Here's my friend Dave Etkin's e-Christmas card. Always a treat.

Todd Jackson has an in-depth interview with Kurt Andersen here. Fascinating, for the seven or eight of us who like that sort of thing. There's a puzzling insistence on Mad Magazine as Spy's forebear, when Spy's lineage is obvious: Private Eye filtered through the graphic sophistication of National Lampoon. Lampoon was Punch's Harvard-educated American cousin; Spy played the same role with Private Eye. Like Private Eye, Spy was a irreverent, sharply written update on the doings of a well-heeled clutch of people on a island they mistook for the center of the universe. I like and admire Kurt Andersen (he blurbed Barry 1, bless him), and I'd love to see him write a book on American humor. He's smart as hell and funny, too. But I think Spy's legacy is mixed.

First off, its central premise was flawed. In our current culture, celebrities are more or less immune to satire (witness the continuing omnipresence of Spy bete noire Donald Trump). A humor magazine devoted to skewering celebrities constantly runs the risk of turning into just another celebrity magazine. That's why Graydon Carter could move from Spy to Vanity Fair so effortlessly. And that move suggests that, far from having an honest conflict within its original brief, Spy's heart was never pure. It didn't want to change the world, New York, or even the media; it simply wanted to be its arbiter, with all the power and privilege that accrues thereto.

This destroys its moral power, the primary weapon of any satirist. In all the interview's yammering about MAD, it doesn't mention that maybe one of the reasons that MAD has survived is because it was created by outsiders (Gaines, Kurtzman and Feldstein) for those eternal outsiders, kids. Gaines wouldn't even allow ads in MAD, that's how pure his heart was. He knew that in a culture dominated by advertising, hucksterism, and hype, MAD had to be beyond reproach.

Of course there was no way Spy could shun ads, even if it had wanted to. By 1986, Spy was the only new humor magazine the American magazine business could generate, because it fit their prejudices about how magazines had to work in the post-TV age--who they had to appeal to, how they had to be published and distributed, et cetera. This locked Spy into having to court the same old advertisers, ones that would always prefer supporting a magazine that didn't antagonize the rich and powerful (like Rolling Stone, or New York, or The NY Times Magazine), as opposed to one that did. And it meant that when it came time for the founders to sell, they would be looking for money from the exact same people they'd been sneering at. Perhaps Spy could've lasted over the long haul if it had used the Private Eye model: a like-minded angel (in the Eye's case, Peter Cook) supporting a constantly imperiled, vaguely disreputable, bare-bones operation. And if my aunt were a man, she'd be my uncle.

Still, Spy was better than nothing, and certainly vastly better than it had to be. Some great writing; consistently excellent design. It was thoroughly itself, which was admirable. But in all the time I read it, I never thought Spy grasped the central lesson of Harold Ross' New Yorker. The New Yorker only appeared to be exclusive. It was actually inclusive; it survived not because Manhattanites read it--they were then, as now, an overserved demo--but because it became a fixture on coffee tables and nightstands in Evanston and Denver and San Francisco. Spy, on the other hand, was genuinely exclusive--it really was for people who knew about The Odeon and the Ochs family and Spee. That's why it was doomed from a financial standpoint.

In the "not its fault" category, Spy also influenced a generation of writers and editors, convincing them that archness, knowingness, insiderness--what lazy-brained media types call "being smart"--was the essence of being funny. (This replaced the old definition which was, of course, being able to make people laugh.) Now, sweating it to make your audience laugh was the worst thing you could do--better to go in the opposite direction, to be affectless, deadpan, blank. Or best of all, ironic: express one thing, imply the opposite, and let the audience figure out the puzzle. The smart ones would follow, and screw the rest. The people who followed Spy confused a nice side-effect of comedy--welding people together through shared affinity--with the whole point of the exercise. "I don't want the most laughs; I want the right laughs." This attitude is catnip to comedy types because it feeds into their resentment towards the audience; it takes away the audience's power, and makes the comedian the decider of what's funny or not. Trouble is, professional comedy is a business transaction, and under those circumstances the customer is always right.

Most people have jobs, and don't have time to decode layers of irony. What's more, they don't need humor magazines that might make them feel stupid, ill-educated, unhip--excluded. That's why Spy gave (and continues to give) the New York media crowd such a boner, and also why it couldn't carve out a sustaining niche from the most literate, most educated, richest mass audience in the history of humanity. Spy and its descendents proceed from the belief that most people would rather watch TV, so they make no concessions to the mass taste, and are content to appeal to small, compulsively literate subgroups. That may be valid as an artistic approach, but it also insures that print's impact on our culture will continue to dwindle. Humor magazines--the best ones, at least--aren't Nell's. You shouldn't have to know the bouncer to get in. When humorous prose is a puzzle, when it's a method of separating out the cool kids from everybody else, I agree with the rest of America: bring on the funny pictures.

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Italian scientists have discovered a way to replace the expensive silicon in solar panels with blueberry pigment You cannot make this stuff up. Whatever else it will be, our future will be indescribably weird.

Saw "The Madness of King George" a night ago and found myself, to my surprise, somewhat annoyed--I usually love Alan Bennett's work. For those of you who haven't seen it, King George III goes mad (historians now believe as a result of the hereditary eyzmatic disorder porphyria). He is tormented by doctors and forced into seclusion by his conniving son. But, just as he's about to be locked away for good, he's given a new doctor with strange, modern methods and is cured.

Okay, nice story, but not true. George went mad periodically for the rest of his life, and the Prince of Wales did eventually take over. So the catharsis of the movie--which is blatantly historical--is fraudulent. Furthermore, the "methods" of the hero-doctor involve slinging the King into a restraining chair (think of an electric chair without the metal cap where all the real business is conducted), then keeping him bound and gagged "until [he] learns to behave." The scene where George, formerly a King in all his confidence, suffers an outbreak of compulsive talking, then walks over to the chair and meekly offers himself to be strapped down, is heartbreaking.

"The Madness of King George" reduces authentic mental illness to a two-year-old's tantrum. It's lesson is that we can conquer anything--if we can just be masters of ourselves. This is a comforting idea. Unless you're gay. Or bipolar. Or mortal.

It's very British of the old school, that locked-down ethos that caused so much quiet suffering, and loud alcoholism. That attitude seems to be changing now, thank goodness, but "The Madness of King George" is nothing less than a paean to the proverbial stiff upper lip. And, in my opinion, a load of bollocks.

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From George W.S. Trow, via an essay about him in The New York Observer: "America is a glory of a country, and a glorious idea for a country, and we would be saved now by the love of it if the idea of the love of it hadn’t been strip-mined and left ugly.”

About sums it up, doesn't it?

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Stephen Metcalfe sums up writer George W.S. Trow and his major work, Within the Context of No Context. It's a reasonably good read for people interested in such things.

The scion of a prosperous New York printing family, Trow was a prime mover in the revivication that turned the Harvard Lampoon from a snotty finals-club tipsheet into something quite splendid. In addition to helping National Lampoon get off the ground, Trow wrote for The New Yorker back when that was more akin to an Oxbridge donship than to magazine work: lifetime employment among a collection of overbright individuals simultaneously more influential than they probably should've been, and yet much less influential than they thought they were.

Reading that back, it sounds harsh; I don't mean it that way. Trow and his ilk were extremely good at whatever it was that they did--you cannot question their seriousness or devotion, and the chasing of the dons from The New Yorker hasn't been an unalloyed good thing. The current magazine's closer connection to timeliness and pop culture, which replaced an unwavering adherence to a completely internal, idiosyncratic, persnickety sense of quality, has given The New Yorker many of the flaws of the current culture...while keeping its Olympian self-satisfaction intact. It's Baby Boomer magic: all of the arrogance and exclusivity, but none of the redeeming seriousness of purpose. The old magazine disdained the mass taste, and this squareness allowed it to champion worthy things that didn't fit into the marketing machines. Now, The New Yorker is as likely to profile Tim Allen as a Nobel Prize winner, and in a world glutted with entertainment, that's not really progress. It's to Trow's credit that he excused himself after Tina Brown arrived. Coming from money allows one to stand on principle; it's one of the things we look to them for, to remind the rest of us that it is possible.

If the decline of the Eastern Establishment interests you, Trow's Context is worth a read; also good is Nelson Aldritch's Old Money. Though the particulars change from book to book, the central thesis is simply this: the Eastern Establishment withered away when it could no longer project a set of values strong enough to compete against the commercial/celebrity culture--what Metcalfe calls "hustler culture."

Coming as I do from more-or-less broke Midwesterners, I have a soft spot for the Eastern Establishment, which was nice enough to let me bed down with them for four years at Yale. But the solidity and memory that it represents to me--a sense of the individual in history that I have such affection for--doesn't really exist anymore. I'll quote Metcalf:

The hustler-elite, meanwhile, converted the old WASP hegemony into a pair of useful minstrels: the preppy and the yuppie. The preppy is the old country club nonstriver who never got the memo and so recluses stupidly within a set of dead social conventions. For her part, the yuppie is all too happy to play by the new rules. After mastering semiotics at Brown, she puts to use her new knowledge by creating content … well, by, for, and about the exciting world of content!

This shift, like most things in life, is a mix of good and bad. On the good side, there's more mobility than ever before--the circumstances of one's birth matter less and less. On the bad side, though, success has shrunken to a single skill: manipulating the media, the masses, or the market. Learning how to work in the world of commerce and celebrity--hardly ennobling pursuits, not really worth the sweat of a lifetime (just ask anybody who's "made it")--has become the only field for ambition.

Here's a bit of proof: at least according to one Princetonian, "starting a revolution" is the same as launching a cross between Rolling Stone and GQ." The youthful hyperbole can be excused--we're all there at some point in our lives, though most of us manage to keep it off the internet. But the dream of celebrity, of stardom through entertainment, is as paltry as it is common. When our best-educated, most able young people cannot think of a finer future than the well-compensated manufacture of shiny objects, something's deeply wrong. Person by person, generation by generation, I fear we'll become unequipped to do the serious work of society. And the worst thing is, we won't know it's happened, until a test comes and we find ourselves wanting, quoting "Seinfeld" lines to the onrushing tsunami. I suspect the homeless and the hungry suspect it's happened already.

Oh well, back to writing comic novels!

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Between Michael Richards and BORAT, there's been a lot of talk lately about comedy and prejudice. I've held out as long as I could, but here's my two cents. Playing a prejudiced character shouldn't get anybody in hot water. Acting prejudiced should.

Each of us can only inhabit one body/identity/gender. If we are virtuous, we try to empathize with others, imagine what it might be like in their skin, but this is an intellectual exercise. It's not very visceral or immediate; it's imaginative. When you add in the immutable preference we have towards ourselves and our own group (however we define that), slippage is inevitable. Prejudice can be tempered by education, shown up by diversity, and soothed by material comfort, but the tendency to deny the essential connectedness--even sameness--of us all is a regrettable fact of the human animal. It's a mistake in perception. Comedy can show this mistake, but it has to show prejudiced behavior to do so.

Humor based on prejudice has always existed, and perhaps this isn't an entirely bad thing: resentment dissipated through humor is resentment that doesn't fuel violence. The trouble, of course, comes when these attitudes leave the barbershop or bathroom wall and become accepted by the culture at large. Outraged right-thinking types primly call for punishment; racists feel emboldened; and the injured parties are justifiably frightened that injury will follow insult.

In situations like this, I think of two things: First, the diagnostic power of comedy. If prejudiced comedy finds widespread acceptance, the problem is with the society--the joke is the symptom of the disease beneath. Symptoms are unpleasant, disgusting even, but they can suggest cures. The outcry over Michael Richards, celebrity idiot, suggests that we're on the right track: people didn't laugh, they got pissed. And that's good.

Feminists disapproved of "woman driver" jokes, but it wasn't ordering people not to laugh that killed them--it was a generation (or more) of parents actually raising their children differently. "Woman driver" jokes proceeded from the assumption that women are inherently less able than men; once that perception faded, there was no joke there. We can only hope that America's racism will attenuate until current comedy involving race seems as outdated as Amos and Andy.

Second, I try to remember the complexity of the comedic game. Is the character Borat anti-semitic? Unquestionably--but he's also crude, unattractive, and vastly ignorant, nobody you'd want to be. Does his anti-semitism help him? No. Is it portrayed as a good thing? No, it reveals him as an idiot. Who are the "Jews" that Borat hates? A weird species of horned shape-shifters where the women lay eggs. Some sort of demon, not human beings of the Jewish religion.

I think I know what Sacha Baron Cohen is getting at with this. The only explanation for the persistence and virulence of an irrational prejudice--whether it's the anti-semitism of Europe, or the racism of the United States--is an insistence that the "other" is nothing like you, another species. And that's insane. In the movie, we see a nice elderly couple running a B&B; Borat sees a pair of horned shape-shifting witches, determined to poison him. Borat is insane; ergo, anti-semitism is insane. Anti-semitism is portrayed in "Borat," and it's shown to be a form of mental illness.

At least that's what I took from it. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

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Is it YOU? Are YOU doing it with your eyes?

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...but I have faith that it will be fixed eventually, so here I am with some random thoughts:

1) I celebrated the Cardinals' victory in the World Series with a bottle of Veuve-Clicquot. The trick to not becoming a lush is to cultivate sufficiently expensive tastes.

2) I celebrated Halloween at The Aero, a theater here in Santa Monica. It was running an all-night marathon of horror movies. Decent time, though I wasn't able to stay for more than two and a half. I don't like Italian horror movies, and I'm tired of people telling me how freakin' great Dario Argento/Lucio Fulci/etc are. If that's good, that whole area of culture is incredibly impoverished. "Gialli" are like Hammer movies but with horrible dialogue and worse special effects. I've given these guys at least five chances to entertain me, and they've never done it.

3) Same with Brian DePalma. I think he's a retard. Anybody who watches "Sisters" and doesn't figure it out within the first thirty minutes (fifteen if you're a USC film student) should be escorted from the room. And please, don't anybody explain to them how to reproduce.

4) At the same festival, I watched "Re-Animator," a pleasant memory from my teenage years (with a surprising amount of full-frontal; I wonder how I ever got into that theater at 16?). Apart from the nudity--always welcome, even now--I noticed that actor David Galt looked strikingly like Senator John Kerry. Take a look.

Here.

Here.

They're a little dark, but I think you can see what I'm talking about. It's really striking in some scenes. I think this explains 2004. That, and the voter intimidation. And the electronic voting machines run by Republicans.

5) In more conspiracy news, anybody with 42 minutes to burn and an obsession with Robert F. Kennedy (as fitting a description of me as any) might be interested in this talk given by Lawrence Teeter, Sirhan Sirhan's lawyer. Keeping in mind that he WAS Sirhan's lawyer (he died), Teeter's talk is a nicely compressed discussion of the case for conspiracy.

6) Yesterday was not a day to root against me in football. Not only did Yale beat Harvard, USC beat Cal. Yale hadn't won in five years, including a crushing triple-overtime loss last year. But not this time, Cantabs.

7) I am working on several books, including a couple that should be available for this Xmas. Watch this space (assuming I can figure out what's going on with the site...)

8) And finally: "What happens in Vegas..."
"...can usually be cured by antibiotics. Usually."

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...it's been on the fritz. But if you're seeing this, Kate and I have fixed it. More to come.

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This new device routs greywater from your sink for use in your toilet. This could be big, especially in water-starved spots like Los Angeles...

Why didn't I think of that?

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After years of suffering through offenses that call to mind the phrase "spastic colon," Rex Grossman is literally healing me. I continue to be delighted that the 2006 Chicago Bears can actually run, throw, and catch. You'd think that all football players could do that, but if you did, you wouldn't be a Bears fan. Bears can only hit, tackle, bleed--and eventually lose.

But now we have an offense! In celebration of this novel feeling (as short-lived as history suggests it might be), I provide the following smattering of Bears coverage, in the wake of their 37-6 drubbing of the Seahawks.

Rick Telander.

Rick Morrissey.

Before you ask: no, this defense is not as good as the 1985/86 squad. Those guys changed how defense was played. This year's team is a really, really good version of the so-called "Tampa 2."

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Dennis Perrin, biographer of Michael O'Donoghue and all-around comedy head, has posted several of his favorite sketches from Mr. Show, Exit 57, and other YouTube-friendly shows. Check it out!

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Okay, things are getting just TOO cool. Now there's a type of glass that generates electricity. Read more about it here.

Look out your window at all the high rises with sealed shut, smoked/reflective windows. Now imagine them with solar glass. Then imagine how cheap solar glass would get to make, if it were being produced on that scale. Then imagine the incredible economic incentives that would then exist for its improvement.

Big problems do not necessarily have big solutions; many small ones can work, too. The new world is becoming available, folks; all we have to do is ask for it.

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Courtesy of my internet-roving wife...

Grand mal Elmo?
Thrashing orgasm Elmo?
Devil-zombie Elmo?

Join in the madness here. But don't say we didn't warn you.

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Two friends of mine have recently had books published, and since they're on topics likely to interest readers of this blog--and I can vouch for their quality--I wanted to encourage everybody to take a look. The books are (in order of publication):

A Futile and Stupid Gesture. Doug Kenney was a seminal figure in the revolution that transformed American comedy in the Seventies. After co-writing "Bored of the Rings," Kenney co-founded National Lampoon, co-wrote "Animal House," and created "Caddyshack"--then fell/jumped/was thrown off a cliff in Hawaii. As a fellow Midwesterner, I've always been a rabid Kenney fan, and have been waiting for someone to write this book for decades. Josh Karp conducted over 150 interviews--AND talked humor with me much, much longer than any sane person would--in the course of writing what is likely to be the last word on this mercurial, fascinating, essential figure. Those who know see a big Doug Kenney-shaped hole in the comedy of the 80s, 90s, and today. Anybody the least bit interested in where comedy was in the Seventies--and where it might've gone had people like Kenney and Belushi survived--should buy this book.




The Prisoner of Trebekistan. Bob Harris is one of those people who, like Doug Kenney, is too smart to be just funny, and vice-versa. It's not always a comfortable way to be. But all of us who know Bob enjoy the hell out of it, and his relentless intelligence makes him one of the funniest writers around. This book--about Bob's many appearances as a contestant on the game show Jeopardy!--gives him ample room to struct his unique combo of stuff. There are jokes, of course, philosophy, too; even some insights into programming your mind. I read Trebekistan in an early form, and even then it was funny enough to make my testicles shrink up into my body. You, as a non-comedy writer, will probably have a much more pleasant reaction, but there's only one way to find out. Buy it.

Here endeth the shameless plugging.

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In celebration of the beginning of the NFL season, I present this devastating hit dealt by Chicago Bears LB Wilber Marshall. Frankly, I remember this sort of thing happening regularly between 1984-86. It was fun to be a Bears fan then, lemme tell you.

The Bears are playing the Lions this weekend, but you won't see anything like this. And it's a good thing--when I saw it a moment ago, first I whooped, then I threw up into my mouth a little. (It was a complicated emotion.)

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Carleton and St. Olaf's, two top-notch liberal arts colleges in Northfield, MN, are betting on wind power. Carleton built their windmill in 2004; in the best spirit of collegiate rivalry, it was only a matter of time before St. Olaf's did the same.

These two schools are not the first to erect their own windmills to provide power. That honor rather predictably goes to Stutts, the world's most prestigious university, based in Great Littleton, CT. Unfortunately, Stutts' mammoth, skyline-dominating project was taken off-line last May, after it was discovered that it was actually nuclear-powered.

Undeterred, Stutts has just announced a vast network of new power plants located all over the third world. "Each one is totally green," said Stutts President Patrick Manolo Rivington. "By 2020, we're hoping to employ the entire nation of Guinea-Bissau, even the children. Especially the children."

Called "Jobs for 50 Million," the new Stutts project has come under fire from human-rights groups. "Chaining poor people to bicycles is simply inhumane," said Gavin Matare of Nicer World. But Rivington is unapologetic. "We want a world where spinning classes aren't just a privilege of the rich."

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Did anyone else see that sign during ABC's telecast of the Texas/Ohio State game? Cracked me up.

For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, be enlightened.

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Just priceless--anyone who was ever forced to memorize the first bit of Canterbury Tales will enjoy this blog."Serpents on a Shippe," indeed!

Just so you know: the post contains "spoilerez".

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...you should surf over to Treehugger.com. Not only does the site keep you up-to-date on all forms of more efficient technology, it also makes you very hopeful that humanity can (and perhaps will) get its act together.

Sorry I've been quiet. Just finished a new book.

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...Jack Silbert forwarded me this funny piece he wrote recently.

Mikegerber.com: your one-stop shop for assassination humor.

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Excellent, just excellent. Go there.

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In the wake of my umpteenth viewing of Stardust Memories, I read Andrew Sarris' reviewof Woody Allen's latest in The New York Observer. (It's the second one, after Chambrol.) I was struck by this paragraph:

The suspicion persists among many critics that when one of Mr. Allen’s films fails, it is because he isn’t really trying: He doesn’t spend enough time rewriting, he doesn’t do enough retakes, etc. One can be tempted to believe that Woody is the prisoner of his own reputation. After all, why does a genius have to do retakes or rewrite his own spontaneous wit? One can also suspect that talent diminishes with age, but where does that leave us aging critics? Perhaps the ability to make people laugh fits into a special category. As Chaplin got older, he was widely thought to have lost his comic gifts. With beloved aging performers, the question becomes more and more complex. Did people really laugh with exuberant surprise when Jimmy Durante performed the same shtick for the thousandth time the same way he’d performed it 999 times before? Or was something more complex at work, something like nostalgia or shared survival? The problem is that Woody never asked us to love him: His humor was more sharply edged than that, and now the edge is gone. Or is it? I ask because I do not know.

I don't know, either. I do know that there is something really complicated--and more than a little sad--going on between Woody and his audience. For years, I delighted in Woody Allen's work, and was more than willing to forgive him his flaws and indulgences. Now, he inspires in me a real feeling of loss.

I would disagree with Sarris that Woody never asked us to love us--his early material (the schlemiel persona, the references) is an enjoyable, but very calculated, attempt to give the people who he respected the kind of comedy he thought they'd respond to. Then, having done what he set out to do, Woody began to look around. He didn't like what he saw, either in himself ("I'm dishonest, this persona isn't real, I'm manipulating them...") or us ("...and they lap it up."). When a self-hating performer becomes successful, the audience becomes a target of his/her self-hatred. "If I'm worthless, and they love me, they must be idiots."

With every laugh I think Woody despises us all a little more, throwing out one-liners like fish to a trained seal. Maybe he hates us for continuing to laugh while in a world Allen finds absurd, vile, repugnant. That we see the suffering of the world and want more jokes is, perhaps, an indictable offense--but a famous comedian isn't the person to scold us for it. After all, that was Woody's reaction to the world, too. He may have since discovered that "comedy as palliative" doesn't work, but audiences would naturally feel angry, even cheated, to hear him say that.

A comedian engages in a simple transaction with the audience; an artist's transaction is more complicated, and for better and worse, Woody Allen's become much more of an artist than a comedian. But what he's been attempting for the last 25 years feels very unhappy and thwarted to me. I feel bad when I watch his movies. Whether they are entertaining or not, I feel like I'm watching a desperate, unsuccessful attempt to escape.

Anyway...

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I'm a hard-bitten comedy hombre, and bow to no man in my inability to be callously unimpressed by things that everybody else thinks are hysterical. "Derivative," I'll say. "Seen it before." Or perhaps I'll snip, "They didn't go far enough." Or, if I'm really reaching, trying to badmouth something obviously a million times better than anything I've ever done, I'll dismiss it with, "I can see why people would think that was funny."

Understand, these are just a few of my favorites. I've been practicing for years.

But sometimes even I can't find anything wrong with a bit. This segment from The Daily Show hits it out of the park. Bravo, folks--I give you the cupcake from my lunch.

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Reviews, I'm here to tell you, suck. When they're good, they're never quite good enough, and when they're bad, you're convinced that they've just ended your career.

Humor writing is particularly ill-starred in this regard (as it is in every regard save making readers laugh). Nothing is more subjective and personal than somebody's sense of humor, and a mismatch can entice the most reserved reviewer to new heights of disdainful venom. And if you're actually trying to do something new or difficult, treading new ground or combining things that haven't been combined before, you're just asking to get creamed. I don't try to do new things on purpose--I know it's no way to get rich or popular--but I can't help myself. I get bored. You'd get bored, too, if you had to read my stuff as much as I do. Hell, maybe you get bored already.

As a rule, I ask all my publishers not to pass along reviews. This, plus the fact that humor tends not to get reviewed in the first place, keeps me in a barely manageable state of self-loathing. I may well suck as hard as I suspect, but as long as I don't know it for sure, I can scrounge up the optimism to keep trying. Things are better, of course, when you have a runaway hit; after you've made the bestseller lists, you might get a mention, but it's usually of the sniffy "people will buy anything" variety. But that's easy to take when you know actual people--not just publishing volk--are reading and liking your work.

Still, it's freakin' AWESOME when somebody actually gets it, and no more so than with a unique beast like Freshman. Here's what my new favorite publication, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, said about Freshman:

"...That's the plot, but mayhem and hijinks are the story in this parody that blends Animal House antics with tony Jeeves and Wooster sensibilities. The sometimes bawdy, sometimes sophisticated comedy takes on the absurdities of the very rich and their pretentious traditions with sunny alacrity and an acerbic bite...The real audience for this is the twenty-something crowd, either in the midst of or just over their own college daze--for them the guffaws are loud, constant, and gut-shaking as Gerber delivers his over-the-top send-up of the freaks, geeks, and other creatures of the night that thrive on or around college campuses.—KC"

Thank you, KC, whoever you are! You just made my day!

By the way, when I was poking around the Bulletin's website, I found this amusing bit of humor.

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Dennis Perrin takes a break from the troubles of the world, here. In reading Dennis' post, I was moved to find out a little more about someone he mentioned: Peter Ivers, the brilliant but ultimately somewhat troubled songwriter/performer/New Wave impresario.

Ivers belonged to the coterie of folks who haunted Harvard in the late 60s, who believed that they were destined to conquer/transform the creative world. This is a classic undergraduate fantasy--"our group is SPECIAL"--but given where they were and when, it must've been even more seductive. Some did prevail, albeit only temporarily: National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney, for example. But for the others, the dream ended as it always does, smashed against the rocks of adulthood, biology, commerce, happenstance. The one thing you can't see from college is the role of seredipity; the world is not one big campus, to be grabbed and bent to your will. It's much, much bigger than that, and has its own imperatives to achieve. That's both great and terrible, but some people who cut a figure at a high-falutin' school never get over the big drop into the soup. God knows it took me a bit--assuming that I have!

Unlike Kenney, Ivers never found (or refused to seek) mainstream success; he scuffled along doing interesting, but difficult, projects until his murder in 1983. Like Kenney, he seemed totally committed to inhabiting a personal myth. And like Kenney, this strategy worked splendidly in college, but less and less so as he got older. Here's an interesting (though hard to read!) obituary/appreciation clipped from New York magazine. There's also a nice song Ivers wrote at the bottom of the page. Hail and farewell to another interesting person that I never met.

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Sure, I'm a little late to the party, since it's been about 48 hours since Joe-mentum was revealed as faux-mentum (blame this next parody I'm working on). Still, I thought you might enjoy The Daily Show's take on it. (Lieberman, not my manuscript.)

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As some of you know, I'm a freak for The Beatles, especially for "Beatlegs," unreleased or otherwise unofficial recordings. These are studio tapes--composing tapes, alternate mixes, or unreleased songs--concert recordings, or demos. I discovered Beatlegs around 1981, and have gotten a huge amount of enjoyment out of listening to them in the 25 years since. Not only do they provide one with a break from the official material (which, if you're anything like me, you've heard to death), nothing is more encouraging to a fellow creative person than hearing The Beatles--The Beatles!--screwing up and singing weak, half-finished songs.

I'm far from the only fan interested in this stuff (witness the site Bootleg Zone) but I've never seen any attempt to assemble a list of the creme de la creme. It is the nature of Beatlegs for there to be a large percentage of dross to diamonds, and I have spent more than my fair share of time and money on crappy stuff I only listened to once. (Especially in the bad old pre-internet days, when everything was on vinyl and cost a boatload of cash. You can't imagine how pissed I'd get after spending $45 on something awful. Of course, the fact that I was making $5.50 an hour working at the local drug store had a lot to do with it.)

In an effort to share my hobby, I thought I'd post the Beatlegs that I have found most enjoyable (or most illuminating). Discussion is encouraged; the links go to the CD's page on Bootleg Zone, if it exists. Obviously I can't burn you copies, so don't ask, but everything I'm going to list is available on the web, newsgroups, eBay, et cetera. And trust me: the hunt is half the fun!

Wildcat
Madman 13-14
Two discs' worth of The Beatles jamming in 1960, before they were The Beatles. Not great listening, but certainly worth having for historical interest.

The Early Years, 1962, Decca Tapes Revised, Right Speed
Yellow Dog 101
The best version of the group's unsuccessful audition for Decca.

The Complete BBC Sessions (ten discs)
Great Dane 9326
Most fans would be satisfied with the official Beatles at the BBC release. This gives you everything--including interesting stuff not on the official set, including Lennon (not Ringo) doing "Honey Don't." I've seen collections that boast improved sources for some recordings, but this is what I've got, and it's quite nice.

The Complete Ed Sullivan Shows
Yellow Dog 062
More a historical document than something that's always in my player, but given that The Ed Sullivan Show played such a huge role in the legend of The Beatles, it's nice to have.

Turn Me On Dead Man/The John Barrett Tapes
Vigotone 178/9
In 1983, so the story goes, an EMI engineer battling cancer was allowed to make the first-ever catalogue of all Beatle-related recordings in the EMI vaults. This two-disc set is the best of what he uncovered. The highlight of the first disc is an awesome unreleased version of "What You're Doing." The second disc has a bunch of excellent White-era stuff, including "Step Inside Love/Los Paranoias/The Way You Look Tonight."

The Beatles Christmas Album
MO 6369
From 1963 to 1969, The Beatles recorded an annual Christmas message to be sent out to their fans. These discs are extremely fun (and some are even musically interesting). Anyway, it's a tradition in the Gerber/Powers household to play this every Christmas morning while drinking big bowls of Soy Nog.

Live at the Hollywood Bowl
STAO 2222
The Beatles' great lost live album! In 1964, Capitol Records recorded several Beatles concerts at Los Angeles' Hollywood Bowl, in hopes of producing a live album for the Christmas season. Unfortunately after hearing the tapes, The Beatles and George Martin nixed the project over concerns about the sound quality. I dunno--sounds great to me. (This version was reputedly mixed by the legendary Dr. Ebbetts, so that may be the reason.)

Shea!/Candlestick Park
Spank 108
Taken from a television film, the (semi-live) recording of The Beatles' epochal '65 concert at Shea is surprisingly good. Historically important, and a good listen, too. You can't say the same about the recording of their last concert, which comes courtesy of press agent Tony Barrow's tape recorder. But it's nice to have, regardless. (By the way, some people would add Budokan from the same tour, but there's only so much "God we're so tired of this and they're not even LISTENING" live Beatles I can stand.)

The Alternate Revolver
Walrus 021
Demos, mono mixes, and interesting fragments related to The Beatles' greatest album.

It's Not Too Bad
Pegboy 1008
The evolution of one of The Beatles' most fascinating songs: "Strawberry Fields Forever." This disc contains every meaningful step along the way, from the earliest demos, to edit pieces, and then finally the tracks that eventually coalesced into the finished song. Another one you won't listen to constantly, but it's really worth having.

Sgt. Peppers monomix
PMC 29567
A must for any true Beatles fan. The monophonic mix of Sgt. Pepper's--the only mix supervised by The Beatles themselves--is significantly different than the official (stereo) version. The guitars are more present, "She's Leaving Home" is at the right speed, there are more and different sound effects...And there are even ten bonus tracks. Truly one of my desert-island discs.

From Kinfauns to Chaos (Disc 1)
Vigotone 183
This disc collects the best available versions of the White Album demos recorded in May 1968 at George's house in Esher. Some really lovely stuff here, including early versions of John's "Jealous Guy" and two unreleased Harrison songs, "Circles" and "Sour Milk Sea." Sometimes I like this better than the actual album, which is full of bad vibes; Paul with a backing group, John with a backing group, et cetera.

The Beatles ("White Album")
Mono PMC 7067-8
Not as revelatory as Sgt. Pepper's, there are still enough differences between the mono and stereo mixes of the White Album to make the mono version worth getting. (No link because I got mine off eBay and it is not listed at Bootleg Zone.)

As Nature Intended
Vigotone 122
The Glyn Johns' mix of Let It Be, plus the entire rooftop concert. The best of a bad lot, in my humble opinion.

Artifacts I/5 Get Back to Abbey Road
BIG 1022
The sessions that later became the movie Let It Be are incredibly repellent to me; it's awful to listen to the band breaking up. Still, this disc collects the gems from the hours and hours of tape. You get all the highlights--"Commonwealth," "Fancy Me Chances," and a ripping version of Get Back done in German, among others. This disc also has a few nice tracks from the Abbey Road sessions that followed. Only one quibble: where's "No Pakistanis"?

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It's been brutally hot in California--even here in usually cool Santa Monica. Lucky for me, movie theaters provide air-conditioning free-of-charge. (They don't like it when you sleep there, but we're negotiating.) Here's what I thought about...

...Who Killed the Electric Car? Interesting story, and a well-made documentary, but nothing will surprise you if you have half a brain. Guess what? GM is stupid and short-sighted, the oil companies are greedy bastards determined to wreck the world's climate for a couple more bucks, and the Bush White House eagerly fellates them both. However, there's a grizzled pair of inventors that rock, and the smokin' hot Tesla electric sports car. B.

...Little Miss Sunshine. Awesome. Go see it. A.

...Wordplay. Imagine "Spellbound" but with obsessive, shaggy adults rather than cute, stressed-out kids. Once again, well made, but more about the post-Spellbound pitch meeting than a story that really needed to be told. If you worship NPR and especially the NYT, run don't walk. Everybody else: feh.B-.

...Clerks II. Would've been better if the two male leads were more natural in their acting. Luckily, the female lead is appealing, and Jay and Silent Bob are funny as usual. I laughed hard at some jokes; it's loose and outrageous and real(ish), which makes it worth seeing, but probably a rental. B.

And two DVDs:
...The 40-Year-Old Virgin. This could've been flat and cartoonish, a la "Wedding Crashers," "Old School," or "American Pie," but it wasn't. It was quite authentic, which made it tremendously funny and surprisingly sweet. Great screenplay full of excellent touches. Highly recommended. A+.

...The Squid and the Whale. A fine 2/3rds of a movie. Hard to watch, because it was such an unblinking portrait of a self-destructing marriage between two assholes and the children trapped in the middle, but at the same time, I must admit I was fascinated. Unfortunately, the movie ends without resolving anything, and while that may be more "realistic," it's fundamentally unsatisfying. Assuming it's more or less autobiographical, I suspect that since the filmmaker's own life did not resolve neatly, he didn't know how to make the movie do any better without feeling inauthentic. B.

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Several bloggers that I read and admire (okay, Jon Schwarz and Dennis Perrin) have posted recently about the crushingly bleak nature of reality. Jon linked to this Woody Allen interview in the Washington Post where, among other things, Allen reduces life to a concentration camp. Dennis, on the other hand, describes having a massive panic attack as a result of following the current situation in the Middle East. Obviously, these two things aren't the same--Woody's straight-out insane, and has been for years, while Dennis is a victim of his own laudable intensity--but both reactions are object lessons for all us thinky types.

Here's something I've learned: knowing things is not for the faint of heart. Too much of the wrong type of knowledge can poison a mind, and we all must be the guardians of our own mental ecology. Especially now, when there is more information, and less filtering, than ever. The structure of media--as well as the structure of our brains--skews relentlessly towards exceptional things. And by exceptional, I of course mean horrific. We are wired to notice potential threats, not common pleasures.

The unbroken chain of nasty stuff (tumult, malfeasance, sickness, death) we call news is no more "reality" than a similar chain of sweetness would be. Pick any place on the globe: at this moment there is fear and death, and also happiness and life. Suffering and injury and despair is balanced by joy and health and contentment. The fear/death is larger and easier to spot--a war, explosions, injustice--while the joy/life is smaller and more personal--prosperity, natural beauty, great sex.

Acknowledging only the negative aspects of existence is a distortion, and I disagree with the idea that indulging in that distortion is somehow more realistic or more responsible. Woody Allen's whining about existence devalues not only his absurd good fortune, but also all those people who suffer more than he. And he's mistaken even if you accept his absurd view; if life really IS a concentration camp, isn't it inspiring how we all carry on? How we all struggle to wrench some happiness from our time on Earth? If Woody had said, "For me, life is a neverending orgasm," wouldn't we consider that a reflection of a distorted mental process? We wouldn't think, "He's right" or "Ah yes, Pagliacci." We'd think, "Uh, maybe I shouldn't let Woody around my six-year-old."

Which some of us already do. Feel better, Dennis.

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...I submit this video, taken from the 1965 NME Pollwinners' Concert. They perform "Ticket to Ride" quite well, nobody seems too miserable, and the shots of John and Paul harmonizing on the same mike (a rare sight) are nice, too.

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Thanks to the magic of YouTube, I just discovered this incredibly funny cartoon tribute to our first President, George Washington. Brad Neely, I salute you.

BTW, like everything I really enjoy, it's NSFW.

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In the midst of a summer vacation, but I wanted to direct everybody to a funny interesting piece that Jon Schwarz did for Slate, on Al Quaeda's sworn enemy, The Rotarians...

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I had the great good fortune to watch the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" in 70mm at the Aero Theater last night. I decided to do it on a whim, and the theater was packed, but it was really a wonderful experience. It reminded me of other times, mostly as a boy, when a movie has so filled my head that for a few hours it has become as powerful as reality. Those are sweet memories, and now I have another.

If you haven't seen it, you should, preferably in a theater, and preferably in 70mm. I just read Roger Ebert's review/appreciation, which does far more justice to the picture than I ever could.

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"Only a fool would buy soda for the long holiday weekend without first checking Summer of Soda."--some person

Here are the sodas Kate and I have reviewed so far:

Empire Spruce Beer
Thomas Kemper's Ginger Ale
Hank's Orange Soda
Milca Red Soda
Fitz's Root Beer
Fentiman's Mandarin and Seville Orange Jigger
Red Ribbon Root Beer
Pangleheimer's Gourmet Blush
Apple Beer
Nehi Orange

Enjoy 'em!

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So I've spent the last decade or so trying to nudge the nascent humorists at The Yale Record in the right direction. And together, we have significantly increased the whimsy of America's lawyers and management consultants. In retrospect, they probably would've gotten more out of sticking their heads in a bucket. At least that's restful. You can really think.

But the cavalry is coming! John Cleese recently announced that he is retiring to write a book on comedy. There is some hope that laughs will not become an entirely endangered species--the culture that produced him (and Peter Cook, and Eleanor Bron, and all the other luminaries of British Comedy in the 60s and 70s) must be passed on!

Todd Jackson over at DeadFrog.com explores Cleesian humor a bit, using everybody's favorite term paper crutch, Henri Bergson, as well as that Rosetta Stone of all things John Cleese, Life and How to Survive It. Ooh, Professor Cleese, pick me! Pick me!

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As you may know, George Meyer is a television comedy writer here in Los Angeles. He is considered by many to be "first among equals" in that awesome team-effort called The Simpsons. Several years ago, Meyer's college buddy David Owen wrote a glowing profile about him in The New Yorker.

In this profile, Meyer was shown to be somewhat of a free spirit, as well as somebody who had more going on in his head than a running total of his residuals. Along with yoga, much was made of Meyer's despising of advertising. It struck me immediately how strange it was to loathe advertising, while spending your entire career creating things that exist primarily to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. That's a basic fracture, like loving animals but working in a slaughterhouse. Yes, the pay is really good; yes, you're REALLY good at it; but you have this big ol' contradiction you have to square every morning as you shave. I'm not judging, just genuinely puzzled. I don't see how he does it; the idea alone makes my stomach hurt. And when you add in the fact that, to do what he's done, Meyer's got to be 1) really freakin' intelligent, and 2) have a naturally (self-)critical turn of mind...I just don't get it.

Ed Page over at Danger Blog sent me this link, where the gentleman who did an interview with Meyer for The Believer has posted a segment cut out of that interview which deals with just this conundrum. It's interesting, and gave me one thought: Meyer's belief is that The Simpsons does good in the world by exposing its viewers to positive concepts like vegetarianism. (Meyer is a vegetarian and believes that such a diet is superior--I happen to agree with him, though I have a spate of food allergies that makes vegetarianism utterly impossible for me). However: in comedy, the amount which your audience pays attention to your beliefs is function of how much rectitude and wisdom they think you possess. If Lenny Bruce's drug habit had been widely known, only a very few people would've had their minds changed by his words. I think a similar thing is at work here; how much can you change people's minds about consumption with something so thoroughly embedded in our consumption culture? Not much.

Still, it's a nice thought, and nearly everybody in the comedy biz (myself included) indulges in such rationalizations. I'd love to see George Meyer quit "working for Pharaoh" as he puts it; that would be a powerful message to the people coming up now, and a step towards a better comedy than we have today.

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Aficionados of the carbonated arts will want to bookmark my new blog, Summer of Soda. Kate and I are planning to review one strange/storied/non-standard soda every day for the entire season. Check it out.

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Dennis Perrin over at Red State Son has some interesting thoughts about Chevy Chase's ongoing comedic straight-talk. I was particularly interested in what Dennis said near the end, comparing the blunt, righteous anger of comedians during Watergate to the weak tea being peddled today. Even with legends-in-the-making like Stewart and Colbert there seems to be a distance, a sense of "look at how ridiculous these humans are--too bad we are powerless to intervene in their affairs." But comedy CAN move opinion, and the shenanigans being lampooned DO matter--they really effect real people in our real world.

The satirists of the 60s and 70s had an immediacy, and a sincerity which energized their material. They had a personal commitment to reality as a place changeable for the better (and worse) that the current ones seem to lack. Was there ever any doubt where "The Vietnamese Baby Book" stood on Vietnam? Was there any doubt that Hunter Thompson HATED Richard Nixon? Does Jon Stewart HATE Bush? Or does he merely dislike him intensely, while remaining just a tiny bit grateful for the steady stream of material? I simply can't tell. When Stewart and Colbert dropped their "foolish humans" distance and showed the anger beneath, people went crazy for it. People crave that kind of honesty--why don't our comedians and satirists give it to us?

I blame irony. The current comedy culture in America arose in the 80s as a "cool" response to the "hot" satire that had dominated from 1955 to 1980. Hot satire is immediate, personal, and hard-to-duplicate; cool satire is detached, often impersonal, and reproducible. Animal House is hot, while Porky's is cool. Office Space is hot, Dilbert cool.

"Cool," ironic satire was immediately championed by the entertainment industry, because it solved the problem inherent in marketing satire: it made people laugh without suggesting that they change. We've been drowning in it ever since. Irony is satirical-seeming--"things are bad"--yet fundamentally passive--"but all you can do is laugh."

But that's a lie; laughing ISN'T all you can do. The ironic stance is based on a false knowingness, a sense of having done and seen it all which is excusable in an 18-year-old but shows ignorance, if not outright corruption, in an adult. Irony's not a worldview, it's a defensive crouch against being exposed as a fool, based on the belief that everybody gets exposed sooner or later. It insists that nothing ever changes, then its passivity makes that so. Irony's perfect mass-satire for our fractious times, because it's a way to comment without taking a stand--but it makes our times more fractious in the process. It's a unclear, excuse-making, self-serving form of communication, and as a form of satire, it's crap.

Since 1980, American comedy's been about getting rich (because everybody else is) treating authority figures like entertainers and vice-versa (because everybody's corrupt, and everything is showbiz). It's Lenny Bruce's cynicism, without his explicit admonitions to be better. Bruce and his ilk said, "Here's how politics is corrupt--so don't be corrupt. Here's how people are racist--so don't be a racist. Here's how morality is hypocritical--so don't be a hypocrite." Bruce self-selected for fans that didn't want to be corrupt, racist, or hypocritical. But the current satirist says, "Be however you want, we'll take everybody. It's all a hustle anyway." Smaller audience versus bigger audience--for the entertainment biz, irony's a no-brainer. And exactly what we don't need right now.

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...and this is how I look now. Actually, things are working out--so far. For those readers out there who might be aging, be aware that thirty-seven's a bracing total. One of those "what is my dream?/am I following it?/did I misplace it on the way to the bank?" times of life; a not-insubstantial piece is gone, yet (with luck, and replacement organs grown in petri dishes) there is still plenty of time left to explore.

We (Jer and Whit, Kate and I) celebrated over margaritas at the Border Grill, then toddled across the street to Harvelle's, Santa Monica's 75-year-old juke joint. What followed was a prodigious banquette-ensconced grooving, thanks to the psychedelic stylings of Deep Eddy (see left, above). Odd, and compelling--a perfect way to ring in another year of life on this odd and compelling planet. Eddy can play the HELL out of his guitar, and was accompanied by a appealling tambourine player wearing a jangly belt.

I wonder if Harvelle's started as a speakeasy--it was founded during Prohibition, in 1931, when there were about 1,000 jobs in all of Santa Monica. It must have been either that or a soda fountain, and the latter seems unlikely, given Santa Monica's bootlegging past.

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Sorry for the silence, folks--I've been hard at work tussling with Sophomore, trying to determine whether it's the best thing I've ever written, or a total piece of crap. Opinions vary, and my own changes on the hour. I fear the truth is somewhere in the middle.

In the meantime, I thought I'd pass along something my wife brought home from film school a while back: it's a list of the 101 best screenplays ever written, according to the members of the WGA. Enjoy!

101. Notorious
100. Memento
99. The Wild Bunch
98. The Grapes of Wrath
97. The Searchers
96. The Hustler
95. Hannah and Her Sisters
94. Patton
93. Do the Right Thing
92. Psycho
91. The Verdict
90. Sideways
89. Forrest Gump
88. Field of Dreams
87. 8 1/2
86. Harold and Maude
85. La Grande Illusion
84. The Princess Bride
83. Rear Window
82. Cool Hand Luke
81. Being There
80. Witness
79. The Producers
78. Rocky
77. Adaptation
76. Raging Bull
75. High Noon
74. Being John Malkovich
73. Amadeus
72. Thelma & Louise
71. The Lion in Winter
70. The African Queen
69. Dog Day Afternoon
68. Star Wars
67. E.T.
66. Jerry Maguire
65. Singin' in the Rain
64. Terms of Endearment
63. Jaws
62. Moonstruck
61. The Silence of the Lambs
60. L.A. Confidential
59. It Happened One Night
58. Ordinary People
57. Crimes and Misdemeanors
56. Back to the Future
55. Apocalypse Now
54. Manhattan
53. All the President's Men
52. The Lady Eve
51. Broadcast News
50. The Sixth Sense
49. Schindler's List
48. The Bridge on the River Kwai
47. The Maltese Falcon
46. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
45. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
44. The Best Years of Our Lives
43. Taxi Driver
42. Raiders of the Lost Ark
41. Goodfellas
40. When Harry Met Sally
39. The Sting
38. American Beauty
37. The Philadelphia Story
36. Midnight Cowboy
35. The Usual Suspects
34. The Sweet Smell of Success
33. The Third Man
32. Fargo
31. His Girl Friday
30. Unforgiven
29. Sullivan's Travels
28. Shakespeare in Love
27. Groundhog Day
26. Double Indemnity
25. The Wizard of Oz
24. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
23. Gone with the Wind
22. The Shawshank Redemption
21. North by Northwest
20. It's a Wonderful Life
19. To Kill a Mockingbird
18. On the Waterfront
17. Tootsie
16. Pulp Fiction
15. The Apartment
14. Lawrence of Arabia
13. The Graduate
12. Dr. Strangelove
11. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
10. The Godfather 11
9. Some Like It Hot
8. Network
7. Sunset Boulevard
6. Annie Hall
5. All About Eve
4. Citizen Kane
3. Chinatown
2. The Godfather
1. Casablanca

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Today is the 38th anniversary of the day Bobby Kennedy got shot--no, it wasn't marked on my calendar, Slate reminded me. I thought I'd take a short break from revising Sophomore to share some thoughts.

I come by my Kennedy assassination fetish honestly: My mother was raised Catholic, and my seldom-seen father died when I was young. By 1978 or so (when I was nine) I was spending too many hours delving into JFK books filled with timetables and testimony, alibis and ballistics, tryng to figure out what had happened. This fascination persisted for years. I never understood then why the adults in my life all got so emotional when I asked about it. Now, of course, I get it: to me, JFK's death felt like ancient history, but it was no more remote than the Challenger explosion is today.

The JFK assassination is a maze with no end, and I eventually lost both the heart and stomach to run it. I read about the murders of Martin Luther King and RFK, too, but they seemed (wrongly, it turns out) too open-and-shut to sustain my interest. Eventually life--by which I mean, girls--took hold, and I moved on to other things. I was fortunate; these riddles are poisoned. Attempting to solve them is a religion that eats its acolytes.

When I think of the assassinations now, there is no curiosity or nostalgia; because they have never been definitively solved, I feel that they are still with us. History is fact robbed of its ability to injure; these events still bite. And so, when I saw RFK on Slate today, the long-haired, doom-etched RFK of '68, I felt the bite again, and not a little dread. JFK's death was about the unthinkable happening, but his brother's murder was the world confirming the terrible fact of what it had become. Or maybe, what it always had been.

Forty years on, Kennedy-King-Kennedy looks to me like the moment things started going bad, when control really clamped down from above, and apathy really took root below. Our country is headed in the wrong direction, and without a shred of romanticism, I think that direction was set by the assassinations of the 60s--not only by the loss of those people, their ideas and their ability to inspire, but also by our getting used to unsolved public murder as business as usual. That is a coarsening equal to any suffered by the Roman Republic. Is it merely coincidence that we've turned from a country of possibilities to one grinding out the same tragic, hoary imperial script? The country is traumatized, directionless, hurt; and a generation of politicians have risen who are experts at keeping us that way.

We go around in circles, searching for Kennedy-manques, a right wheel turning around a chewed stump where the left wheel used to be. If you don't like metaphors, here's a fact: All of the "lone nuts" of the 60s weakened one side of the spectrum, in favor of the other. We may think that's a mournful coincidence now, but I doubt future generations will. In my dark moments, I'm convinced that those bullets marked the beginning of American civilization's decline, the time when our capacity for fear and corruption decisively outstripped our desire for positive change. Perhaps the internet will save us; perhaps this glorious chip-and-wire hive-mind is stronger than the gun. I hope so.

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There are a lot of interesting things going on over at Dead-Frog.com, Todd Jackson's uber-comedy site. I highly recommend it to any comedy volk. I check it every day; it's like sampling the NY scene without paying NY rent.

He's just posted this interview with the UCB's Matt Besser. I was intrigued to hear that UCB is apparently creating a humor magazine, "Don't Think." That sounds like a winner idea to me--they can get good material for free/cheap, have a natural audience to sell it to, and the obvious distribution outlet in their theaters...

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I was flipping through the Sharper Image catalog (motto: “Buy a nose-hair trimmer once, get mail forever") and I saw something called a “Weapons-Grade Super Soaker.” Now, I’m all for summer fun, but there is something very, very wrong with a culture that gives its children “weapons-grade” waterguns. What is wrong is that I am no longer ten.

But I was ten once, and when I was ten, I loved waterguns. For weeks, I lusted after one that looked like a Tommy gun, only to discover after bringing it home that it shot absurdly crooked. I traded it in for an orange transparent Luger, also flawed. No matter which way you stuck it into your shorts, it always dripped down your crotch.

Water balloons had their appeal, too. They were cheap—you could get fifty balloons for a dollar, and pump each one to the size of an avocado, if you were skilled enough. I learned to work the bathroom faucet like a virtuoso. There was a little lip that you had to wrap the balloon around, then turn the faucet on slowly, slowly…Sure, there was some talent there, but I loved what I was doing. Hitting somebody with a water balloon gave me a sense of accomplishment, a satisfaction that I doubt even a “Weapons-Grade Super Soaker” could match. Balloons also had the advantage of distance, essential for a kid like me, who could throw well but couldn’t run a lick.

Of course, balloons had their flaws, too—they had a habit of exploding randomly, thanks to the lax manufacturing standards of third-world countries. When that happened, or I simply wanted to enjoy life’s simple pleasures, I pulled out the garden hose. I developed several different methods of sticking my thumb over the nozzle; one was for distance, another for accuracy. I was, in my limited way, a scholar.

What can be deduced from this boyhood mania is that I grew up in a hot place: Missouri may not seem hot to you, but the whole Midwest is much hotter than, say, Phoenix. In Phoenix (cue the cliché) it’s a dry heat. There’s nothing dry about summer in Missouri. My armpits ache just thinking about it.

Phoenix is also the desert, so people look at the thermometer and think, “Screw that. I’m staying in the air-conditioning.” Places like Missouri look all right—that’s how they get you. Take it from somebody who knows: from June to September, the Midwest is hostile to human life. It’s like a planet where, as soon as the astronaut takes off his helmet, he discovers the atmosphere is chlorine, the distress call a fraud, and the naked women just holograms. Then the mantis-people slice him up for food. (There are no mantis people in Missouri, just a lot of born-agains.)

The heat always made the question of what to do for my birthday—June 14—pretty tough. For a while my parents and I went to Six Flags, but eventually none of us could take it anymore. It was like spending the day standing in line on an airport runway, interspersed by rounds of Mystery Nausea. (“Is it from what you just rode, what you just ate, or the beginnings of heat prostration?”) I wasn’t even old enough to have really interesting hallucinations.

My tenth birthday, we decided to throw a “water party” in the backyard. In some respects this made sense—cheaper, cooler, less chance of vomiting—but in others, it was an example of the touching yet undeniably foolhardy optimism my family is known for. (You’d be amazed at how often things turn out okay. I’m amazed, anyway.)

Our backyard was an irregular rectangle fifty feet wide and 150 feet long, bordered by sticker bushes. There was a single tree about halfway down which was where we tied the dog, a black lab-Satan mix named Gus. Gus was the living embodiment of that optimism, and felt obligated to show us our folly whenever possible. Gus associated the backyard with being tied up, which he naturally resented; he sincerely felt he belonged indoors with us, no matter what he had chewed up or rolled in. Gus took out his righteous anger on the lawn, digging holes and tearing around in circles until the rope caught and yanked him off his feet. One entered Gus' radius at great peril.

Faced with this onslaught the scrubby grass, never strong, gave up almost immediately. By the time of our party, about 75% of the yard—all that Gus could reach—was as bare as the surface of the moon. In case you’re wondering, I still had to mow it. I remember the mower throwing up a gray, soot-fine soil. “Soil” is the wrong word. It was really just stationary dust.

The one good thing about there being no grass was that it was much easier to see the rocks, pieces of brick, and other assorted hazards sprinkled thickly underfoot. Chief among these was a foot-high seam, which ran the entire length of the yard, perfect for twisting ankles. I was, and remain convinced that this was a far-flung arm of the New Madrid fault, which spawned a deadly quake in 1836, and was just itching to do it again.

For the sake of time, I won’t talk about our neighbors, except to say that one was an alcoholic and the other were pot dealers. Speaking of criminality, a final strike against our backyard as the site of a child's birthday party was that it was right next to the Missouri State Penitentiary. Perhaps somebody out there is saying, “Come on, Mike—that wasn’t the pen. That was just the employees’ parking lot.” To which I say, maybe so, but it’s a lot closer to a prison than you’ve ever lived.

To sum up: if my guests and I didn’t mind getting a little dirty, could avoid getting jumped on by the dog, didn’t fall on a sharp rock, escaped twisting our ankle on the seam, kept a sharp eye out for escaped convicts and survived any minor earthquakes, we stood to have a pretty good time. My parents were convinced this was a great idea, and sent me out to mow the lawn for company. I sifted the dust a little and tried to think about presents.

Anyone who grew up with an insane relative in their cellar will understand why none of my invitees had ever seen my backyard. The invitations my mom drew up did not let on; as an abstract painter, she was used to fudging the details. As usual, my parents were convinced everything would work out. As usual, I expressed my grave doubts, then tried to be as cheerful as possible.

Everybody I invited showed up, in trunks and/or goggles. There was my best friend Ross, whose Dad had an incredibly thorough (and highly organized) collection of Playboy; and my friend Larry, a really, really quiet guy with a filthy mouth that sprang to life whenever adults were not present, and my friend Kurt, whose main claim to fame was being able to replicate John Travolta’s dance from “Saturday Night Fever.” I still remember watching him do it for me—even at that age, I realized there was something creepy about a fourth grader doing pelvic thrusts. While Ross, Larry and I occupied pretty much the same social strata, Kurt’s family was much better off; his dad was a dentist. I remember at his birthday party, Dr. Name-Withheld-to-Avoid-Lawsuit gave everybody laughing gas.

Temporarily out of laughing gas, we issued everybody a squirt gun as soon as they walked in the door, along with a stern warning not to tease the dog. (Some did anyway, and got what they deserved; Gus was crazy, but he was fair.) We had positioned zinc tubs all around the yard, some filled with soda, others with water balloons. These were dutifully replenished by my mother, who was not a master of the art like me, but nevertheless did her best. She even tried to keep her sense of humor whenever she got wet. (Just the sight of her doing something as naughty as making a water balloon was a tiny little birthday present.)

My dad was manning the Slip ‘n’ Slide, bought especially for this occasion, which we spread out on the most grassy part of the lawn. There were still rocks and bricks under it, however, so after a few times through, all of us looked like we’d gone a couple of rounds with Ali. We didn’t care, but eventually there was a question of internal injuries, so Dad switched to the grill.

As he cooked hot dogs, we all ran around like small animals of every species, stalking and surprising and ambushing each other. Alliances were formed, broken, and reformed in the twitch of a trigger finger. We were all soaked within the first five minutes, and spent the next couple of hours in serious, if not exactly solemn, investigation to see if we could discover some way to get even wetter. From the first drop of moisture, the backyard turned to muck; when you added soda to it, the mixture got truly foul, so Mom set up the sprinkler for us to stand over. The mayhem didn’t stop when the hot dogs were done; I remember eating a hot dog with one hand, and squirting with another. We threw so many water balloons that the yard became covered with scraps of rubber, which Gus promptly ate. Then threw up, then ate again. Gus could eat anything, and did. He once ate a bee, but that’s another story.

There was no prison break. There was no earthquake. (I doubt we would’ve noticed either.) Even the dog had a good time; Gus always enjoyed it whenever things got crazy; that’s when he felt most comfortable, I think, not so judged. Sure, some people stubbed their toes, and even more stepped on grasshoppers (not painful, just gross, imagine crunching a Funyun filled with mucus), but there were no serious injuries. Only one kid Rory, got scratched by the dog. Rory always spilled fruit punch on the rug whenever my mom hosted my Cub Scout troop, so we all felt he had it coming.

Dusk started to fall, and the mosquitos came out (yet another thing they don’t have in Phoenix). That didn’t stop us, but the heat-lightning did, we everybody trooped inside to open presents; I don’t remember what I got—Star Wars stuff, probably, given the time. Maybe that was the year I got the little stormtrooper (they were out of Luke and Han and Darth, and Leia wasn’t allowed by my Y chromosome). Just as everybody’s parents came, there was a fierce, rip-the-siding-off summer thunderstorm. Perhaps God was celebrating my birthday; all I know for sure is I was the one that had to go bring in Gus.

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...and was totally disappointed! None of my favorite ones were in it. I couldn't have been the only kid who loved "Lariat," the guy with the mammoth, prehensile penis. Or "Waft," the dorky dude who could turn into a mildly unpleasant smell. Him and Wolverine fighting would've been great comic relief. Or "Spurt"--remember Spurt, the guy who could empty his circulatory system at will? I guess I understand why they didn't use him; his was obviously a one-shot kind of skill. Still, I remember crying during the issue with the blood drive. "To Serve His Fellow Man."

And where was Sassy Silver, a/k/a "Chopper," who could crush walnuts without using her hands? She was Lariat's girlfriend, so I guess once they decided he wasn't in it, she wasn't either. There were so many great ones to choose from--Misapprehension, Tummler, Ennui--why did they stick with all the boring ones? I tell ya, audience testing is killing movies.

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The famed Indy 500 auto race takes place this weekend, and even though only retards care, I thought I'd share a few Indy facts I've picked up over the years.

Fallacy #1: It’s called the Indy 500 because the track is located near Indianapolis, Indiana.
Untrue! The race is named for its first winner, Indira Gandhi.



Fallacy #2: The “500” refers to the number of miles in the race.
Nope! It can be as long or as short as the governing body decides. “500” is how many commercials they run before declaring it over. Whoever’s leading at that point, wins.

Fallacy #3: Women cannot drive race cars during their period.
A sexist lie! As Danica Patrick proves, there is no biological reason women cannot drive race cars—although the g-forces involved can rip off their breasts.

Fallacy #4: The nickname “Brickyard” comes from the bricks originally used to pave the Speedway.
Uh-uh. In the early days of racing, all speedways were brick (except for the few “safety courses” that used three feet of water). This particular one was called “The Brickyard” after spectators’ penchant for hurling paving stones at drivers they didn’t like.

Fallacy #5: Upon winning the race, the winner is given a quart of milk.
If only! That’s a jug of piping hot boar semen.

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In honor of Memorial Day and the official start of summer, I'd like to share my only fishing story. Like all the best ones, I have no evidence whatever that it actually happened, so you'll just have to take my word for it. I haven't been fishing since, not because of what happened (though it would be just like me to develop a phobia) but because I never got the hang of grabbing the fish after you catch it. Not being able to do this makes fishing pretty pointless, and after your grandfathers die there's nobody left to do it for you.

My only fishing story comes from a trip the family took to Wisconsin when I was about ten. My dad's grandfather had a place up near Hayward, and we used to go every year, so my parents could relax, and I could freak out. Strange place, strange people, strange rules, strange schedule, strange smells. No books. What little sports equipment I could find had inevitably been broken by my much more athletic Aryan step-cousins. Every day brought something new that I wasn't very good at--or very interested in. My only possible escape was to be cheerful, try really hard and hope for the best. It was "A Boy Called Horse," with occasional trips into town to get fudge.

One day I was fishing with my dad and uncles for muskies, big nasty late-Cretaceous Period items with lots of sharp teeth and no grasp of right and wrong, justice or mercy. You can tell how nasty they are by the size of the lures we were using: chunks of fish-like plastic as big as two of your thumbs. They had multiple hooks on them--apparently one isn't sufficient to get a muskie's attention.

I should start out by saying that I had been raised in an extremely urban, artistic, all-female environment. Putting me out in a boat in the middle of a Wisconsin lake with my dad and uncle--you might as well have drafted me. I remember strangers shouting advice from nearby boats. I was simply out there hoping to get through the day without having to poop over the side of the boat or otherwise humiliate myself.

It wasn't so bad; after the alcohol had kicked in and the adults started to relax, I began to enjoy myself, too. We spent the entire day fishing with no success--we went to every spot, tried going deep, tried going shallow, even tried casting near submerged logs and such. There was only the occasional lure-in-tree moment. It should not surprise you to know that I was convinced I would catch somebody's ear with every back-cast, and then for the rest of my life, every time I'd see my uncle or father, I'd be confronted with the big hole the backwoods doctor had to cut in their ear to get the lure out. I was also terrified of getting lured myself, but less so; if that happened, I would just be cheerful and muddle through.

Anyway, the sun's going down and it's getting cold--it never gets truly WARM on a shady Wisconsin lake, even in the summer, which suggests that what we call "a muskellunge" is in fact some sort of horrific beast from the cold wastes beyond the Van Allen belt. Look at it: the first muskie (possibly in larval form) doubtless rode to Earth on a meteor, plopped into a lake, and took it over. More evidence for this comes from the fact that there was (apparently) nothing else in the lake. The muskies had systematically eaten every other fish, and were now mouthing plants, dirt and the occasional rock. In addition to making suggestions to each other like, "Why don't you swim into that hole and see what's in it?...Of course you won't get stuck, don't be a pussy!...I'll wait out here."

So by the time we get to Lake Thunderdome, it's basically a moon crater filled with icy water and the most ruthless, amoral, cunning bunch of fish imaginable. The ones near the bottom were wearing SS uniforms. The ones deeper than that were plotting to take over the world. These are the things we're trying to catch, god knows why. Perhaps so they can jump into our boat, snip our hamstrings with one scissor of their jaws, then leap away, laughing or doing whatever muskies do in those fleeting moments when they aren't pissed. Or maybe a whole bunch of them will rush the boat, and tip us into the water, after which they can pick us off, one-by-one, at their leisure.

In an effort to distract myself from thoughts like this, I have concentrated all day on making sure my reel doesn't get tangled. To do this you've got to wind the line through your thumb and forefinger. After a day of nothing--nobody's line has so much as shimmied since we got there--everybody takes a final cast, and we all discuss how we're going to "spin" our dismal failure. Fishing is a lot about putting a good face on disappointment, arranging it in your head so that it doesn't crush you. In this way it's a lot like life. One uncle plans to blame the weather (too dry--they come up after a rain); another says it's too hot (they stay down, where it's cool--and also out of the reach of local law enforcement). As I recall my father's opinion--or maybe it was his grandfather's--was that we didn't get out there early; it was a moral failure.

So I'm listening to this, winding the thick, wet strand through my fingers when suddenly, BAM! The reel buzzes like a wasp as something big hauls out line. Before I can whip my fingers away, a groove 1/4 inch deep has been dug out of both my thumb and forefinger. Given that my 10-year-old fingers weren't that large to begin with, this is a significant slice and it starts hurting like a bitch. Blood isn't a problem, however--I'm holding on to the pole much too tightly for that.

Finally the fish gets tired, or complacent (it's shown me who's boss), and slows for a second. Now I was nothing if not gritty as a kid, so I grab the handle and start cranking, dragging the fish back towards me. If it had been just me in the boat, there's no way I would've been able to beat Mr. Muskie, but after I got tired, I handed it to my dad, who handed it to my uncle when HE got tired. (Their periodic grunts and swearing made me feel a lot less weak.) I'm sitting there in the bow, sucking my injured fingers, when my dad says, "Get the net." It takes me a second or two to realize this sentence means, "Go to the side of the boat, and lean over towards the water, where all this fish's buddies--the guys smart enough to elude us all day--can leap at your eyes." It is a measure of how much I wanted to please my father that I did it anyway.

First there was splashing, as we finally got it near the surface. As the splashing grew closer, I started to wonder how the hell I was going to scoop up this very mean fish who almost certainly hated me the way a Hell's Angel does somebody who dents his bike. And in that moment, I suddenly saw the appeal of being drunk. But that was not an option; even if I could done a few quick shots, I had to keep both hands on the net--my goal was simply to keep the muskie away from my face, throat and groin until we beat it to death or trapped it in our cooler or whatever the adults were planning.

The fish thrashed by the side of the boat, really giving it everything. You could tell this was no longer fun for it, and it started getting truly angry. I caught a glimpse of its face as it rolled on its side for a second. Not only were there a lot of teeth jutting out like a Swiss Army knife waiting to be stepped on, there was a look in its eye: "I blame YOU."

I didn't have time to contemplate the possibilities for revenge or vendetta because everybody started yelling for me to scoop up the fish. Far from sure this was a good idea, I gave a few timid swipes, not nearly deep enough; the muskie dipped and flopped, skimming under the net with ease. (Apparently one of us had done this before.) My grittiness came to the fore again; if I was going to die--I was a dramatic child, and often thought in these terms--I was determined to die honorably. Putting my knees in the brackish water that had collected on the bottom of the boat, I leaned 'way over the edge, and dipped the net deep. Success! The lake water sprayed my glasses as the muskie thrashed. Blind, I brought it straight up out of the water--the fish was mine. I had won!

Everybody in both boats cheered. I remember being shocked at how heavy it was, and how I had to use my stomach and back to keep from plopping the fish-loaded net straight back down into the water. Just as I brought the twisting, shuddering net into the boat, the net suddenly flew up; there was another, final splash, and the net was empty. It took us a second to figure out what had happened: at the last minute--with one, effortless snip of its jaws--the muskie had bitten through the metal leader and the net below it.

It was gone; all we had was the story. My dad started the engine and the beat-up boat (my step-cousins no doubt) began to dig through the waves towards the shore. My fingers began to really kill, but it wasn't a bad pain--it was evidence, a mark, my Red Gouge of Courage. I hoped my mom would make a big deal out of my injury. I'm happy to report that she did.

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