more mean and nasty film. Consider that in Juno Mark must leave in shame because he questions the centrality of breeding and parenthood in adult life. This is a harsh judgment, perhaps, but at least Mark has some agency in his own fate. He chooses to end his marriage and go live in a loft where he can spend more time listening to punk rock and watching horror movies.

Young Adult, on the other hand, makes the following division:

Successful Breeders "Crippled" Breeders

Buddy (functional penis and sperm) Matt (crooked penis)

Beth (functional uterus and ovum) Mavis (had a miscarriage)

Thus, Matt and Mavis' "regressions" are explained by a physical inability to assume the role of an adult breeder. Unlike Mark, they are denied even the opportunity of questioning the breeder position--it is simply assumed that both desperately want a marriage and family (especially Mavis), but have "regressed" to a non-adult position as an effect of their reproductive failure. Matt and Mavis are doomed because, in their cases at least, biology is destiny.

I would submit this is a fairly loathsome position to take on these issues.

Okay, I'm done.

Ten Best List

2011-12-19T12:05:00.001-06:00

I don't typically compile a "ten best" list each year as I find the entire ritual a narcissistic and even imperious performance of one's own taste. This year, however, I decided to get off my high-horse and share the most outstanding films I saw this year. After all, I am highly credentialed in film studies/analysis, so it would be criminal of me not to share that expertise with the lay public. Be advised, however, many of these films will prove difficult to see, especially if you live in some God-forsaken, cultural backwater.

1. Seven Tangerines (Poston)

Reportedly shot for less than $50,000 without permits in an abandoned brownstone in Queens, Jack Poston’s Seven Tangerines succeeds less as a well-crafted work of cinema than as a raw document of extraordinary writing and acting. As a play, Seven Tangerines never even made it to off-off-Broadway, Poston staging only six performances at a rented community center in Astoria before taking it before the camera. For many productions, that would be a mistake. But here there is a sense that Poston and co-star Jakov Lund, May-December junkies slowly freezing to death in a Bronx tenement, might have over-cooked their characters if they had waited any longer to capture them on film. And the ending remains as haunting as it is enigmatic-- do the two men, at the brink of unconsciousness, see the face of God, or is it merely the lights of a police helicopter? Thankfully, Poston allows the viewer to make his or her own decision.

2. The Winter of the Mouse Friend (Fu)

On the surface, Su Jing Fu’s study of a girl’s dormitory during the Cultural Revolution may seem like a straightforward celebration of female bonding and empowerment. When a small and very bedraggled mouse wanders into the dormitory during the first winter snowfall, the girls nurse it back to health and make it their communal pet, going to great lengths to hide their furry friend from their harsh housemother. The charm of the premise gradually mutates into something more sinister, however, as Xiaobai (“Whitey”) becomes hostage to the various interpersonal struggles between the roommates. Cantopop singer Denise Ho Wan-See is surprisingly good as the dorm’s primary villain, Bao-yu, manipulating her peers for chocolates and other favors by constantly threatening to reveal the mouse’s hidden den in the wall.

3. Jacques et Jacqueline (Courbet)

Hopes were not high after comedian Ricard Courbet’s first feature, Les Idiots sur un Bateau (2009), a broad physical comedy set at a failing yacht rental yard in Nice. And Courbet probably did himself no favors in the follow-up by playing both “Jacques” and “Jacqueline,” combative fraternal twins brought together by the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. But Courbet surprised everyone by crafting a rather poignant character study amid all the requisite yucks, making Jacqueline in particular a stealthily tragic composite of poor life decisions. And while the ending set-piece with the frozen baguettes and broken teeth was a bit crass, overall it didn’t derail this surprisingly complex portrait of sibling rivalry turned bittersweet affection.

4. Zero-Muybridge-One (Muybridge/Locklear)

Experimental cinema can often be unbearable, and on paper, Zero-Muybridge-One looks like it would be no exception. Digital artist Camden Locklear has digitized every single frame of Edward Muybridge’s foundational “motion studies” and then re-sequenced them according to a cryptograph derived from the texts of Walter Benjamin. The effect is a haunting flow of sepia-toned light and shadow punctuated by furtive images that struggle to cohere on screen. Horse and cat strobe toward one another from opposite sides of the frame. A tumbler appears to somersault in and out of oblivion. A nude man strides into the very maelstrom of modernity itself, chin held high as he enters the new century with what we can now see was a sadly misplaced sense of confidence. Credit too must be given to Philip Glass’ architectural scoring that gently accents the emerging images even as it stolidly anchors the overall flows of amorphous light.

5. Yellowknife (Slidell)

Two painfully shy teenagers, he from Vancouver and she from Montreal, find themselves “exiled” together for a summer in the remote wilderness of Yellowknife. While their fathers work together on a geological survey, Marcus and Claudette negotiate a relationship they know is both inevitable and doomed, brought together by their mutual distaste for life in the wilderness and yet knowing their time together will be over come September. First love is an old story, of course, but director Felicity Slidell does an excellent job here undercutting the genre’s more maudlin elements by refracting them through the precocious sophistication of her leads. There are a few missteps (the scene where the young and still awkward couple happen upon moose copulating in the woods flirts a little too heavily with the American Pie series), but overall a touching meditation on the millennial generation’s turn at “summer love.”

6. El vano heredarán la tierra (Urueta)

Transplanting William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair from Regency England to the slums of contemporary Mexico City is an audacious move, as is placing a 14 year-old male hustler in the role of Becky Sharp. But Urueta’s satire of the links between social mobility and sociopathology shares Thackeray’s at times misanthropic eye for the often brutal violence underlying custom and convention. And by removing the “Amelia” character entirely, some might even say Urueta has improved on Thackeray.

7. Tarantula (Emmerich)

Given his last three spectacularly interesting failures (10,000 B.C., (2008), 2012 (2009), and Anonymous (2011), many suspected that Roland Emmerich might just have one truly outstanding film in him struggling to get out. Who could have known that Emmerich would finally strike gold in a remake, especially considering that his 1998 attempt to reboot Godzilla was such a giant reptilian turd? And yet, in reimagining Jack Arnold’s 1955 classic of an irradiated spider on the rampage, Emmerich achieves an emotional depth wholly absent in his turn at the Godzilla franchise. Wisely, Emmerich transforms Arnold’s creepy-crawly Other into a more sympathetic fellow citizen of earth, one that never asked to be trapped in a laboratory much less forced to ingest radioactive grain. In a testament to the director’s subtly in making us identify with what is, after all, merely a CGI program, our attachment to the giant spider is really only apparent at the very end. As “Tarantula” looks down with his 8 eyes, seemingly betrayed by his former scientist protector (played with surprising verve by Tara Reid), we hope for just a moment that the seemingly inevitable laser blast and explosion will not come. But of course, as it must, it does. So far Emmerich’s Tarantula has not found a U.S. distributor, but hopefully that will change in 2012.

8. Reflections (Corday)

Very few people have had the opportunity to see the first feature film by avant-garde video artist Christian Corday, but fortunately I was invited to a screening last month for 25 or so people at the artist’s new loft/studio in DUMBO. It is truly stunning, and I highly recommend you try to see it should it come to a theater near you (although that’s probably unlikely—given the film’s formal and thematic complexity, it is likely only to play in New York City and Los Angeles for the foreseeable future). Corday begins with an odd but intriguing premise. “A” and “B”, married artists in Chelsea, decide to cover every surface of their apartment/loft/studio with mirrors. From there, they decide that all of their daily interactions—both in and out of the house—will be conducted through mirrors as well. Gradually the inevitable happens. Their identities become ungrounded and uncertain, eventually transferring between their two bodies. From here the film engages a series of metaphysical dilemmas—what happens when “A’s” subjectivity is in “B’s” body, and vice versa? Original, profound, and utterly unsettling—it’s a must see for anyone with an interest in film, philosophy, or both.

9, The Royal Disease (Dankworth)

Excruciatingly detailed bio-pic of Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany and fourth son of Queen Victoria. Leopold lived a short and troubled life, his hemophilia keeping him under the watchful eye of his mother the Queen. Dankworth’s film only has time to sample a few of Leopold’s many failures at love, focusing primarily on his combative relationship with his overprotective mother. But the true star here (no offense to Jude Law’s turn as Leopold) is the set and costume design. Shot entirely on location, The Royal Disease’s painstakingly accurate reconstruction of every costume, object, and room of its Victorian milieu unfolds almost as a type of time travel. One forgets they are watching a movie so complete is the immersion in period detail. Elegantly stunning and highly educational.

10. Up My Own Asshole, with Vigor (Farren)

Playfully self-reflexive morality tale of Hollywood manners, focusing on a screenwriter who sets out to write the most damning critique ever of the Hollywood system, only to find himself co-opted at every turn by the very system he detests. While this material can often lead to a type of insufferable navel-gazing, Farren very effectively foregrounds the film’s recognition that it is nothing more than navel-gazing, thus allowing it to gaze even deeper with absolute impunity. Amanda Seyfried has a wonderful turn as the embattled screenwriter’s on-again, off-again girlfriend, a “granola” type constantly hectoring him to do something more “useful” with his life (until, of course, she lands a role herself in a network mini-series). By now, one would think the public would be tired of “insider” tales of Hollywood’s glamour and duplicity, but Up My Own Asshole, with Vigor proves the genre still has yet to exhaust its creative possibilities.

Let Us Tax Gwyneth Paltrow's Infected Brain

2011-12-14T13:21:00.005-06:00

First of all, kudos to the sadist at American Airlines who programmed Contagion (2011) as the only viable option on the eastbound transatlantic flights this month. Just what a person wants to see after being shoehorned into coach for six hours of hermetic ripening--a film about a clumsy bat almost taking out half the world with a horrible mutant virus, all because said bat couldn't fly and eat a banana at the same time. Way to go, stupid bat. Watching Contagion amid all the coughing and hacking and sweating was like trying to make a birdhouse in shop class while the teacher screens the Saw films back to back. But it was either that or Crazy Stupid Love (2011), so there you go.

From what I understand, many have celebrated Contagion because Gwyneth Paltrow dies a ghoulish death in the first ten minutes. This is probably very mean and unfair to Ms. Paltrow, who is quite possibly a nice person in daily life. But it does raise an interesting question: why do so many people dislike Paltrow?

I think we can isolate four interrelated factors:

1. She named a child "Apple" because
2. She married a "rock star," which is exactly what you'd expect
3. Of someone who has gestated in the designer womb of Hollywood her whole life and yet
4. Still had the audacity to play a hard-scrabble C&W singer, even when country singifying is
the last show-biz job available to Red State folk who have actually eaten gravel from
fighting in a bar parking lot.

Still, credit where credit is due. It is not every well-known actress who would be willing, not only to "pull a Leigh," but to also have her skull opened up with a bonesaw and her scalp and hair peeled off like a fuzzy grape. This type of role is typically left to an aspiring starlet who calculates that the shock value of showing a little skull in her film debut will open more doors than it closes--and besides, it's either that or a day's work as one of Steve Carrell's failed dates in Crazy Stupid Love, so there you go again.

One can only imagine what Soderbergh was thinking as he framed this one up in the view finder (or perhaps it was the B-unit. Interesting DGA question: who is typically tasked with shooting scenes involving inert corpses? [Keanu Reeves joke goes here]). "Boy, this is awesome, I got one of my famous actor friends to let me peel her scalp off in close up!" And it is awesome, precisely because of Paltrow's "star power" (or for those who remain skeptical and/or irritable, "unavoidable familiarity as an icon in mass circulation despite any apparent market demand).

But the undeniable impact of the Paltrow autopsy scene also foregrounds what has become the most insufferable aspect of Soderbergh's "big film" Hollywood work: the suffocating over-abundance of A-list stars who are cast for no apparent reason other than Soderbergh knows them and can get them. I'm not the first person to say this, clearly. It's gotten to the point where the ongoing Oceans Infinity series has become like paying some form of symbolic tribute--regular Americans herded into theaters and netflix queues to bear compulsory witness to just how fabulous it is not to be a regular American. I suppose the Oceans films could be defended as an effort to bring back the "glamor" of the old Hollywood star system, but that would assume "star" means the same thing now as it did in 1935. Let's face it, now that everyone perceives themselves to be uniquely special and yet unfairly screwed in everyday life, no one has the time or inclination to watch a celebrity circle-jerk every 16 months.

Even if the celebrity jumbo-pack makes some sense in the Oceans films, however, it makes absolutely no sense in Contagion; in fact, it actively undercuts the film's potential impact. Contagion is barely a story in the first place. Scott Z. Burns' script opts for such a well-researched and reasonable account of a global epidemic that the viewer meets most of the plot developments with only a nod of familiarity: "People fighting over MREs thrown out the back of a truck? Yep, I could see that happening. Officials exploiting inside information to protect their loved ones? Sure, not surprising. Vaccine shortages? Yep, most likely. " For this sprawling ensemble piece to work, especially given its rather dispassionate and even wholly predictable docudrama treatment, it needs a cast of unknowns, fame-ciphers that can actually become the everyday, real-life victims caught up in this very plausible global disaster. What it doesn't need is Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Elliot Gould, and Laurence Fishburne to remind us over and over again: it's only a movie. All that's missing is George Clooney as the moody epidemiologist who, estranged from his daughter and living in an emotional vacuum, volunteers to wander off into the Chinese jungle in search of even more feverish, sneezing bats.

In fairness to Soderbergh, this is probably more a celebrity problem than a directorial one. Celebrities like to be in front of cameras--it's just their nature. And by all accounts, Soderbergh makes them feel good about themselves and their performances, so perhaps these celebrity-stuffed opuses stem less from the director flaunting his connections than from his inability to say no to people who live closer to the ocean than him.

But I have a solution to all of this.

At this point in the cinema's history, I think we can agree that most films would benefit from a cast of unknowns, as least any film that is making a bid for dramatic realism/naturalism. The star system had its place many decades ago, certainly, but today it is simply incompatible with whatever vestigial powers and patience audiences have left for "suspending disbelief." Also, there are so many more people today struggling to be famous that I believe we have an obligation to move talent through the system a bit faster. So here's how we do it:

THE CELEBRITY LUXURY TAX

Here's how it works: An actor is allowed to earn 100 million dollars in fees from appearing in film and television (monitored by an objective accounting firm--perhaps a SAG division of Price Waterhouse). After hitting the very generous mark of $100 million, said actor must from that point on PAY to appear in any subsequent film and television productions (and, just to be safe, this "pay to play" rate will be double if said actor gets an inkling to sing or rap). There might be some room to negotiate this fee depending on the amount of screen time and the overall prominence of the project, but the basic principle must remain the same: once society has given you $100 million for essentially playing pretend-time in front of a camera, the actor must in turn pay for the privilege of remaining in the public multiplex and limelight. It's only fair.

For purposes of illustration, imagine that Tom Cruise had hit the 100 million mark at Jerry Macguire (1996). Would he have been so quick to make Vanilla Sky (2001) or Valkyrie (2008) if each role had cost him a cool million? Meanwhile, maybe his more modest turns in Magnolia (1999) and Tropic Thunder (2008) would only set him back $250,000. Not only would this celebrity luxury tax force big-name actors to be more discriminating and invested in their roles, it might encourage others to get out of the game entirely. I'm pretty sure Adam Sandler gave up caring about his movies a decade ago. Think how much better it would be for him and for us if he could simply take his $100 million and walk away for good. Is there no one else out there with sufficient talent to put on a fat suit and yell at himself as his twin sister?

Money collected through this tax, meanwhile, could be put into some sort of competitive pot to fund young filmmakers. I doubt Kevin James is up to the $100 million mark quite yet. But once Zookeeper 5: Tiger Trouble comes out in a few years, wouldn't you feel better knowing that James' had kicked in a couple million to help a struggling young visionary get her film on IFC? I know I would.

As for Paltrow, maybe she gets a pass on Contagion, given her willingness to play a corpse. But if she shows up in Oceans 15 as a spunky waitress who overhears the plans for the caper, or a down-home country girl safe-cracker, that's a cool million up front, please.

ADDENDUM: I have received a few complaints that this post contains "spoilers." Contagion has now been in wide release, on cable, on DVD, and in airplanes for going on four months now. At a certain point, having to edit around plot points so as to not reveal details to lazy Netflix customers becomes a "spoiler" to those of us who try to keep up with the contemporary state of cinema and culture.

I Dreamt that Diane Kruger Wrecked Three Taxis in Berlin

2011-12-06T13:30:00.000-06:00

One cold winter in Germany

Liam Neeson to a conference did go

But a suitcase was lost, he had to rush

Back through the ice and snow

He hailed a plucky Russian cabby

And together they flew like the wind

I dreamt that Diane Kruger wrecked three taxis in Berlin

Out of a coma and out of his mind

Liam sought the ugly truth

So to the plucky cabbie's home he went

To spy, inquire, and sleuth

But soon assassins were at the door

And they were behind the wheel once again

I dreamt that Diane Kruger wrecked three taxis in Berlin

Kidnapped by friends now turned foes

Liam faced a certain death

But the plucky Russian driver stole a cab

And we all held our breath

Metal justice was at hand as rubber tires did spin

I dreamt that Diane Kruger wrecked three taxis in Berlin

provoked by the film, Unknown (2011)

Sheldon Wigs Out

2011-11-27T17:11:00.003-06:00

Family History

Subject S. was born in Galveston, Texas in 1980. Father (G) remembered as a “stereotypical Texan” with interests in hunting, football, and other “masculine” pursuits—deceased with S. still in grade school. Mother (M) a devout evangelical Christian. S. recalls repeated attempts at religious indoctrination. Two siblings: a fraternal sister (M2) and an older brother (G2). Both unremarkable and apparently socially functional.

Early testing established extraordinarily high IQ (self-reported at 187). Subject’s growing interest in mathematics and science only exacerbated tensions within the home and at school. Advanced intellect and lack of interest in peer pursuits led to extensive bullying. Early evidence of Asperger syndrome (undiagnosed). Enrolled in college at age 11. Completed first Ph.D. at age 16, second doctorate at age 20. One year abroad in Germany. Age of first masturbatory experience unknown. Apparently remains a virgin at age 31.

Symptomalogy/provisional diagnosis

At the time of the homicides and subsequent institutionalization, S. had been working for approximately five years at a prestigious university of science and technology in Southern California. Two male victims (H and L) were co-workers, while L was also subject’s roommate. Third victim (P) was a female acquaintance of S, H, and L living across the hall in subject’s apartment building. All victims appear to have been killed by a single weapon—a prized reproduction of a large sword used by “the Klingons” in the television series, Star Track.

While it is unclear if any single event precipitated S’s violent attack on H, L, and P, subject was heard to be screaming “Big Bang! Big Bang!” when admitted by police to emergency psychiatric ward. Asked his “occupation” during intake interview, subject showed signs of automatism and echolalia, stating repeatedly, “I am a theoretical physicist. I theorize physics and I exist in theory.” Subject punctuated this recitation with childish giggling. Evidence of hypergraphic tendencies collected at subject’s apartment (fig. 1) provides additional diagnostic insight into this ideation.

After administration of haloperidol and a 24-hour course of sedatives, S. engaged in slightly more coherent attempts to explain motivation for the homicides. Subject appears to have been incensed by L. and H’s “incessant yammering about the social protocols attending coitus” and by L’s inability to master a simple “differential syntagm of cereal box order.” This fixation, in conjunction with other odd ritualistic behaviors, suggests long-standing and apparently untreated presentation of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Asked as to why he had severed L.’s head from its body and apparently presented it to P before also murdering her, subject protested that L’s head had been employed as a type of “comic knocker.” When interviewing physician pressed for more information on this odd detail, S. would only respond, “They know what they did.”

Blunted affect indicative of schizoaffective disorder. Subject also presented with First Rank symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. In initial psychiatric interviews, subject insisted that his actions were monitored weekly by “millions of Americans.” Moreover, S. was frequently heard to boast that millions more watched him than the neighboring “community.” As evidence of his surveillance, S. drew a diagram of his apartment and demanded hospital staff search for three cameras hidden in his living room (fig. 2). This delusion had become elaborated to the point that S. spoke of his tormentors as Camera “C,” Camera “B,” and Camera “S.” Subject also expressed delusions of grandeur in his repeated claim that he was “the smartest person currently alive” and that he was a personal friend of actor Wil Wheaton (known primarily for his work in the Star Track television programs). Partly to humor subject, hospital staff allowed S. to call “Wheaton” during his second day on ward so that their supposed friendship might be confirmed. When call went unanswered, S. claimed Wheaton was “not home.” Subsequent court documentation demonstrated that actor Leonard Nimoy (also famous for his involvement in Star Track) and comic book author Stan Lee had previously filed for restraining orders against S. Subject also expressed severe delusions of contamination, especially related to food preparation. Subsequent interview with peers confirmed this to be a life-long issue.

Prognosis

Not good. Arrival of mother from Texas instigated cascade of pathologically regressive behaviors that, quite frankly, were embarrassing even to seasoned psychiatric professionals. These included repeated demands for the recitation of a beloved childhood lullaby (“Soft kitty”) and requests for a highly sexualized application of “vapo-rub” to subject’s chest. Subject also received a brief visit from another co-worker, “R”, who himself appeared to be suffering from various forms of psychiatric distress. After a short detention, "R" was issued a prescription for valium and released.

The Annotated Ann Coulter: Volume I

2011-11-20T12:27:00.000-06:00

Concerned citizens have debated the Ann Coulter question for many years now. Does Coulter sincerely believe in the often ridiculous positions she champions in print, on Fox news, and during her campus lecture tours? Or, as many have suggested, is Coulter an ongoing "performance" project of some kind, a hyperbolic parody of conservative anger and illogic dreamed up by a conceptualist collective somewhere in the Village? Rachel Maddow has recently attempted to make this same "art school" argument about GOP pizza magnate and freelance genital inspector Herman Cain, but in truth, it is Coulter who first compelled left-leaning cultural elites to contend with the enigmatic posturing of feckless fascism. So, for example, when Coulter claimed after the meltdown of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima that there now exists "burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine," baffled bystanders could only wonder at her motivation. Regardless of one's position on nuclear energy, no one would really take a "pro-meltdown" position, would they? Talk about seeing the glowing silver lining around a hazy cloud of Cesium-137-- this has to be a stunt, right? Ultimately, however, Coulter's "intent" in her books and punditry is not all that important. Be it sincere or a sham, the effect on American culture and politics remains the same. If you want to drink from a mountain stream, after all, it matters little if a horse up river pissed in the water by design or by accident; either way, you still have a mouth full of horse piss.

One of Coulter's signature moves, both in print and in person, is to appear so consistently agitated by the moral bankruptcy, political hypocrisy, and all-around stupidity of the American "liberal" that she might at any moment hyperventilate and pass out. From a performance perspective, these histrionics involve conveying a sense of boiling rage that, if not for the displacements of her "wit" and/or the threat of incarceration by the state, might actually erupt into either localized or more systematic programs of violence, perhaps an on-camera seizure triggered by patriotic exasperation or a call for a national liberal-cleansing program based on information gathered from Amazon marketing cookies. Slander, Treason, Godless, Guilty, Demonic--these are the words Coulter has deployed to brand her engagements with the American "left," inflammatory generalizations that work well in stoking her core constituency of hotheads who prefer to live their lives in a perpetual state of generalized inflammation. Given the cartoonish provocations of these titles, one might assume Coulter is hoping her political adversaries will respond in kind by simply drawing Hitler mustaches on her annual point-of-sale ad flats, thereby taking the reactionary bait that would drag an otherwise thoughtful progressive down into the limbic mud with her.

But what if Coulter's perpetual rage is actually sincere, grounded in the frustration that so few take her seriously at whatever it is she is attempting to do (beyond selling books, of course, still the primary conservative test of "truth"--much as one might consider Ray Kroc the greatest chef in the history of the world for having sold some astronomical number of easily consumable meat-units). Even more intriguingly, perhaps Coulter is a bored überfrau, despondent that no adversary appears worthy or willing to join her in mercilessly demolishing and then transcending the doxa of western political thought. Driven to despair that she alone must drive the final nails into the coffin of rational political discourse, her rage has gradually assumed the logic of excrescence described so beautifully by Jean Baudrillard in Fatal Strategies; that is to say, bored with the dialectics of "left" vs. "right," Coulter has worked feverishly to will into existence a world that is "more right than right," an ambition that increasingly has little or nothing to do with anything an imaginary "left" might be doing, but is simply a death-spiral into evermore extreme positions of purely experimental conservatism, a type of "string theory" for post-Bucklidian politics.

Coulter is no ordinary thinker, that much is clear. The easy thing to do would be to ignore her, or when that is not possible, simply dismiss her as a kook wandering somewhere along the continuum between the bitterly insane and the insanely bitter. But this would be shirking our moral obligations, I think. For example, if Coulter truly believes what she writes, to ignore her is to reward and even encourage her harrowing descent into an ever more terrifying (albeit lucrative) form of madness, one that can only end with her camped out by the Bellvue ambulance bay hectoring the sick and injured for their cowardly reliance on public EMTs (Did you even consider for a second that you could have your neighbors submit private bids to bring you here, you parasite!)

On the other hand, if Coulter's act really is a bluff, and she in fact spends all her free time in Manhattan clinking cocktails with book editors, gallery curators, and a few cynical but discrete Ivy League professors, laughing about the endless gullibility of the stupid hayseeds who are paying for her new walk-in jacuzzi--then don't we owe it to her miserable captives to set them free? If, back in 1964, I had been struggling to sit through all 8 hours of Warhol's Empire, I know I would certainly have appreciated it if someone had come into the theater to let me know it was okay to leave, that I was just a prop in the execution of someone else's conceptual stunt.

Perhaps those of us who identify with progressive causes would benefit by digging a bit deeper, by subjecting Coulter's oeuvre to a more sustained and probing form of textual explication. By "deconstructing," if you will, the logic of the Coulterian universe, there is a chance--a slim one, I will concede--that we might better understand, a). what she professes to believe; b). whether or not she really believes what she professes to believe; and c). the sensibility of a readership that truly believes that she believes in things that she may or may not actually believe.

The only way to do this, I propose, is through a line-by-line examination of the work itself--what we in the academic game sometimes call a "close reading." As a slanderous, treasonous, godless, guilty, and demonic member of the professorial class, I hope that I might be well-suited to such a task. In the interest of critical self-reflexivity, I will admit up front that I think she's probably faking it, that she doesn't really believe most of the positions she advocates (like carrying heavy water for the "pro-meltdown" community). But I am willing to keep an open mind, and if somehow Coulter can win me over with the strength of her arguments, I will be more than happy to concede that she is correct and that my "liberal" ass deserves immediate incarceration for crimes against the state, at least until it arrives at its final destination in hell where Coulter and other heavenly conservatives can pelt me and my fellow damned with burning copies of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.

Let us begin with Coulter's fourth book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Though the title remains confrontational (it implies, you see, that talking to a liberal is so unpleasant that one would do everything in his or her power to avoid such a fate), I begin here because this book suggests, at least implicitly, that some type of dialogue might still take place (at least as of 2004, the date of the book's original publication). Admittedly, in Coulter's ideal form, this "dialogue" would be a Thanksgiving dinner wherein a witty "conservative" systematically decimates the sophistry of her uptight liberal relations by demonstrating that there is no problem in the 21st century that can not be answered by some creative combination of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and Jesus. To put a positive spin on this otherwise depressing scenario, let us emphasis that this scene at least has us all sitting at the same table, as it were, and that if Coulter's woefully naive young cousin doing an Anthro degree at Smith began choking to death on the ceremonial wishbone, she still might have enough empathy to get up and administer the Heimlich maneuver (then again, perhaps Coulter really does have the courage to commit an unparalleled act of pure Objectivism: No one help her! It is not in our interest to prevent this lazy, under-achieving masticator from choking, for her death shall leave more turkey and stuffing for the rest of us! Turn the highchairs this way so that the babies might also learn this lesson well!)

So let us begin (Coulter's prose will be in bold black, my annotations in red).

A special note to conservative readers: Given that modern American conservatism has now become indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia, there will be no attempt made here to "persuade" or "convince" you of anything. Rather, much as one might address a co-worker who suddenly professes a belief that extraterrestrials are filling his head with voices telling him to kill the neighbor's dog, the following will proceed from the assumption that logic and reason are of little use in convincing you of anything, and that your best hope resides in a carefully monitored regimen of Haldol or Thorazine. I'm so sorry. If somehow appeals to cooperative reason and socio-economic justice prevail in the future, we will try to send a time machine back to rescue the rest of you from yourselves. Until then, good luck. Also, I think someone on your local public access station just suggested adding a penny in sales tax to help clean up that toxic dump site that's been festering out by the Johnson place and breeding all them mutant super-raccoons---your time might be better spent writing a letter about how the free market is the only way to deal with the mutant super-raccoon problem, and that you'll shoot any city animal control officer who comes on your property to implement a socialist "one-size-fits-all" campaign of mutant super-raccoon eradication.

How to Talk to a Liberal

(1) Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents' home, get a job, and start paying taxes.

Coulter begins here with a touch of folk wisdom, essentially adapting Churchill's bromide, "If you're not a liberal at 20 you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40 you have no brain," so that it might better appeal to her most loyal readers (crucially, however, Coulter is not willing to concede the 20 year-old part of the equation. Even deciding to share your toys in preschool would be counted as a moronic flirtation with wealth redistribution). Conservatives love using this quotation because they believe it imbues the speaker with a type of practical philosophy born of hard-won experience and incontrovertible common sense. By dropping it into everyday conversation, the conservative signals that he or she possesses the necessary intellectual depth to reflect on life's big questions, but still has not been swayed by the more "complicated" book-learned philosophies favored by liberal elites.

Unpacking the sentence, we see three interlinking assumptions:

1. Liberals are children.

2. Liberals are unemployed.

3. Liberals do not pay taxes.

By casting the liberal as a child who will, under ideal circumstances, be "cured" by confronting the more sober truths of adulthood, Coulter endorses the rather sad but protoypically conservative position that the world is what it is and nothing will ever change it. Only children believe that the world's inequalities and injustices might be productively challenged. The "adult" conservative, on the other hand, knows how the world "really works," and that the child-liberal will eventually understand that s/he must give up the ridiculous aspiration for a world that is less horrifying. Most often, this "adult" perspective is the product of having been worn down by age, fear, and fatigue so that no other possibilities remain imaginable. A mortgaged and mirthless 40 sees what carefree 20 cannot--life is an endless struggle to acquire shit and protect it from other people who want to take your shit, all so that when you get really old you don't end up dying penniless in a ditch. Thus it has been since Thog the caveman first suckered-punched Grunda the hill person so that he might steal his woman, jaguar paw, and pointed stick.

By choosing to open her 2004 book with a generational mapping of right and left, Coulter gives us some insight into her core readership. While I have no empirical data to back this claim up, I am willing to follow Coulter's lead here in baseless speculation to suggest that her books are most avidly consumed by white men who are married, middle-aged, and fairly well-off (given that this is the key constituency of the Republican party, this would not be surprising). Why this particular demographic? Because Coulter "gets" them, she understands the frustration of being a "wealth-producer" surrounded by parasitical sucklings--the wife, the kids, an idiot brother, the city, the state, public education, tollways, welfare deadbeats, the chronically ill, and so on. Thus the appeal of the regressive Randian fantasy of holding one's breath and refusing to "produce" so as to teach all the ungrateful morons around you a lesson (much as the toddler will withhold feces during toilet training as a way of protesting the oppressive discipline of the parents).

Yes, Coulter--or at this point, "Ann"--truly understands the middle-class white guy's pain. She arrived on the national scene during the dark days of the Clinton presidency, a Godsend as the most vocal in a new battalion of younger, blonder, female Republicans who at last showed the world that not every right-winger had to look and talk like Robert Novak. Prominently unattached, Ann is the kind of gal you fantasize about while putting on your cleats to play the back nine at the country-club. Unlike your mollycoddling wife, Ann would understand the horror of having your oldest son come home from college to announce his plans to be a professional "graphic novelist," or seeing your daughter go out every weekend with a trio of pierced weirdos who are most obviously homosexuals. Ann knows what it's like to have your hard-earned pay taxed by an evil bureaucracy that wants to throw that money away on the prostitutes and drug dealers you sometimes think you see loitering around as you drive to the baseball stadium downtown. And with Ann by my side, I would never lose an argument ever again. Next time that wise ass liberal neighbor of mine points out that I'm much more likely to get shot by my own gun than to shoot a burglar, Ann would be right there to call him out for the dickless coward he really is! In fact, I wouldn't mind if she called me a few names as well. Don't get me wrong--I still think it is the man's role to take the lead in any relationship. But when I see Ann in that tight, little leather vest...I don't know, suddenly I want her to get mad at me. Really, really mad. I want her to tell me what a worthless weakling I am. I want her to yell at me for nicking the upholstery in the Beamer. I want her to lock me in the bathroom with just bread and water until I work up the courage to go tell off those pricks at the Sanitation department for cracking our new trash bins, just because they're too lazy to put them back down gently (and I pay there goddamn salaries with my taxes!). And then I want Ann to hold me as I cry and cry. Why has the world become so scary and why don't I understand anything anymore? How could anyone be against a flat tax, Ann, I just don't get it--it's so obviously and objectively fair to everyone. What do you mean you found a picture of Ashley's vagina on her cell phone? Why would she do that? I don't care what anyone says, Ann, this democracy will only really work as long as white people are in the majority.

And so on.

It would seem explicating the first line of Coulter's book has taken more time and space than I anticipated, so perhaps this is a good place to stop for now. See you next time...maybe. I can't decide if it's really worth it or not.

Editor's Note: I would also like to note that in googling the phrase "annotated Ann Coulter," I discovered another site that had this idea long before me. You might want to visit them as well (here).

Hothlandia

2011-11-08T20:16:00.001-06:00

If none of THIS makes sense to you, count yourself lucky.

"I Had Sex with Hitler and then Almost Fed His Brain to a Condor"

2011-11-07T14:51:00.006-06:00

If you're like most dolts produced by the American education system, you probably actually believe Adolph Hitler died in his bunker in 1945 when the Russian Army reached Berlin. Such ignorance is understandable, given how important it was, then and now, to protect the world from the terrifying REALITY of the situation, namely this: At the end of WWII, Adolph Hitler's brain was surgically removed, placed in stasis, and then transplanted into a willing new host! Most likely, "Hitler" is still somewhere on the planet today, scheming, ever scheming, to return and complete his plans for world domination. My money says the brain is now in Rick Perry. Every Texas yahoo talks about secession now and then, but Perry's recent campaign pledge to annex the Sudetenland is troubling to say the least.

They Saved Hitler's Brain (aka The Madman of Mandoras) (1963) dared speak this truth in the tortured logic of Z-cinema some fifty years ago. Legend has it that the film began shooting in the late fifties--only to be shut down by Nazi agents in Hollywood looking to suppress its startling revelations. It took the courage of a rag-tag band of UCLA students in the early sixties to shoot some additional framing footage, thereby padding out the original film by ten or fifteen minutes so that it might get distribution and thus see the light of day. But it turns out the Nazis had nothing to worry about. The temporal rift created by grafting together the film stock and styles of the late fifties and early sixties was so jarring that the movie elicited only jeers and ridicule. For years it played in the post-fringe graveyard of late-night television, leaving an astonished few to admire the stamina of the actor forced to kneel for hours at a time behind an old ham radio set and under a bell jar in order to "sell" the illusion of functional decapitation.

Happily for lovers of historical drama, the saga of Hitler's itinerant brain did not die with that noble, yet failed cinematic experiment. In 1973, novelist Roland Puccetti tried once again to alert the world to the ongoing hazard presented by allowing Hitler's brain to remain at liberty, giving us the sublime revisionism of The Death of the Führer (Arrow Books-1973).

I have now read Puccetti's book. Before recounting its alternative history of the years after the Second World War (absolute and total spoiler alert), let me say this: The Death of the Führer MUST be adapted for the screen as soon as possible. How it hasn't already ended up as a major motion picture is a true mystery, one that makes me suspect Nazi sympathizers are once again pressuring Hollywood to ignore the R-rated bombshells contained in this book. The Death of the Führer is everything Inglourious Basterds hoped to be--but done with such economy and ease that it utterly shames Tarantino's lumbering attempt to pass off what are essentially five interminably long dialog scenes as some kind of fast-paced caper film. If you want brutal and stunning Nazisploitative action, then Puccetti is your man.

We begin at a Bavarian ski lodge some time in the 1960s. A young man--his name is unimportant, call him Mr. Framing-Device if you like--has twisted his leg and must stay off the slopes. An old man sitting on a bench nearby accurately diagnoses the skier's condition from afar--for you see, this old man is a doctor: Karl Giesvius. As so often happens when strangers meet in the Bavarian Alps, their conversation soon turns to Hitler. Karl, it turns out, knows the REAL story, which he proceeds to tell us:

Ten or so years after the end of WWII, Karl had been sitting in a Parisian cafe when suddenly a local rushed in and begged him to attend to a dying man elsewhere in the city, a dying man who claimed to have information about the whereabouts of....Hitler! Understandably intrigued, Karl rushed to the man's bedside to hear a startling confession: "I assisted in the removal and transplantation of Hitler's brain!" Later, after the man dies, Karl looks through some old photos and verifies that the dying man had indeed been a member of the Führer's personal medical team. He decides to fly to Berlin and begin his investigation.

First task: get inside the Führerbunker and see if any clues are still there. Now, you might think the Führerbunker would have been picked over for just about any and all items of historical import, and that accessing it would be difficult if not impossible. But this turns out not to the be the case. Consulting a map of the compound, Karl figures out where the ventilation shaft should be, and after moving a few well-placed rocks, he's unearthed the entrance. After shimmying down the vent, he's the first person to stand in the Führerbunker since the Russians collapsed the entrances at the end of the war. What's down there? Junk, mostly. It would also appear a Russian soldier took a retributive shit on Hitler's bed, an extremely resilient shit considering it somehow survived for a decade before Karl descended into the bunker to witness it. He checks out the conference room. Nothing. Eva Braun's bedroom. Nothing. He's just about to give up and/or suffocate from a lack of oxygen when finally Karl discovers a hidden passageway connecting Hitler's bedroom to... a secret surgical theater!

Looking around the tiled room with his flashlight, Karl discovers a bloody operating table and scalpels that still have hair on them (the hair of Hitler!). Strangely, though the Nazis had apparently pioneered the art of brain transplantation, they still didn't quite understand that one should shave a surgical area before operating. Karl continues his search for evidence. His flashlight illuminates a strange object on the floor. Bingo! It's a brain!

Hitler's brain? Well, no, actually--Karl quickly reasons it is the brain of the poor schmuck who donated his body so that Hitler could have a new ride. This was some particularly good writing, I thought. Here Puccetti captures the urgency of the situation back in 1945. With the allies advancing, Nazi doctors had no time to wash down the operating theater nor throw away the old brain--a point Puccetti emphasizes by revealing that the floor-brain is still in the steely clutches of the forceps used so many years ago to wrench it from its skull! There's also a bucket of congealed blood nearby, but Puccetti does not speculate as to why the brain didn't end up there rather than on the floor. Also, we are left to wonder how this brain tissue, much like the enduring pile of Russian infantry crap in the next room, could survive more or less in tact for over a decade.

Karl's investigation continues. He finds a plaque bearing the name of the surgical genius responsible for all this brain shuffling: Dr. Wilhelm Tager. Karl is flabbergasted. Tager, as it turns out, was his buddy from medical school before the war, his old fencing partner, and a genius of neurology who finished at the top of their class. That just about seals it. Find Tager find Hitler's brain, he reasons. And then he can kill them both!

After a little more detective work, Karl tracks Tager down to a remote castle somewhere in Spain. Next obstacle: How to infiltrate a well-guarded compound full of evil Nazi scientists? Here Karl decides for an elegantly direct approach--he simply floors his motorcycle and breaks through the front gate (as seen on the action-packed cover above). That might seem crazy, but Karl's plan is actually a bit more complicated. After taking a few Nazi bullets and wrecking his bike into a tree, it is Karl's hope that Dr. Tager will attend to him and then recognize him from their college days. And this is precisely what happens. After surgery, Karl wakes up and tells his "old friend" that he just happened to be vacationing in Spain and that the throttle on his motorcycle just happened to get stuck--that's why he crashed through the gate uncontrollably.

One might think that the Nazi brain trust (those entrusted with the Nazi brain, that is) hiding out in Spain would be the most paranoid gated-community on the planet--but no one seems to question the fact that Karl, unseen by Tager since before the war, has suddenly and seemingly coincidentally arrived on their doorstep. Before you know it, all the Nazis have welcomed Karl into their little clique, probably because Karl wastes no time fishing for Hitler leads by constantly bemoaning the fate of the Third Reich.

Later, once he's completely healed from his injuries, Karl is invited to a big party hosted by the owner of the castle, the beautiful Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny. The party goes well as Karl learns a few new tidbits by eavesdropping. But still no sign of Hitler's noodle.

Things really heat up later that night when a guard knocks on Karl's door. The Baroness has requested a private audience. Well, one thing leads to another, and before you know it Karl and the Baroness are in her bedroom ripping off each other's clothes. And then this happens:

Her fingers dug into my arms with sharp nails, her back arched spasmodically, she started to pull me down deep into a bottomless pit. Somewhere within my body a train of cold liquid left its station with relentless fury and plunged on to its destination.

Here Puccetti is telling us, as artfully as he can, that Karl is about to ejaculate into the Baroness. The story continues.

Gerda's eyes opened widely now. The pupils looked dark in the fire glow, much darker than before, and somehow beyond them and behind them there was a deep rustling of Teutonic forests, of shadowy predators roaming in the night...Only then did I raise my trembling, terribly tired fingers to her head, slide them under the golden hair and feel the bony ridge across her skull. Only then did her lips part to give the fateful cry.
'ICH BIN DER FUHRER.'

Yes, friends, our intrepid hero and narrator has just enjoyed a simultaneous orgasm with Adolph Hitler-- a drop-dead gorgeous Hitler, mind you, but Hitler nonetheless (an alternate cover for the book foregrounds this reveal a bit more forcefully).

Some might be thinking this was surprisingly enlightened on Hitler's part, this willingness to have his brain transplanted into a woman. Funny thing about that--it was actually a complete surprise for the Führer. Later we learn that Tager and his team had a young, strapping Aryan male all ready to host Hitler's brain, but the kid died during surgery from an unforeseen complication. The original Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny, a loyalist if ever there was one, stepped right up and volunteered her body. Man, was Hitler ever mad when he woke up. But we are told that the Führer eventually warmed up to and even embraced the idea of being a sexy Baroness. Realizing it made for a good hiding place, the brain decided to stay put.

But back to the post-coital revelation that our narrator just had some manner of queerly heteronormative gay sex with Hitler. "What would I do," wonders the reader, "under such circumstances?" Given that Karl is dedicated above all else to his mission, he loses no time recovering from this quite literal "mindfuck" and stabs Baroness Hitler-brain straight through the heart, leaving her for dead.

For the next twenty or so pages, Karl is on the run trying to evade capture in the compound. He jumps a guard and steals his uniform, which buys him a little more time to wander around the castle in search of a way out. Eventually he finds another series of hidden passageways leading deeper and deeper into the castle's foundations. Finally he stumbles upon, wouldn't you know it, another goddamn secret operating theater! No sooner have you killed Hitler's host body than his evil surgical team is right back at it putting his brain in yet another body. Actually, Karl probably should have seen this coming. After all, as narrator, he of all people should understand the basic premise of his own story. Caught off guard indulging in some well-deserved self-recrimination, Karl is taken into custody and whisked away to a holding cell.

You're probably thinking at this point that Karl himself is destined to be the new donor body for Hitler's brain. Makes sense. Hitler needs the body and the Nazis no longer need Karl--that's certainly what a lesser writer would settle for here. But Puccetti has other and much more incredible ambitions. Karl is wheeled into surgery alright, but finds that his nemesis Dr. Tager instead plans to implant a type of experimental electrode "harness" in Karl's brain. In fact, he forces Karl to remain awake as he cuts off the top of his skull and inserts the electrodes one by one. Later, in post-op, we discover that Tager and his assistants can now control Karl's actions simply by pushing the appropriate buttons: THIRST, HUNGER, LUST, etc. This is the sort of thing Nazi doctors live for, apparently. Bouncing Hitler's brain from body to body is a neat trick and all, but Tager's real ambition is to rule the world by implanting electrodes in every human skull! We also discover here that Tager has no real investment in Nazi ideology--he chose to ride Hitler's coattails only because Hitler seemed--at the time at least-- the most likely to make his dream of global brain control come true. He would just as easily have cast his lot with the Americans or Russians, if need be. That's just how evil Tager is--the pure evil of pure science.

After some pleasure/pain interrogation from Tager and his buttons, Karl is taken back to his cell, which it so happens is a glass cube. There he devises a brilliant plan. He will break the glass by ramming his head into the wall, which will also probably disable the brain-electrode stuff at the top of his brain. At the very least, he reasons, it will interfere with its optimal operation. Gathering his strength and courage, he runs headlong into the glass--so hard that he blacks out. When he comes to, however, he finds the plan has indeed worked--there is nothing but shattered glass all around him (and no guards, apparently). Karl quickly runs back to the lab and pulls all the wiring out of the control-console so that Tager cannot send any more brain signals.

But the console can be quickly repaired, Karl reasons. No, there is simply no way around it, the electrode net in his brain must come out. But how? Who will do the delicate surgery? Karl. Karl will do the surgery. Karl will do the surgery on himself. Brain surgery. Karl will perform brain surgery on his own brain.

Are you beginning to understand why this novel must be committed to film as soon as possible? I already have Scarlett Johansson down for the role of the Baroness. As for Karl...well, who cares really? I just want to see the scene wherein Scarlett Johansson reveals that she is actually a busty receptacle for Hitler's devious brain. I would trade you any number of Final Destinations and/or Centipede units for such a moment to be captured on film.

Back to the brain surgery. Karl sets up a mirror to see the top of his head. "The scalp was easy," Karl tells us. Then the skull bone. Then the membrane covering the brain. Underneath are the electrodes. Though delicately inserted only hours earlier by Dr. Tager, Karl finds he is able to simply rip them out of his brain with no real consequences. But the suspense isn't over:

There I was, nude and exhausted, unarmed and with the whole top of my brain exposed to raw air. If I so much as leaned forward, the cerebrospinal fluid encasing my brain would spill out; I could imagine the sticky liquid dripping over into my face and blinding me.

To make matters worse, a guard suddenly appears and interrupts the operation. Luckily, Karl still has the presence (and fluid) of mind to dispatch him with a nearby bone saw. But there he remains, his brain still exposed to "raw air" and all of his brain juice about to spill out. He decides he has no time to stitch the membrane and just goes for wiring the skull back in place. After that he's so tired that he just kind of flops his scalp back over the bone, figuring he'll deal with that after he's finished killing Tager and finding Hitler's new cranial hideaway.

Eventually he corners Tager and forces him at gunpoint to the "vault"--the most secret of secret chambers in the bottom floors of the castle. Inside is the requisite vat with Hitler's pulsating brain floating inside, awaiting its new host. As an incidental detail, we are also told there are two crossed sabers on the wall as part of the castle's Coat of Arms. Almost immediately, however, this proves not to be incidental as Tager calls Karl's bluff on the number of bullets in the gun, which leads directly to the two men retrieving those very same sabers and reliving their days as college fencing opponents (remember? I told you about that earlier). Karl is worried, for he never beat Tager in their university matches, but it remains his only hope. Thrust and parry. Thrust and parry. And then Karl spies an "Auto-Destruction" button on the wall. It's true. He really does. A big red button that will blow everything up. Even if Karl can't escape, he can blow up the entire castle, Hitler's brain, and all the remaining Nazis at the same time!

Karl pushes the button. No, you fool! screams Tager. Ten minutes to absolute annihilation. Just then Karl sees that the brain vat has become unmoored and is rolling into the periphery of his vision. Two quick ballet leaps and he is standing over the bubbling vat. He then drives his sword directly into the Fuhrer's brain! Tager screams in horror, and Karl takes advantage of his shock to stab Tager "in the crotch" all the way back to the pelvis. Tager collapses, and in doing so, knocks over the now pinkish red vat of brain and blood. Hitler's brain slides across the floor where Karl, not wanting to leave anything to chance, scoops it up.

Karl must escape--the castle is still going to blow at any second. Miraculously, he discovers another secret door leading to some kind of mining-car contraption below. Still clutching the well-stabbed yet still relatively cohesive Hitler brain, he jumps in and releases the brakes. A bloody Tager crawls along the tracks begging for mercy. But no dice. Karl rides the mining-car out of the castle and out into the open air. There he sees a mighty condor flying through the sky, and considers throwing Hitler's brain on the grass so that the majestic bird might swoop down and carry it away. For that would be a fitting final indignity for Hitler's stupid evil brain--snatched up by razor-sharp talons and fed to a nest full of baby condors. Just then the earth rocks with the force of the castle exploding. In the end, Karl simply falls on the brain and "collapses" it good and flat.

Victory!

Back to our Bavarian ski-lodge in the present day. The story over, Mr. Framing-Device doesn't know what to think. Did this old man really have sex with Hitler in a woman's body, operate on his own brain, and then almost throw Hitler's brain to a hungry condor? Just then a nurse appears on scene to retrieve Karl--the sun is setting and it's time to go back home. Mr. Framing-Device takes the nurse aside and asks if he might visit Karl again some day. "Why not?"the nurse responds, "visiting hours at the sanatorium are open to everyone."

And there we leave it. Karl might be crazy. Then again, he might just have a bad case of tuberculosis. I guess the next generation of historians will have to make the ultimate determination: did Tager somehow get the brain back and put it in Scarlett Johansson, or did it end up in the bellies of a dozen hungry little condor chicks?

"Jack and Jill" Press Guide

2011-10-27T15:52:00.001-05:00

Toward the Final Beatle

2011-10-23T18:50:00.004-05:00

Confronted with the prospects of watching yet another Beatles documentary, there are many who would understandably prefer a ticket to ride—some place where no one has ever even heard of the Beatles. Well good luck, mean Mr. Mustard, because that octopus’ garden doesn’t exist. You may have never given them your money, dear Prudence, but you can no more escape the Beatles than you can throw an old brown shoe across the universe. “And your bird can sing” is another great title.

So Martin Scorsese had his work cut out for him in producing a 208-minute opus that once again revisits the single most perverse fame eruption of the twentieth-century--Beatlemania. Even more remarkable, Scorsese’s Living in the Material World (currently playing in two 90-or-so minute chunks on HBO) is really only about 25% of the Beatles; namely, George Harrison…the “third” Beatle, the “quiet” Beatle, the Beatle who forced millions of pop fans to contend with the sitar and songs that occasionally strayed from 4/4 time.

Fifty years after the Beatles began playing for beer and lodging in Reeperbahn (Hamburg’s notorious red light district, brought to screen here courtesy of contemporaneous footage culled from Mondo Cane), what is there left to say about this collective psychosis that defined a generation, a fixation on the music, biography--and most importantly--the mythos of the Beatles that will continue to enshroud the planet until someone pulls the plug on the last baby-boomer clutching the faders at the final classic rock station? Even those who have only a casual Beatles habit will be familiar with most of the territory covered in part one—the lads meet in Liverpool, gig in Germany, get signed to Parlophone and George Martin, ignite a mass adolescent sexual frenzy, come to America, become bigger than Jesus, drop acid, push the confines of the recording studio, and so on.

There are a few new details for the truly obsessed. We meet George Harrison’s brothers, for example, who rather refreshingly seem to have remained non-fab Liverpudlians unfazed by a having a little brother who, in some improbable cosmic lottery, turned a fascination with skiffle riffs into a billion dollar empire. Studio geeks, meanwhile, get to hear a few new tales about the recording of Harrison’s tracks on the Beatles’ records, including the story of an Abbey Road engineer working tirelessly to mix properly the saxophones on "Savoy Truffle" only to have Harrison request they be more distorted and bright (and truly, that track remains a treble endurance test to this very day—very “toppy” as George Martin pops in to opine). Ringo also informs us that if it wasn’t for Paul, the other 3 Beatles would have spent most of the late 60’s in their respective Surrey mansions smoking pot and just hanging out. Perhaps the oddest detail: the Beatles actually commuted into work each day at Abbey Road in Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls Royce (somehow the idea of the Beatles as working stiffs commuting on the A3 is a winning image—especially given that today even the most abject reality star flotsam expect to be driven everywhere by limo).

But expecting something “new” in a Beatles documentary misses the point, really. No one stands alongside the route of a Passion Play with a box of popcorn wondering how things are going to turn out. And so it is here. The entire point of watching the story of the Beatles—over and over again in seemingly endless iterations—is to see the mop tops take up the cross of global fame, get cranky with each other, and then wander like lost souls into the 1970s. Twelve men have walked on the moon. There were four Beatles. Both professions remain utterly mind-boggling in terms of their impact and exclusivity. Much of Beatles’ lore has to do with the singularity of their collective experience. What would it be like to be that famous? That beloved? That influential? To be so epoch-defining that even those who hate you have to use you as the reference point for reclaiming another vision of late twentieth-century culture?

All of which makes Part Two of Material World--the real heart of the documentary--all that much more interesting. With the necessary Beatles preamble out of the way, Scorsese and editor David Tedeschi are able to focus on what becomes the unexpectedly poignant and even tragic afterlife of Harrison proper.

Part two starts with a bang as the Beatles break-up (rather strategically and wisely withheld as the seemingly natural climax of part one). We then get an extended account of the recording of All Things Must Pass, still the single greatest post-Beatles album by any of the four (this is provable by objective, song-by-song, empirical science—I will accept no arguments on this point. What are you going to put up against it? Band on the Run? The Plastic Ono Band? Goodnight Vienna? Please, take a seat, you’re just embarrassing yourself). Sitting atop a dozen or so songs that could not find room on the later Beatles records, Harrison and friends produced what was the first and probably the last wall-of-sound, folk-rock, Krishna record. Scorsese is such a fan (recall that Ray Liotta freaks out in the last reel of Goodfellas to “What is Life?”) that virtually every song on the record receives a detailed accounting of its genesis.

George-fans will also appreciate that Scorsese endorses the proposition that Harrison’s musical talents have always been woefully under-appreciated. Even as early as “I Want to Tell You,” with its oddly dissonant piano figure under the chorus, Harrison’s songs were always the weirdest and even spookiest of the Beatles’ catalog (“Blue Jay Way,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Piggies,” “It’s All Too Much,” and, of course, the criminally obscure yet chillingly sublime “Long, Long, Long.”) There is also some respect for Harrison’s guitar chops, both his distinctive “wah-wah” slide technique and the non-shredding elegance of his soloing (the short solo on “Something” is a clinic on not wasting notes—even as the solo on “All You Need is Love” remains a mysteriously aborted failure—evoke it in your minds, fellow Beatle-nerds, you’ll see what I mean).

After the huge success of that record, Harrison moves on to the Concert for Bangladesh—becoming, for better or worse, the first rock star to leverage his fame for charity relief.

And then things get a bit sad and weird. In addition to being the “quiet” Beatle, Harrison was probably best known for his enthusiastic embrace of Indian spirituality and philosophy—bringing sitars into the studio for “Norweigian Wood” and spearheading the band’s famous expedition to India to learn meditation. Part one of the documentary emphasizes that this was no fashionable hippy trend on Harrison’s part, that his commitment to getting airlifted out of “maya” remained a lifelong pursuit. Those who hate the Beatles often find this aspect of the fable particularly annoying—one of the richest men in the world using the security of his wealth and fame to engage in quite literal navel-gazing. But Scorsese rather doggedly works to convince us that Harrison’s relation to the “material world” was genuinely tortured, that he really attempted to escape the suffocating obligations of being an ex-Beatle (and even if he was, in the end, more a pampered rock star afforded the luxury to indulge in spiritual experimentation, the story of how a working-class kid from Liverpool becomes one of the most famous people of the twentieth-century and then whole-heartily embraces eastern mysticism is, in and of itself, a fascinating story).

In part two, Harrison’s commitment to embracing the non-material world experiences some obstacles. There is the notorious triangle with Eric Clapton and Harrison’s first wife, Patty Boyd (speaking of burdens—imagine being the woman who inspired both “Something” and “Layla”—truly she is the face that launched a thousand tracks on Ampex tape). Scorsese rather delicately handles Harrison’s apparently bad cocaine problem in the mid-70s (footage of a rail-thin Harrison, his voice absolutely decimated, chugging through a truly awful live arrangement of “What is Life?” is one of the documentary’s more cringe-worthy moments). Wholly absent, no doubt by demand of second-wife/producer Olivia Harrison, is the foundational copyright lawsuit fought between Harrison and the Chiffons over the melody of “My Sweet Lord.” Also hanging like a dark cloud over part two is the knowledge that Harrison’s spiritual journey will eventually culminate in getting stabbed in his own home by a schizophrenic and then dying shortly thereafter from cancer.

This might make Living in the Material World sound like a total bummer. And in some respects, part two is often melancholic to the point of being downright depressing. There are bright spots, of course, as in Harrison’s support and patronage of Monty Python (Harrison produced Life of Brian and Time Bandits…as well as Shanghai Surprise, which Scorsese understandably ignores). Mostly, though, Scorsese’s portrait of Harrison casts him as someone who genuinely wanted to be a better person in a better world, and who ultimately preferred to stay at home and garden rather than do the obligatory record tour every year (at the time of Harrison’s death in 2001, Ringo had put out more albums than his former bandmate—Ringo, for Vishnu’s sake!). Toward the end of part two, Olivia Harrison recounts how, toward the end of his life, George was invited to various award ceremonies to honor his many achievements, invitations invariably declined by the Beatle who really no longer wanted to have anything to do with the Beatles. His widow offers this as evidence of her husband’s incredible humbleness—but there is also a sense that his reclusiveness had a touch of bitterness in it as well.

The Traveling Wilburys. And then a “come-back” solo album that Harrison claims wasn’t really a “come-back” because, by that point, he had long stopped considering himself to be a pop star/public performer anymore.

And then the stabbing at his home in England. Given the unprecedented mass cathexis on the Beatles, it’s a miracle all four of them didn’t end up murdered by various crazy people. Olivia Harrison narrates the events of that particular evening, leaving us to wonder why someone didn’t simply pick up a phone and call the police (Harrison’s initial strategy for dealing with this intruder, we are told, was to “chant” at him from the upstairs window. A few moments later the guy has broken in, rushed up the stairs, and is wrestling with a wounded Harrison for the knife. So remember, while your mantra may be good for your soul, it remains generally ineffective in warding off the psychotic).

Harrison survives, of course, only to die two years later from his ongoing bout with lung cancer. As recounted by Scorsese, Harrison’s death is both more banal and yet, oddly, more profound than the murder of John Lennon. Assassinated at forty, Lennon died so young and so abruptly that he was able to assume Kennedy-esque stature as a generational icon unimpeded by the embarrassment of continuing to live and thus disappoint everyone (and Lord knows, Double Fantasy was a bad step in that direction). And besides, getting shot by a nut job outside the Dakota is a freakish tragedy—much like getting hit by an asteroid or falling through a manhole. But to be someone who ruled the western world at the age of 25, only to then slog on through a failed marriage, some bad investments, a drug habit, and the burdensome expectations of your former greatness, all so that you might then live to be stabbed in your home before dying of cancer two years later—that’s the kind of depressingly common life arc almost any middle-aged boomer can relate to (if, of course, one substitutes the general exhilaration of one’s perceived youthful immortality for Harrison’s time as a Beatle). And I don’t care how much you think you hate the Beatles, if Ringo’s account of his last meeting with George doesn’t get you misty-eyed than truly you are a soulless monster who deserves to come back in the next life as a latrine-born cockroach (while I understand the counter-distinctual obligations of thinking the Beatles were overrated or even just downright terrible, how anyone who has ever listened to and enjoyed a 3.5 minute guitar-based pop-song in the last 30 years thinks they “hate” the Beatles is beyond me. It’s like loving spaghetti while claiming to hate Italian cuisine. Even Kurt Cobain had the self-knowledge and graciousness to acknowledge that nothing much had happened since the Beatles, except perhaps for a general increase in yelling and distortion.

Ultimately, Living in the Material World, with all its familiar popcult signposts of the past fifty years, is as much about its audience as it is about Harrison himself, artfully beginning the perhaps inevitable process of rewriting Beatles nostalgia into boomer elegy. Here, too, is where the fascination with meditation, Krishna, and all things eastern finds its ultimate rendez-vous--both for Harrison and a generational audience that once upon a time fancied itself disenchanted with western politics, morality, and religion. Throughout the documentary, we are told how Harrison’s spiritual quest was to practice “the art of dying,” to be at peace with one’s death so that the universe doesn’t force you to return for another round of frustrated desire and corporeal misery. Apparently realizing at a freakishly young age that one faces the end alone, no matter what one acquires or achieves in this world, Harrison makes for a compelling index on boomer spirituality in general, an emblem of material success/excess apparently quite sincere (and thus quite conflicted) in his attempt to renounce the trappings of this world.

This, finally, is the ultimate trick of Scorsese’s documentary--transforming Harrison the counter-cultural icon into just another aging boomer (albeit one of unimaginable wealth and fame—and, technically, not actually a boomer), doing his best to survive the humiliations of mortality with some grace and dignity, all while trying to remain true to a core set of beliefs. Olivia recounts her husband’s last moments on earth as “glowing.” I certainly hope so. If, after his extraordinary ride through the late twentieth-century, George Harrison couldn’t figure out what does and doesn’t ultimately matter, what hope remains for the rest of us still plowing our way through the particularly pernicious maya of western existence, the legions of boomers who--years after their perceived rebellion against the social order--have rather lazily crawled back to the church of their parents more out of habit than belief. Scorsese ultimately makes the viewer admire George, the quiet Beatle, not so much for being a Beatle, but for fighting so hard (and perhaps so futilely) to escape the absurd cosmic joke that gave birth to the Beatles in the first place.

Sandy Filler

2011-10-14T13:07:00.005-05:00

The current teaching quarter is kicking my posterior...so before the next real post, please to enjoy this trio of sand related videos.

thanks to Jacob Smith for bringing this wonder to my attention.

Bonus Sand:

I Saw That Show Where People Travel Back in Time to a Spielberg Movie from the 1980s.

2011-10-02T12:32:00.006-05:00

Conventional wisdom has it that science-fiction doesn’t do well on television, or at least on network television. Too expensive to produce and too limited in its appeal. Earth 2. Firefly. The Event. V. None made it beyond 30 or so episodes. “But what about Battlestar Galactica?” cries the guy with the phalanx of Cylon Centurions protecting his iMac from the incursion of various snack-related threats, “that was the greatest TV series of all time!” Cool your jets there, space-boy, that was first-run syndication and a whole other kettle of space-fish. For the most part, network executives listen to sci-fi pitches with the same enthusiasm that label heads used to reserve for concept albums. A plucky band of space pirates raiding ships in the Van Allen belt, played for love and laughs but still true to the principles of actual science? Great…let me clear Thursday night for you.

What a surprise, then, that sci-fi (or sexy, sexy Syfy as the Sci-Fi Channel has rebranded itself) should make such a triumphant return to the fall schedule. Most hyped, of course, was Chuck Lorre turning to Encino Man as a way of rebooting Two and a Half Men. For those who missed the two-part season opener, this year’s shenanigans began with a giant wave off the coast of Malibu splitting open a prehistoric rock to reveal Walden Schmidt, a caveman mysteriously “frozen” in stone for the past 10,000 years. Somehow, as he makes his way from the beach to the Harper House of Prongs, Schmidt slips into some discarded clothing and concocts a bogus story about a fake suicide attempt. It wasn't long, though, before he reverted back to his natural state—walking around the house nude after successfully implanting his gametes inside two willing young wenches. For good measure, the premiere ended with Schmidt squatting and taking a dump in Charlie’s old sock drawer.

Meanwhile, over at NBC, the peacock has made the daring decision to program sci-fi during its storied Thursday-night block of comedies. Taking a nod from the 80s girl-robot oddity, Small Wonder, upcoming episodes of Whitney will reveal that the show’s sassy lead is actually under the brutal cybernetic control of her bionic ass, an implant turned sentient that now demands endless display and tribute. As seen so prominently in the first two episodes, the imperious buttocks frequently compel their helpless host to wear silly costumes that better accentuate the bio-butt’s perky insouciance. Will Whitney’s jaunty yet evil ass ultimately demand admiration and tribute from all of the earth? Just what does Whitney's ass want of us? Stay tuned and find out.

But it is Fox that may well be taking the biggest sci-fi gamble, partnering with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin’ productions for Terra Nova, a mind-bending entry into that subgenre of sci-fi typically known as “a real hoot.” The basic premise here involves the standard Spielbergian narrative-focalization family-unit traveling back in time 85 million years to start over in a new human colony, one that seeks to escape the tech noir future so cruelly foisted upon the earth by Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the 1980s.

We open in the Chicago of 2149, where every cliché of our collective dystopian future must be mobilized in just under twenty minutes in order to motivate Jim and Taylor Shannon’s rather impulsive decision to flee the civilized world so that their children might touch dinosaurs. In this horrible future of 2149, we are told, the air is really bad, oranges are rare, kids have never seen the moon, and the government strictly enforces a two-child limit on breeding. Worse yet, decent middle-class families with Irish surnames are forced to live in small apartments that, while they would be palaces to most of the world’s population in 2011, are shown here to have the bad taste and abysmal feng shui that comes standard with a galley kitchen.

Now, I realize I’m supposed to think this is the most horrible fate imaginable, and that any sane person would gladly run blindly into a wormhole for the chance to eat a fresh peach and see the Big Dipper. Perhaps it’s because I live in the Windy City, but all I could think of was how amazing the Chicago of 2149 looked, as if five Hong Kongs had been smashed together on the shores of Lake Michigan, all interconnected by tubular monorails and reaching up into a perpetually hazy sky. It looked like a city where a million different adventures were taking place at that very second—an urban paradise where you could eat any cuisine in the world, network on your quad iReality device, solve a perplexing future-crime, and have your scrotum painlessly tattooed… all at the same time. Why anyone would leave this citadel of wonder is anyone’s guess, especially for little more than an opportunity to repeatedly hammer one’s thumb building some kind of prehistoric hut in which to store a sumptuous harvest of nuts, twigs, and berries, most of which no doubt fished out of the great steaming piles of Apatosaurus shit surrounding the Terra Nova compound.

If you subscribe to Spielbergian logic, of course, you would do this because nebulous “government” agents represent a hazard to your dear sweet innocent children. Sure enough, as the Shannons gather at home to savor their precious orange, the police arrive unannounced to investigate a rumor that the family is harboring an illegal third child (which they are). Not being the sharpest tool in the shed, dad (Jason O’Mara) hides the contraband toddler inside an air vent, thus insuring that the child will start crying from claustrophobia and dust mite infestation in under a minute (which she does). Jim takes a swing at the cop and ends up in jail, thus initiating a pre-credit action sequence in which dad must escape from the pokey, pick up a suitcase stuffed with child #3, and get to the wormhole in time to meet his wife (Naomi Scott) and other two kids. Once again, our sympathies are supposed to be with the Shannons, sharing their outrage that the government would be so evil and repressive as to enforce a ban on having more than two children. Still, you have to think that if ol’ Jim would have just snipped his vas deferens, his family and the world would have been better off, leaving more oranges and kitchen space for everyone else.

Once we get to Terra Nova, both the Shannons and the viewers have a lot to learn in order to make this a functional weekly franchise. We discover that Terra Nova was founded by Nathanial Taylor (Stephen Lang)—a great white father who was the first to stumble through the wormhole. There are dinosaurs, of course, and a big fence separating the community from the more interesting narrative possibilities outside. Then there are “the sixers,” ~~a group of castaways that apparently crashed on the other side of the island~~—a splinter group of settlers who live near the quarry and continually hassle the Terra Novenians. There are also lots of boss machine guns and sonic pulse weapons, as well as a motor pool stocked with all kinds of military vehicles.

So, in this effort to “save” the human race and rebuild humanity without “repeating all the same mistakes,” we can see that Terra Nova is already D.O.A. from scene one. A charismatic patriarch, nuclear families, guns, gasoline, and a mysterious Other living out in the woods—why not call the show Red State Nova instead? How long until the Shannons are standing in line for a shot of cyanide-flavored Kool-Aid, convinced the mysterious Robamanites are about to raid the compound and take away the colony's best guns and cutest children?

I will admit that at this point I took a break to pay the delivery guy and eat some Thai food, so I missed a good 15 minutes or so of the premiere’s first hour. From what I can surmise, however, this is when we learn that Terra Nova exists in an “alternate time stream,” which is of course the chicken-shit way of explaining oneself out of various time-travel paradoxes (i.e. if Terra Nova “succeeds,” isn’t it inevitable that it produce the very future that allowed the Shannons to go back in time? Or, wouldn’t the existence of Terra Nova skew history to the extent that the Shannons might never have existed in the first place and thus could not go back in time to follow House? An “alternative time stream” takes care of all that, space nerd, so just enjoy the ride).

The true highlight of the first episode, however, is the moment when the Shannons are shown to their tasteful bungalow, complete with hardwood floors, a breezy open floor plan, and even a little SoCal landscaping. Incredibly, though they were just living in a supposedly hellish cube in a Chicago high rise of 2149, everyone seems vaguely disappointed—like they expected better digs in 85 million B.C. Truly, American privilege knows no limits. Happily, Mom decides they might salvage the space with a rug of some kind…that is, if they have rugs in 85 million B.C. It is an anxious moment, played for pathos, in which the family realizes--perhaps for the first time--that they now live in a world without the riches and comforts that come from living in proximity to a strip of Big Box stores.

With some basic exposition out of the way, Terra Nova then chugged into a second hour that was strictly about making work for Spielberg’s old raptor pals from the nineties. The terror begins when the son (Landon Liboiron), like any rebellious high school senior, ditches his mandatory orientation session to hang with a cute girl and some other teens from the rec center. Together they sneak outside the fence so they can drink some moonshine they have brewing out in the jungle and play a little G-rated grab ass. Before you know it, they are at the center of a standard Jurassic era scenario—trapped in a vehicle and getting knocked around by a pack of bloodthirsty dinosaurs! The producers must think this is a major draw for the series, since this dinosaur evasion sequence ended up eating about thirty minutes of screen time. Run! Shoot! Growl! Scream! Run some more! But in the end, everyone's okay, and the son has learned important lessons about obeying dad, respecting the rules of Terra Nova, and following the directorial cues for interacting with CGI beasts that aren't actually on set.

The second episode ends with an attempt to get us invested in the mystery of some inscrutable cave scrawling, folding in a bit more Lost folderol to hook the easily hookable into thinking something more profound might be at work here (beyond a table of writers treading water from week to week). The scribbling, it would appear, is the work of the Great White Father’s missing son, who now lurks the jungle as a primordial Boo Radley. Given the already pissy relationship between the men in the Shannon clan, this certainly puts Terra Nova in the running for the most Oedipal series of 2011.

All in all, Terra Nova is just what you’d expect in a craven attempt to travel back in time to the stronger and more certain entertainment franchises of the golden nineties. Apparently, though, not everyone was pleased with the two-hour premiere spectacular, as evidenced by the following comment at imdb (the very first, no less):

Apparently, the dinosaurs are bullet proof because they wouldn't take ANY damage! All you saw was a ricochet effect off them, and in some cases they were using a 50 caliber gun mounted on a transport vehicle. This wasn't a plot point or anything so it comes off as very lazy special effects. This then leaves the problem, if the guns don't hurt the dinosaurs, why would you take a weapon out to defend yourself from them if it doesn't work? I mean they had about 6 guys shooting one and it eventually turned and ran. I can see maybe they wanted to tone down the blood and death a bit in the pilot but it came off as a major flaw.

So there you have it, Fox. You wanted to do science-fiction? Just remember the type of fans that come with the genre. This customer won’t be happy until you spend a couple extra million animating some convincing bullet trauma to T-Rex’s face. And are you ready to withstand the overly long and ridiculously self-righteous letters you will get once you cancel Terra Nova? Maybe it's not too late to greenlight that new Gordon Ramsey show where he tears down little kids' lemonade stands. Or, given that Terra Nova's premiere got bested by the second episode of Two and a Half Men, maybe we can look forward to Charlie Sheen emerging from the wormhole at mid-season. That would be Terraterrific!

UPDATE: Episode 2 (or 3, depending on how you count them) featured a pretty straight forward rip-off of The Birds (1964), with tiny (but deadly!) pterodactyls taking the place of Hitchock's murderous crows. Episode 3 (or 4) promises an "amnesia virus" sweeping through the compound. Could Terra Nova signal its fundamental contempt for television any more loudly?

25 More Imaginative Deaths for Charlie Harper

2011-09-20T08:12:00.000-05:00

1. Butt-plug misfire.
2. Complications from experimental Hep-3 treatment in Mexico.
3. Beaten to death by Gaddafi's crack team of female bodyguards.
4. Hummer. Hummer. Cliff. Pacific.
5. Murdered in violent altercation with Hollywood celebrity Charlie Sheen.
6. Melody to new cereal jingle accidentally opens fifth circle of Hell.
7. Killed in duel for the hand of Miss Kandy Kardashian.
8. Toxic blood condition created by years of exposure to unrestrained farting in house.
9. Pornslide.
10. Autoerotic asphyxiation while watching DVD of Platoon.
11. Mauled at L.A. zoo in drunken attempt to fellate tiger.
12. Eaten by .5 Man.
13. Bloody bathroom suicide that Bertha simply will not clean up.
14. Drawn and quartered in accident with new sex harness.
15. Beaten to death with tire iron by the ghost of Jack Warner.
16. Killed by Alan Harper in attempt to harvest and transplant magical penis.
17. Murdered by his own prostate.
18. Stroke triggered by sheer hilarity of all-night Punk'd marathon on MTV.
19. Complications from most violent yet most hilarious kick to groin ever captured on film.
20. Rose found wearing his skin.
21. Body spontaneously dissolves leaving behind only a stain of liquid putridity.
22. Crushed by safe containing 25 million dollars thrown randomly out a window.
23. 3 x 8-ball = 24-ball.
24. Utter f@#king boredom.
25. Dildo on staircase.

It’s Never Sunny Anywhere

2011-09-18T14:22:00.004-05:00

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia just began its seventh season on FX. With any luck, the series will bounce back from a sixth season that, as any objective Phillyphile would agree, was uneven at best. Last week’s premiere, “Frank’s Pretty Woman,” was certainly a good start, returning “the gang” to the moral muck in which they thrive best (Frank decides to marry his favorite prostitute, the gang decides she needs to be "classed up," hilarity ensues).

Sunny may well be the most distinctly “American” sitcom on the air at the moment. That claim will make many bristle, I’m sure, especially those sensitized by post-graduate name-calling to resist any and all such sweeping generalizations about nationhood and identity. So let me clarify: the series does not (and could not) speak to some impossible unity of “American experience,” whatever that might still mean for anyone beyond Tea Party time-travelers; instead, it rather doggedly documents a certain mindset that is unique (or perhaps just particularly widespread) in the USA of the twenty-first century.

Like many sitcoms, Sunny is a hybrid of earlier successes given its own distinctive twist—what might best be described in industry shorthand as a more loathsome Seinfeld meets a downscale Cheers. From Seinfeld, the show borrows the now ubiquitous formula of urban singles who seemingly have little to no responsibilities beyond cultivating their skills at bantering. Sunny also replicates the 3 guys/1 gal structure—but with the crucial addition of Danny DeVito’s “Frank” as the gang’s debauched and wholly irresponsible patriarch (Frank was a brilliant addition to the show’s architecture. Father to the borderline American Psycho Dennis (Glen Howerton) and his ever-annoyed sister Dee (Kaitlin Olson), Frank doesn’t really seem to give a shit about anyone other than himself—devoting his senior years to drinking and whoring. But as he either has (or had) money stashed away, he becomes the default protector/bankroller of the gang’s various misadventures).

But while Seinfeld and company most often worked over the everyday minutiae of middle-class aggravation (“first-world problems,” as some now call them), Sunny’s crew seems to bicker endlessly about absolutely nothing at all. More to the point, each character is typically so dug in defending his or her own delusional take on the sitcom situation at hand that, in the show’s best moments, it creates a polyphonic exchange of variously narcissistic and selfish monologues that amplify more than answer one another. Often this is the crucial ingredient in separating the best episodes from the average—whether or not cast and director have captured the best possible group rants on film (last season, for example, some of this banter—typically so “natural’ to the cast—seemed a bit more forced, for whatever reason).

Obviously, people everywhere in the world often argue about completely stupid and pointless things. The distinctly American flavor of Sunny, I would argue, stems from the fact that each character, despite being a woefully uninformed and misguided idiot, is always completely and wholly convinced that he or she is 100% correct in any and all arguments—so much so that any actual communication, dialogue, and persuasion as we typically know them rarely if ever take place. Characters will on occasion convince one another to cooperate in enacting a scheme of some sort, but most often these are only alliances of momentary convenience—each member of the gang is ready, willing, and able to screw over the other at the drop of a hat. If Seinfeld famously lived by the credo “no hugs,” Sunny remains steadfastly committed to the principle of “no empathy”…for anyone…ever.

Set primarily in the crappiest bar in Philly’s most dilapidated neighborhood, Sunny also references Cheers, but with an emphasis on capturing more honestly the milieu of the chronic drinker (Paddy’s, or its Boston equivalent, is where Cliff and Norm would eventually end up after drinking away their pensions). The “bar” set (or its displaced cousins like “Central Perk” and the “Peach Pit”) has long been central to TV architecture—public spaces where characters can congregate for jokes and plot points. Typically these sets weave the characters into a larger social world—the cast surrounded by various extras that circulate to signify the characters' integration with our own reality. True to the wicked inversions of Sunny, however, Paddy’s bar is a bleak and generally empty space. It is occasionally packed on special occasions in service of the plot, but for the most part has no clientele and merely serves as an echo-chamber for the inane bickering of the cast. This isolation is further underscored in the exterior establishing shots that invariably depict the bar as standing alone in a beaten-down warehouse district devoid of all humanity, a place where one expects to see a tumbleweed blow by festooned with used condoms and dirty syringes (at left, L.A. exterior used for Paddy's--courtesy Flickr Yousuba&!).

American comedy is frequently concerned with the invisible shell-game of “class,” typically in ways that stylize poverty to make it either a momentary comic irruption in middle-class life or the launching pad for eventual middle-class success. Sunny, on the other hand, is particularly candid in examining the thin line dividing crippling destitution from out-and-out homelessness. Given their location, the gang is constantly mixing with addicts, prostitutes, criminals, and—perhaps most magically—various shady characters that Frank and Charlie meet “under the bridge.” Slightly better off than their neighbors, the gang’s relation to the human misery all around them is like that of most Americans—instrumental indifference (their repeated dealings with “Cricket" come to mind). Building on this bedrock of a permanent underclass with no possibilities or aspirations, individual episodes often focus on the particularly American delusion--cultivated by almost everyone occupying a position other than Fortune 500 CFO or crack whore—that every citizen of the USA is middle-class and rising. Dennis, Dee, and Mac (Rob McElhenney), in particular, are constantly misjudging their positions on the economic, educational, and cultural ladder (Frank and Charlie (Charlie Day), for different reasons, don’t appear to care one way or another).

If nothing else, Sunny signifies how far television has come from the days of Buffalo Bill. A noble one-season failure in 1983-84, Buffalo Bill was a much-heralded MTM sitcom starring Dabney Coleman. The show garnered a lot of attention as the first sitcom to feature a lead character who was often “unlikeable” (a matter of judgment, obviously, as all of us no doubt have a sitcom lead from the 50s, 60s, or 70s we would like to punch in the face. I’m looking at you, Hawkeye). With Sunny we have an entire ensemble of assholes.

With one notable exception, perhaps unexpected in the show's original design. Despite the program's general commitment to venal nastiness, Frank and Charlie’s warped father-son vibe has become somewhat of a moral anchor for the series. Frank, again, has lived the middle-class “dream” of marriage, kids, and a house in the ‘burbs—but has decided, rather courageously, that he’d rather crash in a horrifying studio apartment and devote his time and energy to getting fucked up and laid as much as possible. Meanwhile, his room and Murphy-bedmate Charlie is the show’s sole remaining innocent, a guy that one could imagine, given the right circumstances, might end up institutionalized either out of injustice, inconvenience, or a simple misunderstanding. Like the rest of them, Charlie has his schemes. But he also seems relatively content to never leave Philadelphia so that he might continue devoting his life to trapping the bar’s prodigious rat population.

So, to summarize: uninformed, narcissistic idiots constantly arguing at cross-purposes, standing in a dying business in a dying neighborhood, ceaselessly scheming their way toward greater class mobility and failing utterly, but protected from their unrelenting idiocy by the residual capital reserves of their putative father—what could be more American than that?

Exploded Fortress of Solitude

2011-09-12T19:38:00.001-05:00

If you plan on being in London anytime in the next couple of months, I recommend you check out the new exhibit by American artist, Mike Kelley, at the Gagosian Gallery (6-24 Britannia Street). Exploded Fortress of Solitude bookends an earlier show at the Gagosian in Los Angeles (Kandor 10 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #34, Kandor 12 / Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #35)--both exhibitions staging an momentary point of exchange between Kelley's series of Kandor sculptures and his ongoing 365-part EAPR project. In the interests of self-promotional full disclosure, I should say up front that I wrote the essay for the exhibit catalog (forthcoming from Rizzoli), so I am a particularly enthusiastic supporter of the show.

For those who don't know Kelley's work, the Kandor series is an ongoing sculptural project based on the "shrunken city" of Kandor featured in the silver-age Superman comics. The capital of Krypton, Kandor was miniaturized and stolen by the evil Brainiac moments before the destruction of Superman's home planet. At some point, Superman himself came into possession of the tiny city and its citizens, securing them beneath a large bell jar in his fabled Fortress of Solitude until he could find a way to return the Kandorians to their normal size (a task that took some 20 years of comic book time). Fascinated by the fact that Kandor, as inked in the comic book, seemed to mutate into different forms with each new appearance, Kelley has over the past decade translated several of the comic panels into large sculptural form (Kandor 14 is to the left). Like much of Kelley's work, the Kandor series plays with Freudian exchanges between the popular unconscious and the unconscious popularized, presenting Kandor as an insistent and quite literalized symptom of Superman's boyhood trauma. In many ways, the sculptural pieces expand upon a reading of the Superman mythos that Kelley first introduced in 1999 with Superman Recites Selections from The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, a video that
presents exactly what the title suggests--Superman reading The Bell Jar to the bell jar that hangs over Kandor. If you find that as hilarious and as poignant as I do, I highly recommend taking a look at the catalog from the 2007 Kandors exhibition in Berlin. At the current London exhibit, the Kandors range in size from small table-top studies to the immense installation, Exploded Fortress of Solitude (at top), which requires the viewer to step inside to view a hidden Kandor 10B. And even if you have little to no interest in Superman and/or Freud, the Kandors are well worth seeing if only for the beautiful play with color and texture that runs through the series. Each is, in its own way, a truly remarkable object.

The EAPR series, meanwhile, is an ongoing video/sculptural project based on Kelley's 1995 piece, Educational Complex. Below is a description of this project taken from the catalog, Mike Kelley Educational Complex Onwards: 1995-2008 (2010, JRP Ringier).

In 1995, Mike Kelley devised the Educational Complex, an amalgam of every school he attended and of the house he grew up in, "with all the parts I couldn't remember left out"--a total environment, "sort of like the model of a Modernist community college." The blind spots in this model represent forgotten ("repressed") zones, and so are reconceived by Kelley as sites of institutional abuse, for which specific traumas were devised (each having their own video and sculptural component). For Kelley, this work marks the beginning of a series of projects in which pseudo-autobiography, repressed-memory syndrome and the reinterpretation of previous pieces become the tools for a poetic deconstruction of such complexes and the way we interact with and narrate them.

The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction project (EAPR) is to be a 365-part video/sculptural series addressing the "repressed" blank zones of Educational Complex. Each EAPR is a promiscuous mix of personal memories, pop culture, and standardized "recovered memory" scenarios. The London show debuts #36 in the series, "Vice Anglais," which imagines the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti staged as a Hammer horror film. Rossetti, displaced here as "M'Lord," leads a gang of perverts on a subterranean tour of debauchery, loosely organized around Rossetti's own famously salacious biography. Particularly stunning is the sudden appearance of M'Lord's muse, Golden Rod, an ambulatory yet mute corn cob creature apparently visible only to M'Lord. At another point in the video, M'Lord wanders alone into a cavernous chamber and encounters--without explanation--the seemingly abandoned Kandor 10B.

The London show also features a number of sculptural works independent of either the Kandor or EAPR series. Topo Gigio Topographical Model (detail at left) is a particular favorite of mine in its odd mixing of the whimsical and the creepy, a difficult tone that Kelley is particularly adept at achieving, here and elsewhere.

So if you're in the vicinity of Kings Cross, stop by and take a look. The exhibit runs through October 22 and the catalog should be available shortly thereafter.

Generation X: Still Relentlessly and Hopelessly Screwed

2011-09-05T19:17:00.006-05:00

If you were born in 1970, you certainly don’t need me to tell you that you recently turned 40. Nor do I need to tell you that you are smack dab in the middle of that grumpiest of demographics, "Generation X" (a term variously deployed through the century, but most commonly associated with Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel about the post-boomer baby-busters). While the exact parameters of this generation remain unclear (some go as wide as 1960 to 1982, others as narrow as 1965 to 1979), X’ers have long been regarded as the most cynical, detached, and ironic of population clusters. Boomers, the logic goes, got all the good jobs and prime real estate, while Gen Y (aka, “the millennials”) got a renewed sense of earnestness, enthusiasm, and optimism. X marks the spot in between—those pissed off at baby-boomers for their narcissistic entitlement and pissed off at the millennials for not being more pissed off. Terrifyingly, Generation X is now beginning to send its own kids out into the world—a group that so far has yet to generate an appropriately pithy label (although “Generation Z” and “Generation Text” seem the most likely contenders).

Of these four admittedly amorphous categories, why do X-er’s in general remain the grouchiest? After all, being a member of Generation Y is no picnic, especially if all your earnestness, enthusiasm, and optimism eventually force you to move back in with your parents. Generation Z, meanwhile, may well be the most screwed of them all. Luckily, as most Z’s have only a vague memory of the pre-Bush v. Gore world, they’ve known nothing but escalating bullshit for their entire lives. They thus have no baseline of non-suckitude to cultivate bitterness or nostalgia. Generation X’s “bad attitude,” on the other hand, has always been a function of living in the boomer shadows—culturally, economically, politically, and so on.

Just how resentful is X? Two movies currently coursing their way through the tributaries of paid cable speak to the diabolical nature of the X-dilemma: Greenberg (2010) with Ben Stiller and Everything Must Go (2010) with Will Ferrell. Do not be deceived by the fact that both films were aggressively marketed as comedies—they are not. In fact, if you are a few years either side of 40, I would be sure to give yourself a break between the two screenings so that you don’t end up eating a box of razorblades.

Greenberg’s ad campaign positioned the film as just another comedy of regressed masculinity: 40-something man-child moves to L.A. and realizes the time has come to grow up (in L.A. no less!). This has become something of an idée fixe in contemporary film comedy over the past decade. The 40-Year Old Virgin, Knocked-Up, I Love You, Man, and Step Brothers are all, in varying degrees, about guys creeping up on 40 who need to put their toys away (literally) so that they can successfully impregnate a woman (I have yet to see Our Idiot Brother, but I’m willing to guess it has its own unique take on this genre). The back-story here is that Greenberg (Stiller), born and bred in L.A., has spent the past fifteen years working in New York as a carpenter. Recently released from a mental hospital after a breakdown of some kind, Greenberg returns to L.A. to housesit for his brother and sister-in-law while they visit Vietnam. He also boasts it is his opportunity to “do nothing” for a while, a life goal that his eventual love interest Florence (Greta Gerwig) finds courageous, given his age. Of course, the sad joke is that Greenberg has been committed to doing nothing for his entire life—it is up to us and the less-than-stable, twenty-something Florence to figure out why.

From there, Greenberg runs the table on the various humiliations of the mid-life crisis scenario. There is the delusional fantasy of rekindling a romance with an old flame who has long since transformed into another person entirely. Incensed at how stupid and poorly run everything is, Greenberg spends hours everyday firing off angry letters to anonymous institutions (like Starbucks), tirades that are to be read as feeble evasions from taking control of his own life. When his niece arrives and throws a big house party, a coked-up Greenberg (in probably the film’s best scene) delivers an agitated generational rant against “these kids today” and their wholly unearned sense of confidence (a recurring X-er complaint about the young ones). There is also the age-inappropriate haircut that Stiller gamely endures for the entire film.

Eventually we learn that the great trauma in Greenberg’s life, as well as among his former circle of friends, was the formation and subsequent break-up of their "next-big-thing" rock band back in the early 90s. On the verge of making it to the national stage, Greenberg refused to sign a record deal that, he claims, would have sacrificed the band’s artistic freedom and turned them into "sell-outs." Such is the central conceit of Gen-X cinema: the only moral compass that really matters in the end is the issue of subcultural authenticity, a divide as old as the celebrated case of Punk v. Part-Time Punk. Everyone else, as it turns out, would have gladly become plastic popsters, and they all still resent Greenberg for screwing everything up.

This premise, it should be noted, speaks to a certain contradiction in this genre. If, as the film argues so adamantly, Greenberg (and by extension all X-er’s) need to “grow up” and become functional adults, then it would seem he did his band mates a favor by breaking up their adolescent fantasy machine and forcing them into real jobs with real wives and real kids. Strangely, however, no one sees it that way.

Will Ferrell’s “Nick Halsey,” meanwhile, has taken a different route in Everything Must Go. When we first meet Nick, a slimy twenty-something is firing him from his job as Assistant Vice President. Halsey, we learn, is a recovering alcoholic, and his termination stems from a relapse at the Denver office that may or may not have led to the sexual harassment of a co-worker. On the way home, Halsey loads up with some 12-packs to make his fall off the wagon official. Arriving at his home, however, he finds that his wife has thrown all of his possessions out on the front lawn, changed the locks, and left a note demanding a divorce. Dealt this double-whammy of adult problems on the same day, Nick takes the one reasonable course of action available—he decides to live on his front lawn for a few days in a drunken stupor until he can figure things out.

From this inspired premise (courtesy of Raymond Carver), Everything Must Go doesn’t really know what to do with Ferrell or the situation. Through movie logic we establish that Nick has five days to get his shit together (literally, by clearing his lawn, and figuratively, by devising a plan for the future). Nick spends the five days checking off many of the same plot points that occupy Greenberg. He also revisits an old romantic possibility, showing up unannounced on the doorstep of single-mom Laura Dern. Nick also finds a twenty-something woman (Rebecca Hall) to feel his pain—a new neighbor that seems to have relationship problems of her own. Nick eventually learns “everything must go” in a giant garage sale, except of course for his impressive collection of vintage and thus authentic vinyl (there’s that Gen-X line in the sand again—it’s all about the good taste of appreciating “real” music, a quality that, in truth, does tend to make every male over 35 basically insufferable).

The strongest link between Greenberg and Everything Must Go, however, is a rather relentlessly heteronormative insistence that the only thing preventing both characters from achieving happiness is successful reproduction. Greenberg is unmarried and childless at 40, while Nick notes, when asked if he has any kids, that he and his wife “have fish” (a collection of Koi swimming in the back yard). Drunk and crossing the line with his new and very pregnant neighbor, Nick predicts how her marriage will eventually fall apart just like his (as a salesman, Nick prides himself on “reading people”)—but by the end, when her absentee husband finally arrives, her prodigious baby-bump tells us maybe, just maybe, they’ll be okay.

Of course, stepping straight from the “irresponsible” narcissism of childlessness to becoming a dad is not something that can be done in one step. Happily, both films provide their dysfunctional X-er’s with a “training child” so they can get some practice first. Greenberg must care for a suddenly ailing German Shepard, forming a temporary interspecies family with Florence. Nick, meanwhile, temporarily adopts a chubby, fatherless neighborhood kid to help with his garage sale (“Will you teach me to play baseball?,” the kid asks at one point. No, I’m not kidding, he really does say this). As the film ends, we sense Nick is probably only a few months away from acquiring the necessary skills to take over in the Dern household (he’s been invited back, once he gets his life in order).

Now, here is what makes Greenberg and Everything Must Go such a diabolical one-two X’er punch. Nick goes to college, gets married, gets a job, buys a house, and works like a chump for 15 years—only to be end up divorced and miserable on his front lawn. Greenberg, meanwhile, stays “true to himself,” refusing to join the rat race of marriage, work, and responsibility—only to end up institutionalized, alone, and borderline suicidal. The generational message for 40-somethings could not be any starker: work or don’t work, marry or don’t marry, join society or reject society—it doesn’t matter, you’re fucked either way. Goddamn boomers!

I think my favorite of this genre remains Step Brothers (2009), featuring Ferrell once again, this time alongside John C. Reilly. It is a much broader, borderline gross-out comedy that actually seems more intellectually honest than either Greenberg or Everything Must Go. Ferrell and Reilly play two guys in their mid-30s who, having been insulated from the "real world" by virtue of their rich single parents, basically live the dream-lives of 14 year-old boys. When the parents get married, the two must learn to live together as "step brothers," which they do blissfully until thrown out to fend for themselves. As each takes the first tentative steps toward adulthood, there is a major falling out and ongoing feud. What is their reward for becoming adults? They both become incredibly boring and generally miserable. Courageously, the film finds a way for them to remain "independent" at the end while also allowing them to regress back into their personas of endless adolescence. I haven't read Judith Halberstam's new book on The Queer Art of Failure yet, but Step Brothers seems a likely candidate for inclusion.

For those annoyed, finally, that this genre is so obsessively focused on retarded masculinity, you might want to check out The Future (2011), written and directed by Miranda July. Here the specter of adopting a sick cat sends a 30-something couple into a major life crisis, constituted in large part by their realization that by the time the cat dies (in about five years), they’ll both be 40 (“and 40 is the new 60,” they both agree in classic anti-Boomer logic). From here the film becomes an art cinema hallucination with July suddenly and seemingly randomly having an affair with a 50-something man, presumably because he’s an actual adult who owns an actual house. I’d write more about it, but as that would require me accessing a form of subjectivity that I don’t fully understand, I’ll leave it there. Some, I’m told, find July’s movies insufferably cutesy, but I appreciated the fact that the film made at least some attempt to escape the scourge of Hollywood naturalism. And it was nice, for a change, to see a woman as the center of all the generational floundering.

Autumn Impregnations

2011-09-03T01:50:00.000-05:00

Farewell, Summer Television

2011-08-30T17:39:00.001-05:00

The fall television season starts soon, and with it, the return of some of our most beloved entertainment franchises. Soon we’ll know the true extent of Chuck Lorre’s rage at Charlie Sheen when he offs him in the most humiliating way possible on A Man + Ashton Kutcher ÷ the Teenage Remainder. I’m pretty sure we left “House” in some kind of interesting scrape at the end of last season, although I am hard pressed to remember what it was. And then there are the shiny new shows, like Whitey, which I think stars the lady from the Progressive Insurance ads shacking up with her boyfriend as they try to save up money to buy him a shaving kit. There’s also the sci-fi show, Terra Nova, which upon cancellation will introduce us to the next generation of futuristic whiners mortally wounded that their series was not allowed to fulfill its destiny, even if that destiny was merely to be the Time Tunnel of 2011.

Most exciting of all is NBC’s bold new experiment in wasting, as egregiously as possible, the considerable talents of Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph. With little to no shame, Up All Night apparently has no more ambition than to document the hilarity of couples fighting over just who is going to get up and stick a bottle in the puling maw of a baby. Given that these TV couples apparently chose to have these TV babies, I’m not sure why this should be my TV problem. I know young parents secrete an enzyme that makes junior’s inopportune puking on various fabrics and visitors endlessly fascinating, but in the past such banal war stories have typically and mercifully circulated only among fellow parents —how NBC plans to do 22 episodes a year of dirty diaper jokes for those who don’t find little Johnny’s little shits adorable is a true mystery. Unless one of the babies is from Venus or the reincarnation of Albert Fish or something equally edgy, I’ll pass, thank you very much.

Of course, for all these new and returning shows to take to the airwaves, we must first say goodbye to the “summer” television season. Time was when there was no such thing as a summer television season—the networks simply flipped into rerun mode and assumed everyone, on both sides of the screen, had better things to do with their time. But as TV gradually came to realize that going dark for three months might, in the very near future, lead to an entire generation completely forgetting that television ever existed in the first place, the decision was made to create the illusion of exciting new programming year round.

Many complain about the quality of summer television. Not me. In fact, I’m always a little sad to see it go. Summer programming, as we have come to know it over the past few years, is like television’s feral cousin—recognizable as TV and yet unexpectedly “wild” in a way that the prestigious gloss of the autumn schedule would never abide. It’s like the dog you once rescued from traffic at the side of the Interstate: he’s cute enough that you grow a little attached to him as he lives in your basement for a few days while you put up posters; and yet he is deranged enough that you come to understand how he got left on the side of the freeway in the first place. You’re a little sad when the Humane Society finally comes to take him away, but not inconsolably so, much like the feeling you have when MTV breaks out the cattle prods to herd Ronnie and Sammi back into their enclosures until next season.

One of the highlights of this summer was undoubtedly ABC’s Wipeout, a show where mobile assemblages of bone and meat subjected themselves to a punishing obstacle course for reasons that apparently had nothing to do with either prizes or fame. In fact, I’m not even sure if Wipeout was actually a game show or just an ongoing X-treme sport product demo featuring recruits from various So-Cal fitness clubs looking to “test themselves” against the challenge of a human pachinko machine. Making it even more stupidly unfair, some off-screen tech-lord apparently had the power to activate various booby-traps at his own discretion, making sure that even the most worthy competitor eventually ended up in the drink with a broken coccyx. If, as a child, you ever wondered what it would be like to be miniaturized so that you could try to outrun the various components of "Mousetrap," this was the show for you. Wipeout may seem like America’s take on those wacky Japanese game shows that focus on contestant pain and humiliation, but that comparison makes little to no sense given that it is almost impossible to humiliate an American, especially one appearing on television. It would seem these people decided to appear on Wipeout for little more than talking points at various Orange County juice bars; or perhaps because, to have not done so, would be to lead a life slightly less awesome.

Less strenuous but no less ridiculous has been NBC’s It’s Worth What?, a post-empire version of The Price is Right hosted by a strangely distracted, perhaps even painfully embarrassed Cedric the Entertainer (at top). Whereas The Price is Right concentrates on commonsense consumer-citizenship, rewarding viewers for actually knowing what a can of tuna or a washing machine might cost, It’s Worth What? works the freak show wing of capitalism. The conceit here is that Cedric the Entertainer has access to a giant vault filled with odd treasures from around the world. In each segment, contestants have to guesstimate the price of said objects—most of them ostensibly worthless-- without fainting from shock or outrage. Quick—which costs more—a Lamborghini Spider or a mint copy of the first issue of Spiderman? The answer is almost unimportant (it’s the sports car, by a hair)—it is the question itself that is so perversely cruel. In an era of massive economic retrenchment, here we have an entire hour devoted to “Theoretical Expenditures of the Leisure Class,” reminding viewers struggling to make rent that someone out there just paid 2.35 million for a Honus Wagner baseball card.

At least It’s Worth What? feigns a “gee-whiz, rich people sure are crazy” type of populism that makes it available, however remotely, for an eventual Marxist epiphany. Over on Lifetime, however, there resides the irredeemable loathsomeness of The Picker Sisters. In what is perhaps the most tone-deaf series currently on television, here we have two noisome interior designers (apparently on loan from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) who wander through economically depressed regions of the nation in search of hidden treasures and cute knickknacks that they might refurbish and sell in their upscale boutique back in L.A. In the episode I saw, the vulture twins spent a couple of hours swindling an older junk-gentleman in Alabama out of all kinds of odd scrap metal so that it might be stripped, powder-coated, and sold as adorable patio furniture to some copyright lawyer at Sony, a tool who will no doubt regale guests at his pool party with the interesting story of their origins (“Apparently these chairs were originally involved in the transportation of chickens in Alabama,” he laughs, reaching for another canapé. “How, I simply can’t imagine.”).

Not only is The Picker Sisters irksome for unabashedly trading in fantasies of the bi-coastal tasteful gleefully screwing over clueless rubes, it is also—quite unintentionally, I’m sure--a rather depressing documentary about the precipitous decline of the nation’s once great manufacturing base. In another segment, the gals raid an old Army depot (again, somewhere in the south), now reduced to little more than a rusting collection of obsolescent hardware. They are delighted to find an “Acid Suit" locker, a stand-alone metal closet that apparently once housed an emergency “acid suit” for that lucky soldier called upon to deal with the ominous eruption of an acid emergency in the plant. Rather than ponder the object as silent testimony to the shared dangers and selfless sacrifice of previous generations working difficult jobs for the common good of the nation, the Pickers instead declare that the locker would make a great “wet bar” for some young Hollywood bachelor. On a truck and back to L.A. it goes. With any luck, residual benzene levels will ensure that everyone involved feeds a tumor with each new Mojito.

The vaguely hypnotic Hillbilly Handfishin’, meanwhile, attempts to redress the regional antagonisms provoked by the likes of The Picker Sisters. Here unlikely handfishers from around the nation come to a lake in Oklahoma to stand around in muddy water and let freakishly gigantic catfish swim through their legs—a practice offered as the key to resolving all manner of racial, regional, sexual, and class difference. It’s an odd show, inasmuch as most of the “action” takes place under the water and the producers are apparently too cheap to spring for any submergible camera equipment. For most of the program, we watch as three visiting couples and the two hosts stand waist deep in water, occasionally shouting out with surprise, pleasure, and/or pain when a giant flathead cat swims past their thigh, giving the whole enterprise a vaguely pornographic feel (perhaps better captured in the title of the earlier fish-in-the-crotch show, Okie Noodlin’).

Speaking of slimy things swimming near your junk, Animal Planet got just about everything right in titling its summer exploitation classic: Man-Eating Super-Snake. The premise here, as I understand it, is that there is currently a rogue species of Anaconda loose in the Florida Everglades. If they begin to interbreed with another humongous snake indigenous to the area, most likely everyone weighing under 80lbs. and living south of Jacksonville will soon be dead. The few minutes of the program that I witnessed featured the requisite “slither-cam,” in this case showcasing “man-eating super snake” as he made his way toward a crib. I assume the baby was rescued at the last second and everyone learned an important safety lesson, like not leaving your baby’s crib at the edge of a swamp, but I can’t say for sure.

Of course, the summer friends I will miss the most are the freaks, the glorious, glorious freaks, especially those lost souls that we got to meet in the second season of TLC’s My Strange Addiction. Who could forget the gas-huffing Mom or the grown woman who took her creepy stuffed animals everywhere? The woman who bathed thrice daily in bleach or the hipster taxidermist obsessively prowling the streets of Brooklyn in search of dead mice to stuff? And who could forget Teresa, she who eats rocks, and Casie, she who eats the ashes of her dead husband? If you somehow missed either of these segments over the summer, I highly recommend them both. Teresa was especially amazing in that she apparently really eats rocks, not by swallowing little pebbles, mind you, but by actually taking great big crunchy bites out of large, hard rocks—teeth, intestines, and foley sweetening be damned!

I have come to love My Strange Addiction so much that I fear it may have peaked this season, so in the interest of having some good kooks for next summer, I will end here with the casting call currently posted at TLC. If you are really screwed up, I beseech you, for my own personal entertainment pleasure, to share your story with us all:

MY STRANGE ADDICTION
Think you have an unusual compulsive behavior or strange habit? Do you find it consuming you, affecting your life, work and relationships? If you or someone you know is suffering from a strange addiction and would be interested in participating in our program, please send us a short description of your unusual behavior and the impact it has on your daily life to: casting@20west.tv. Please make sure to include your name, age, city of residence, a current photo, and a phone number or email where you can be reached for further questions.

I Saw That Movie Where All the Apes Get Mad and Take Over the World

2011-08-11T01:35:00.001-05:00

First of all, credit where credit is due. Thank you, Hollywood, for finally making a film this summer that didn’t make me wish I had stayed home to express my cat’s blocked anal gland with a Q-Tip. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is actually really, really good. Surprisingly good. True, it did require the industry to dip back into the stockpile of science-fiction ideas that existed before Star Wars transformed the entire genre into little more than an endless sword ‘n’ sandal flick with more and better weapons, but if that means getting a Zardoz reboot next, I’ll take it.

If anyone reading this is in or near Malibu, by the way, please kidnap Michael Bay and force him to see Rise immediately so that he might learn the basics of scene articulation and narrative structure. If Rise can make me misty-eyed over a big, dumb ape taking out a helicopter, surely Bay can learn how to help us keep track of who is a Transformer, who is a Decepticon, who is Shia LeBeouf, and why we should even care in the first place. Okay, obligatory Bay = State of current cinema joke out of the way, let's proceed...

Let me say this: I wish Rise of the Planet of the Apes were happening right now. I wish super-intelligent apes were swinging through the trees this very moment ready to lay waste to our sorry civilization. It’s about time another species took over for our terrible stewardship of the planet and of ourselves. Millions starving. Inequality increasing. Axe Body Spray still on the market. At this point, the ghost of Paul the psychic Octopus deciding affairs of state with an aqua-Ouija board could probably run most governments better than we humans. And look, we all know this movie is only showing us our inevitable future. Apes may not learn to talk and organize themselves into medieval fighting formations, but it’s even money we end up taking ourselves out with a virus that we will probably invent for profit. It may be an additive used to extend the shelf-life of Cheezy Bread Stix or a fine mist Steve Jobs sprays into the atmosphere to make Apple users misplace their dongles and cords that much quicker, but it’s going to happen, we’re going to take ourselves out in a way that is cosmically embarrassing.

That’s why it’s so great that Rise targets San Francisco as the first city to go—It’s an open attack on all the Trekkies out there who imagine that Frisco will be the gateway for projecting our boring, homogenized cultural differences of the future out into the universe so that we can lecture other cultures (alien ones, no less) on what they should and should not be doing. You say the future is a bank lobby in space where we all obey the prime directive whilst discovering every civilization in the universe has its own form of brightly colored liquor? I say it will be genetically mutated monkeys ripping out our tracheae and kneecaps just for the hell of it.

In this respect, I always thought Spielberg missed a real opportunity with the Jurassic Park series. After humans stupidly brought dinosaurs back to life, wouldn’t it have been great if a bunch of pterodactyls got loose, bred in such numbers that we couldn’t really control them, and then occasionally swooped down to snatch away house pets and small unguarded children? Not so often that we had to declare a “War on Pterodactyls,” obviously, but maybe with the same frequency as people being hit by lightning—just enough to remind us of what dumbasses we were for bringing dinosaurs back to life in the first place, or for trying to play an extra hole of golf in the face of an advancing thunderstorm. I salute Rise for having the courage to remind us that it is often our very intelligence that makes us the stupidest ape of all. Imagine how much more free and full of life you’d feel if you could simply entertain yourself by throwing your own feces at various comic foils, as opposed to feeling dead inside after paying $14 to see Kevin James do it for you (wait, crossover alert: the mad-as-hell apes of Rise invade Zookeeper, radicalize the non-human primates, and then all escape the film to leave their bewildered human cast-mates wondering where the next fart joke will come from).

Like all science-fiction, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is of course an allegory. I’ve heard many say this week, either in jest or quite earnestly, that the film is a great parable about the Tea Party—angry right-wingers as angry apes rising up against their oppressors. That’s a really nasty swipe, of course, seeing as how gratuitously insulting it is to apes. After all, the apes of Rise all learn to cooperate for the common good. They share their cookies and divide the labor “from each according to his need, to each according to his ability.” They also learn very quickly how important it is to get a good education, as in that scene where the guard catches them all going to night school. Say what you want about how smelly, dirty, or damned they might be, but an ape isn’t the type of creature that would prefer to shit in coffee cans and stack them on his neighbor’s property line rather than pay that extra penny in sales tax to refurbish his community’s sewer system. No, an ape is smarter than that.

Actually, as far as parables go, I think the film is much more interesting in its kinship to the zombie genre. A few years ago I delivered a paper in London (at the Cine-Excess conference) on the zombie film as a rather playful indulgence of a collective and accelerating social death-drive. Zombies are scary—particularly those British ones that cheat by running extra-fast—but there’s also something exhilarating in seeing the entirety of our social world absolutely destroyed. After all, what’s so bad about being a zombie? You’re still somewhat sentient, apparently, certainly more so than if you just watched 100 Ways to Leave a Game Show or paid actual attention to the last Katy Perry CD all the way through. Moreover, the only thing that can kill you is a clean brain shot—and once everyone else in the world is also a zombie, that isn’t very likely to happen. Zombies don’t have to work or pay mortgages or worry about their personal appearance anymore---what’s not to like?

If anything, Rise is even more candid and enthusiastic than most zombie films in indulging our desire to watch humankind snuff it—you’re on your feet by the end cheering the primate army as they hoist us brainiacs by our own R&D petard. Hurray for the noble apes! Hurray we’ll all be coughing up blood and dying soon! True, it’s a shame the death of humanity will mean no more incredible specimens like James Franco, Freida Pinto, and the hypothetical primates they might spawn, but that’s a small price to pay for exterminating assholes like that guy in the Ape house with the cattle prod or the pilot-neighbor-from-hell living next door. If I had a neighbor like that, I’d be personally injecting local raccoons with anything I could find in the hopes that one would eventually turn sour and spray his patio furniture with some form of mutantly toxic urine.

So kudos once again, Hollywood, for getting it right this time. I eagerly await the next installment when all the CGI Apes are rather surrealistically talking (which I hope will be even weirder than imagining Roddy McDowell’s mouth flapping behind the latex in the original series). I also hope the sequel has the guts to show thousands of Americans waiting around to die from the mutant virus, sad they will soon be no more, but ecstatic that they didn’t have to see their tax dollars wasted on government medical research or to support the implementation of Obama’s goddamn socialized medicine scheme.

Tea Party Sadie

2011-08-08T10:20:00.002-05:00

"The Five:" Fox After Beck

2011-08-04T21:05:00.001-05:00

With the untimely institutionalization of Glen Beck, Fox News faced a momentary hiccup in their nightly procession of puffy male blowhards and the icy blonde women who serve them updates at the half-hour breaks. Beck, you might recall, had set himself the seemingly impossible goal of concocting a theory so horrifying that it might reasonably be considered an insult even to Adolph Hitler. But, like an Icarus aloft on wings of steaming bullshit, Beck flew too close to the infotainment sun and fell like a great corn-fed turd into the sea of psychosis. When a Fox intern stumbled upon Beck coating gold bricks with his own semen, network executives knew he had to go.

How does one replace a legend like Beck? After a quick tour of bankrupt carnival auctions and compulsory telemarketer retreats yielded no promising leads, Fox decided to reach back into its old playbook and resurrect the classic “Colmes” strategy. Alan Colmes, you might recall, heroically sat opposite troglodyte Sean Hannity for a number of years, ostensibly to argue the “liberal” side of various political issues, but mainly to serve as the Fox demo’s collective instantiation of mealy-mouthed liberalism. Bespectacled and obsequious, Colmes got bulldozed pretty much every night, his highbrow philosophizing no match for Hannity’s monobrow “common sense.” After each pummeling, one imagined him in the Fox commissary—tie dipped in his mashed potatoes—getting jumped and noogied by Brian Kilmeade.

The origins of the fabled Hannity and Colmes, by the way, remain shrouded in mystery. Some say Hannity hand-picked Colmes to be his servile adversary. But there is also the rumor that Colmes once ran a famous bear-baiting act in the Ukraine, and that after unwittingly camping one night in the shadow of Chernobyl, his best working bear, Aleksei, gradually began to shed his fur and—incredibly—develop a limited capacity for human speech. Shunned by the local community and subsisting on old fish heads tossed from the Kiev Zoo, Colmes and Aleksei were eventually spotted by a Newscorp scout who saw something promising in the talking bear’s gruff taunting and bemused swatting of his former keeper. Groomed, indoctrinated, and given the Irish-friendly moniker of “Hannity,” “Aleksei the Argumentative Bear” has gone on to enjoy a lucrative career at Fox and on the radio. Or so some say.

At any rate, Fox is too smart to simply return to such an obvious propaganda vehicle as a nightly pitting of hawk v. sparrow. So, with Beck gone, the network has debuted a new hour-long punditfest called The Five (five pundits who appear each night at five o’clock EST—hence, the “five.”) And it may be the most brilliant move by Fox yet. Knowing that conservatism continues to be associated with the hopes and dreams of old white men looking to crush the hopes and dreams of those who are not old white men, Fox has decided to “flip the script,” as they say, and make The Five a forum in which a quartet of photogenic young conservatives tease and trouble one bedraggled old liberal—in this case, former CNN Crossfirer Bob Beckel. Much as Colmes excelled at playing the “NYU anthropology professor who is against handguns—until his own wife is mugged in the street” type of liberal, Beckel would be central casting’s first choice for playing a Democratic machine union enforcer, drunk by five on the steps of his Chicago stoop but still ready to pull levers for the dead in the local alderman election.

I’ve only seen a few minutes of The Five since, like any reasonable person, I don’t want my head to explode from consuming Fox product. From what I have seen, however, Beckel plays his assigned role perfectly. While everyone else on set is bright, chipper, and (I’m almost certain) better miked, Beckel slouches, yawns, mumbles, and otherwise puts forward the Democratic position with all the zeal of the last remaining alchemist on staff at DuPont. The message is clear: liberalism is your father's or even grandfather’s ideology, and boy is it ever a tired one. The younger, fresher Foxes, meanwhile, treat Beckel—not with the contempt and sarcasm Hannity employed in trouncing Colmes every night—but with that patronizing kindness the young always use with the elderly and out-of-touch—much like when your grandmother drops the “N-word” at a family gathering and everyone under 40 makes the mental calculus that she’ll be dead before she can be reformed, so let's just smile and talk to her as if she’s not really there. Except here they do that whenever Beckel questions the premise that tax cuts for the rich = more jobs.

As an added bonus, the new format also allows aspiring Fox conservadroids an excellent opportunity to hone their on-air skills before tarrying with more dangerous prey (unlikely, given Fox’s protocols for generally keeping smart lefties off its feed, but you never know when one of these prospects might get trapped in a room, on camera, with someone who might actually rip them a new one. Plus—Fox must realize they eventually need to turn to their farm system in order to re-staff the media embarrassment and national nightmare that is Fox and Friends). In this respect, Fox has brought in Beckel in much the same way that a mother lion deposits a wounded wilderbeast before her cubs, letting them find the jugular for themselves so that they might stand a chance if cornered by Rachael Maddow at a midtown media mixer.

Will it work? Who knows? But I am looking forward to the new Fox News Project: You Kids Get Off My Greedy Entitlements, wherein Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. must defend his twitter and Facebook feeds from a rotating pack of College Young Republicans, each chosen for their skill and dexterity at incendiary texting.

Praying Hands x 3

2011-07-28T19:54:00.000-05:00

Found in Chicago thrift store (July 2011)

Some Great "Gags" for Your Next Summer Comedy Movie

2011-07-24T20:17:00.000-05:00

I'm not really a "make stuff up" writer, so I don't have any screenplays going at the moment. But I did recently think of some great "gags" that would be perfect for someone out there who might be writing a “zany” comedy. Since I probably won't find a place for them in my own work, I thought I'd put them out there for someone else to use. I think they’d all be really good for anyone looking to put a couple extra “sure-fire” yucks into his or her movie.

Okay, so for this first gag, you'll need to have your main character go swimming. And it needs to be at the beach, or a pool, or a gym, because this gag will be a lot funnier if there are a lot of people standing around to see it happen. In other words, it can’t just be a creek or someplace out in the middle of nowhere. Okay, so your guy is just about to jump into the water when he notices a really sexy lifeguard on duty. Maybe she’s up in her chair twirling her whistle around, or even better, just walking back and forth in a hot bikini keeping an eye on things like lifeguards do, all cool and remote. So now you’ll need to have a shot of your character suddenly getting a great idea—a sort of “light bulb over the head” moment (although if your movie is more plot driven, maybe he already had the idea before he got to the pool or the beach--that's up to you). Okay, so now the guy jumps into the water for a quick swim. But almost immediately he starts thrashing around in the water. But he's not really in trouble, you see, he's just pretending like he can't swim, or maybe even that he's actually drowning. His goal here is to make the sexy lifeguard jump in and "save" him. What better way, he's thinking, to get a chance to meet this girl up close and personal? So sure enough, with our guy flailing in the water, the hot lifeguard jumps in and pulls him up to the shore or the poolside. But that’s not really the funny part because our hero has another trick up his sleeve. Even though he's perfectly okay and not drowned at all, he's going to lie still as if he really were drowned. Maybe he even spits up a little water to make it all look more realistic. Anyway, his goal here is not only to meet the hot lifeguard babe, but also to "trick" her into doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him. He figures, not only will I get to meet this great looking chick, but it will also almost be like making out with her even before going out on a date. What guy wouldn't take that deal?! So anyway, our guy is lying there with his eyes closed just waiting for the big payoff. Maybe he even puckers up a bit for comic effect. Now here comes the funny part. Okay, so just as his dream is about to come true--whammo! someone who is the exact opposite of "hot" swoops in and does the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on him instead. Maybe the lifeguards are changing shifts, or maybe the new lifeguard is better at CPR. In any case, a real “Olive Oil” or “Helga” type jumps in and locks lips with our hero--or maybe even a dude, or maybe even a gay dude! It's funny because it's such a last-second turnaround and a great comeuppance. Mr. Cool thought he had it all figured out, but then he gets this really unwelcome surprise, one that might even teach him a good lesson. The audience will go nuts.

Maybe you can’t justify taking the time in your movie to have your character go swimming. Fair enough, not all stories can take place near pools and beaches. Well, how about a haircut? Again, I don't know because I don't write movie stories, but it seems like everyone needs a haircut every so often. So here's a great gag I thought up for the barbershop just in case your movie doesn't take place near any water. Okay, so this gag starts with your guy going to the barbershop for a quick trim. The important thing here is to make sure the audience understands that this is no ordinary haircut. It's a really important haircut. Maybe he's got a hot date or an important business meeting coming up. At any rate, he can't just be on his way out into the woods or going to prison the next day or something, for reasons that you'll see below. Maybe he says to the barber, "Got a hot date tomorrow, Joe, so make me look good!," or something to that effect. Okay, so our guy is sitting in the barber chair reading a magazine and not really paying attention. The barber, meanwhile, is finishing up this extra special cut with one of those big electric buzzcut razors. So here's where things get wacky. Just as the barber is finishing up the trim, a really hot looking chick jogs by on the sidewalk out front. Maybe she even stops and bends over to tie her shoe so that the barber gets a really good look at her shapely buttocks. And here's the gag: the barber is so distracted by the hot babe out front that he completely forgets what he's doing and cuts a huge chunk out of our guy's hair! Maybe it’s a big, unsightly bald spot, or perhaps a straight-down-the-middle reverse-Mohawk that makes him look really weird and “crazy.” Either way, the timing couldn’t be worse because of his important appointment coming up, and that makes our hero’s predicament all that much funnier. Now he’ll have to wear a funny hat on his first date or go into the boardroom with a crazy toupee. Either way, it will be hilarious.

If neither of those fit into your project, I have one more that might just do the trick. This one would be especially good in a "buddy" movie, or really any film that has a bunch of young single guys in it. Okay, so this time our main dude is at the gym and he's brought his buddy along as a spotter for some bench presses. To set this one up real good, you'll need to have some conversation on the way in about how important it is to have a spotter during this workout, because our guy is going to try and benchpress more weight than he ever has before. Maybe he's going for a personal best among the circle of young single dudes, and he needs his friend there both as a spotter and as a witness to his accomplishment. In any case, it's really important that he have a spotter. Okay, so our guy gets on the bench and gets ready. Once the weights are on the barbell, he takes a couple of deep breaths, and then wham--he's lifting the weights. So here's the funny part. Just as our hero gets the weight free and clear over his chest, his spotter-buddy sees this really hot chick on the other side of the gym! "Be right back, buddy," he tells our hero. And our guy can't do anything about it because he's struggling to keep the really heavy weight up over his body. But he can't hold out forever! Now we cut between the spotter-buddy making small talk with the babe on the other side of the gym and our hero slowly losing his strength under the barbell. Our guy is huffing and puffing, but his spotter-buddy is so into this chick that he's not paying the least bit attention. And then, when he just can't take it anymore, our guy lets the barbells come crashing down on his throat. We hear the sickening sound of his trachea cracking. His eyes bulge out and a trickle of blood comes out of his mouth. He's dead! Thirty minutes into your film and your wisecracking Vince Vaughan or Jack Black or Seth Rogen or whoever you have playing your jaunty man-child bachelor type is dead, dead, dead. No one saw that coming, making this the "Psycho" of comedies. Congratulations, I just put you in the running for a Palme d'Or.

Transformative Mysteries III

2011-07-17T20:55:00.001-05:00

I demand to live in a world where the following is possible.

A sleepy summer weekend with two films opening wide: Larry Crowne and Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. No one is particularly exited by the prospects, but having come to expect so little anymore, no one is particularly outraged either. Middle-aged white guy courts middle-aged white girl. Michael Bay takes one step closer to generating the most synthetically pure shockwave in the history of the motion picture.

But what if bored cinephiles had access to technology that allowed for an exchange, a transposition, a “Freaky Friday” that could restage two relatively generic films into something more sublime? In short, I want the ability to switch Tom Hanks and Optimus Prime. I want to see Optimus Prime courting Julia Roberts in Larry Crowne, and I want to see a gigantic Tom Hanks battle Decepticons in Transformers 3. Given all the digital wizardry we have access to now, not to mention all the money I have shoveled atop the dying embers of the Hollywood bonfire over the years, is that really so much to ask? When do my dreams get to come true on the big screen?

With no explanation given whatsoever, a 50’ tall Tom Hanks takes over in the role of Optimus—no armature, no make-up, no digitally processed voice effects, just Khaki Dockers and a plaid short-sleeve shirt. He fights the Decepticons with the usual wit and modest demeanor of the Tom Hanks we all know and love, apologizing to pedestrians before he throws Skywarp down a busy street, or saying something self-deprecating to Megatron before they battle to the death in Lake Michigan. I suppose he’ll need to “transform” into something to maintain the preschool wonderment of the franchise—perhaps a trusty Volvo.

But even Tom Hanks can only do so much to polish a giant mecha-turd like the Transformers franchise. More interesting, I think, would be seeing Optimus Prime in Larry Crowne. As we open, Optimus has been laid off from his job as head of the Legion of Metal or the Rustless Avengers or whatever the hell he’s been doing for the past 30 years. Despondent, he is encouraged by his childbots, Subprime A and Subprime B, to go back to college. There’s some low comedy as Optimus discovers the typical university campus was not designed to accommodate his massive frame—perhaps he accidentally takes out the centuries old colonnade leading to the library or backs-up over the Dean’s new Porsche ("I apologize, Dean Reynolds, but your vehicle was temporarily lost in what I believe your refer to colloquially as the “blind spot’"). Maybe he takes a History class and gets in a hilarious argument with his liberal professor over the necessity of occasionally destroying entire civilizations for the overall good of the universe. “You will find, Professor Tompkins, that the Torg-bots of Andulus-12 will not respond favorably to your cherished reason and diplomacy. They are programmed to respect only violence and power. They would leave the earth a tattered husk adrift in the solar winds before your starry-eyed diplomats could even make it to the spaceport.” Can’t linger here too long, however, or else we’ll simply become Robot Chicken.

So he meets Julia, sweet, sweet Julia. At once he is smitten. And though she is only a fleshy humanoid woman that he might crush with a flick of his phalangeal pulley array, he finds himself strangely awkward in her presence. Usually confident and loquacious in all situations, he becomes tongue-tied and oddly inappropriate (“Can I assist you in greasing your chassis later this evening, Professor Tainot? Excuse me, I should not have verbalized my odd longing to inspect the specifications of your skeletal framing. Perhaps you would assist me in greasing my chassis instead? Again I must apologize. I have just now received a software update indicating that chassis-greasing in the human species typically only occurs after the third interface. I did not mean to offend.” And so on. Really, it just writes itself).

Optimus can’t fit on a scooter, obviously, but there’s no need to jettison this scene of romantic joie de Vespa. In fact, the scene could be made even more profound and meaningful. “I am afraid my metric tonnage prevents my transport by ‘scooter,’ as you call it; however, I have calculated another option that may prove more feasible.” And then, for the first time in their relationship, Optimus transforms into his other identity, an extended-cab model 379 Peterbilt truck. The music swells as Julia Roberts, still idling on her Vespa, looks on in wonder and amazement. “I invite you to relocate your vehicle to the rear of my trailer,’ says Optimus. His payload door opens and a ramp descends covered with rose petals. “Please, Professor Tainot, I invite you to accelerate up my ramp and into my main cargo hold.” Julia is hesitant at first. Can she really be in love with this strange humanoid student-bot that has just transformed into a Peterbilt truck right before her eyes? She thought she was too old for love, that she would never love again, and yet….

Julia Roberts revs her engine and scampers up the ramp.

The trailer is pitch black inside, at least at first. But as her eyes adjust, Julia sees that Prime’s cargo hold contains the riches of a thousand years traveled across a thousand galaxies. Platinum servos from Kaldar-7; the luminous feathers of a Gorlond harvested from the nests of Outer Torqew; a rare diamond-codex monkey from the Talnasia system. A beautiful necklace of unknown but dazzling jewels materializes in mid air and then slowly lowers itself around her neck. And then, quietly, tenderly, a door opens at the front of the trailer. Optimus has opened the hatch to the sleeping compartment of his extended cab model 379 Peterbilt form. With a soft flash of light, the standard issue acrylic sheets morph into silk and satin. A candelabra self-ignites on the bed stand.

There is an awkward a pause, until at last Optimus speaks. “I am but a simple fighting bot,” he says, his voice noticeably cracking with emotion, “but I know that I love you, Professor Tainot. Somehow, I feel I have always known you, across the eons, and that we shall be one across the centuries."

Tears in her eyes, Julia advances, tentatively at first, but then with ecstatic joy spreading across her features. Yes, she loves Optimus too, she can see it now. She makes her way toward the threshold of the sleeping chamber.

But then a violent shaking knocks Julia to the ground! The entirety of Optimus’ metal frame seems to vibrate, its hinges and joints groaning. Julia bounces from one wall of the trailer to the other, as if Optimus were twisting and tumbling through open space. The trailer door reopens and we see some large, fleshy object begin to make its way into the compartment. Julia looks on in horror. What is happening? What is that thing inexorably advancing into Prime’s cargohold? “Optimus!” she screams. “Optimus! Help!” But there is no answer, only the inchworm undulations of the strangely organic intruder.

A look of horrific realization steals across Julia’s face. “Oh my god,” she mouths soundlessly to herself, the camera dollying-in and tilting-up in classic Spielberg fashion. We then cut to her POV and see what appears to be…..yes, it’s a giant human finger! And at the tip is a painted fingernail sparkling with pink glitter and the shimmering image of a prancing unicorn. A second finger appears out of nowhere and suddenly Julia is caught. She holds tight to her lover’s roll bar, but it is no use, the giant fingers gradually pull her out the back of the trailer.

We cut to a wide shot outside the trailer. It’s a little girl holding Optimus-as-379- Peterbilt-truck in the palm of her hand. With the other hand, she deftly extracts a struggling Julia Roberts, tiny and flailing. But this is no ordinary little girl. She wears a gingham dress with lace collar, to be sure, but a third eye blinks impassively in her forehead, her bald cranium encircled by four equidistant “goat” horns. For this little girl is….an alien from another world!

But there is still yet more movie fun to be had. The camera tracks past the 4-horned girl still immersed in her play. The mise-en-scene suggests a familiar yet slightly “off” living room—the chairs, lamps, and wall hangings of another world. As the camera continues moving, we see a series of dolls laid out side-by-side on the carpet. There is a doll that looks eerily like Amy Adams. Another resembles Drew Barrymore…Meryl Streep…Megan Fox…and so on. Finally the camera rests on what appears to be a video monitor of some kind, an alien “television set,” if you will. An animated commercial appears on the screen. It shows a little girl playing with dolls, ones that look just like the actresses we’ve just seen on the carpet. We can’t hear the dialogue, nor could we understand it even if we did—but we see the animated little girl holding a Julia Roberts doll—she bends the doll’s legs backwards, tucks the head into its chest, detaches and repositions the arms. Suddenly Julia Roberts has been “transformed” …into a canoe with oars!

Dear god, we realize, this is a planet where it is the female of the species that exhibits genital mastery through transformational doll play.

As this mind-blowing epiphany washes over us, offscreen, away from the alien TV, we hear the horrifying sound of bones cracking like broken celery. Roberts screams, “Optimus! Save me!” But there is no rescue, for we will now fade to black.

Representatives of Micheal Bay should feel free to contact me by email to discuss points and residuals.

Cantorblocked

2011-07-14T09:01:00.000-05:00

"The Zookeeper" with Kevin James in Biblical Prophecy

2011-07-10T21:04:00.000-05:00

"Zookeeper" Checklist

2011-07-08T01:18:00.001-05:00

Zookeeper with Kevin James opens this weekend and there’s not a god-damned thing you can do to stop it. Moreover, it will probably make a lot of money genuinely entertaining people you can’t stand; or more charitably, the pre-adolescent children of people about whom you have no real opinion. You may even find yourself forced to see it due to circumstances beyond your control. If so, Godspeed and good luck. To make your experience slightly less hellish, please feel free to print the following checklist and take it with you to the theater. It is a comprehensive inventory of things that we can probably expect to see in Zookeeper. As each of these comedic affronts transpire, you can amuse yourself by checking it off the list. After you're done, you can even score your results. Have fun!

Zookeeper Checklist

[ ] Kevin James eating a pastry

[ ] Kevin James eating a large bag of chips

[ ] Kevin James involved in comically futile fitness routine

[ ] First Appearance of workplace bully, either “boss” or rival employee

[ ] Kevin James’ comic double-take at hearing first words spoken by talking animal

[ ] Kevin James humiliated in front of “love interest”

[ ] First cursing zoo animal

[ ] Feces thrown

[ ] Feces stepped in

[ ] Love interest overhears Kevin James talking to animals; thinks he’s crazy

[ ] Kevin James invents awkward, unconvincing story as to why he was

talking to an animal

[ ] Love Interest surprises a pantless Kevin James, mistakenly assumes he is

about to have sex with a zoo animal

[ ] Kevin James invents awkward, unconvincing story as to why he was

pantless in zoo pen with animal

[ ] Zoo animal speaking with “funny” ethnic and/or regional human accent

[ ] Joke about sexual allure of “swollen” or “red” hindquarters

[ ] Kevin James mistakenly consumes disgusting zoo animal food

[ ] Elephant using trunk to douse Kevin James and/or workplace bully

[ ] Running gag involving llama or camel renowned for either stinking or spitting

[ ] A zoo animal behaving in a way that defies our typical view of species (i.e.

monkey afraid of heights; pacifist lion, etc).

[ ] Kevin James fart attributed to zoo animal

[ ] Zoo animal fart attributed to Kevin James

[ ] Primate makes inappropriately bawdy remarks about Kevin James’ love

interest

[ ] Kevin James takes shot to the balls

[ ] Kevin James takes repeated shots to the balls

[ ] Zoo animals execute a cooperative caper to assist Kevin James, but

without his knowledge (each animal displaying a distinctive "skill")

[ ] Zoo animals engaged in “typical” male recreations (i.e. poker, bowling, cigar smoking, etc.)

[ ] Zoo animal paired with “nagging” spouse

[ ] Love interest tells Kevin James she’s always liked him for “who he really is.”

[ ] Humiliation of workplace bully, most likely in pile of animal dung

[ ] Ending in which zoo animal implies, by words or by winking, that Kevin James and love interest are about to have sex--most likely the monkey voiced by Adam Sandler.

Score

Perfect 30:

Warning! May actually be a subversively brilliant critique of the genre

25-29:

It's the end of the world and I feel fine.

20-24:

Could my little (brother/sister/cousin/nephew) really think this is funny? Am I really related to such an imbecile?

15-19:

Like watching a 'King of Queens' marathon with the flu and no access to a remote

10-14:

The sweet spot of shit

5-9:

Slightly less terrible than predicted; better than Grown Ups, certainly

1-4:

Sincere apologies to all the talented people involved in this project

Scottish Rats

2011-07-06T19:00:00.000-05:00

Notes on "Orphans of the Storm"

2011-06-30T17:14:00.000-05:00

During a recent raid on the Salvation Army, I found a copy of the photoplay edition of Orphans of the Storm, published by Grosset and Dunlap in 1923. The book is a "novelization" of the film directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Lillian and Dorothy Gish. As old books go, it's not really all that valuable (you can still get a decent copy for under $5 at Amazon). But what makes this particular copy unique is a glowing, hand-written appreciation of the film on the book's opening endpage. Given that these lines, written in blue pen, are signed and dated at the bottom of the page, perhaps this celebration of the film was inscribed as personal testimony before giving the book as a gift. Then again, maybe the writer just wanted to write down his feelings about the movie for him/herself (unclear from the signature). In any case, the complete inscription appears below as a service to silent film scholars, Griffith/Gish fans, and marginalia aficionados.

Ass Screamer

2011-06-25T13:09:00.000-05:00

Summer Hoarding Season on A&E

2011-06-22T17:07:00.002-05:00

Good news for those who have an inordinate interest in symptomatic neurosis: Hoarders has returned for a fourth season on A&E. Since its premiere in 2009, Hoarders has become a rather unexpected “hit” (at least in basic cable terms), introducing viewers to some 80 “hoarders” over 40 episodes. “Hoarding” should be a self-evident condition, but if not, here’s the Mayo Clinic’s definition:

Hoarding is the excessive collection of items, along with the inability to discard them. Hoarding often creates such cramped living conditions that homes may be filled to capacity, with only narrow pathways winding through stacks of clutter. Some people also collect animals, keeping dozens or hundreds of pets often in unsanitary conditions.

The Clinic goes on to add that “hoarding” is sometimes but not always linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and that treatment for the condition can prove difficult in that individuals “often don’t see it as a problem.”

The Foucauldian and/or libertarian in you might be saying, “If so-called hoarders don’t perceive a problem, then why not just leave them alone?” That would be fine, except the practice of hoarding typically leads to a confrontation with an institution that will not abide such behavior: neighbors complain about the junk in the yard; the courts threaten to take children away; landlords threaten to evict; spouses move-out; rats move in; and so on. The A&E series usually starts each story at one of these crisis points, the moment when friends and family decide grandma can no longer be allowed to live buried underneath piles of ever expanding garbage (lest they have to take her in themselves).

"Hoarders" appear to come in two basic forms: 1). those who fixate on accumulating a particular item (dolls, plates, junked cars, animals, etc); and 2). those who manifestly refuse to allow any material object to exit the home (empty bottles, old newspapers, pizza boxes, etc). The first type is the more rare and of interest precisely because the symptom is so specifically Freudian (why tea sets? Parrots? Cabbage Patch dolls?) But the real meat of the series is the second type—those who have let a once pristine house or apartment devolve into abject squalor, not only “hoarding,” but abandoning any attempt to organize—much less utilize—any of their precious possessions.

A&E tries to pass off Hoarders as a “documentary” series, but do not be fooled—it trades in the very same class horrorshow as bottom-feeders like Cops. The problem for most “hoarders” is not so much that they hoard things; rather, it is the lack of resources that prevents them from hoarding items in a more socially acceptable manner. Jay Leno, for example, is by all accounts a disturbed hoarder of vintage automobiles. Given that he has sufficient real estate to house the vehicles, however, no one seems poised to make an intervention. If Jay collected vintage microwave ovens on his front yard in Encino, on the other hand, the Sheriff’s office would be there each week ticketing him for his socially and psychologically disturbed behavior.

The “intervention” structure of the series flatters viewers into believing they are concerned for the psychological welfare and eventual recovery of each week’s hoarder—but in truth the primary attraction here is the anarchic spectacle of unchecked consumption and the ensuing cycle of obsolescence, decay, and contamination. Perhaps this explains the unexpected popularity of the “hoarding” meme over the past three years (even Marge Simpson temporarily fell under its sway this past season). As the economy contracts, severely impacting the lower middle-classes that Hoarders so frequently showcases each week, the series stages a surprisingly frank confrontation between a commodity life disrupted and a psychological life traumatized—something that now almost everyone can relate to in some fashion.

Looking back from the other side of the economic meltdown, George W. Bush’s wartime advice to “keep on shopping” now seems even more pathetically desperate and sad—a “clap for Tinkerbell” strategy that could only succeed for so long. Now that everything has gone to shit, the “hoarder” stands as a particularly tragic yet fascinating figure, an individual who makes the inevitably deteriorating cycle of consumption and happiness most explicit. Some hoarders, like demented squirrels, have to bring some new “acorn” home everyday lest they feel intense psychic distress for not making an acquisition. And, as the series loves to showcase repeatedly, once an object—no matter how insignificant and utterly disposable—is in the home, the prospect of removing it causes what is obviously an intense psychological crisis. In one episode, a therapist confronts a woman with hundreds of sweaters that have never been worn. Following the fashion-industry’s rather self-serving advice that any item not worn in a year should be given away, the decluttering team attempts to persuade the woman to sell some of them at a garage sale. But when the time comes to pick the actual sweaters to put on sale, the woman becomes anxious and distraught—her expression revealing a mental calculus equating “having” with happiness and security, “not having” with depression and vulnerability. Given that other family members are threatening to walk unless the sweater problem comes under control, her pained and almost panicked reaction enacts Marx’s “commodity fetish” in most literal and poignant terms. Having the magical cloak of 500 sweaters seems more important than any human relationship within the house.

Hoarders intersects in an odd way with a major theme in the last few novels of J.G. Ballard. Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006) are all essentially the same book—each trying to capture the post-millennial malaise of a western middle-class for the most part immune to scarcity and danger, bored to death in their suburban compounds, and half-heartedly invested in the last remaining erotics of contemporary life: cycles of sexy commodity consumption. Millennium People is perhaps the most successful of the three novels, telling the story of a London psychologist slowly drawn into a middle-class terrorist cell operating out of the privileged neighborhoods of Chelsea. The cell’s targets involve, not governmental or military sites, but rather those institutions that symbolize the politics of leisure: travel agencies, video stores, cat shows, etc.—disruptions staged in an effort to wake the slumbering middle-class from their insulating cocoon of unreflexive consumerism (in one chapter, a “terrorist” dons the garb of a social scientist/market researcher and goes door-to-door in a rich development asking homeowners survey questions specifically designed to make them uncomfortable about just how boring their lives have become). The thesis that middle-class consumption replaced proletarian labor as the primary engine of capitalism in the twentieth-century is not necessarily original or unique, but appearing in 2003, right at the threshold of the global economic meltdown and the rise of the TV hoarder, Ballard’s novel seems—once again—eerily prescient.

Perhaps these are the times we are living through: a disenchantment with commodity life attached to its future improbability. All of which makes the “hoarder” all the more fascinating—an empathetic figure who believes if they just store enough shit in the house they might just get by (or better yet, find happiness), even as the continued storing of said shit in fact only makes them more miserable. And hats off to A&E for designing a compelling advertising vehicle that hinges, for the most part, on our growing revulsion at spectacles of consumer alienation and dysfunction.

Media Archaeology

2011-06-21T16:23:00.001-05:00

I have an article on media, psychosis, and the "influencing machine" in a new anthology edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. Below is a description of the book and a full table of contents.

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

1. Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology

Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka

Part I: Engines of/in the Imaginary

2. Dismantling the Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study

Erkki Huhtamo

3. On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media

Eric Kluitenberg

4. On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine

Jeffrey Sconce

5. Freud and the Technical Media: The Enduring Magic of the Wunderblock

Thomas Elsaesser

Part II: (Inter)facing Media

6. The “Baby Talkie,” Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern

Machiko Kusahara

7. The Observer’s Dilemma: To Touch or Not to Touch

Wanda Strauven

8. The Game Player’s Duty: The User as the Gestalt of the Ports

Claus Pias

9. The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future Is a Memory

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Part III: Between Analogue and Digital

10. Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation

Paul DeMarinis

11. Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media

Wolfgang Ernst

12. Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance

Jussi Parikka

13. Objects of Our Affection: How Object Orientation Made Computers a Medium

Casey Alt

14. Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational Processes

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

15. Afterword: Media Archaeology and Re-presencing the Past

Vivian Sobchack

Astro-Chillaxin'

2011-06-15T00:22:00.001-05:00

South Park: Either/Or

2011-06-09T13:44:00.001-05:00

If you've fallen out of the habit of watching South Park (and no one would blame you--it's been on the air now for a somewhat unbelievable 15 seasons), you really owe it to yourself to check out this week's mid-season finale, "You're Getting Old." Don't be fooled by Comedy Central's typical misdirect in the promos (which pitches the episode as another fart-filled satire on pop-music trends--in this case a mythical "tween wave" explosion sweeping the nation). The episode is much more interesting than that, ending with a moment of genuine melancholy that has many pop-pundits and fans speculating the series either has or will very soon come to an end. Technically Parker and Stone owe the network 6 more episodes before their current contract is up, but who's to say they might not pull a Chappelle and simply walk away. It would be a great and completely appropriate ending, closing the series in a genuinely thoughtful way and--in keeping with their often antagonistic relationship to their employers--denying CC the opportunity to do a month of hype in anticipation of an announced series finale.

Why did this week's episode surprise so many long-time viewers? Mainly because of some rather significant transgressions of format, cues that this was meant to be, dare I say it, a "very special" episode. The story opens with a party for Stan's tenth birthday, thus puncturing the "timeless" oblivion so crucial to episodic television, and in particular the contemporary animated progeny of The Simpsons. Actually, South Park did make a gesture toward this earlier in the run by having the boys advance a grade at school (most likely to punch up the classroom aspects of the series). Stan reaching the ripe old age of 10, however, signals something more definitive, especially in that his move into double-digits brings with it a genuinely troubling philosophical crisis. Stan notices that the "tween wave" music that he once loved (and that Kenny, Cartman, and Kyle continue to idolize) now sounds like shits and farts. Later, at the doctor's office, he is unable to distinguish between a movie poster for the new Kevin James' film and a picture of a re-heated turd in a microwave. Just as 99.99% of South Park's viewers are identifying with the beauty, classicism, and necessity of this gag, the doctor has bad news for Stan (and the viewer): he has become a "cynical asshole."

For the middle-block, Stan becomes a surrogate for any and all who have ever felt themselves to be living in cultural exile. Everything looks, sounds, and tastes like shit to Stan, evoking an endless litany of complaints over how crappy, predictable, and generally awful everything has become. Stan's cynicism is so unchecked, in fact, that the other three boys begin to avoid him--they want to retain the ability to enjoy the new Adam Sandler movie or Jim Carey in Mr. Popper's Penguins as actual entertainment. In the "B" plot, meanwhile, Stan's parents, Randy and Sharon, are involved in another huge fight (ostensibly over Randy's purported love of "tween wave"). All of this leads to the episode's wholly unexpected and surprisingly poignant close--an extended montage of the Marsh family dissolving set to Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide." Yes, the show that once depicted Stevie Nicks as a braying goat here uses her signature ballad without a shred of irony, acknowledging (at least it would seem) that the song actually does possess some degree of beauty and wisdom.

Well, I've been afraid of changing
'Cause I've built my life around you
But time makes you bolder
Children get older
I'm getting older too

It may seem corny and improbable, but it's a beautiful moment of television, even more powerful because it's so thoroughly unexpected given the show's reputation and history. It's also a complicated gesture, one that reaffirms that pop culture can be every bit as allusive and complicated as "high" literature and art. Some are interpreting the ending as Parker and Stone's personal realization that its time to move on, that they can't go into their forties and fifties still making fart jokes and simply ripping on each month's current pop outrage. Then again, the very premise of the episode suggests that such cynicism is an inevitable product of age (part of the effect here is the sense that after this episode, it's hard to imagine how Stan can simply go back to being the Stan of old).

Here the question becomes positively Kierkegaardian: how does one share the world with Kevin James? Is it pathetic, sad, and futile to continue struggling against a world that gives us such a steady diet of reheated turds in the form of Kevin James' movies, or should one simply acknowledge that Kevin James (and others like him) are never going away, and so you might as well turn your attention to something more productive in life? Either way, it's a diabolical dilemma, sort of a pop-consumer version of the "red pill/blue pill" choice offered Neo in The Matrix. As they now get older, what will South Park and its audience of veteran ironicists do? Continue with a critical-political position of bitter disaffection from the mainstream of American culture, or make some attempt to change it through strategies other than reflexive negation?

If nothing else, it certainly raises the stakes on The Book of Mormon, Parker and Stone's soon to officially open Broadway production, and by all accounts a surprisingly empathetic account of religion and faith in general (and again, as with Nicks, based on a previous target of merciless ridicule). Is this the end of irony and a shift to the ethical life? The next six episodes (if they happen) should be very interesting.

Abandoned Photo

2011-06-08T23:29:00.001-05:00

Photograph found on the sidewalk.

Neatly ripped in half.

Rescued and scanned so that it can now be equally lost in digital form.

The Conservative Unimagination

2011-06-06T17:13:00.003-05:00

Move over James O'Keefe of dressing up like a pimp, editing out-of-context, and destroying ACORN fame, there's a new right-wing whippersnapper making the rounds on the TV and Internet and he's got a bold, new, and breathtaking thesis: "The media is dominated by liberals." Old news, you say, as you hose down the deer guts off your F150--everyone knows that Fox and Limbaugh are the only trusted sources for news. But wait! This new kid, Ben Shapiro, has just enough edge on the tools in his critical toolbox to realize that it isn't just the news that's biased--so too is the alleged "entertainment" programming on network primetime. Ben even got some well-known Hollywood liberal types to admit as much--openly, unabashedly, and without bursting into flames!

Like Disney films and crop rotation, every seven years or so an intrepid conservative makes this discovery all over again for a new generation (or more cynically, a hack realizes it's been six years since the last "liberals are using TV to force me into having an abortion and/or feeling sympathy for the poor" book). Contracts are signed. Anecdotes are gathered. Lube up and let the Fox daisy-chain begin anew!

From his web graphics, Ben looks like a nice enough young man. And he's got the Constitution unfurling behind him, so you know he understands what America's all about--especially in terms of the founder's "original intent" as to the true principles that should be guiding the network up-fronts. True, knowing as we do now that conservatism appears to be linked to a "fear" gene, it's always sad to see someone so young already aspiring to the value system of a fifty-something executive worried the city might build public housing near his country club, but the kid seems earnest enough, like he's really on to a big discovery of some kind. So assuming he isn't just cynically exploiting the tragically pre-sold market for this Chicken Littleshit, let's review (sigh...once again) the basic arguments:

*Hollywood is dominated by liberals. Yes. Check. Absolutely. You see, Ben, most of the people in Hollywood--even the most calculatingly bloodless producer types--consider themselves to be involved in the Arts. I know that may seem incredible when talking about CSI or The Big Bang Theory, but it's true. And most of the people who are willing to take the time, effort, and trouble to forge a career in the Arts are liberals. Ben, think back a couple years to your High School, and more specifically to the "Theater kids"...did you have much luck convincing them that John McCain had their best interests at heart? As they traded bottles of magenta hair dye and smoked joints in the bathroom, were they less than attentive to your pleas for a flat-tax and the virtues of traditional marriage?

The writing staffs of most sitcoms, meanwhile, are dominated by whip smart, clever, witty arts/humanities majors from top universities. After college, they move to Los Angeles and live 3 to an apartment in the city's less scenic outskirts, hustling to sell a script or get signed onto a show. That process can take months or even years, and even when it does happen, there is zero job security. Who else would fit this profile other than a starry-eyed liberal, someone who is so blinded by the romance of art, culture, and self-expression that they would willingly forgo a decent income, stable personal relationships, and a Bosch kitchen for a shot at punching up the dialogue on a David Spade movie?

The truly smart kids, like yourself Ben, all get MBAs and Law Degrees so that they can buy, sell, sue, and control foolish liberals at will. Don't believe me? Just watch a young liberal artiste trying to buy a car, negotiate a mortgage, or do his or her taxes. It's not a pretty sight, Ben, because conservatives have forged an entire world designed to fleece the romantic, flaky, artistic and otherwise easily distracted of their time, money, and sanity. You may be mad that TV doesn't show more people bitching about Obamacare--but compare that to the stress of having no health insurance and driving a ten-year old Hyundai around Burbank trying to get a meeting for a "can't lose" retro-eighties Bro-mance, based on a forgotten side-plot of Moby Dick that you wrote an essay about back at Brown.

*Hollywood discriminates against conservatives. We've already established above that there just aren't really all that many conservatives clamouring to work in show biz -- the ones that are, moreover, no doubt suffer from various forms of shame and self-loathing (it's hard, after all, to be so completely surrounded by the compassion, wisdom, and basic good sense of liberalism without eventually converting--we warned you thirty years ago the U.S. was poised to collapse under the weight of mindless consumerism, widening class divisions, selfish materialism, and environmental disaster. You do remember those conversations, don't you? Not you, Ben, I realize you've learned most of your conservatism by seeing how Fox makes it look like a really cool family that has all the answers in a scary world).

Shapiro finds it outrageous that Dwight Schultz, who played the crazy guy on The A-Team, hasn't worked much since the show went off the air in 1987. This lack of work is purportedly a function of Schultz's conservative political views. I'll be the first to concede that we haven't seen much of Mr. Schultz since 1987. Then again, there are many hundreds of actors with "liberal" political views who, like Schultz, had their one turn at TV fame and then never worked again--that's how television generally works. For every raving communist like Tom Selleck who somehow finds a new TV job with each new TV decade, there are thousands who would kill for their one shot at A-Team residuals so they could retire to Ojai and open a pottery shop. And quite frankly, looking back at Mr. Schultz's complex and nuanced portrayal of "Howlin' Mad" Murdock, should he really expect a long line of producers and directors knocking at his door to employ his singular talents? Was he hoping for the lead in a PBS adaptation of The Fountainhead? (and before you feel too bad for Mr. S., he eventually got a gig playing Reginald Barclay on Star Trek: Next Generation--the single most in-your-face liberal show ever to be conceived by the human brain, a show so appallingly Utopian in its leftist politics that it even embarrasses many liberals. Meanwhile, do you think the folks over at the 700 Club are actively interviewing secular atheists in the service of diversity and expanded perspectives? No, they are not.)

Perhaps conservatives feel discriminated against in Hollywood because show biz doesn't really follow their expectations for how one lands work. Connections can help in Hollywood, for example, but not to the same extent that they matter in the land of conservatism. Knowing someone might get you an internship at a studio for a few months, or in rare cases a starring role in Beverly Hills 90210 (where the very premise of the show somehow made such slimy nepotism okay)-- but it's certainly not going to get a C-student into Yale or a dimwitted nephew into middle-management at Bank of America. Drop Jon Cryer's latte three times and you're a marked man or woman, demoted without ceremony back to the Warner Brothers copy room. Screw over a hundred thousand people with bad housing loans from your dad's bank? Take a vacation, son, and when you come back we'll put you in charge of corporate real estate.

Another reason Hollywood tends to depend on cultural producers from the Left is that they have more talent. I'm sorry to have to say this so bluntly, but it's true. Given that "conservatism" is at heart an ideology that believes in moral absolutes and unquestioning subservience to authority (unless it's black and from Hawaii), it does not really lend itself to powerful dramaturgy or empathetic comedy. Which is the better outline for Les Miserables: Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister's starving children and spends 19 years either on the run or in jail for his "crime," thereby demonstrating the horrifying ironies of man's "law," prejudice, and social corruption; or, Jean Valjean is a thief and suffers the appropriate penalties for his defiance? Which strikes you as a better sitcom premise: four to six young singles negotiate the uncertain world of relationships and professional life in a big city full of new ideas and experimental possibilities; or, Jack unquestioningly marries his high school sweetheart right after graduation and they reproduce without incident?

The "left" has just about every significant writer and philosopher of the past two centuries. The right has Ayn Rand, who misread Nietzsche and then wrote some truly dreadful novels painfully elaborating on that fundamental misreading.

*Hollywood inserts "secret messages" supporting the Left:

Here's the kind of thing that gets right-wingers like Shapiro all hot under their starchy collars: Remember on Friends, way back in 1996, when they had that lesbian wedding?   The "minister," if we can call her that, was played by none other than Candace Gingrich, the openly gay sister of right-wing idiologue Newt Gingrich. God damn, that chaps my homophobic hide! How dare the producers of a network sitcom insert a liberal "in-joke" recognizable only to those who already support gay marriage (i.e. if you know who Candace Gingrich is, or even more to the point, could pick her out of a police line-up, I would say the odds are 99 to 1 you support gay marriage). This is particularly outrageous considering that her poor brother Newt has almost no recourse to a public forum of any kind to tell us why his sister shouldn't have the right to marry whomever she chooses.

Imagine, liberals, if the producers of 24 had cast Ted Nugent as Jack Bauer's munitions consultant, you would have been madder than a wet-yet-still-pansy-assed hornet!

Speaking of Ted Nugent, who's going to give me back all the brain cells I destroyed as a teen listening to and memorizing such nuggets of conservative wisdom as:

Wang Dang Sweet Poontang!
Beat me, beat me, come on and eat me!
Got you in a stranglehold now baby, then i crushed your face!

And this gets to the political right's saddest misunderstanding about both the media and the world. They really do seem to think that every object and/or person is 100% pure in terms of its politics. You're either with us--completely and totally--or you're agin' us.   Friends has a lesbian wedding with Candace Gingrich and is thus a "left-wing" show, 24 beats up people for timely information and is thus from the right-wing. Never mind that all culture is infinitely more complex, ambivalent, confused, and contradictory than that (well, maybe more so from always questioning lefties than "God said it. I believe it. That settles it" conservatism).

Yes, Glee is a homofriendly propaganda machine designed to make future generations less uptight about issues of sexual orientation (a long-running and extremely successful project of Leftist entertainment, I might add. Note to cantankerous old farts upset about all the gays on the TV and radio: your children and grand-children are waiting for you to die. Nothing personal, but truly you are the glue gunking up the progressive gears of future liberty and justice). But Glee also encourages me to believe that I can find true self-expression by obediently consuming and celebrating the marketplace's canon of corporately-crafted pop songs about the joys of love, fun, and "being yourself." So its politics are a 50/50 proposition at best.

But even the right is more confused than they know. I mean, just look at that picture of the Nuge above: He's wearing the chosen emblem of poor, disaffected, rural whites who imagine they somehow share something of the Frontier spirit with Native Americans, when in fact their own ancestors drove these tribes out of Dixie so that African-Americans could be brought in as a slave labor force--all of these injustices enforced under the threat of very real violence (i.e. guns). What is the Nuge trying to tell us in this hostile hot mess? Good ole boys and Injuns unite to kill the liberal elites? Stay vigilant my cracker friends, I done heard Obama wants to repatriate the Cherokee back to Georgia? The Indians are going to "rise again," better armed, and burn Alabama to the ground? Red man or white, we can all agree that freshly-killed raccoon meat is delicious? Who can tell what is going on in the complexities of the Nugent mind?

Let's conclude with an offer to Ben and all the other conservatives upset that liberals are "brainwashing" them through movies and TV.

Conservatives: pick any five of the top ten shows currently on TV and you can replace the entire writing and directing staff with bonafide right-wingers. Glee, Modern Family, House...whatever gets your goat. In exchange, liberals get to pick any five of the top ten companies on the Fortune 500 and replace the CEO and Board of Directors with bonafide left-wingers.

Let's check back in a year and see who had the opportunity to have the most impact on the political life of the nation and world.

Terrifying Images from this Week's 'National Enquirer'

2011-05-30T23:17:00.000-05:00

The monkey from Hangover II walking the red carpet at the premiere

Maria Shriver rendered as psychotic harpie.

The head of Peter Fonda

Oil portrait of Jennifer Aniston's

recently deceased dog.

Something called a "teacup fairy."

The white light is a unicorn-shaped bowling ball

2011-05-26T18:53:00.000-05:00

The following is an "exquisite corpse" story written by students in my Exploitation/Cult Cinema course this past term. The opening sentence is the first line from Boy Crazy by Nicolas Pine, the fifth installment in the Terror Academy series.

Shannon Riley sighed and lifted her crystal green eyes to the tinted window of the bus. The emeralds had arrived last night, and were carved so exquisitely that they fit into her eye sockets better than her original eyes. She put on a new necklace and decided tonight was going to be different. She didn’t want to be treated like some two-dollar whore. She was worth at least twice that. How many elephants would a man sacrifice to deserve her? He would never truly know, but he was determined to find out if he could ever win her over. Knowing that he had from birth been set up for failure, he knew that winning her over, making her notice him, and her accepting his hand in marriage would be the last thing he would attempt before giving up for good. But alas, a simple ‘no’ concluded his bearlike passion. Gerard could not believe that this was her response! The idea that she had planned the whole thing to the extent of vomiting blood and soiling herself during the wedding—it was inconceivable. It was as though she didn’t care a thing for her husband-to-be or the $20,000 wedding dress he had bought for her.

She’d rather try on hats in front of the bathroom mirror. The mirror shattered when she gazed into it. Still, she didn’t need the mirror to confirm what she already knew in her heart—she looked good, damn good, and something as trivial as a kitty mask wasn’t going to change that. Suddenly she realized something was wrong—‘you know things with your brain, not your heart!’ she thought (with her heart). She remembered taking long baths in her neighbor’s porcelain tub. Her neighbor had no idea. How would he know he was living next door to a nudist if the blinds were always closed? He must have broken into the house and seen the nude man in person. Seeing a man naked in the house made him forget completely why he was there in the house to begin with. He completely froze up and hid himself in a closet and watched the action unfold hidden from sight. The nude man would often do push-ups. His exercise routine was specifically designed to maximize his abs, and therefore his chances with the ladies. But more specifically, he wanted to impress Marlene, the new HR rep at work. What he didn’t know is that Marlene only dates midgets. This results from an incident in her early childhood, when she had a particularly beautiful one for a preschool teacher, with long, curly hair and blue eyes.

But this phase soon ended, and we find now find her living in her great aunt’s basement with twelve cats and a cactus. The cactus, which may have seemed like an afterthought, was actually a very rare species and meant a great deal to her. She approached the cactus, fondling its fruit, mouth watering in anticipation of its bittersweet taste. The fuchsia prickly pear was just out of reach, even when she climbed on a small ladder. Taunted by the pear’s intoxicating aroma, she decided to forsake the ladder only to be reminded of the experimental jet pack technology that her great uncle Snidely had been developing in his top secret basement laboratory. Ultimately, the jetpack’s exhaust gave her one hell of a buzz. Her landing was a bit bumpy but she made it to the laundry mat. Upon reaching the laundry mat, she realized she had forgotten her clothes, and decided to bathe herself in a washing machine. Since she wasn’t able to fit into one washing machine, she combined two, placed half of her body to one and the other half to the other. One half of her body in the washing machine started counting the number of holes in the machine. There were too many holes, she decided. Far too many! She needed to fill in the holes immediately. Looking to her left, she saw a can of Play-Do that she could use as Spackle.

She chose not to, however, which left her with no choice…it was either this or going back to selling vacuums door-to-door in Arkansas. Anything in the world would be better than moving there. There was nothing left there for anyone under the age of 65. Nothing except the xylophone carousels that filled the fields. Their music echoed among the grains and tractors. Then the pig donkey started dancing! They danced until the donkey wheel created a white light. Suddenly the white light gets too bright so they have to stop dancing. The white light is a unicorn-shaped bowling ball. The bowling ball got blasted by the unicorn’s galaxy destruction ray. The bowling ball shattered, and the shards flew out to impale the unicorn once and for all. It was at this moment that the transcendent man self-actualized and sprouted a beard. He had now become the man he had always hoped to be. He looked at himself in the mirror and didn’t want to change anything. Because he was born that way! And because of the way he was born, he had trouble making friends. He probably just needs to practice. I mean no one is hopeless. It’s almost impossible to do anyway, and it takes years to get it right. 2 years pass. Sam and Tom reunite. But in their reunion they found themselves lost in static, destined to exist within the screen. “Get the balls, Mama,” they said, and they grabbed the balls and threw them at the wall.