19 Thoughts

The Big Show

2011-10-24T15:48:00.003-04:00

There is probably no other sport more photographed than baseball. There are myriad reasons for that, the chief being that baseball was the nation’s game at the turn of last century when the art of photography was just taking shape. Also the pace of baseball lends it to being photographed more than hockey, football and basketball.*

* During Joe DiMaggio’s record 56-game hit streak in 1941, there is a picture of DiMaggio ripping a hit. Most of the time this picture is cropped, but in the uncropped version there are three or four photographers five or six feet away from the batter’s box. I’m not sure when this practice fell out of vogue, but it’s startling to see people without protection so close to the action.

One of the better photographers of this early era of baseball was Charles M. Conlon. In a new book called “The Big Show” Neal and Constance McCabe gathered some of Conlon’s best work and preserved it in an exquisitely done coffee table book featuring a few hundred of Conlon’s 30,000 shots. There is also a remarkable foreword written by “Boys of Summer” author Roger Kahn.

There are plenty of stars littered through out this book: the aforementioned DiMaggio, Walter Johnson and Tris Speaker to name a few, but the main characters in this book are, to use baseball card parlance, the “common players”. Ballplayers that had solid careers, but weren’t household names. The McCabes did a fantastic job of choosing terrific shots and incorporating vivid stories to go with the pictures. And in a way, it underlines what baseball can be about.

In the annals of baseball, for every Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb story there’s a cool story about a guy like Fred Snodgrass, a player who had an auspicious past. He was a slick-fielding centerfield who dropped an easy pop fly for the New York Giants against the Boston Red Sox in the 1912 World Series. This is one of baseball’s biggest and most famous gaffes and the authors mention it in his write up in a roundabout way. Instead they focus on an incident in 1914 when he was almost plunked by a Boston Braves pitcher Lefty Tyler. Snodgrass took exception said some words and Tyler responded by throwing a ball in the air and dropping it, mimicking his mistake in the ‘12 Fall Classic. Snodgrass went back to the batter’s box, was promptly plugged and started a brawl.

After the brawl, Snodgrass went to first base and he thumbed his nose at the Braves fans who went bananas throwing bottles, cushions and anything else they could at him. The Boston mayor tried to have him ejected from the game from starting a riot and harbored a resentment towards him until the following year when he was dealt to the Braves. *

* A few things: one if this happened today both Tyler and Snodgrass would be internet sensations and talk radio would have a field day with this story. “Tyler did what?”, “What was Snodgrass thinking egging the crowd on like that?” And when Snodgrass died, his New York Times obituary headline read, “Fred Snodgrass, 86, Dead; Ball Player Muffed 1912 Fly.” That just sucks.

And there are literally hundreds of players like this in the book all with thoroughly interesting stories.

But the real star of the book are the photos. When I was a kid, black and white pictures from around this time scared the crap out of me. I don’t know why, it probably had something to do with the fact that these guys don’t look like anyone that I was used to seeing. And it’s still true, these players all look like hardscrabble men who came to the wilds of the country to play ball in the big city. Their complexions and eyes are pointed and dark, their faces ragged with deep lines, their smiles crooked and wherever they’re standing, it looks cold and dank.

Most of these people were younger than me, yet they looked more world-weary than I will ever be. These athletes should be in the prime of their lives, but they don’t look it. And that’s what’s so interesting about them. They look tired, weary and like they have a million things on their mind other than baseball. The youthful exuberance that we associate with today’s game is nowhere to be found back then. But that’s the expression that all working men had back then and the baseball players found in this book are a reflection of that.

One hundred years ago, life wasn’t fun. If you lived in the city it was cesspool of crime and filth, if you lived in the country you were cut off from modern life and grew up backwards and (probably) illiterate. There wasn’t much to be happy about. Some time after World War II this all changed and Americans became a more “happy” people. Life simply wasn’t as hard and this continues today. Things are getting easier, but it’s important to remember where we came from and recognize the folks who pioneered for our way of life.

“The Big Show” brings those people to life.

I Don't Know How to React to This

2011-05-24T10:27:00.003-04:00

Every day I read a Blog called TVTattle.com, which is a list of links that relate to television. Yesterday I came across a link that said, "Gwyneth Paltrow raps 'Straight Outta Compton'" and I have no idea what to think of this.

Twenty years ago, I would have been pissed. I'd get all self-righteous and wonder how an ultra privileged woman born with a silver spoon jammed in every orifice (she is the the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and film and television director and producer Bruce Paltrow) could identify with NWA and their message. I would drone on and on about how while Paltrow may have lived in Los Angeles, there is no way that she came close to Compton nor did she understand the racial and socioeconomic struggles that the group was talking about. On and on I would go about the obnoxiousness of this woman and how fake she was and how it was just all bullshit.

I'd probably even think that NWA sucked because they were reaching "this type" of audience of faux hipsters with fake English affectations whose only worry is whether to spend the summer in the Hamptons or traipse around Europe.

And here's the thing, not only would I be 100% wrong but my diatribe and outrage would be boring.

Who am I to tell anyone what music they can listen to? If Gwyneth Paltrow digs on NWA, then fuck it, she should listen to NWA. And it's not like I'm a product of the ghetto. I explain my background with NWA here. Aside from the bank account and the looks, I'm really not that different from Paltrow.

NWA wasn't speaking to me anymore than they were speaking to Paltrow. We just happened to come across the transmission and at the very least, enjoyed it and at the most were moved by the rhymes that we heard. And that's the job of music.

Bringing the reaction to the present, it's a funny clip. Paltrow gets the name of the song incorrect--it's not "Straight Outta Compton" it's "Gangsta, Gangsta", but it's a goofy minute of TV. That's all it really is. I don't think that it means that Paltrow was a secret Black Panther and her PC-ness shined through when she wouldn't say the n-word*, however it actually showed me a glimmer of humanness that is buried under the veneer of press clipping, PR statements and the careful speech of Paltrow.

* I'm not saying it wasn't a smart move on her part. You say that word, it gets taken out of context and the next thing you know your career is in the toilet. I have much, much less to lose than she does and I referred to it as the "n-word".

What it all comes down to is that at one point NWA was considered the most dangerous, most scary band in America. They really weren't. While they had a lot of truth in their raps, ultimately they are just another in a long line of musicians that made an indelible mark in American popular culture.

Kill Your Leaders?

2011-05-17T14:17:00.002-04:00

Currently I’m reading a book called “Why Rome Fell” which details the reasons why we don’t solely speak Latin any more and don’t care for Italians—other than every four years when the World Cup comes around. It’s a pretty good book, a little dry in some parts, but filled with some interesting tidbits about Roman Republic’s lesser known emperors who make Nero look like Mr. Rogers.

What I find most fascinating is that the way that most of these emperors came to power is through a brutal and always violent power grab. The would-be emperor was either a general or a senator who had the backing of the army who decided that they wanted to rule Rome*. They’d then kill the existing emperor and after a song-and-dance with the Senate (“No, no. I couldn’t accept this crown? Oh, alright. I’ll do it.” It reminded me of Tenacious D’s “City Hall”.) would accept the crown. Normally within nine months or fiveyears later, the cycle would repeat itself.

Power was transferred like this for a couple of hundred years and the people of the republic seemed okay with the way things went down. They just went on living and paying tribute to whomever was running the show.

* An interesting story that exemplifies the treachery of the age was of Emperor Valerian and his co-ruler who happened to be his son, Gallienus. Valerian was taken prisoner by Persian King Shapur after he tried invading Persia. Shapur didn’t just throw Valerian in a prison and let him rot. The story was that he used Valerian to make him get on his knees so that Shapur could mount his horse, essentially turning him into a step stool. Once Shapur died, the Persians skinned Valerian alive, painted him red and hung him in a temple as a trophy. Gallienus didn’t even try to rescue his father, he was having too much fun being the sole emperor.

At some point in history, the act of overthrowing an unpopular ruler by brazenly murdering him and then taking over his rival’s position lost a bit of favor with civilization as a whole. The answers are obvious to us why this isn’t a good idea and to be truthful, I’m not even sure why someone would want to be ruler of Rome if they know how the story is going to end.

When did this practice stop? What prompted the ruling hierarchy to figure out that this wasn’t a good solution to replacing leaders. Remember, this didn’t happen over a decade or two, the activity of murdering the emperor occurred over centuries. At some point the light must have gone off in someone’s head and it was decided that this wasn’t a good way of doing things. This moment of clarity represents an evolution in the modern human brain. Or it at least represents some foresight and the ability to understand history.

What if this practice came back into vogue? All of a sudden being the President really became a life threatening job that usually ended in a grizzly death? And not only was the assassination by someone that you trusted, but it would be one that virtually no one would mourn. Even when shitty presidents die, it’s a pretty big deal in America. But if this was Rome and a shitty emperor like Georgius Bushian II died, he’d be thrown onto a pile with the rest of the plagued and war-torn bodies. It would barely register a mention in any of the public records.

I’m obviously not advocating for a return to regularly-scheduled regicides*, but I would imagine that after a few of them went down in quick succession, we’d have the same blasé reaction to them as our Roman ancestors did. Remember, much like the United States, at one time Rome was the crowning achievement of civilization and if their economy and their ways of life were able to exist and thrive with their leaders getting snuffed out every few months, I’m sure that the American people could eventually handle it too.

* I know that this is the Latin word for an assassination of a monarch, but I’m not sure what the Latin term is for the assassination of a president. I tried looking it up on Google, but couldn’t find anything.

In any event, those years before deciding that our leader’s lives were worthless would descend into complete and utter chaos. In other words, it would suck. Thank god for the anonymous cabal that controls and runs our world.

The Constant Quest for Coolness

2011-05-09T14:58:00.005-04:00

BTW, this picture was the first one listed when I typed the word "cool" into a Google Image search. There were a lot of LL Cool J pictures, but he's no Millhouse.

I am 36-years-old. I’m married with two children. I own a home in the suburbs, I work a normal 9-to-5 job and every day I drive one of two Hondas that are parked in my driveway. I am not part of any family feuds or dramas, I like my wife’s family a lot and get along well with 99% of people I know. Aside from going out to dinner with my wife, most weekend nights involve me hanging out with my family and watching a movie.* During the entire weekend, I may consume six beers; if I drink more than two I get sleepy. I am thoroughly and completely in the most stable period of my life and I love it, I have no reason to try to be cool or impress anyone.

Yet I rewrote this opening paragraph at least three times because it didn’t convey the “right” message.

* I can honestly argue about the plot lines and discrepancies of any of the three Tinkerbelle movies and could probably quote entire scenes on request. This is just what happens when you have a three-year-old daughter.

My generation is the first generation that constantly seeks validation from others that they’re cool. Not that they’re good people, or that they live a virtuous life; but that they’re cool. And it’s not going to matter how old we get, we’re always going to wonder if what we’re doing is cool. I don’t think that it’s something that we can ever stop either, because since we were babies we have been exposed to a daily dose of what cool is.

I was born in 1974 and one of the first memories I have is of my Star Wars pillow case and a plastic “Happy Days” cup that I drank my milk from daily. The pillow case had the entire cast of characters, but aside from Darth Vader’s gigantic head looming as a scary moon, the most prominent character was Han Solo. My beloved “Happy Days” mug didn’t have a group shot of Richie, Ralph, Potsie and the gang; it was just a picture of Fonzi taken from the shoulders up against the backdrop of a brick wall. His expression was a bit different than his outer space compatriot. While Han Solo’s likeness was all action: gun drawn and about to leap from the canvas. Fonzi’ expression was one of utter indifference, it looked as if he just got done with the Aloha Pussycats and was exhaling his trademark, “Ayyyyyyyyyy!”

Both of these cultural touchstones were at the peak of their popularity during the late 1970s, the number one movie event of all time paired with the number one TV show in the land. And both had charismatic anti-heroes who looked similar (Harrison Ford and Henry Winkler shared a similar coif and facial structure ), who dress alike (black jacket/vest with exposed white TV shirt), who had the same mission in life (shepherd a nerds to the promised land – getting girls or blowing up the Death Star), who didn’t talk much (men of action, mostly), both drove iconic vehicles (the Millennium Falcon or a motorcycle) and both got the girls at the end of the day.

While the movies and TV show weren’t especially targeted towards kids my age, the duo were so gigantic that they eventually filtered down to my age group. And what was the message? Being cool was the ultimate and it trumped everything. Fonzi’s pal Richie Cunningham was a decent athlete who received high marks through high school and college and Solo’s buddy Luke Skywalker had the Force and was on his way to being a Jedi Knight. But Fonzie and Han Solo were the breakout stars of their medium and the “main” stars were often relegated to the background when Fonzie and Solo shared space with them. They were who everyone wanted to be because they were effortlessly cool.

Being cool didn’t stop when the popularity of “Star Wars” and “Happy Days” waned. As the 1970s bled into the 1980s more and more TV shows had at least one character whose job it was was to be cool. On shows that were targeted to tweens (we weren’t called this then) like “Diff’rent Strokes” it was Willis and on “Silver Spoons” it was Rick Stratton. As we got older, the shows changed but the attitude stayed the same: the entire premise of “Miami Vice” was two cool cops fighting crime.

And it worked in reverse as TV series that ran prior to the hay day of “Star Wars” and “Happy Days” retroactively made their characters seem cool; with ubiquitous reruns showing Greg Brady, JJ Evans and Keith Partridge cooling it up in their seemingly daily adventures.

The tempo changed was amped up in the 1990s as shows geared towards teenagers and stoned 20-somethings (“Beverly Hills 90210” and “Saved by the Bell”) dumped the one-cool, rest nerds formula of the 1970s and 1980s and replaced it with an entire group of cool kids and one nerd to provide contrast (David Silver and Screech for 90210 and SBtB).* Even shows geared towards adults, like “Freinds” or “Seinfeld” were about what happened once the cool table moved from the high school cafeteria to Manhattan—just edging out Seattle as the ultimate cool city in the 90s. The entire philosophy of the FOX network was that they were cooler than the other three networks.

And it wasn't just television, if you boil down a lot of movies from this time, it's really just about trying to be cool. "Pulp Fiction", "Clerks", "Swingers", "Clueless" were, at their cores, movies about the main characters trying to be or keep some semblance of coolness. These movies wouldn't have worked in the 1980s as audiences weren't prepared to see adults try to be cool.

* The one thing that’s odd about coolness in pop culture is that it is always evolving. If you jammed Fonzi in a sitcom today, he wouldn’t be cool because mores have grown and changed. However, the nerd or uncool character never changes. Potsie could change places with Urkel who could exchange roles with David Silver who could have been Will Smith’s dorky cousin on “Fresh Prince of Bel Aire” all of whom could be uncool character X on the latest FOX sitcom. Since the dawn of time, the nerd has stayed constant. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for a person to be an outcast. Being cool is hard and an always-evolving role, being uncool is easy in comparison.

Suddenly it wasn’t fashionable to be the cool fish in a pond of dorks. Each cool person needed to find other cool people in which to hang out. As we grew up, we were completely and totally immersed Alex DeLarge-style in this never-ending, never-blinking loop of what cool is. It wasn’t just kosher to be cool, we had to be part of a cool subset too. Because of this maturation of coolness, we subconsciously learned that being cool is the only thing that really matters.

And this is why I wear a Public Enemy t-shirt, with blue adidas Gazelles and a throw-back baseball cap. It’s why my friends, most of whom are approaching 40, still play in a band, or will scour the Internet for the latest underground band or watch Adult Swim or stay up until 3 am drinking beer and playing video games and then drag their asses to work the following day. Because all of those things are pretty cool things to do.

I think back to my father and members of his generation. None of them wore sneakers and band t-shirts, hell, none of the ever wore t-shirts at all—if it was a weekend, it was polo shirt time. None of them were in a band or knew anything about the latest music or even knew how to turn on an Atari. And while I can blame this on the perspective of being young, most of the adults that I knew were responsible. Yes, there were a couple that were completely irresponsible, but even in that fashion, they were irresponsible in an adult way.

Why is that? Because while coolness was a factor when they were teens, it never seeped down to their days of impressionable youth. The line delineating entertainment for older and younger kids was clearly marked. If you were born in the mid to late 40s, you watched “The Mickey Mouse Club” or “Howdy Doody” and aside from Annette Funicello’s tits, there wasn’t anything cool about either show. They starred a bunch of dorky white kids doing dorky white stuff. At the same time Marlon Brando and Jimmy Dean, the Rat Pack and tons of jazz and blues heroes were emerging and taking coolness to a new height, but rarely did that move into the collective subconscious of this generation.

As the baby boomers grew older the hip touchstones began: Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and what signified cool became more and more defined. As that was taking shape, the lines of what was suitable for young kids were being erased. The second decade of television brought with it a familiarity so strong the TV set wasn’t considered immovable furniture—like a kitchen table—anymore. As technology improved, mobility improved too and now one could roll the TV into the kiddies’ room and you could have a baby sitter for the afternoon.

It’s this constant exposure to mass media that causes a 36-year-old to look in a mirror and ask, “Does this look cool?” when there is no one to impress. And these questions of coolness inhibit our interactions with other people. The other day I was walking to the cafeteria for lunch and I saw a coworker walking through the foyer wearing a bright blue shirt. Emblazoned on that shirt was about 30 different Marvel Comics characters. If you’ve ever read this Blog, you know that I dabble in comics, but my first thought was, “Jesus, what’s wrong with this guy?”

The lesson in this story wasn’t that I was being a judgmental prick because obviously, I was.* But the lesson was much like I was when I was a teenager, I’m still conditioned to make instant generalizations on people that I don’t know solely based on how they dressed. And while I take no solace in knowing that I’m not the only Generation Xer that does it, I have to wonder when will it end.

* I mean seriously, I wear a Public Enemy t-shirt—when will the revolution be televised, Gramps? And on that particular day I was wearing a t-shirted version of a 1970 Houston Astros baseball shirt.

Is there ever going to be a day where I don’t give a shit about what someone’s wearing, watching on TV, listening to, driving around in or talking about? Because really, when it comes down to it, who gives a shit? Haven’t I learned from shows like “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared” and the myriad of Paul Fieg/Judd Apatow movies that the cool kids are usually the most shallow, the most insincere, the most boring?

Why would I want to be like that? Especially now.

My Weekly War with the New Yorker

2011-05-06T14:33:00.003-04:00

This entry isn’t so much about my problem with the periodical the New Yorker, it’s mostly about the Mexican standoff between me, laziness and free-time. Usually laziness and me gang-up and kick the crap out of free-time, but there are times when laziness and free-team turn the tables on yours truly. In any event, the New Yorker is a perfect conduit for this standoff that happens every day.

In my opinion, the New Yorker is probably the best magazine being printed today. It’s smart, it’s timely, it’s funny, it has cartoons, most of today’s top writers would give their thumbs to appear in its pages. And the best thing--the length of the articles--are ironically what’s kicking my ass on a daily basis*.

They’re too interesting and too long—and trust me, I will expound on this insanely whiny reason after this Posterisk because I sound like a world-class steakhead with the first six-and-a-half words of this sentence.

* Whenever I complain about the downfall of Sports Illustrated, I always crab about the length of the articles; mainly they’re too short. Usually, I’ll say that when the story really starts to get going, you see that little box at the end of the page and you know that you’re done. I’ll prattle on (I'm a hit at parties) that when I was a kid, the articles were “much more in-depth” and it was a “more satisfying read” when I was younger. Yes, the articles are a bit shorter than 20 years ago, however what I really mean is that SI seems to know that I don’t have the time to read long articles, so they’ve made them shorter. This in turn, pisses me off because subconsciously, I know that I don’t have the amount of free time that I used to but I'm not ready to lose that battle yet.

Since I was in my mid-20s, I’ve always wanted a subscription to the New Yorker. Not because it’s the quintessential “adult” magazine, but because I found each issue packed with interesting articles and thought that if I read them I’d become a more well-rounded, educated person. And while that certainly was a reason, I also harbored thoughts of where I'd read the articles that would make me a hit at any cocktail party. There I'd be in front of a roaring fire, in a high-backed leather chair that is part of an immense home library where I’d be in a velvet smoking jacket, a snifter of brandy at my right hand and that week’s New Yorker in my left paw. Oh, I’d chuckle at the issue’s bon mots, nod approvingly or shake my head with consternation when reading articles about foreign policy, maybe even shed a tear or two when reading a piece about some ravaged far away land.

In my mind’s eye, I was more erudite than Mr. Howell (this reference should have been my first clue that this was a complete fantasy) and more worldly than Uncle Traveling Matt (and there’s my second clue) and judging from the home library and smoking jacket, richer than Scrooge McDuck.

As I’ve come to find out, future events that happen in your mind never coincide with what happens in real life. In reality, there are a few places where I read the New Yorker:

1. When I’m on the couch and my wife is watching a show that I hate
2. During the 45 minutes that I carve out for lunch at my desk. Of course, I’m not really concentrating too much on the written page because I also have to keep one eye on my email inbox.
3. While I’m on one of the cardio machines in the gym. And if you've seen my waist line recently, that hasn’t happen in about six months.

Deep down I knew that I was never going to get the immense home library or high-backed leather chairs or the velvet smoking jacket. But it would still be nice to really concentrate on a truly great magazine.

About 10 different magazines arrive in our mailbox every month (the New Yorker is a weekly) and I rarely read any of them.

A few years ago I subscribed to Esquire because one of my favorite authors, Chuck Klosterman, wrote a pop culture column every month. Two months after I subscribed, he stopped writing for the magazine. In recent years, Esquire has turned into a bossier version of Maxim and is filled with mindless articles on “manly” celebrities (like Vince Vaughn) who are pushing their next mindless movie that I’ll never see. Every two or three months they have an article that I may want to read, but I have to wade through so many perfume and designer ads that by the time I get to the article, I smell like the first floor of Macy’s and I’m concerned that I'm under dressed to read the piece. I have two years left on my subscription.

We also get ESPN the Magazine, but I only subscribed to it so that I can get the Insider columns on ESPN.com. I rarely even crack open this literary abortion, but when I do it looks like it was written by ADHD chimps who have been raised to think that AXE Body Spray and Mountain Dew advertisements are the pinnacle of page design and literary achievement. I know that I sound like an old man trying to figure out these damn video games that the kids play these days, but on the occasions when I do peruse this magazine it’s actually difficult to know where to begin reading. ESPN the Magazine gives me the literary version of an ice cream headache.

Entertainment Weekly comes to our home too and most of the time, it’s not worth the $6 I pay for the yearly subscription. However there are times when it doesn't disappoint and the way I look it is if I get one or two issues that touch on something that I enjoy, then it almost pays for itself.

Aside from the New Yorker, the other magazine that we get (and that I like) is Boston Magazine. But I like this for reasons other than the New Yorker; I like to read it because they review restaurants and places that I may have been to. I sit there and say, “Aly, remember we went there?” or “Aly what did we eat there? It was pretty good, right?” I’m sure my wife hates Boston Magazine day at our house. They also have some pretty breezy articles that are enjoyable to read.

The rest of the magazines that come to my house are food magazines. Those are for my wife and she enjoys them. I think.

The difference between the New Yorker and the rest of these magazines is that it’s not written for a person with a third-grade education. The writers don’t dumb down their articles, it’s the responsibility of the reader to fill in the blanks if they don’t understand a topic. And while that’s an admirable quantity, it also one of the things that makes it tougher to read. Any of the magazines I’ve listed above, I can buzz through in about an hour (ESPN the Magazine and Entertainment Weekly, 10 minutes tops). And this isn’t a humblebrag, there just isn’t a lot of substance to these weekly/monthly reads.

But the New Yorker is prestigious, even the cartoons have some sort of gravitas—and I am not ashamed to admit that one of the main reasons why I originally subscribed to the New Yorker is because of the cartoons. Both the subject and the art are better than you’re going to find in the daily newspapers. They aren't all gems though.*

* One of the most famous episodes of “Seinfeld” is when Elaine couldn’t understand a New Yorker cartoon, so she confronted the editor of the magazine and walked away with a cartooning gig. Not surprisingly, it’s one of my favorite episodes of that TV show. And the fact that her published cartoon was a rip-off of Ziggy is even better.

While the New Yorker is a weekly, humbling experience it’s subscription is still something that I’m going to continue. Some of my brightest friends subscribe to the magazine and I've found that they’re just like me, they have dozens of issues scattered around their house dog-eared and worn pages with titles circled—indicating that these are articles that will be read later.

It seems to me that we’re all fighting the laziness/free-time battle with ourselves. I guess that we’ll get around to reading all of this stuff when we retire—what age is that again?

Two Guys Discussing How to Make a Jim Davis Balloon for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

2011-04-18T13:43:00.001-04:00

The setting is an indistinguishable office in mid-town Manhattan. Two young men are talking about a project to create a gigantic balloon sculpture to celebrate the 33rd anniversary of Garfield and Universal Press Syndicate. The syndicate wants to make a splash and expects the balloon to lead this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The deadline is just hours away.

“Do you have any ideas yet?”
“Yes. I have a few. Want to hear them?”
“I do. We better have something fast. And soon. And good.”
“Don’t worry. I have a bunch of good thoughts. First off, I was thinking that we can have a balloon made up to have Jim Davis in a bath tub. You know, the old- time bath tubs with the claw feet?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what I was thinking of. None of this modern bathtub-personal spa bullshit, Davis is nothing if not classy. Anyway, he’ll be in the tub and we can have a bubble machine pumping bubbles and suds on the crowd.”
“Nice. I like that.”
“And we can have a little piece of a wall near the tub and on the wall we can have a calendar saying, ‘Monday, November, 13’. And then in Davis’ hands we can have him drop a plugged-in radio into the tub.”
“Uh, what?”
“What do you mean what? Are you talking about the bubbles? I thought you liked the bubbles going over the tub and on the kids?”
“I did. The other thing.”
“The calendar? You’re right, that might be a bit in-your-face for Thanksgiving. I bet the audience will get that he’s having a bad day.”
“No. I mean the radio. Why would he drop it in the tub?”
“Because it’s a Monday. Bad day, remember? Doesn’t sound like you like (or get) this one. Here’s another idea: how about we have a big balloon scene of Jim Davis’ kitchen. There’s a fridge, a sink, a stove with a plan of lasagna and a cat just staring at it. All of this stuff will be stainless steel. Because of the classy thing.”
“Sounds good so far. Where’s Davis?”
“Davis has his back to the audience and his head is in the oven. Behind the balloon, we can have a bunch of blue, white and gray paper streamers on a fan in the background and they can be wafting up to make it look like the gas is on. Oh yeah, they’ll be a calendar showing the date of ‘Monday, September 28’ in the background. What do you think?”
“Why is Davis trying to kill himself? And why is he in the kitchen?”
“Monday’s bad luck strikes anywhere, man. It doesn’t matter if he’s in the kitchen or the living room or under a tree. When shit is going down, shit is going to get you.”
“I don’t think that this idea is family-friendly. This is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Kids will be watching.”
“Ok. How about this, Davis is hanging by a belt from a door frame with his pants around his ankles, an obvious victim of auto erotic asphyx --”
“No.”
“Ugh. Alright. This is my last idea, good thing it’s my best one. Are you ready?”
“Yeah. We need a good one.
“Ok. Davis is at a draftsman’s board.”
“Good. We’re getting somewhere.”
“He has a few drawings tacked up and a pen in his hand.”
“Great. This is exactly what I’m looking for.”
“And a protractor jammed into his jugular. He’s got blood all over his hands and a ton of blood spurting out his neck like a fucking geyser. We also need to have a look of shock, confusion and serenity on his face. Can a balloon do that? It has to be all at once. And his calendar reads ‘Monday, June, 19!”
“Forget it. This is pointless. Do you even know who Jim Davis is?”
“No. Isn’t he that clumsy friend of yours?”

Suddenly a door barges open, breaking the silence. It’s the men’s boss: Jim Davis. He isn’t happy.

“What the fuck are you idiots doing? Get back to work! Those urinals aren’t going to scrub themselves! And use a toothbrush this time. God, you’re fucks.”

Remembering Fenway Park

2011-04-12T11:49:00.001-04:00

If we can be completely honest with each other, I’ve never been a member of the “Save Fenway Park Club”. I found the lyrical, little bandbox to be cramped, dirty and a bit depressing. Every winter the previous Red Sox ownership would slap a little green paint on the Wall and proclaim that they “updated” the park for the next season. However, generations of green paint couldn’t hide the crumbling bleachers or the compact seats or the terrible sight lines or the appalling lack of any modern amenities*.

* When Gillette Stadium were built at the turn of this century, Bostonians actually got excited because the seats had cup holders. This is not an exaggeration. Writers wrote about this phenomenon and people in the Boston area were pumped for a half-cylindrical piece of plastic that held a 16-ounce beverage. That’s how poor the stadia in the greater Boston area was even a decade ago—the addition of cup holders were met with Hosannas.

I had been to other parts of the country and I had watched a game from a seat that faced home plate (not left field). And I’ve been to a ball park that didn’t give me a choice between Bud and Bud Lite and called it a day. I’ve been to a ball park where the game was the number one priority, but the enjoyment and comfort of the fans was paramount too.

It was good. And it made me hate my home ballpark, Fenway Park, even more.

So when “Remembering Fenway Park: An Oral and Narrative History of the Home of the Boston Red Sox” by Harvey Frommer came to my home, I was a bit suspect. Yes, under the new ownership of John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Luccino, the experience at Fenway Park has become infinitely better. But this place is still old. And while their tenure has made me want to bomb the place back to the stone age less, really didn’t want it to stand for another 100 years either.

After reading Frommer’s book, my attitude changed even more. There are scant few places in the world where one has access to this much history on a daily basis and Fenway Park is one of them. Frommer has gone to great lengths to interview and create a narrative where the reader is able to delve into the rich history of the Red Sox, from the folks who were actually there. The ballpark and the team’s history is intertwined.

One of my all-time favorite books is “Loose Balls” by Terry Pluto, which details the rise and fall of the American Basketball Association. Using only the recollections and words of the people who were associated with the ABA, Pluto penned a fascinating book that felt epic in scale to its subject. Frommer has done the same thing with his book, and being a die-hard Red Sox fan, I couldn’t be happier.

From players to sportswriters to long-time fans, the passion of the people that he interviews is captured in each anecdote they tell and practically jumps off each page. And that’s what makes this more than just another stale history of the Boston Red Sox—most can spout the names and numbers of events both good and bad in Red Sox history as if they were our children’s birth dates—this books is more like a gathering of your closest and most knowledgeable baseball friends sitting around and swapping extremely entertaining stories.

And while the writing is fascinating, the photographs are just as fantastic. I’m not going to be too bold and say that I’ve seen every picture of the Boston Red Sox ever taken. That’s obviously an insane proclamation, but I have seen a lot and I must say that by my calculations at least 90% of the shots in “Remembering Fenway Park” are ones that I had never laid eyes on before.

All of the great Red Sox heroes of the past are represented here including a really cool double page shot of Ted Williams pitching against the Detroit Tigers. I know that Williams took to the bump a few times in his career and I’ve seen smaller shots of the occasion, but never had I seen one so larger and with so much detail. I’m not sure where Frommer found the snapshot, but not only is it an important picture, but a beautiful one too.

The one gripe that I have with the photo selection is that Nomar Garciaparra is conspicuously missing from the honor roll of Red Sox greats. The aforementioned Williams, Johnny Pesky, Carl Yastrzemski, Fred Lynn, Jim Rice, Roger Clemens, Mo Vaughn, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz all make an appearance in this tome, but not Nomar. And while it’s not a reason to not purchase the book, it struck me as a bit odd to not include a player that was instrumental in keeping the Red Sox afloat in the latter part of the 1990s.

Another of the books’ winning qualities is its size. Oversized and meant for the coffee table, “Remembering Fenway Park” has the luxury of laconically taking the reader through Boston’s American League’s representative’s history at a pace conducive to the nation’s past time. Not only can the reader absorb the stories of the men and women telling them, but thanks to the over sized photos, they can immerse themselves in the details of the past.

“Remembering Fenway Park: An Oral and Narrative History of the Home of the Boston Red Sox” is a terrific book and one that should be on the bookshelf of every Boston Red Sox fan.

My Half-Assed, Very Quick 2011 MLB Preview

2011-03-31T16:44:00.007-04:00

BTW, I have no idea who the kid pictured is. I did a Google image search for "Yay baseball!" and this is what came up.

Ok gang, Opening Day has come and I’m late delivering my Major League Baseball preview. So let’s get to it, shall we? This is the second time I've done this, click here and here for the 2008 previews and see how awful I was.

Enjoy!

American League East:

1. Boston Red Sox: on paper, they’re the best in the division, best in the league and best in the sport. I don’t think that they’re going to win 100 games--the American League East might be the best division in baseball--but I think that they win between 95 and 99 games.

2. New York Yankees: not as bad as you think that they’re going to be. They’re going to hit like hell and on the third, fourth and fifth days they’re going to need to. The back of their bullpen is absolutely stacked (provided that the Mariano Rivera-bot 3000 doesn’t break down) and their infield could be one of the best in baseball history.

3. Tampa Bay Rays: have the exact opposite problem of the Yankees: their bullpen has the potential to be a fire hazard and their starting rotation is loaded. Evan Longoria is probably going to need some help, but this isn’t a bad hitting team either. Plus they got new astroturf at the Trop. Finally I won’t want to treat myself for depression after watching a game from there. Did you ever see their old turf? It looked like shag carpeting from George and Weezie's rumpus room after their weird British neighbor puked pea soup all over it.

4. Toronto Blue Jays: I don’t know what to make of these guys, they could be a third place (or even second place team) or they could completely suck. Former Sox pitching coach John Farrell is up there and he’s a pretty bright dude, so I’d say it’s closer to the former.

5. Baltimore Orioles: despite Buck Showalter’s headline grabbing stunt of a week ago, I don’t think that the Orioles are going to be that bad. In fact, I think that they’re going to be a real interesting team and one that no one in the East should take lightly.

American League Central:

1. Chicago White Sox: in all actuality, any of the next three teams could win the AL Central and I wouldn’t be surprised. However, I think that the White Sox are going to be the ones that climb out of this scrum due in part to their power. That being said, Paul Konerko is going to be the fantasy guy that you’re going to look at in June and say, “Why the fuck did I draft him?”

2. Detroit Tigers: Miguel Cabrera is a beast and along with Victor Martinez should help the Tigs put up a lot of crooked numbers on the scoreboard. And they’re going to need it, as their pitching is mediocre at best.

3. Minnesota Twins: I put them here because I don’t want to watch the Twins in the post season this year, rolling over for the Yankees. Though I have to admit, I love watching Joe Mauer hit.

4. Kansas City Royals: either next year or in two years, they’re going to be the class of the division. They have six prospects in Baseball America’s Top 40. You have to figure that even with KC’s luck, at least two or three of those guys have to pan out, right?

5. Cleveland Indians: I wonder if Clevelanders get angry that so many sports fans pity them? It used to piss me off when I’d read or hear people from other cities patronize Sox fans and say, “Don’t worry, you’ll win too some day.” Fuck off.

American League West:

1. Oakland Athletics: they have a stellar pitching staff and they brought in a bunch of “professional hitters” like Hideki Matsui to improve an anemic offense and that should be enough to win the American League West.

2. Texas Rangers: last year was a year where just about everything fell in line (including the Mariners telling the Yankees to screw off and dealing Cliff Lee to Texas). No matter how good you are, when you experience a season like that, the next year never follows the same script.

3. Los Angeles Angels: I guess we’ll see how brilliant Mike Scioscia really is, won’t we? I will admit this, he was one of the funnier guest stars on that baseball Simpsons from the early 90s. In fact, most of the Major Leaguers were really funny. According to the writers, only Jose Canseco was an asshole. What a shock—at least he didn’t send his twin brother to the taping.

4. Seattle Mariners: last year I was telling everyone that they were going to the World Series. I was really high on the Mariners and they crashed and burned, hard. This year, around July 31 there’s going to be a fire sale in Seattle. You can get yourself a really nice Chone Figgins for cheap. Maybe even a Felix Hernandez (I just hope the M’s dick over the Yankees on this one again).

National League East:

1. Atlanta Braves: a few years ago I bet three of my friends $20 that Tim Hudson would win 20 games with Atlanta (he had just been traded from Oakland). He did not do it, but I think that he will this year. The Braves also have some nice young talent that’s about ready to contribute. Could be a fun year.

2. Philadelphia Phillies: I think that the Phils will make the post season and they’re going to be really awesome with their four starters. I just think that they have a lot of injuries to overcome in the first half of the season that may make a division crown a tough road. According to Jayson Stark, they do have the easiest first half of any team in the majors. So basically, I have no idea.

3. Florida Marlins: they’re in third place every, single year aren’t they? They’re just good enough to take seriously, but not that good to keep your attention. Next year they’re going to have a new stadium and will be known as the Miami Marlins. Also, orange will be one of their primary team colors which has a bunch of people who love uniforms up in arms. Frankly, the fact that I know what angers uniform aficionados this says more about me than it does about them.

4. Washington Nationals: they won’t be this bad for much longer. Bryce Harper is coming soon and Stephen Strasburg is beginning a rehab from Tommy John surgery. Even with all of that, I wonder why Jayson Werth signed with them? Oh yeah, he likes money.

5. New York Mets: this team is such a mess, it’s not even fun to rag on them. Good luck Mets fans, take heart in the fact that at least you’re not Yankee fans. However, if you’re a Jets AND a Mets fan, go crap in the woods.

National League Central:

1. Milwaukee Brewers: if the Brewers don’t win this year, then it’s going to be a long time before anything good happens in Suds City. They got Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum, so their rotation should be good enough. They also have Ryan Braun and a pre-walk-year Prince Fielder. If they miss again, cheer up. Milwaukeeans in only a little more than a year, I will come to your city. Woo-ha!

2. Cincinnati Reds: the Reds have young pitching talent. The Reds’ manager is Dusty Baker. Ask a Cubs fan if this ends well. Aside from the young pitching, they do have more than a few guys that can hit bombs. In any event, this is a fun team and I’d love to see them make the post season. I’m just not sure if it will happen.

3. St. Louis Cardinals: I hate Tony LaRusa, but I’ve always liked the Cardinals. They have really cool fans (I’ve been to St. Louis before and they’ve come up here when they played the Sox and they couldn’t have been nicer) and they have a transcendent player in Albert Pujols. With that being said, I would be lying if I said I didn’t chuckle when Adam Wainwright went down for the year. If you’re such a genius, LaRusa, manage around that.

4. Chicago Cubs: I don’t know what to tell you about this team. It seems like a club that’s loaded with crappy, over priced veterans that can’t be moved and they don’t have a lot of good, young guys coming down the pike. I would pencil them in for 78 wins exactly. And I’ll be seeing you next year too, Chicagoans. Yes, I am going to Chicago and Milwaukee with my buddies next year in part two of our “Seeing all the Stadia Tour”. Check out part I right here.

5. Pittsburgh Pirates: they could be the Royals of the National League, though they may have to wait a year or two extra before they get good. The last time the Pirates were over .500, I was starting college. In 1992. That is so depressing on a number of levels—both for me and Pirates fans.

6. Houston Astros: this could be the worst team in the Major Leagues. I watched the Red Sox kick the crap out of them on Wednesday night in the last Spring Training game and there was absolutely nothing there. Just a rotten product. And owner Drayton MacLane may sell the team, so anything decent is going to be sold off for pennies on the dollar come July and August. That should put some fannies in the seats.

National League West:

1. San Francisco Giants: last year’s rookie catcher’s name was Buster Posey. This year’s rookie first baseman’s name is Brandon Belt. Grantland Rice himself couldn't have written better names. I think that the Giants are a hair better than the Rockies this year, but that’s only because I am really biased against the Rockies for some strange reason.

2. Colorado Rockies: they have a good staff, they have decent hitting but like I just said, I don’t like the Rockies. I have no idea why I don’t like them, I think it’s because I don’t like Denver. Which is really strange because I’ve never been there before. Maybe it’s because of my hatred of Robin Williams who starred in “Mork and Mindy” which was set in ... Boulder, CO. Same fucking thing. Nanu, Nanu.

3. Los Angeles Dodgers: these guys are almost as messy as the Mets. The good news for them is that they have the Padres in their division and they still have some pretty good players. Unfortunately, they don’t have as many good players as the Rockies or the Giants. And clean-shaven Don Mattingly is managing them. I'm not sure what makes Mattingly (or anyone) think the he can manage without his mustache.

4. San Diego Padres: yes, I realize that the Pads were about three days away from beating the eventual World Champions and taking the NL West crown last year, but let’s be honest: that was done with smoke and mirrors. They got rid of their best player (you DID stay classy, San Diego!) and Will Venable led the team with 13 home runs. That’s not a lot. At least you San Diegans had the San Diego State University Aztecs hoop team this year, they were really exciting.

5. Arizona Diamondbacks: it's been almost 24 hours and I finally realized that I forgot to add these guys to the preview. That's how bad it is for the Diamondbacks. They do have the All-Star Game this year, so that should be pretty good. Other than that, it's snoozeville in Phoenix.

I almost forgot to do this:

ALDS
Boston over Chicago
Oakland over New York

ALCS
Boston over Oakland

NLDS
Atlanta over Milwaukee
Philadelphia over San Francisco

NLCS
Philadelphia over Atlanta

World Series
Boston over Philadelphia

Jeter

2011-03-25T10:42:00.003-04:00

A few weeks ago, I reviewed a book called “Scorecasting”. I was contacted by the book publisher’s PR company and was offered the book in exchange for writing a blurb on my Blog. I love reading and I love writing, so I was pumped to do it. I enjoyed the experience so much that when I was contacted to receive another book, I jumped at the chance. The book in question is “Derek Jeter: From the Pages of the New York Times” which is a collected works of the nation's "Newspaper of Record" that follows the Yankee shortstop from before he was drafted through the 2010 season.

Before I get into the epiphany that I realized after reading this collection of stories, I have to say that the book itself, is absolutely gorgeous. The writing, which includes dozens of stories from top writers like Buster Olney, is fantastic. And the photos are breath taking. If you’re not a Jeter or Yankee fan, you should at least consider it for your baseball library just so that you have a time capsule of the sights and words of the late 20th/early 21st Major League Baseball.*

*There are also some really humorous pictures of Jeter as a skinny—almost sickly-looking—minor leaguer. That’s almost worth the price of the book itself.

As a Red Sox and baseball fan I’m conflicted about Derek Jeter. On one hand, I’m a fan of anyone who plays baseball well and despite wearing pinstripes, Jeter definitely fits into that category. It’s really hard to argue any other way, the guy is a first ballot Hall of Famer. On the other hand, “Nomah’s bettah!” Sorry about that, old habits are hard to break, you know.

During the mid to late 1990s, there was a renaissance in shortstops throughout the American League. In Cleveland, there was defensive wizard Omar Vizquel. In Oakland, Miguel Tejada manned the position and led the small-market Athletics to the postseason year after year. In Boston, the aforementioned Nomar Garciaparra started for the Red Sox and was drawing batting comparisons to Joe DiMaggio. While these three guys were plying their trade, up in Seattle Alex Rodriguez looked like he was going to be the best of the bunch—maybe the best ever.

And Derek Jeter wore number two for the New York Yankees and patrolled the Yankee Stadium infield, but didn’t quite find a real tangible niche. He wasn’t the best defensively, that was Vizquel. He didn’t win any MVPs that was Tejada and Rodriguez. And he wasn’t the group’s best all-around hitter. In his prime, that would have been Garciaparra. Yet, Jeter out-lasted all of these players as he’s the only one still playing shortstop for his original team. There were numerous reasons: some players were brittle and prone to injuries, others were helped by artificial means and regressed once more stringent testing began and others shifted positions. The odd thing is that all of them played for at least more than three teams.

But through it all, every season, Derek Jeter, consistently made his way to shortstop in two different Yankee Stadiums. And what’s most surprising is that he’s probably going to be considered the class of that late 20th century shortstop group. That’s pretty amazing considering that while Jeter was an All-star and all-time Yankee, he didn’t have a defined skill that made him stand out from the other shortstops.

Is he a winner? Sure, but there are 24 other guys on the Yankees that enabled him to reach that pinnacle five times. Is he steady and reliable? Sure, but he’s not Cal Ripken and there’s nothing particularly sexy about coming to work every day getting a couple of base hits and making the routine plays. Was he a tabloid sensation? Sure, but it wasn’t in a Tiger Woods sort of way. Jeter was the handsome, unmarried Yankee shortstop who dated starlets left and right, but there never was anything scandalous about the way he lived the night life. For a person whose bedposts had notches from Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Mariah Carey, among others, his personal life was remarkably boring.

About the only tangible quality that you could put on Derek Jeter is that he had set of intangibles. He always seemed to get the key hit in the biggest game. As a Red Sox fan, he was the last guy I wanted to see at the plate in a big situation. He always seemed to be at the right place at the right time. Witness his famous play against the Athletics in the 2001 Playoffs where he was way out of position—but in the right place—to pick off a bad cutoff throw and then make a flip to catcher Jorge Posada that cut down Jeremy Giambi at the plate.

After reading this book, it seems to me that none of these things were accidental: he was in the right place because he was prepared. He seemed like the most dangerous hitter in tough spot because he worked hard. He outlasted the other shortstops because he has a drive to be the best.

Even after reading this book, Derek Jeter won’t ever be my favorite player—to quote Jerry Seinfeld, “I root for laundry”—but after reading the accounts of what he’s done and following the trajectory of his career, it’s easy to respect the guy and root for him. Any time I got into an argument with a Yankee fan over the merits of Jeter versus any of the other shortstops, the one chestnut that the New York guy would ultimately put out is, “Jeter does it the right way”.

As much as it pains me to say this, they may have been right.

I am not in London

2011-03-23T10:05:00.003-04:00

My Facebook and email accounts have been hacked and I can't get into either until Thursday. You may have received this email from me:

I'm writing this with tears in My eyes My Family and I came down here to (London,England ) for a short vacation,unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we stayed all cash,credit card and cell were stolen off us but luckily for us we still have our passports with us.

We've been to the embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all and our flight leaves in less than 3hrs from now but we're having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won't let us leave until we settle the bills.

Am freaked out at the moment.

A few things:

1. I have not been mugged
2. I am not in London
3. I don't write that poorly

However, I am a bit freaked out at the moment because I'd like to get my email. So they got that part correct.

20. South Park

2011-03-22T15:51:00.005-04:00

The way that I was introduced to “South Park” was such a unique experience that there is no way that I will ever be able to duplicate it again. When “South Park” was launched on August 22, 1997 it had been about two weeks since I had moved away from parents' house. My two college friends and I had rented a third-floor, three bed room apartment in Winthrop, MA. This place was pretty damn nice. It was a large apartment on short dollars that put subsequent places I lived in to shame.

Aside from the large rooms, one of the great things about this place was its proximity to Boston and despite my meager earnings as a fund accountant (and later a reporter for a mid-sized city weekly) we’d all venture into Boston every Friday and Saturday night determined to quench our thirsts. When we got back from the latest Boston bar adventure, we’d end up staring at the TV hoping for nudity or sports scores. One of the first nights we came back from Boston, we got something a bit more interesting.

In the mid- to late-90s, Comedy Central was still trying to find itself. It would run hours and hours of crappy 80s comedy flicks, warmed-over sitcoms and a bunch of dated stand up "specials". Every once in awhile it would debut a new series, but it usually died on the vine never lasting more than a season or two. In therms of standout performers, the biggest star that Comedy Central had at the time was Craig Kilborn who hosted “The Daily Show” and that’s because most people knew him as the sarcastic 2 am SportsCenter anchor who was among the first to escape Bristol, Connecticut. Other than that, it was a wasteland.

With shows like "Beavis and Butthead", "The State" or "The Half-Hour Comedy Hour", MTV was a better place for laughs despite the channel being known for music.

We weren’t expecting much that late Saturday night when my buddies and I were drunkenly channel surfing and wound up on some crudely animated kids cursing a blue streak, threatening to kill each other and witnessing a gigantic alien anal probe sticking out of the fat, obnoxious kid’s ass. It was a jarring enough image that we dropped the clicker and watched the rest of the episode. And then another, and another, and another, and another—Comedy Central was running a marathon that night and we were completely blown away.

We were shocked at how unlikeable the fat kid was and how much he hated the Jews (is his name Cartman or Carmen?) and we were taken aback at how the kid in the orange sweat shirt died in every single episode. I was really surprised at how bad the animation was, but I was more surprised at how I couldn’t take my eyes off the show. And there was a reason for that. Even though I was a devoted “Simpsons” disciple and often told people who ripped on the show for being “just a cartoon”that it wasn’t the medium, it was the message that made that show great, I didn’t truly realize until watching “South Park” exactly what that meant. Because “The Simpsons” has very good animation and terrific writing it wasn't until that I saw show with great writing and shoddy animation was it proved that ultimately it doesn’t matter how well the animation was done, it really was about the writing.

And “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone could really write a great story.

My friends and I became obsessed with the show at this point. And it wasn't just us. It seemed that overnight everyone knew who Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick were. If someone talked about Scuzzlebutt you knew that he understood that this was a monster who lived in the woods and had Patrick Duffy for a leg. When someone referenced Mr. Hanky you knew that that person was talking about a literal piece of shit that only appeared around Christmas. And if one of your buddies “pulled a Stan” when talking to a girl, you knew that he was so nervous that he threw up (whether literally or figuratively) all over her.

Parker and Stone were clever enough to add these really surreal moments and characters to some great story lines. Not only did it put the two creators on the map, but it also made Comedy Central a top-tiered channel enabling it to shed it’s reputation as a place where bad movies go to be rerun into infinity. Before the Jon Stewart-hosted “Daily Show”, this was the only show that kept people coming back to the channel week after week.

My roommates and I had completely different schedules but there was only one thing that all of us cleared the decks for: Wednesday nights at 10:00 pm. We were on our couch watching “South Park” and laughing until our sides hurt. And while the community aspect is something that I won’t experience again, what I find most fascinating is how this show sneaked up on us. The internet was still in its infancy in 1997, it wasn’t the sprawling source of information that it is today and even if it was, I wasn’t connected to it. I wasn’t living in a vacuum as I used to read at least two newspapers a day and was able to keep up with popular culture through television and radio.

But “South Park” came out of nowhere. If I hadn’t been drinking that night, I’m not sure when I would have run into this show. I assume that it would be at least by October of that year, because Comedy Central marketed the hell out of it, but for the first three or four weeks, it was nice to seemingly be in on the cutting edge of something that you knew was going to be huge. And it was.* Now, that doesn't happen. Thanks to the internet, most people know about TV shows and movies weeks if not months before they show up.

* My wife, who was going to school at American University when "South Park" started airing, told me that her entire dorm was as obsessed about the show as my friends and I were. She said that they would use their dial-up modems to download episodes, wait the hour or two and then watch them. Because of the tiny bandwidth, it was often tough to discern exactly what was happening, but she said that they enjoyed the dialogue the most. Again, the lesson here is: message NOT medium.

Suddenly everyone was wearing a “South Park” t-shirt, the mall was overstuffed with “South Park” tchotchkes*, they were on the cover of “Rolling Stone” (when that meant something) and everyone was imitating Cartmen’s voice or quoting the show (“Oh my God! You killed Kenny!” or “Screw you guys, I’m going home.” or “Sweeeeeet”). By March 1998 it was starting to get to be a bit much and the show was growing stale.

* I had Kyle, Cartman and Kenny key chains sitting on my computer, a post card of bit character Pip on my bulletin board at work and a “South Park” sticker on my wall. So, I was definitely a part of this merchandising madness and I am convinced my boss thought that I was a 12-year-old.

The one shining light was on April 1, “South Park” was finally going to reveal who Cartman’s father was. A lot of people that I knew were terribly excited about this and couldn't wait for the show to air. When April 1 came, the show wasn’t about Cartman’s father rather it was a joke episode centered around the South Park boys’ favorite cartoon those farting Canadians “Terrence and Phillip”. After the first five minutes of this episode passed, my roommates and I kept waiting for the big reveal. After the first commercial break came back with more Terrence and Phillip, we knew that the big reveal wasn’t going to happen.

This angered a lot of fans, so much so that Comedy Central sent out a press release the following day promising that the conclusion to the first part of “Cartman’s Mom is a Dirty Slut” (which aired on February 25) was going to air on April 22. It sucked, but three weeks was better than never so again, the clock ticked down to finding out who Cartman’s father was. The episode never lived up to the hype (these things never do) and it turns out the Cartman’s mother was a hermaphrodite who impregnated herself.

This letdown, combined with the Terrance and Phillip debacle*, soured me on “South Park”. I would catch it now and again, but I kept waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me—once a show loses a viewer’s trust, it’s hard to get it back. To me Stone and Parker were just a bit too clever for themselves and overplayed their hand. I was pretty done with the show.

* After a few years have passed, I can see now that the Terrance and Phillip April Fool’s Day show was actually brilliant. Parker and Stone were riding high on the show’s popularity and as we would see in subsequent seasons, they rip on everything. Fooling your own fans is tough to do, but they did it. And more importantly, they did it really well. In my circle of friends, finding out who Cartman’s father was was as big of a deal as finding out who killed JR Ewing or what was in Al Capone’s vault (how’s that for timely references). When the T&P episode was aired it was like a big fuck you to the fans, but in a way that borrowed from the classic William Shatner SNL skit where he told a roomful of Star Trek fans, “You need to get a life. TV isn't that important.” This message is never truly understood at the time and only after you separate from your obsession do you truly get the meaning.

During the next few years, I stayed away from “South Park” and looked down my nose at people who still watched it. I just found the entire show to be a copy of “The Simpsons”, which looking back wasn’t true. Especially since “South Park” devoted an entire show to the criticism and made the point that “The Simpsons” have been on for 20 years and have over 400 episodes and that there are only so many stories that can be told.

A few years into my self-imposed “South Park” exile, a friend of mine was talking about the show and asked if still watched it. I said no and gave my myriad pompous reasons to which he countered that I should give it another shot, he said it was still really funny. That night I sat down and watched an episode and he was right, it really was funny.

I became a big “South Park” fan again, only this time is different because it seems like there is a much smaller group of fans. Because of that the newer episodes are a bit different than the older ones. There is more a topic du jour where Parker and Stone stand on their cartoon pulpit and lob bombs at that week’s hypocrites. The show takes less than a week to write and animate, so turn-around time on various topics are insanely quick.

While that week's targets are easy and really unnecessary, for the most part Parker pens episodes that make solid points. When he does do one of these episodes, the episode tends to devolve from a well-thought out argument into one where a universally detestable (like Paris Hilton or Snooki from "Jersey Shore") gets their comeuppance. And while that's nice (and cathartic) to see, you almost want to tell him that he's better than that and there's a better way of satirizing the rich and stupid.

And the duo are equal opportunity offenders. You would expect a couple of Colorado-born, young-ish, pothead cartoonists and social commentators to be lean to the left side of the political spectrum. But they aren’t, I believe that Parker (the main writer) is a Libertarian, so his ideology is with neither the Republicans nor the Democrats. And this is a good thing.

While “South Park’s” message and satire is a bit heavy-handed and a little too black-and-white at times, it’s still a thought-provoking show. It forces the watcher to be literate on not only pop culture but on the world around them. And that’s a good thing.

The Definition of Pandering or Where the 1950s Truly Comes Alive!

2011-03-21T15:00:00.003-04:00

Late last week my wife, her grandmother, my infant daughter and I met for lunch at Johnny Rockets in the mall. If you’ve never heard of Johnny Rockets, it’s an overpriced restaurant chain located in most malls that are decorated to look like a 1950’s style hamburger joint. Basically, you’re paying 25% extra for the ambiance.

Or at least it’s supposed to be ambiance. Johnny Rockets is decorated to look like what someone else thinks that a 1950’s hamburger joint looks like. All of the waiters and waitresses wear pristine, almost blinding white uniforms, there is a lot of polished chrome in the restaurant and at each of the booths there is a non-working mini jukebox packed with the hits of the 50s and 60s. The eatery’s draw is that this is supposed to be a time machine that will take you (even minorities!) back to a simpler time where the nation “rocked ‘round the clock”, had a best friend named Potsie and ate hamburgers until their sinuses were impacted with meat.

The pandering doesn’t come from the retrieval of false memories or even the fact that Johnny Rockets’ unspoken promise of taking you back to a simpler time still includes modern inflation – seriously $2.29 for a Coke plus extra thirty-nine cents for a shot of vanilla? They had names for people like this in the 1950s: Pinkos.

No, the pandering comes when you peruse the menu. They have the normal fare that you’d find in any number of chain restaurants or diners: hamburgers, hot dogs, milk shakes, $2.29 Cokes. But there was something in the menu that caught my eye, it was listed right there on the second page above the onion rings: American fries.

American fries? AMERICAN fries?

Someone is still waging that battle against the French? I couldn’t believe it, it had been so long since I heard the word Freedom fries that I thought that this was a goof. I assumed that American fries were the same as french brothers except there was probably a ton more cheese and chili plopped on it and it was adorned with mini-American flags and sparklers. Essentially, the July 4th of fried potatoes.

Thinking that this was a joke, I ecclesiastically ordered these American fries and waited for the inevitable spud spectacular that was obviously heading my way. Would they bring out a brass band? Nah, that was too expensive. But I’m sure there would be a radio blasting the “1812 Overture” while sparkler illuminated my dish and mini-American flags crisply waved in a breeze of grease and salt. But it wasn’t too be, I got a dish of plain old, normal French fries and a little paper bowl to put my ketchup in.*

So disappointing. So blase. So unAmerican.

* At Johnny Rockets the server usually cheerfully dumps the ketchup in the paper bowl for you, so you don’t have to messy your delicate hands. I guess this was how it was done everywhere in the 1950s. But for some reason our waitress didn’t do that last Thursday, which is the way that it’s done everywhere in the 2010s. Sherman, alert Mr. Peabody, our time machine restaurant is busted.

In any event, this new naming technique got me thinking about the whole French fry foofaraw of a few years ago. In 2003 when the United State boldly invaded Iraq looking for WebMDs—or was it WMDs, I forget—the French government loudly protested this move. Americans, being Americans, didn’t take too kindly to anyone—especially the fucking French—telling us what to do, so a movement began to strike back at the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Would bombing the Eiffel Tower do the trick? No. How about a gigantic tariff on cigarettes and berets? No. The only way we could strike back was to do something that a Frenchman would do be extremely passive aggressive and petty. The collective American mind worked together and came up with a plan to call french fries, Freedom Fries.

Eat that, Paris!

According to the always reliable Wikipedia: “On March 11, 2003 Representatives Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) and Walter B. Jones, Jr. (R-North Carolina) declared that all references to French fries and French toast on the menus of the restaurants and snack bars run by the House of Representatives would be removed. House cafeterias were ordered to rename French fries "freedom fries". This action was carried out without a congressional vote, under the authority of Ney's position as Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, which oversees restaurant operations for the chamber. The simultaneous renaming of French toast to "freedom toast" attracted less attention.”*

* I don’t give a shit about French toast because I think it tastes like rat steak, but if you were a French toast fan, wouldn’t you be pissed that your favorite food got the short end of the stick? I mean, it’s already in the breakfast ghetto, way behind in popularity to the superior pancake and the versatile egg. This was the opportune time for the French toast to take the national spotlight and it failed miserably.

The French embassy didn’t comment on the action, but did say (in I’m sure the nicest way possible) that French fries weren’t originally from France, they were from Belgium. In fact, Thomas Jefferson was probably the first person to identify fried potatoes as being cooked in the “French style”. “Irregardless,” screamed the American public and the name Freedom fries stuck like a fine polymar.

Until a little over two years later. When, again according to Wikipedia, “In May 2005, Representative Jones, having arrived at the belief that the United States went to war "with no justification", said of the "freedom fries" episode: "I wish it had never happened." By July 2006, the House had quietly changed the name of the two foods in all of its restaurants back to "French fries" and "French toast".”

So while the whole country was really, really, REALLY angered by the French*, they eventually realized that this whole thing was a bit silly and the French returned to the fry and everything was cool again.**

* That Wikipedia article on Freedom fries said that the makers of French’s mustard were so freaked out as being seen as anti-patriot that they wrote up a press release assuring people that they were NOT a French company and that the mustard’s name was derived from a family name. The best part is that they used the release to assure America that they were patriotic as hell.

I’m not sure if the company’s CEO took a public patriotic test, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he did.

** This isn’t the first time that America changed names of foodstuffs. During World Wars I and II as hamburgers were called “Liberty Steaks”, sauerkraut was called “Victory Cabbage” and frankfurters were called “Hot Dogs”. I can totally see the need for changing the name of French fries because all Germany did was genocide about bunch of people. France had the balls to call us out on a unjustified war. It’s really the same thing if you think about it.

Which brings us back to Johnny Rockets. I would guess that the reason why they didn’t use the Freedom fries moniker is because another restauranteur, Neal Rowand of North Carolina (of course), has copyrighted the word “Freedom fries” and they’d probably have to pay a couple of bucks to use it*. Patriotism isn’t free, asshole and there’s always a dollar to be made during war.

* You know who doesn’t mind spending a few bucks to offer Freedom fries at his red, white and blue restaurant? The most patriotic sumabitch who ever lived, Mr. Toby Keith. He owns the “I Love This Bar & Grill” chain of bars and grills and you can be damned sure that you won’t find any FRENCH fries anywhere.

Presumably Johnny Rockets went with the cheaper and more generic “American fries” for their menu to prove to everyone who stuffs himself into one of their booths that they are the most patriotic restaurant ever! I mean, it’s obvious right? It’s right there on their menu, see? No, Senator McCarthy, I do not consort with communists, Muslim sympathizers or the French. No. I am most assuredly NOT unAmerican! Ronald McDonald is damn liar! This is an outrage!

It seems to me that Johnny Rockets encapsulates the 1950s perfectly.

Who’s Cooler: Zack Morris vs. Brandon Walsh?

2011-03-15T11:39:00.007-04:00

Note: I can't seem to find any pictures of Priestley and Gosselaar together on the internet, so I decided to choose this picture of Tiffani Amber Thiessen instead. It's only because she straddles (HA!) both worlds so easily. It's not because I thought she was super hot. Not at all.

In the early 1990s, there weren’t a lot of TV stars that teenage boys could emulate. They were either too weird (Urkel), too stupid (Joey Lawrence), too shady (Bud Bundy), too Christian (Kirk Cameron), too smart (Doogie Howser) or way too cool (Will Smith). And yes, I realize that I mixed real names with character names, so if you want me to be consistent here they are: Jaleel White, Joey Russo, David Faustino, Mike Seaver, Neil Patrick Harris and Will Smith. There were really only two lead characters that a young man could aspire to be: Beverly Hills 90210’s Brandon Walsh (Jason Priestley) or Saved By the Bell’s Zack Morris (Mark Paul Gosselaar).

I guess if you wanted to be AC Slater (Mario Lopez) or Dylan McKay (Luke Perry) that’s ok, but those guys were second-bananas*. And I suppose if you had a blonde afro mullet, Steve Sanders (Ian Ziering) could be someone to look up to, but he was at best a third-banana. And if you were your group's loser you could always find similarities between yourself and David Silver (Brian Austin Green) or Samuel "Screech" Powers (Dustin Diamond). But why would you want to do that to yourself?

We’re going to stick with the leads of these two shows and break it down, 19 Thoughts style. By the way, we’re only going as far as high school graduation since SbtB had one craptastic year outside of Bayside High and 90210 had four crappy years after the gang graduated from West Beverly High School.

* He was called Sideshow Luke Perry for a reason.

Height: According to the interweb, Brandon is no more than 5’8” and Zack is 6’0”. The internet is usually right about this sort of thing. Point: Morris.

Dudes: Brandon hangs around Dylan, Steve and hapless tool David Silver (who may be white, but he ain't vanilla-take that Robert Van Winkle!). Zack hangs around Slater and hapless tool Screech. Silver and Screech's lameness cancel each other out, so it’s down to the rest of the posse. Dylan’s a puss, but he’s rich and he’s the most popular dude at WBHS and Steve Sanders tries so hard at being cool that he's uncool thus making any of his friends look cool by comparison. Slater was a meat head but vied for ultimate popularity at Bayside, Zack had to befriend him in order that he wasn't usurped. That's a coward's move, Zack should have crushed him. Basically, Brandon’s friends are an updated version of “Happy Days”* while Zack’s friends were rivals that couldn't be squashed and a spastic loser. Point: Walsh.

* The analogy: Dylan = Fonzi, Brandon = Richie, Potsie = David Silver and Ralph Malph = Steve Sanders. The only wrench in this theory is that Potsie and Richie were best friends, but David and Brandon never were. But I do like how Potsie and David are both annoyingly bad singers and Malph and Sanders have perms.

Self-righteous chick friend: Both were supposed to be the “soul” and "conscience" of each show, both sucked. Hard. Episodes stopped when they were built around these two. Brandon had Andrea Zuckerman (Gabrielle Carteris, who looked like she was 50-years-old) who made a big deal about every slight, real or imagined. While Zack had Jessie Spano (Elizabeth Berkley) who made a big deal about every slight, real or imagined. Jessie was a main ingredient of the super-group “Hot Sundaes” and she almost OD’ed on caffeine pills. Andrea just crabbed that everyone at WBHS was antisemitic. Point: Morris.

Other chick friends: Brandon had his bitchy twin sister Brenda, Donna Martin and Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth). Zack had Kelly Kapowski* and Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies). Shop-a-holic Donna Martin was the catalyst for one of the all-time great 90210 episodes (Donna Martin graduates **) and Brandon ended up getting into Kelly Taylor’s pants. Zack ended up doing the same to Kelly Kapowski and fooled around with shop-a-holic Lisa Turtle. That leaves Brenda as the tipping point and she made the show’s engine run. Point: Walsh.

* As you are well aware, Tiffani Amber Theissen made a splash as the Walsh’s bad girl cousin (she smoked pot, used a fake ID to get into bars, and had sex with every dude in the cast), Valerie Malone on 90210. She replaced real-life bad girl Shannon Doherty (Brenda). There aren’t a lot of actresses who can pull this dramatic 180 and was quite a shock to the system. Especially when you watched SbtB in the afternoon and she was worried about kissing Zach and tehn two hours later she was on 90210 screwing everything in sight.

** The whole premise behind this episode was terrific: Donna gets drunk, gets caught at the prom and is barred from graduating with her friends. This has her so down in the dumps, that the gang rallies behind her and tells the school board that no one is graduating unless Donna graduates. The school board folds, the kids cheer and Steve yells, “Let’s get a keg!” Donna Martin did indeed graduate.

The Tori Spelling Factor: Someone once said that Tori Spelling was the zeitgeist of the 1990s. That was supposed to be funny, but it's kind of true. And that's just so fucking sad. Spelling was a cast member on both shows: she played Donna Martin on 90210 and was Screech’s girlfriend Violet Bickerstaff on Saved by the Bell. She wasn’t good on either of them. However, she was on less episodes of SbtB than 90210 and her dad wasn’t the executive producer of that show either. Point: Morris.

Sex: Brandon had a nice run of “going all the way” in high school. Zack had none and seemed very ok with it. Point: Walsh.

Daddy issues: Brandon had the most clueless (and therefore the greatest) TV dad of all time: Jim Walsh. He was brilliantly played by the one and only James Eckhouse. Morris had three different actors playing his notoriously absent father. It’s my contention that all of Morris’ stunts were constant cries for attention from his daddy. Point: Walsh.

Oedipus Complexes?: None here. Both mothers were rarely seen and when they were on camera, weren’t listened to. They were ornaments to prove that the dads were straight as arrows. It seems to me that Brandon may have wanted to have sex with his sister, but that's not really the same thing, is it? Plus, that taboo sexual tension was part of what made the show great. Point: None.

Dealings with authority figures: As we have seen with the Donna Martin Graduates episode, Brandon Walsh held a lot of sway with the Beverly Hills School Board and the school's vice-principal, Ms. Teasley—not to mention a few teachers (like senior English teacher Gil) and other advisers. Zack Morris had the Big Kahuna of Bayside High School wrapped around his finger: principal Richard Belding (Dennis Hastings). Belding was so thoroughly flummoxed by Morris, that by the end of the series Zack was often trying more outlandish schemes because he was so bored of bamboozling Belding. It was almost as if he wanted to get caught and punished which I think has to do with Morris’ daddy issues. It’s obvious that Belding was a surrogate father to the lonely student and Morris’ actions were the typical teenage rebellions that were normally aimed at parental units. Arm chair psychology aside, Morris ran BHS so point: Morris.

Hangouts: Brandon had the Peach Pit where he had to work. Morris had the Max where he seemed to get free food. Point: Morris.

Hangout Owners: Armed with old-school wisdom, veteran B-actor Nat Bussichio—played with panache by Joe E. Tata—owned the Peach Pit and served up mega burgers and advice. The Max was run by a failed magician named Max (so imaginative) whose specialty was the Max Burger (doubly imaginative). The dude was a fucking failed magician who named burgers after himself, point: Walsh.

Work: Brandon slaved at the gang’s hangout the Peach Pit during the school year and when it got hot, he took a job at the Beverly Hills Beach Club. While it seemed like he was being mature, he ended up spending half of his shifts talking to his buddies who all hung around his places of work. Morris was too busy scheming about ripping off his classmates to get a real job. Point: push. Walsh made the system work for him, Morris worked the system.

Race Relations. There was an episode of "90210" that dealt with the Rodney King riots where Brandon and his Crenshaw High School newspaper editor counterpart traded op-ed pages. Brandon angered the community by inviting the Crenshaw kids to their West Bev dance (THEY'RE PROBABLY ALL IN A GANG!). But David Silver angered everyone by rapping. However, the kids learned that they aren't so different and started hip-hop line dancing. The Crenshaw editor started dating Andrea (how SHOCKING!). Also Brandon's boss at the beach club was a soap-opera watching black guy and the short order cook at the Peach Pit was a dude named Willie who seemed like a terrific back ground actor.And Silver and Andrea are both Jewish. On SbtB, aside from Lisa Turtle, there was one black nerdy kid who talked like Froggy from "Our Gang". Mario Lopez is Hispanic, I guess. Point: Everyone! Hooray!

I was backstage and I heard that you kids liked ALCOHOL!: It’s true, Paul Stanley, these kids did like alcohol. Unfortunately they liked it a bit too much and both crashed their cars. Walsh crashed the very symbol of his Minnesota roots,what made him so different from the Hollyweirdos, a piece of crap car named Mondale (after former presidential candidate and piece of crap car, Walter Mondale). Morris crashed Lisa Turtle’s parents’ car after a toga party gone awry. Also Morris injured his friends. At least it took Brandon more than one party to fuck up his life and he didn’t take anyone down with him. Point: Walsh.

Drugs!: Both were anti-drug, however only Brandon got high. And that was inadvertently when his girlfriend spiked his club soda with ecstasy*. Brandon also shit his pants when he found out that Steve was taking steroids. The only time the Saved by the Bell gang saw drugs is at a party for superstar celebrity Jonny Dakota (who ironically chose BHS as the site for his “There’s No Hope With Dope” PSA). Dakota is passed a joint, takes a comically large hit and hands it to Kelly. Morris busts in at the last minute (the gang had left when Screech did something stupid and Zack had forgot his jacket) and tells Dakota that no one does drugs in HIS school. The commercial shoot is ruined and superstar NBC President Brandon Tartikoff is brought in to replace Dakota and film the commercial. Point: I don’t know, at least Walsh did something.

* Although Brandon was angry about being drugged, he was more angry when his psycho girlfriend (Emily Valentine) showed up to help the gang build a float wearing his “lucky Minnesota Twins” jersey. He was absolutely incredulous about the gall that this gal had wearing his shirt. To be honest, I’d be pretty pissed off about that too. Emily ends up burning down the kids’ float. Not sure what happened to the shirt.

Cars: After destroying Mondale, Brandon worked his ass off for a summer and got a nice, late-60s Mustang that he thankfully didn’t name after a failed presidential candidate. Morris had his two feet. Point: Walsh.

Athletics: Despite being two inches taller than Spud Webb and less black, Brandon made the WBHS junior varsity basketball team, which (rightly, I might add) pissed Steve Sanders off. He also made the track team and was a pretty good hockey player. Zack Morris found his Native American roots and ran really fast. All story lines were pretty far-fetched (aside from the hockey one), but at least Morris looked like an athlete. Point: Morris.

Intelligence: Brandon did very well on his SATs, was salutatorian and was accepted to numerous top-tiered schools, but chose to go to a state school with his buddies. There was one episode where Morris literally aced his SATs and he chose to go to a state school with his buddies. Aside from being crafty, Morris was kind of a dumb ass, so I can see why he did well on standardized testing. Point: Walsh.

Musicianship and Music Influences: Morris was in a band called “Zack Attack” and he played lead guitar. His room had posters of the Bangles and Janet Jackson on the wall. Walsh was famous for not being able to sing or dance and his room had a poster of the Neville Brothers* on his wall. The lameness in poster choice cancels each other out, and at the very least, Zack was actually in a band. Point: Morris.

* Seriously, the Neville Brothers? I would have been less shocked if Brandon had a poster of Neville Chamberlain on his wall. I can guarantee you that if you did a nation-wide sweep, there would be zero teenagers with a Neville Brothers CDs in their collection, never mind a poster on their walls. Any time that they would show Brandon’s room, that poster took me out of the story and I’d end up wondering whether the producer was a huge fan and wanted to subconsciously influence America’s teens. It was just weird.

Kids: Brandon and Steve once had to take care of a sullen teenage mother’s baby named Joey. They did this during a montage while Concrete Blonde’s song “Joey” was playing in the background. I wonder if the producers asked each other whether the viewers would understand the significance, especially when the lead singer warbled, “Joey, I’m not angry any more!”. Zack Morris once delivered a baby in a stuck elevator. Bonus! The baby was Mr. Belding’s son! How’s that for ham-fisted subtlety! Point: America for having these two great story lines.

Miscellany: Brandon Walsh had pretty cool hair and along with Luke Perry brought the sideburns back into popularity. Zack Morris seemed aware that he was on a television show and would freeze time and talk directly to the audience. That’s post-modernism, baby! Zack also was one of the first fictional characters on television to have a cell phone. A phone so stupidly large that it's a point of reference when discussing the immense size of things. Point: Morris.

The winner in this very scientific survey is Brandon Walsh by a whopping 8-7 count. So the next time you’re at a fancy dinner party or having cocktails with the boys and someone brings up this question, you are now able to answer this question without any hesitation.And the best part is that you'll have this scientific study as absolute proof when you are called a liar and a heretic.

We're Pretty Close to Being the Jetsons -- Media Wise, At Least

2011-03-10T16:01:00.012-05:00

The other day I drove to our local Borders bookstore because I had heard that there was a liquidation sale going on and everything in the store was at least 25% off. Borders is going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy and needs to close a bunch of shops and sell off as much product as they possibly can—incidentally, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Best Buy might be next. My family and I walked around the store, I got something and my oldest daughter got a few books and we left.

I’ve always been a big fan of going to book stores, browsing the aisles and picking up a tome or two but this exercise is something that might be going away in the near future. While I don’t think that all book stores are closing tomorrow (people will always want to buy books and thus there will always be a spot for the mom-and-pop store), but it is beginning to look like the large brick and mortar book stores are becoming extinct.

And people like me might be part of the blame.

There are a few reasons for this, with main reason one having nothing to do with me. The Borders in my store is two stories and is pretty large. More than half of the first floor is devoted entirely to DVDs and CDs. And they’re not cheap, a CD is about $17 and a new DVD is more than $30. Even with the 25% off, it was be cheaper to go to Newbury Comics or Best Buy to get what you want. And who pays full price for DVDs and CDs any more?

Borders not recognizing a shift in paradigms when it came to music buying is simply ignorance. What the store is selling isn’t hard-to-find CDs, you can find the new Coldplay album anywhere. The same goes for a new movie. Why would I want to spend $35 at Borders for “Iron Man 2” when I can go to Best Buy and get the same flick for $20?

The other two things that are murdering places like Borders is Amazon.com, which sells books at cheaper prices—not to mention cheaper music and movies and people switching to eBooks. There’s nothing that Borders could do about Amazon.com, the web site just doesn’t have the overhead that Borders has and can slash prices to a bare minimum and still make money.It looks as if Borders tried to combat them by selling books on line too, but why buy from Borders online when you can get it cheaper at Amazon? Much like being unable to recognizing the death of CDs and online ordering, Borders was even slower to react to eBooks and didn’t come out with their own Kindle-type reader (the Kobo) until it was too late. By then it was another product in an over-saturated market. It may be the cheapest eReader on the market, but who cares? I’ll spend the extra $40 for a Kindle.

And that last sentence is something that I never thought that I’d say. Not so much that I’d spend extra amount of cash for a brand name, but that I’d even consider buying an eReader. At home I have three book cases chock full of books. It’s my one indulgence and for every Christmas and birthday I get at least one $50 gift card to Barnes and Noble. I've always surrounded myself with books and ever since I was a kid I wanted three things in my house: a bubble hockey game, a bar (my uncle had one in his house and it was awesome) and a library with shelves built into the wall stacked with books and a few comfortable, high backed, leather chairs in which to read.

But the reality is that I’m not going to own a home that I’ll be able to have my own library. I guess when my daughters move out of the house in 20-25 years, I can take over one of their rooms as a library but that’s a long time to wait. And in the mean time where am I going to store all of my books? And there in lies the rub, to quote Shakespeare. My wife and I don’t fight much, but the one thing that we have always butted heads on are my books. Her argument: they take up too much space, you’ve already read them and books aren’t decorations. My argument: but they’re my books.

Jerry Seinfeld once said this about books, “"What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses like they're trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?” And to be honest, he and my wife have a point. I have no idea why I keep half the books I own*. It’s not like I need them for research or anything like that.

It's like the 20 years of Sports Illustrateds that I have in my basement. I have no idea why I keep them, especially now that Sports Illustrated has all of their magazines archived online, but I know that one day I'm going to need them.I just don't know for what.

I guess I have this secret wish that someone will come into our house and just stand in front of my shelves, mouth agape and just gasp at the collection I amassed. “Have you read all of these books? You must be a genius! And what a collection! So diverse, so eclectic! You are easily the most interesting person ever.” This has not happened. Yet.

So with the ever-growing book collection that is now taking up space in our guest bedroom, I’ve come to a conclusion that I have one of two choices: stop buying books or find a way to store books cheaply and without taking up a lot of space.

Enter Amazon.com's Kindle. Apparently this eReader has enough memory for over 3,000 books. And it doesn't take up much room, the reader itself is very thin. No larger than a hardcover, and slimmer than a pamphlet. Anyone who I have talked to about these things universally sings its praises: My life will be forever changed. It’s easier. It’s actually made reading more enjoyable. Reading in bed is a breeze. You can purchase a new book instantly as long as there is a WiFi connection and some Kindles don’t even need that. The only negative that I’ve heard is that airline stewardesses make you shut it off ten minutes before take off and landings.

And the price on the hardware is coming down too. I read an article in the New York Times last week where Amazon.com’s CEO has pretty much said that soon they’re going to give the hardware away (I think that he was being factious about the $0 price tag, but not the price coming down to virtually nothing) because the money isn’t in the Kindle itself, it’s in the books. It’s a brilliant strategy. Amazon still charges “normal” physical book prices (up to $15) for something that isn’t physical at all. So if you can get the hardware into people’s hands for a limited price, you’re going to make 10 times that amount when you sell them products that you don’t have to store, don’t need someone to sell and won’t ever go bad.

It’s literally the perfect item. It’s almost as if you’re selling air.

And that’s what I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around. When I purchase something, for the most part I like to be able to tangibly hold that object. When I buy an eBook, I’m really just buying the rights to the book. Yes, the book is mine, but at the same time, it doesn't really feel like it is. It’s hard to explain, but it almost feels like I’m just borrowing it. Even though I realize that's not the case, it's what I'm having trouble with.

It’s also why I haven’t completely dropped the CD habit either. I don’t buy a lot of CDs any more, maybe five or six a year at most. But when I do buy a new CD, I want the CD. I’ve purchased a bunch of singles from iTunes and have downloaded a bunch back in the day*, but I’ve never downloaded an entirely new album. Again, I think it’s the whole tangible thing.

* I was on the cusp of downloading music 10 or 12 years ago. My friend showed me how to set up an FTP connection through my dial-up and while it was fun, it was slow as hell (15 minutes for a song that could break up if you get a phone call). Then when Napster and Limewire and Kaaza came out, it was like Christmas. I got booted off of Napster thanks to Metallica or Dr. Dre, but a friend supplied me a patch and I was back online within a week. As sad as this sound, I don’t download any music because there’s nothing I really want. I suppose if I sat back and thought about it, I can think of a few tunes, but even though it’s easy and would take a few minutes to get comfortable with the software, it’s a hassle and not something that I miss too much.

Put it this way, we have a new TV that can go on-line and we have streaming Netflix. Aside from the myriad movies, there are a ton of seasons of different TV shows. For the last two weeks, I’ve been watching a few episodes of MTV’s “The State” every night. I was thinking of purchasing the DVD set, but what’s the point? As long as I have my Netflix membership, for all intents and purposes I own the set. I can watch it any time I want. But I always have a nagging feeling that the service is going to go away and one day I’m going to watch an episode of “The State” and won’t be able to.

I know that this isn’t the same as actually purchasing an eBook or a song off iTunes, because I actually own it. But I don’t physically own it and while today the Kindle is a pretty cool piece of machinery, in 15 years is it going to be this decade’s 8-track player? And if so, what happens to my books then? Will they be nothing but binary code that I can’t crack? At least with physical books, unless I get bumped on the head and lose my ability to read or a flood or fire destroys my house, I am guaranteed to enjoy them for the rest of my life.

And another thing is the social aspect of trading books and CDs. Some of the best times I had was going over my friend Shawn’s house in the late 90s to burn discs. He literally had an entire wall full of CDs (he bought his first disc at the dawn of the technology in 1989) and had thousands of CDs. It was cool to go over his place and spend an afternoon drinking beer, going through his catalog, finding something and making a CD* of it. Shawn has great taste in music and I’d walk out of his house with an armload of new mix CDs or tapes.

* Usually these CDs were called “Good Songs” because they were good songs that I liked—I’m very literally. But there were sub genres too such as “Hairy Velveeta”. These hair metal bands ironically chosen in the late 90s, but unironically enjoyed. And there were a few Good Songs CDs that I would play while on dates. Don’t laugh, my wife was impressed with the CD mix that I had playing during our first date. She especially liked that I included a Jeff Buckley track—his death was for naught, as I seemed deep (like the Mississippi).

It’s hard to do that now with iPods and MP3 players. Sure you can flick through a screen of CD covers, but it isn’t the same. It seems very sterile and uncluttered, sort of like the glimpses of the future that we get in movies and TV shows.*

* Quick tangent: did you ever notice that in the future there is no more clutter or mess? Everything is very neat, very orderly, very clean. All of the surfaces are a polished, immaculate metal. There are no extraneous things and everything is given to a person with a touch of a button. It seems to me that with the reduction of clutter (like books, DVDs, CDs, etc) and the housing of our media on clouds, we are moving toward this view of the future. BTW, ever since I started watching “Hoarders” I think that this is a very, very good thing.

In the end, I’m not bemoaning technology—I work in the technology field—and these new innovations really excite me, but I guess I’m just a bit hesitant about making the change because it seems we're trading in something.Books haven't really changed in a thousand years and it's good to have that connection to the past. But just because it's old, doesn't mean it's good. And it's not the vessel that's important, it's the message inside that vessel whether it be book, DVD or CD.

Progress must move on and like anything else, once the change is made I’m going to wonder how on Earth I lived with books, music and movies that took up so much real estate. So while my library dream might over, I hope that nothing ever takes the place of a home bar or bubble hockey.

21. 30 Rock

2011-03-08T15:24:00.004-05:00

Every few years there are two similar projects that appear on the pop culture horizon and force people to choose between one or the other: Madonna and Cyndi Lauper (I liked Lauper -- hey, she sang in USA for Africa, Madonna didn't), “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” (I abstained from voting in this one), the Beatles and the Rolling Stones* (Beatles all the way). In 2006 there were two shows on the same network about the behind the scenes antics of a comedy show that grappled for a piece of America's viewing time: Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and Tina Fey’s “30 Rock”.

* Here’s something that you don’t see very often: a comparison between the Rolling Stones and Elvis Presley. The question is always this: “Who's better the Beatles or Elvis?” or "Who's better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?". You never, ever see “Who's better the Rolling Stones or Elvis?” Logic dictates that if this question is asked than Elvis, the Stones and the Beatles are so close in terms of talent, that it's not crazy to think that if A=B and A=C, then B should equal C. This never happens and the question is completely irrelevant with the Beatles becoming the undisputed number one rock band. Therefore, the question should revert to “Who is the second best rock act ever, the Stones or Elvis?”

Mystery solved, America.

During the summer prior to the debut of the two new series, it became apparent that only one of these shows will survive adn the Sorkin show was considered the favorite. For one thing he had the pedigree (“Sports Night” and “The West Wing” were loved by critics and audiences alike), it had a really good cast (Matthew Perry, Amanda Peet, DL Hughley, Brad Whitford) and to me, I thought that it was going to be a weekly docu-drama about how a show like Saturday Night Live really was run. Essentially, I thought that it was go to be a serial retelling of Tom Shales’ awesome book “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live”.

It wasn’t. At all. It was over-written, boring, ponderous and at an hour each week, it seemed like the show never ended. The characters all seemed like assholes, which is ok (see "The Larry Sanders Show") but they were dull. And that's not ok. After three episodes, I stopped watching it at its regularly scheduled time. And after five episodes I permanently deleted it from my DVR.

My initial pretenses of “30 Rock” proved to be incorrect too. Since SNL creator Lorne Michaels was among the champions of the show and Fey was heading up the writing, I thought it was going to be a weekly Michaels lap dance reminding us how awesome he is. The cast wasn’t intriguing with Fey and former SNL co-stars Rachael Dratch and Tracy Morgan. And while I liked all three in small doses, the years that they were on SNL aren’t considered the golden years. I was waiting for the inevitable casting of Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon* and Maya Rudolph to round out the suck fest.

* No two SNL castmates got on my nerves like Sanz and Fallon did. Every time they were in a scene together it seemed that they tried their best to break each other up—and often they did. I think that most “comedy rules” are stupid, but one that is important is to not laugh in the middle of a bit. It completely ruins the story for the audience and the performers look like idiots. The fact that both of them did this week after week after week without any recourse, soured me on SNL for a long, long time.

But I was completely wrong about “30 Rock”. While “Studio 60” billed itself as a drama about a comedy show (and looking back, that seems a bit absurd), “30 Rock” was lighter and also played loose with the sitcom format using a lot of flashbacks and cuts. It mirrored a lot of what made "The Simpsons" so great during their early seasons. While "30 Rock" wasn’t entirely original, it wasn’t entirely derivative either. Fey is obviously a student of pop culture with television history as her major and she uses her skills to drop a lot of pop references and have some terrific guest stars that make each episode really shine.People as diverse as Carrie Fisher to Will Arnett to Alan Alda to Matt Damon have appeared on the show. And while the guest star syndrome can get a bit stale when there is too many in one episodes, when there are only a few they are comedic gold.

But it’s not just the guest stars, Fey has surrounded herself with a bunch of terrific actors like Morgan whose Tracy Jordan is one of the most sublime, original television characters ever. He is so good that he seems to be blurring the line between his character and the real Tracy Morgan. Jane Krakowski took over for Dratch before filming began* is great as the self-centered, egotistical star Jenna, while Jack MacBrayer, Scott Adsit and Judah Friedlander round out an impressive ensemble cast.

* You have to wonder what kind of show “30 Rock” would be if Dratch was kept as Jenna. She certainly wouldn’t have been able to pull off the bulk of appearance jokes (Krakowski is very good looking) so I wonder what direction the character would have gone? Dratch stuck around as a sort of utility player for the first season playing dozens of eccentric roles, but she has disappeared from the show in recent seasons. From what I’ve read her and Fey were pretty close, I wonder if this spoiled their friendship at all?

But while all of the characters and their actors are first rate, there is no one like Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy. Wikipedia describes the character like this, “[Donaghy is] the decisive, controlling, suave and occasionally senseless network executive who constantly interferes with the goings-on at TGS.” (TGS is short-hand for “The Girlie Show with Tracy Jordan” the show within show that Fey’s character [Liz Lemon] is the head writer for.)

However, the explanation doesn’t really capture the essence of Donaghy. He’s the foil for Lemon, the suit that the creative types have to answer to. But he’s not her adversary, in fact he’s more of a mentor and a father figure which leads to a pretty interesting dynamic between the two. And that is what the show feeds on. Fey has said countless times that this relationship is not a Sam-Diane thing where Liz and Jack will eventually sleep with each other. She has flat-out said that this will never happen and I think that’s a great thing because once sex is introduced, the relationship between the characters change for the worse.

Right now, the give-and-take between the two seems fun and even though it was never aggressively pushed at the beginning of the show's run, like all good things it grew organically. And while the relationship is important, having Baldwin play Donaghy as "the heavy" is key. I’ve read a lot about him and he seems like one of the most put-together, cool men on the planet. While on Saturday Night Live, Janeanne Garofolo spoke about him as if she had a school girl crush. It doesn’t seem like impressing Garofolo is an easy trick, so his take on Donaghy seems to be grounded in some reality.

The only thing that is not fun about having Baldwin on the show is that there is always an underlying threat that he’s going to bolt the show. It seems as if he is selling himself short by being on a low-rated sitcom (no matter how brilliant) on a fourth-place network. After his public meltdown of a few years ago (where tapes of him screaming at his daughter were leaked) he talked openly about leaving the show. During the last year or so he has said that once his contract is over (following the 2012 season) he is considering jumping off the “30 Rock” gravy train. I sincerely hope that it doesn’t come to this because unlike Steve Carrell and “The Office”, I don’t think that “30 Rock” could afford to lose Baldwin. He is that integral to the show’s dynamic.

While writing this entry, I took a peek at the show’s ratings and they have never been good. During the first season they were mired in 102nd place and the highest season rating that they ever received was 69th. I don’t normally judge a show by its rating, but for one of the smartest shows on TV, how can this be? I think that quite simply, not many Americans want to watch a show that is smart. And let’s be honest here, “30 Rock” isn’t “Masterpiece Theater” or “NOVA” there are a few low-brow jokes that wouldn’t be completely out of place on a CBS show such as “Two and a Half Men”.

The problem is there aren’t many of these low-brow jokes and they’re aren’t usually strung together. Plus, I think that Fey drives a lot of middle America crazy. I don’t think that they like her too much because of her spot-on imitation of Sarah Palin and perhaps a smart, witty lady comedian scares them a bit or maybe it’s a backlash against an East coast liberal program. I don’t know. And admittedly, the last two reasons are just pure speculation on my part, but I don’t get why this show isn’t more popular. Most of the characters are original, most of the situations they find themselves in are a bit familiar but have an interesting twist and the acting and writing is terrific.

This has been a common theme for shows like “30 Rock” (see “Arrested Development”, “Freaks and Geeks”, etc.) and it’s nice to see a network ignore the ratings and continue to pump out shows that are both smart and funny. And while the program is scheduled to run until the end of the 2012 season, one has to wonder how long NBC will stick with it after that.

Songs no New Englander Should Ever Karaoke

2011-03-07T16:12:00.003-05:00

(I have no idea who is pictured above, I ran a Google image search for "New England Karaoke" and that's what popped up.)

As a rule, I don’t do karaoke. For one thing, it’s not the late 90s and the other is I can’t sing at all. Well, that’s not absolute true, I’ve done karaoke twice and each time I’ve been pretty hammered*. Once me and a couple of my buddies did the Doors “Alabama Song” at a newspaper Christmas party—and how a tune from a 1920s German opera didn’t get the crowd rocking, I’ll never know.

The other time was at a bachelor party—yes, this was probably the inspiration for both Hangover movies, I’m still working on suing the writers of the movie. While at a Cape Cod bar, a friend (the groom) put a bunch of our names in a hat and when the Karaoke DJ chose us, each one of us ambled on stage to sing our song. For the record I did Bon Jovi’s “Living on a Prayer” and two things: it wasn’t that bad of an experience—I can see why Huey Lewis and Gwenyth Paltrow wasted a lot of money and did a movie** about this phenomenon. And two, I wasn’t half bad either, or at least that’s how I remember it.

* It’s amazing that I’m as old as I am and I still use the excuse “I’ve was pretty hammered”. I guess some things never change.

** I happened to catch this movie one lazy Sunday, why didn’t Huey Lewis sing “I Want A New Drug” or “Heart of Rock N Roll” or one of his jazzy tunes? Did the director think that the audience would be shocked out of the fantasy that the movie portrayed? Fuck that, half the time I was watching this flick I was wondering where Lewis had been for the last 20 years, why he chose this movie to mount a comeback and tried to figure out if he actually could be Paltrow’s father.

Anyhow, I was thinking about these experiences the other day and it occurred to me that there are certain songs that New Englanders should never perform under any circumstances. Let’s list them, shall we?

Heartbreaker by Led Zeppelin. Double whammy. Heart become “haht” and breaker becomes “breakah”. If Zeppelin had been made up of New Englanders, they’d have to steal a different blues song, wouldn’t they?

Hard Days Night by the Beatles. Ever hear someone from New England say the word “hard”? It’s the reason why there aren’t many famous Boston porn stars.

Hard Times by Run DMC, Achy Breaky Heart by Bill Ray Cyrus, Hard Charger by Jane’s Addiction, Heartbreak Hotel by Elvis Presley, Hard to Handle by the Black Crowes, Heart of Glass by Blondie, Kickstart My Heart by Motley Crue, Harden My Heart by QuarterFlash ... pretty much any song that has one of these two words in it.

Warm It Up by Kriss Kross. Not just for the pronunciation of the word “warm” in the title. But everyone knows that New England is where the East Coast Family was born. Back in the day, Kriss Kross messed with Another Bad Creation and got Bell Biv DeVoe, BoyzIIMen and the whole East Coast. Some feuds will never die no matter how many years go by. True fact: in some areas of Vermont, it is still legal to shoot someone when they are wearing their clothes backwards.

Piano Man by Billy Joel. Try a little originality on stage, my friend. Everyone sings Piano Man.

(You Got It) The Right Stuff by New Kids on the Block. This is true only in Roxbury.

Mr. Telephone Man by New Edition. This is true only in Dorchester.

Poker Face by Lady Gaga. Another mispronunciation miscue, however with dastardly results. You start singing polka face and the next thing you know, some asshole busts out his accordion. And unless that asshole is Weird Al, you’re in for a lot of trouble.

New York, New York by Frank Sinatra. You do remember what state you’re in, right?

You Give Love a Bad Name by Bon Jovi. Simply for the chorus alone. Also, don’t touch Living on a Prayer, either. That’s my song.

All Night Long, Hello, Dancing on the Ceiling by Lionel Richie. Lionel Richie? Fuck that guy.

Macarena by those two Spanish dudes whose names I’ve forgotten and are too lazy to Google. A New England accent in Spanish? No gracias.

There you go. Next time you find yourself in 1998 and stuck in a Massachusetts karaoke bar; remember these tips and you’ll leave the place with your life, a song in your heart and a lady on each arm.

22. Dragnet

2011-03-01T12:00:00.003-05:00

Let’s get this out of the way right now: “Dragnet” is not a great show, it’s a pretty good show, but it isn’t great. The most obvious question is, if this isn’t a great show, why is it on this list? The reason why I added this show to this list is because it taught me a thing about television shows, all shows can be made fun of and mocked.

I was way too young when this show (and we’re talking about the 98 episodes that aired from 1967-1970, not the ones that were broadcast in the 50s and certainly not the ones aired on the radio) had it’s initial run. I caught them when I badgered my father* into watching them on Nick at Nite or TVLand during the early 1990s.

* When this show started on Nick at Nite, I didn’t have cable in my bedroom and my dad controlled the downstairs TV with an iron fist. He would often say, “I hated this show when it was first on and there’s no way that I’m watching this crap now.” I literally had to beg him to watch an episode because he found “Dragnet” boring, obvious and just an overall mess. I’m not sure exactly what he thought of me for watching it—I tried to tell him that you needed to watch this show ironically (though I probably never said it like that). But I don’t think that he ever agreed with me that watching TV could be an active activity, rather than a passive one.

And holy cow, 98 episodes? The show started in January 1967 and ran through the end of the 1970 season when Jack Webb decided to focus on another show he was producing, “Adam-12”. That’s almost 100 episodes jammed into three-and-a-half seasons. That doesn’t happen today.

Webb, who wrote, produced, directed and starred in this show played the notoriously square cop Sargent Joe Friday. His partner was veteran TV actor Harry Morgan who played his partner Bill Gannon. Morgan would go on to greater fame in his subsequent show “M*A*S*H”. I’m not sure what kind of cases Friday and his partner (it wasn’t Gannon) solved in the 1950s, but in the series they made an effort to bust up the counter culture. And that meant hippies, teens and sometimes teenage hippies.

Showing the “strange and bizarre” world of the counterculture was the absolute life blood of the show. I’m not sure why Webb went in this direction, maybe hippies were scary to middle America and the older generation. Maybe these people had no idea what their kids were up to and they looked at this program as a way to peer inside their world.

But if the latter is true, they didn’t get much insight from “Dragnet”, in fact one could say that they got the exact opposite view of what their lives were. Even someone who was 20 years removed from the hippie movement could see that Webb had no idea how to write for or about young people. It was obvious that he didn’t have a grasp on their culture and what made them tick. Thus, there was no real attempt at any insight. To Webb and his conservative views, hippies and their ideas were just as dangerous as someone who wants to rob a bank.

That lead to a lot of unintentional comedy, which isn’t good for a show that is taking itself so seriously—but it’s good for an audience that was growing up in the age of irony. Their phrases were rote and robotic, the characters were cartoons and the situations they found themselves in (drugs, street gangs, overall no-gooding) were cliched and more comical than anything on TV at the time.

One of my favorite episodes was about a hippie kid named Blue Boy. If you haven’t seen this episode you may ask about the name—I don’t think that hippies referred to themselves as anything but their real names. Was it because of his affinity for the Thomas Gainsborough painting of the same name*? No. That was not it. Was it because the character liked to hold his breath? Nope. Think again. Was it because he favored homosexual oral sex? Bite you tongue, sir!

The reason why Blue Boy was called Blue Boy was because he painted half of his face blue and dropped a lot of acid. That’s it. That’s the only reason why he called himself Blue Boy.

* The characters from “Leave it to Beaver” have this same painting hanging in their living room. I know that this wasn’t intentional, but to me it was a nice bridge between the two best shows to watch ironically. More on LitB in the coming weeks.

At the beginning of the episode Blue Boy is wandering around, talking silly acid-head stuff (“I’m a tree! I have leaves!” while trying to plant himself in a hole)*, but not really bothering anyone. Friday and Gannon pick him up, sober him up, set him straight on the evils of drugs and he’s back on the streets. However, by the end of the episode, Blue Boy is dead—I think that he thought he was a bird and jumped off a building—and Joe and Bill just stare glumly at the body and shake their head. This was the parental freak-out pay off: your kids could be dead if they take even one hit of acid.

* Or at least what Webb thought that kids on acid say and do.

I’ve never done acid, but I know plenty of people who have dropped and this is not what they’re like. Do they say stupid things and act sort of weird? I suppose. But their entire personalities don’t disappear and they don’t become lucid morons.

And that was what was so great about the show, everyone knew it was complete bullshit, but it was fun to watch anyway because there aren’t a lot of shows perpetrate a level of intelligence that just isn’t there. A great portion of the audience was so much smarter and more worldly than the show, that you just had to feel sorry for it.

And worse, you had to feel sorry for the people who thought that this was real. “Dragnet” went to great lengths to let the audience know that, “the story they were about to see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” This was the disclaimer that came before the episode began and they ran a similar disclaimer at the end. Were the stories true? From what I’ve read, Webb was a pretty big police buff and would often talk to the officers at the Los Angeles Police Department to get ideas for the TV show. Hell, his badge number 714* was retired by the LAPD.

* Jack Webb was a huge baseball fan. The badge number 714 was chosen because that was the number of home runs that Babe Ruth hit in his career. The badge numbers of the Webb-produced “Adam-12” were 2430 and 744. I thought that there was some connection between these two numbers and baseball, but I can’t seem to find anything.

But no matter what era Webb lived in, a majority of these tales are completely sanitized and made to fit into the “Dragnet” mold of honest cops, crooked criminals and defenseless civilians. There is never any derision from the formula.

And the formula was as much the show as the actors and scripts, Webb and Gannon wore the same suit in every episode. There were six episodes (I believe) where Webb didn’t wear his gray flannel suit and those were when Friday was kicking back (or in one episode at college and sort of undercover) in his red cardigan sweater. The reason why they always wore the same stuff was because as the producer, Webb wanted to be able to splice older scenes where he and Gannon were walking around into newer episodes, saving both time and money. With a revolving array of different colored suits, this couldn’t be done.

And while the suits looked familiar, so did the actors. Many of the crooks and teens and concerned citizens were used in multiple episodes. You begin to notice this if you watch enough episodes, but if there is a “Dragnet” marathon on it’s inescapable. I don’t know whether Webb liked working with this people much or whether they were cheap labor. I suppose that it was a little bit of both.

As slow and silly as this show is, especially compared to the grittier cop shows that followed (could you imagine “The Wire” starring Joe Friday? He’d be dead before the opening credits ended) it does hold my interest for a half-hour. And while there is a lot to laugh at, Webb took his work seriously and it showed.

In an era where blacks and immigrants were reduced to cheap stereotypes, Webb never went that route. The black and Latino guys on the police force were as much a part of the LAPD family as anyone. Whether this is historically accurate is debatable, but like I said, Webb was a big fan of the police department and wanted them shown in favorable light. Considering the crap that all law enforcement was getting during that time (the late 60s) this is a pretty honorable attempt.

He wasn’t interested in showing the police officers that were smacking students on the head at anti-war rally protests, or the police that were firing tear gas at the 1968 Democratic Convention protesters or turning on the fire hose at black people demanding their rights from an unrelenting South. His interest was showing the every day beat cop, the honest-hard working guy that stood for what America once represented. His police officers were the ones who risked their lives capturing thieves and no-goodniks who made the ordinary citizen’s lives miserable.

Did he go overboard with the depiction? Of course, but if I was a police officer and had to hear people that I was sworn to protect call me pig every day, turn on the nightly news and see my brothers committing reprehensible acts, I wouldn’t mind entering Jack Webb’s world for 30 minutes. While the crime rate is a bit high, it seems like a nice place overall. And if one your crimes is not accurately portraying hippies, than that’s a misdemeanor in my book.

Everyone knows that hippies suck.

Being a Father and Counting Your Blessings

2011-02-28T16:32:00.001-05:00

When I began this Blog in 2004, I looked at it as if it was an on-line diary. If you go back to some of my first entries, they’re basically about myself and my girlfriend Aly, who later became my wife. It wasn’t really interesting to anyone, except me. After I figured out my voice (ugh) and what I wanted this space to be all about, I tried to keep it to mostly non-personal stuff: pop culture, sports, dopey ideas that flow through my head. Every once in a while, a personal tid bit or two would slip into the mix, but it’s rare. It seems that the handfuls of readers that I have appreciate that.

For this entry, I’m going to change it up a bit and write about something a bit personal and if you want to stop reading, I’d more than understand.

My youngest daughter was born three months ago and things have been pretty awesome. She’s energetic and beautiful and smart and has one of the best smiles I’ve ever had the privilege of seeing and aside from nights where she doesn’t sleep, it’s been almost perfect.

Almost.

The second day of her life, Aly noticed that our daughter wheezed a bit when she breathed. She contacted the nurse and we were told that it was probably no big deal, they’d run some tests and we’d get the answers soon. Within an hour we were speaking to doctors about brain surgeries and other remedies to this breathing issue. They weren’t exactly what was wrong with our daughter, but they had a few ideas, one of which was that the brain was sliding down the back of her skull and pinching a nerve that controlled the vocal chords.

Luckily, this diagnosis was incorrect and brain surgery was not the answer. However, our baby spent 10 nerve-wracking days in the ICU where the nurses told us what a strong kid we had. In an attempt to buoy our spirits they wondered why she was even there, but we knew; we could hear her wheezing and we were told that she couldn’t cry at all otherwise she could pass out. By the time we left, the doctors felt that the problem was vocal cord paresis. They weren’t sure whether she’d ever be better. Obviously, this freaked us out because it seemed so final and questions abounded: would she be able to breathe ok? Will she be able to speak clearly? Will she have this wheezing for the rest of her life?

Until we saw a specialist, we wouldn’t know.

Finally at the end of December we spoke to an ear, nose and throat specialist, who allayed our fears and said that our daughter has something called Laryngomalacia or a floppy voice box. The wheezing we heard was stridor (basically the opposite of asthma) and that within two years, though probably sooner, our daughter will be over this and she will breathe quietly like a “regular” kid, all with no impacts to her health.

Aly and I were more jubilant than we had ever been in our lives.

Over the last two months, the breathing has gotten better and there are times when she’s so quiet it’s as if she wasn’t in the room. However, she does have her episodes. When she is nervous or in an unfamiliar setting, when she’s hungry or upset the stridor will start back up and her breathing volume increases. To my wife and myself, this is part and parcel of what makes our daughter, our daughter.

The fact that our daughter’s breathing makes other people nervous is not something we really put a lot of thought into. For the last three months, this has been one of the longest, coldest, snowiest winters in recent memory. Because of that and the fact that not only do we have a three month old, but also a rambunctious three-year-old, we haven’t left the homestead very much. If we do, we may hit the mall or a family restaurant where the daily din drowns out any noisy breathers.

This past weekend, we went to a quiet pizzeria on Saturday and on Sunday I brought her to the grocery store. Both times we were questioned or stared at. At the pizza place our daughter’s had just woken up from a nap and she didn’t know where she was. Her breathing was noticeably louder. The teen age girl sitting behind us kept turning around and staring at our daughter as if something was wrong. She did this more than a half-dozen times. I should have said something, but the girl was with her mother and I didn’t want to cause a scene.

In retrospect, I wish that I did.

The next day when the baby and I went to the grocery store, a similar thing occurred. She was hungry and the stridor was really starting to kick in and it got progressively louder as I stood inline waiting to pay and for my groceries to be bagged. The bagger kept asking me if my baby was ok. I assured her that she was, but she kept pushing me, “It sounds like she’s crying. Is she crying? No? Is she sick? It sounds to me that she can’t breathe? Is she alright?”

Combined with what happened the night before, I sort of snapped (and looking back, I really shouldn’t have). I told her, “There is nothing wrong with my girl. She’s not sick. She’s not crying and she can breathe just fine. She happens to have a condition that is eventually going to clear up on its own and she’s fine. She’s perfect. SHE’S JUST FINE.” I think the bagger was a bit shaken up by the tone of the last part and she apologized profusely and we were on our way.

Here’s the thing: my daughter’s breathing is jarring when you first hear it. I get this. The first night that she slept in our bedroom, I couldn’t fall asleep because of a combination of her loud breathing, my worries for her future and wondering if she was going to be ok in the morning. But mostly it was the loud breathing. It really does sound as if she is having trouble getting oxygen into her little lungs.

I guess that I understand the concern that people have for my daughter and I’m not sure why I reacted the way that I did to the grocery bagger—in all honesty it’s probably residue from the night before. Though honestly, I’d rather have someone ask me what’s wrong than to continuously stare at my daughter like that teenage girl did in the pizza place. What made me respond the way that I did is how she drew this uncomfortable moment out by asking question after frantic question as if I had no idea what was going on. Looking back on the incident, she seemed to have some sort of genuine concern as to the welfare of a fellow human being.

What really bothers me the most is just how I can not seem to put either instance behind me. Aly was pretty shaken up by what had happened on Saturday night and I told her that it was our family’s problem, it was the girl’s problem. She was the ignorant one who had to stare and make us feel uncomfortable. And while I believe that, it’s hard for me to take my own advice about the grocery store employee, who really wasn’t doing anything other than expressing concern. But when you get two days in a row of “someone else’s problem” (and this coincides with another incident from the previous weekend and another constant questioner) it’s hard to stick to your guns, even when you know that you’re right.

And make no mistake, I’m not unlike these people. I’ve been on the other side, I’ve been the kid staring at someone different and truth be told, most of the time I’d probably make a comment too.

Other than “quit staring and keep your mouth shut”—which I figured out some time ago—these last two days haven’t really taught me much. They should have and I’m trying hard to search for a lesson in these interactions. Maybe the lesson is: eventually my daughter’s breathing is going to get better and people will stop staring and stop asking questions; other people aren’t quite so fortunate. Maybe it’s time that I count my blessings. Raising kids isn’t easy, but that’s what being a father is all about.

23. Tom Goes to the Mayor

2011-02-22T14:23:00.003-05:00

Humor is a funny thing. There are those who think that humanity has some sort of skeleton key when it comes to making people laugh. Everyone loves a good knock-knock joke or an episode of “I Love Lucy” or seeing some guy get hit in the balls, right? Wrong. Two out of the preceding three aren’t funny at all, and three out of preceding three aren’t funny if you’re the guy whose balls are being hit.

Where do people get the idea that most humor is universal? I suppose that it comes from comedians who entertain large audiences or the communal viewing of a funny movie. If both examples are good, the majority of the crowd laughs together creating a sense of community or a veneer of shared comedic mores. People walk out of the theater or show assuming that all would enjoy what they just witnessed because the entirety of the crowd enjoyed it. It’s not that simple. For one thing, both of these groups are small sample sizes. And chances are good that if you go to a movie, you have a pretty good idea of the type of humor you’re about to see and thus you’re predisposed to liking it. And you're not the only one.

If I ever go to a Scary Movie-type flick, it’s because I was forced at gun point. Even if everyone is laughing around me, I doubt that I will crack a smile. And that’s because those movies aren’t my type of flicks. I'm not part of the overall audience reaction because I don't want to be part of that audience in the first place.

The same is true if you pay money to see a comedian.* A year or so ago my friend and I went to see David Cross. Cross is my favorite comedian of all time and there was no way that I wasn’t going to laugh. I laughed a ton (he really was legitimately funny) and I walked out of the Wilbur Theater saying that that was the best comedy show I’ve ever seen.

* The one exception to this is if you go to an open-mic night at your local Chuckle Hut. You have no idea what you’re getting there and if there’s a truly original comedian who galvanizes the crowd, that’s more of an exception than the rule. Many times, a new comedian is just cribbing off their comedy idol until they can find their voice. If the comedian worships at the feet of Jerry Seinfeld, you’re going to get some observational humor that might be clever at times. If you dig that sort of thing, you’ll like the comedian.

Establishing that different things makes different people laugh is hardly the revelation of the century. It's whether you tell people that you find something funny that the majority of folks don't that's the trick. You may find watching a handicapped or elderly person slip and fall on an icy street gut busting. Or you might be the type of person who enjoys a good Hitler joke now and then. But you're not going to tell anyone that you like these things. Why? Because you look like a complete sociopath and no matter how you explain why you think these things are funny, you're just digging a deeper hole for yourself.

This brings us to “Tom Goes to the Mayor” (TGTTM), which was created by comedic team Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. If you’ve never seen it before, and chances are you probably haven’t, and that's a shame because it's a sublimely funny show. It began it’s run in late 2004 and lasted about two years (30 episodes) on Adult Swim. The basic plot of every 15-minute show is the same: local entrepreneur Tom Peters (played by Heidecker) stops by the Mayor of Jefferton’s (Wareheim) office to pitch a new money-making idea to him. The ideas are usually insane and aren’t grounded in reality, but the Mayor (and that’s his only name) usually loves the idea, agrees to go with the scheme and ultimately ruins it. It almost always ends poorly for Tom. Yet he's there week after week, pitching to the Mayor.

The show had it’s own unique form of animation, it’s hard to describe so I’ll let Wikipedia do the describing for me:

“The show features a crude yet distinctive limited animation style which is made by taking photos of the cast with different facial expressions and body language. The photos are filtered using the "photocopy" image filter in Adobe Photoshop, so that they are made up of only monochromatic blue and white, resembling mimeographs. There are some live-action scenes, usually on a television set within the show.”

It takes a bit of time to get used to the way the show is animated, but once you do it doesn’t even matter. The strength isn’t in the animation, it’s in the stories as Heidecker and Wareheim both have very broad senses of humor that works on multiple levels. They will take a comedic trope, amp up the action and at the same time make fun of the cliché. For example, if Tom gets hit in the testicles they will show that action to get a laugh from that (because seeing a guy getting hit in the balls is never not funny) but the duo will often over-exaggerate the action by having the actors mug wildly for the camera. The shots themselves will be lampooned and the dialogue and the resulting plot will also be ripped apart. What happens is that you’re laughing at the action itself and you’re laughing at the people who sincerely find this stuff funny.

It’s the ultimate form of having one’s cake and also eating it.

This is sort of a hard thing to explain while watching the show and is why my wife or 99% of my friends has never heard me talk about it—much less seen an episode, even though it’s one of my favorite shows. And while this isn't a show about Hitler jokes or poking fun at the handicapped, it is a show that if a viewer doesn't understand, it will result in a raised eyebrow at you. "You find this funny? Really? How could you? This show is too fucking weird. What the hell else is wrong with you?"

Ultimately, it's just easier not to say anything.

At first blush, it’s a strange show—though not as strange as classics as MTV's “Wonder Showzen”, “Tim and Eric, Awesome Show Great Job!” (created by the same Heidecker and Wareheim that created TGTTM) or any of the Kroft shows from the 70s. The show has a love it or hate it quality to it. If you love it, you really love it. And if you hate it, there is no amount of explanation by anyone to get you to tolerate it*.

* According to Wikipedia, Adult Swim fans hated this show so much they thought that the network was pulling a prank on them. When it was revealed that this wasn’t a prank, they flooded the AS website and message boards with complaints.

What drew me to this show is that it was produced by Bob Odenkirk. Odenkirk is the same guy behind one of my all-time favorite shows, “Mr. Show With Bob and David” and has a comedic resume of awesome projects a mile long. I figured that if he was involved with the show, I should at least give it a go. And I’m glad I did. Not only does Odenkirk make sporadic appearances, but it is a who’s who of mid-90s alternative comics: Cross, Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, John Ennis, Michael Ian Black, Zach Galifianakis, Janeanne Garofolo and Tom Kinney. Also Jeff Goldblum, Garry Shandling, Jeff Garlin, Michael Cera, John C. Reilly and others make appearances.

I’ve often wondered exactly what the guests thought when they read the bizarre scripts and whether they were in on the joke or just there for a pay day. I have to think that this show didn’t pay that much and the exposure was small, so they had to be there because they thought the stuff was funny. In a way that makes me respect the people who took the chance and appeard on this show much more.

“Tom Goes to the Mayor” ushered in a new kind of show for Adult Swim. While it still had the comedic sensibilities of the four original shows, it also strayed away from what made the channel interesting. And while those shows did depend on a level of pop culture IQ (which it turned around and skewered), meta-humor and bizarre plots, TGTTM raised the bar a bit higher and made viewing a bit odder, a bit more uncomfortable. This uncomfortability humor was new-ish to the American airways when this show made its debut. Yes, the American version of "The Office" had been on, but it was hardly a hit. And the British version of the same show was still something that only a relative handful of people had seen.

So while it was easy to talk to my friends about anthropomorphizing food stuffs pulling pranks on each other, it’s a rare person that one can talk to about a guy trying to match dogs for marriage by sniffing their asses.But if you can find any of the episodes on YouTube, or if Adult Swim runs them in the future, set your DVR and check them out they’re well worth your time.

Rats off to ya, everyone!

Confessions of a Sports Bigamist

2011-02-16T11:14:00.002-05:00

I was watching the Celtics play the Miami Heat on Sunday and my wife Aly asked, “Since when do you care about the Celtics?” And I didn’t have a real answer for her, I said something along the lines that I like this particular team as a whole, the personalities of the players and how well they’re playing. But I didn’t really have a strong answer. This question came about a month or so after she made the observation that “I care about football more than I think that I do.”

And it hit me, she’s right. I do care about the Celtics* (and the Bruins for that matter) and I do care more about football (especially the Patriots) than I even admitted to myself. I was a bit shocked about this realization more than I should have been, which is odd because since high school part of my identity has been one of a sports geek. I was a fair athlete (ok, maybe bad is the word), but I could talk sports with the best of them. But during the last ten years or so, that perception had changed; I considered myself a baseball fan first and foremost and the others fell into line. In fact, my mantra was: You can only have one favorite team. And for me, that favorite team was undoubtedly the Boston Red Sox.

* When I was in high school I hated the Celtics. Just hated them. I hated their style of play, I hated their boring-ass players, I thought that Larry Bird was overrated (I know, I know; the indiscretions of youth) and I hated that they were everything that the Chicago Bulls weren’t. I loved the Bulls and Michael Jordan, they were the new NBA of high flying, basketball dunking awesomeness. In a “kill your idols” sort of way, I reveled in every Celtics loss and cursed every Celtics victory. To me, Red Auerbach was an old fool that needed to go far away from the NBA.

But something happened in the almost 20 years that I graduated from good old Amesbury High School. The Celtics stunk, I mean really bottomed out and it wasn’t fun to kick a dead dog. I began to feel a bit bad about hating them so much and began to cheer a bit for the underdog. As they got a bit better and better, it became more fun to watch a Celtics game. The 2008 NBA Postseason is among the most fun I’ve had as a sports fan and last year’s was a lot of fun (until the last game).

The point that I was making is that I still believe that you can only have one favorite team, but I’ve widened my scope to believe that you can have a handful of other teams that you care about just as much. And for me those teams are the other three Boston teams.

I should have seen this coming; a few years ago, when the Pats lost to the Giants in the Super Bowl, I tried to blow it off as “not really a big deal” because New England had won three other Super Bowls and they’d get there again. I told Aly that while it sucked the Pats lost, I would be more upset if the Red Sox did something similar. But that was a brave face and the Super Bowl XLII loss gnawed at my gut the entire off-season and when Tom Brady went down with a season-ending injury just one quarter into the next season, it really hit me as to what the Patriots lost that day in Arizona.

From there it seemed like things changed. When the Patriots lost to the Jets (THE FUCKING JETS!) in January, I was as angry as I’ve been about a professional team in some time. When the Celtics lost to the Lakers in the Finals, I was really bummed out. When the Bruins choked away a three-games-to-zero lead against the Flyers, I was apocalyptic*.

* Again, this wouldn’t have been possible even five years ago because I hated the Bruins and wanted them to lose in the most excruciating, painful ways imagined. And the reason was because of their “thrifty” (read: cheap-ass) owner Jeremy Jacobs. He always seemed to be happy that the Bruins would make a couple of dollars for him and would never dump the money back into the team. One summer he opened the purse strings and signed Zedeno Charra and Mark Savard and I began to come back to the Bruins. That’s really all I wanted, just some show that he cared about the team. I know, I’m a sap.

And you know what? I feel pretty good about the outlet of emotion that I can express about the home town teams. Am I obsessed with the other teams? No, not as much as the Red Sox; but it’s good to have options and care about teams when the Sox aren’t in season.

Scorecasting

2011-02-11T11:11:00.002-05:00

There are a lot of reasons to sit down and read. Some read simply for the pleasure of a new story, others read to learn things about the world around them. Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim pulls off an interesting trick by combining the these two axioms with a twist. The twist is debunking a lot of long-held sports myths.

I like I good story as much as anyone else, but one of the reasons that I read is because I like having a brain full of information nuggets to amaze my friends and astound my colleagues when we go out to have a few beers and watch a ballgame. A lot of times, these thoughts don’t amaze or astound anyone; its a lot of trivia that many people already know or it’s bits of information without any strong backing. However, after reading Scorecasting this is all going to change.

Moskowitz and Wertheim go into detail about how the “hot hand” argument is a complete myth. Or why the Chicago Cubs aren’t really “cursed” or “unlucky”--they’re just a poorly run franchise and their fans don’t care.

My favorite chapter was on how punting on fourth down isn’t always the best course of action. The writers back up this argument with interviews with Arkansas’ Pulaski Academy head coach Kevin Kelley about his strategy of never punting and going for it every first down (even if his team is deep in their own end), eschewing field goals for touchdown tries, throwing on just about every down (his quarterbacks usually have 500 yards of passing offense. PER GAME.), on-sides kicks and never attempting to run back any kick-offs or punts.

Kelley has been really successful at this: two state championships in three trips to the state championship game in about a decade. Armed with empirical data and tons of stats proving that his system is correct, Kelley is unsure why other coaches don’t do the same thing. Moskowitz and Wertheim do as well. One of the more interesting dichotomies that they hit on is that football is supposed to be a “man’s game” full of “risks” and “action”; but nearly all NFL coaches play so conservatively that the game is fairly predictable: run, run, throw, punt. They get to the reasons behind this mentality, but the trip there is the best part.

One of the myths that was debunked for me was the whole "defense wins championships" line of thinking. Last year when the Boston Red Sox decided to go with a run-prevention philosophy, I was on board whole-heartedly. After all, wasn't the October axiom: "Pitching and defense wins World Series" (despite the lack of success of the mid-90s Braves)? Here Boston GM Theo Epstein was taking that thought and stretching it out for six months, rather than one.

If only this book was released last year.Obviously, injuries played a huge part in the Red Sox' 2010 master plan, and the season's result was counter to what the original plan was (the defense was ok, the pitching stunk and the offense shined). It was a very strange year at the Fens.

There are a few parts of the book that tend to drag; I was never a big math guy and when they go on about advanced statistics and probability, my eyes tended to glaze over. But this isn’t an Intro to Statistics text book. Also I’m not much of a golfer, so I skipped the chapter on Tiger Woods.

However, other than those minor points, I would say that for any lover of sports or sports arguments, Scorecasting is a terrific book to have in your collection.

I Appologize to My Future Grandchild or The Cycle Continues

2011-02-09T10:33:00.003-05:00

* There are days when I wish that I still had my comic strip, because this would be a decent story to draw.

When I was a kid I loved the game Hungry, Hungry Hippos*. I’d play it with my family, friends, Jehovah’s Witnesses who swung by the house, anyone who stopped by. Mostly, I’d end up playing by myself.

* If you’ve never played, it’s awesome; bascially you are in control of a hippopotomus who when you press a handle sticks his neck out to gobble a marble. The player with the most marbles wins.

Most kids didn’t lightly tap the handle to extend the mouth and I was no different. I used to whale on that thing as if it owed me money. And the harder I hit it, the louder the game would be. I would literally play this game for hours on end, just slamming those handles and getting more and more marbles.

It drove my mother crazy.

One day I finally broke her. After a rousing few hours of Hungry, Hungry Hippos it was time for a nap. I carefully put all of the marbles back into their alotted spots and put the game away. During the time when I was in a defensless slumber, my mother took the marbles from the game and hid them. When I woke up and ran downstairs to begin another marathon of playing, I found that the marbles vanished.

“Mom? What happened to Hungry, Hungry Hippos?”
“Looks like you lost your marbles, By,” my mother said. Cue sad trombone: wah, wah, wahhhhh.

I was crestfallen and confused because I knew that I put the marbles away carefully and that they were there before I went to bed. I had no idea what happened and while I was probably pretty sad, I got over it and moved on.

The point of this Blog isn’t to denigrate my mother, who was the best mom anyone could have. The point is that history has a way of repeating itself as I’ve found that I do the same thing to my daughter when she has a toy that drives me bananas.

It’s not Hungry, Hungry Hippos. We have that game and I’ll still roll up my sleeves and kick a bit of ass in it from time to time*.

* If there was a professional HHH league, I have no doubt in my mind that I would be the Pedro Martinez of that game. You don’t want to challenge me to that game.

My daughter has two toys that I absolutely abhor, albeit for different reasons. One is a gigantic lady bug tent that she asks me to set up every so often. The thing is huge, it takes up a quarter of our living room and is a giant pain in the ass to set up. It would be cool if my daughter spent more than 10 minutes in the thing, but she doesn’t. She goes in, checks it out and then forgets about it. And every time I try to tear it down, she has a complete melt down.

The other thing that is hidden in our house a Sesame Street puzzle book. You may think that I’m being a dick for hiding this thing because, “It’s a book, what’s the harm?” The harm comes from the six puzzles of 16 pieces each. My daughter doesn’t like to build the puzzles back up, she likes to dump them on the floor and laugh. Guess who has to clean up this mess of cardboard? You guessed it, me.

My wife has started to get a bit funny with these taboo toys. Every once in awhile she’ll point to where the items are hidden and tell my daughter to get them out. Since they’re buried way under the couch, my daughter will whine to me about getting them until I figure out a way to distract her from the tent and the book.

Am I a bad dad? I hope not, I guess I sorta sound like one and deep down I feel bad about hiding her stuff (like I'm sure my mom did). But I like to think that I’m a father who values neatness and order first. At least that’s what I tell myself as I look for new places to rehide the contraband.

All I know is that in about 30 years (yes, neither girls will be with child before 30), I’m going to have a grandchild and he’s going to like something very much that annoys the crap out of his mom. And his mom is going to hide that toy and pretend that it’s lost or misplace. And all I can say is, “I’m sorry future Byron.”

Writing

2011-02-08T10:53:00.001-05:00

I haven’t written anything on this Blog since November 2, 2010 which was a little more than three months ago and honestly, I’m not sure why.

I could say that I’ve been busy and that I’ve been tired—having another baby will do that to you, I suppose. But I don’t think that’s it.

I could say that I haven’t had any ideas lately or that writer’s block has made me it’s bitch. But that’s not true either, I’ve composed dozens of Blog entries that I want to write while I was thinking in the shower or trying to fall asleep. Some of them were pretty decent too. Plus, I have this Top 56 Best TV Shows of All Time list that I need to finish sometime in the near future. I’m stuck at 25, BTW.

I could say that I feel confined and trapped by the lengths of my Blog posts and that they are too long and too ponderous. But, that’s a pretty easy fix. In fact this entry isn’t going to be more than 300 words and it’ll take me 15 minutes to write.

I guess what I should say is that I’ve been really lax and lazy about writing, and that sucks and it’s all my fault.

My friend Tom is always writing at 5:00 or 6:00 am (or at least he was when I last spoke to him a few years ago) because he feels that scribblers need to keep scribbling. I should take his advice, not the waking up early part because that sucks, but I should try to put something down on this Blog at least three or four times a week.

Again, all of the entries won’t be long and they might not be exactly like the other entries on the site, but they’ll be something. And that’s a good start.

24. The Honeymooners

2010-11-02T16:10:00.005-04:00

Do you like television? Of course you do, you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't. You owe a bit of thanks to “The Honeymooners”, you know that? Even though the show only had 39 episodes and began airing in 1951*, it’s possible that this show is the blueprint for a majority of the comedies that we watch today.

* First as a recurring sketch on the “Cavalcade of Stars” on the DuMont Network and then on the “Jackie Gleason Show” before it was turned into a full-length 30-minute show for the 1955-56 season.

Certainly, the Flintstones is the biggest copy cat of the show; but pretty much every two-bit situation comedy on CBS owes a large debt to Gleason and his crew. Ralph Kramden (Gleason) and his wife Alice (Audrey Meadows) were the original no-way-in-hell-does-this-fat-guy-ever-get-this-hot-woman-to-be-his-wife-in-real-life couple. And while Kramden and his best buddy Ed Norton (Art Carney) were among television’s first fat-and-skinny best buddies, they didn’t invent that coupling either. Even by the fifties, this type of odd couple had been done to death (see Laurel and Hardy).

Another sitcom plum that the Honeymooners were among the first to pick, was that of the blowhard (in this case, Gleason) getting his just desserts, the wife (Meadows) outsmarting the husband (Gleason) or the now classic complete misunderstanding (“But I thought that you said, he said, humanna, humanna, humanna!”) “The Honeymooners” was the first show where the actors had to stop their lines because the studio audience went nuts when a main character entered the scene. Shades of “Seinfeld’s” Kramer or “Happy Days’” Fonzi, whenever Norton or Kramden made their entrance, the audience would applaud and cheer so loudly that oftentimes supporting actors had to repeat their lines.

There are a few things that made this show work, one were the actors. Gleason, Meadows, Carney and Joyce Randolph (who played Carney’s wife, Trixie) were terrific actors.* Not only did they played their parts well, but one could actually imagine them as their characters. I believed that Jackie Gleason was Ralph Kramden. I thought that in real life Gleason talked like Kramden, acted like Kramden and more importantly thought like Kramden. Same thing with the other three players.

Of course they didn’t, but I am shocked that Carney or Gleason escaped any sort of typecasting for the rest of their lives. They were that good. And while the writing is terrific (more on that in a moment) the way that the actors could convey an emotion without saying a word (Gleason’s saucer plate eyes, Carney’s plastic face, Meadows crossing her arms) is nothing short than amazing. And yes, it’s mugging and yes, unless you’re a talented actor, it can come across as hackey, but not with anyone from this troupe.

* Randolph wasn’t that great. I mean she was serviceable, but she tended to screech her lines which was ok, because she wasn’t really integral to any of the plots. She gave birth the to Trixie (later Betty—as in Rubble) Conundrum. There are only a few reasons why Trixie is important: one Ralph’s best buddy needs a wife (so no one wonders why Norton is bachelor), two Ralph’s wife needs a best friend. However, since Ralph is the lead character the show revolves around him. There aren’t too many situations where a man hangs around with his buddy’s wife, without some sort of shenanigans occurring

Also, there needs to be a person that either Ed or Alice can talk to about the latest crazy scheme that Ralph has gotten into. In this case, Trixie is basically a proxy for the audience. Since Alice can’t look into the camera and say, “My husband is such a big oaf, I can’t believe that he got mixed up in this again!” she says it to Trixie. If Alice did do that, the fourth wall wouldn’t just be broken, it would be completely and utterly bombed and the grounds would be salted.

The writing really is a thing of beauty. The plots were usually pretty simplistic—and really, you’ve probably seen all of the situations these people get into, but it’s interesting to see the genesis of a well-known gag like the main character getting a swelled head only to fail completely, getting his comeuppance at the end of the show. (Sorry for the lack of Spoiler Alert on that last sentence.) There’s not a lot of “Arrested Development”-esque back story or “Seinfeld”-ian ironies or “Simpson”-ian rifts on popular culture. What you see is what you got.

And while that simplicity could get stale after awhile, here it’s played straight ahead with a lot of laughs. With the laughs there was a lot of warmth beneath the surface. Many times Ralph kicked Norton out of the house, but the audience knew that he was coming back in two minutes. Often Ralph threatened to punch Alice so hard that he’d send her to the moon*, but you knew that a moment would pass before he’d apologize and tell her that “she was the greatest” and plant a kiss on her.

* There is no way in hell that Ralph’s famous catch phrases to Alice, “Pow! Zoom! Right to the moon!” or “One of these days! One of these days Alice! Pow! RIGHT IN THE KISSER!” complete with Ralph pantomiming punching his wife in the face would ever end up on television. People would have a complete meltdown. And rightly so, but on “The Honeymooners” the audience knew that Ralph was full of crap. If he had ever laid a finger on her, the next scene would be him jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.

It was really that evident that the characters cared for each other, the actors cared for each other and in turn they all cared about the show.

One of my least favorite things about television taped in front of a live audience or when it’s actually live, is when a character breaks. This used to happen all the time on “The Carol Burnett Show” or during Saturday Night Live when Horatio Sanz and Jimmy Fallon (another fat and skinny comedy duo) used to do it every single skit. Every once in awhile Gleason and crew would break (or simply forget lines) but unlike Sanz and Fallon who would turn into 12-year-old girls and just giggle for the sake of giggling, the Honeymooner actors were true professionals who often ad-libbed their lines to minimize damage. Interestingly enough, oftentimes the ad-libbed lines were the funniest lines of the night.

The Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn is where the show took place. Kramden and Norton were both blue collar workers (a bus driver and sewer worker respectively) so their apartments were sparsely furnished. The Nortons actually looked like that they lived better than the Kramdens, despite Ed’s job, and actually had a television, while the Kramdens had a lot of nothing. And the Kramden’s house is where most of the action took place.

The setting wasn’t anything special, it looked like a set. It was sort of cheap, appeared that everything was made from plywood and that the whole thing could come crashing down at any minute but that only added to the atmosphere of the Kramden’s poverty. In the long run, it didn’t matter. In Naomi Odenkirk’s book, “Mr. Show: What Happened?” the stars of Mr. Show, Bob Odenkirk and David Cross talk about the sets of their show and it can be applied to “The Honeymooners”.

Basically they said that compared to Saturday Night Live, Mr. Show’s sets looked like crap. They appeared cheap because they were, they didn’t have half of the budget that SNL had. They really had to make do with what they had*. However, since they didn’t have a great set they had to put their focus on their skits and their writing. They had to make the audience forget that they’re surrounded by plywood ovens or cheap plastic cars and focus on the funny.

* According to Odenkirk, who once worked at SNL, the sets for all the skits are made somewhere in New Jersey and are shipped to the show that Friday. They literally have a whole team of people working on sets all week long, that’s why things look so good. Unfortunately, it would be better if SNL spent more time working on script than sets. ZING!

That’s what “The Honeymooners” did too. When it was a particularly good episode, it didn’t matter that Ralph was not in a real Brooklyn apartment yelling to his buddy one floor above him. I mean, it’s obvious that he was just sticking his head through a fake window and yelling up. But by the time the audience even realized that, the scene had moved on and it didn’t matter much. The plot was moving and things were going on, realism be damned.

Overall, the show is amazing. If you happen to catch it on a late-night, watch it for the historical significance. By the end of the half-hour, I guarantee that you’ll be laughing your ass off.

Would the Fonz Be a Good Dad?

2010-10-20T10:40:00.003-04:00

Yesterday’s passing of Tom Bosley, coupled with Saturday’s death of Barbara Billingsley, got me thinking about old TV show and in particular how the two of them were probably the best TV mom and dads ever. Although, I think that Billingsley’s June Cleaver (from “Leave it to Beaver”) turned into a hysterical old shrew by the end of the series’ run*, for the first few seasons she was pretty awesome. She always kept a tidy house, baked an endless supply of cookies and listened to her kids, often running interference for them so Ward wouldn’t freak out when he got home.

* Two things: one by the last two seasons, any time the boys did something wrong, June would fall completely to pieces. And it’s not as if Wally and Beaver were doing anything really bad (for that matter, Eddie Haskell wasn’t either) but she’d just completely lose her shit over the smallest things. I actually felt bad for Wally and the Beave when this would happen because they were tight asses already, not wanting to disappoint their mom (or listen to her prattle on) probably made them more repressed.

The other thing is, I wonder how Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers feel about Billingsley’s death. I’m sure that they’re broken up, but it must be weird that the whole world thinks that their mom just died, when in reality, it was a lady playing their mom. From what I read, both Mathers and Dow were quite close to Billingsley, but she wasn’t their real mom. For some reason, if I were either of them and a reporter asked me about the death of my “mother”, I’d probably snap at them.

Bosley was a really awesome dad in his own right. As Howard Cunningham on “Happy Days” you can make the argument that he was the coolest guy on the show. When high schoolers Richie and Potsie got all of their money taken by a bunch of frat guys at the University of Wisconson, it wasn’t Fonzie that got their cash back. It was Mr. C. When local no-goodnik Arthur Fonzerelli needed a place to live, Mr. C stepped up and allowed him to live over his garage and eat dinner with his family every, single night. He even had a damn good looking wife (Marion Ross) that he often nailed—get it? Mr. C owned a hardware store. “Nailing” is a euphemism for the sex. That’s comedy!

The point of this entry isn’t to eulogize two great TV parents, the point is to determine whether the breakout star of “Happy Days”, the aforementioned Arthur “Fonzi” Fonzerelli, would be a good father.

Let’s set up the premise: assuming that once the show ended, Fonzi found a woman that he could eventually settle down with and they had a couple of kids. He still owns the garage that he worked at it through the show’s run and he’s settled in a house down the street from the Cunninghams. Let’s put together a Pro and Con list to determine whether Fonzi would be an “Ayyyyyyyyy!” or a “Sit on It*” dad.

* Why hasn’t “Sit on It” stayed in our pop cultural lexicon? It’s quaint, it’s exclusionary (how many kids from this or the last generation watched “Happy Days”?) and it sounds vaguely dirty. “Sit on it? Sit on what? Oh, that. No way, I’m not sitting on that pile of crap.” Also if you say it fast enough, it almost sounds like you’re saying shit. That’s an underratedly fun word to say.

Pro:
- He’s the Fonz.
- He could probably fix your car if you got into an accident and wouldn’t get all bent out of shape (more comedy) if you came home with a motorcycle.
- Has a nice head of hair. You’d probably have a nice head of hair too.
- Already acted as a mentor to his nephews Spike and Chachi. Chachi turned out alright, though we never saw Spike again—perhaps he joined Richie’s older brother Chuck somewhere in Happy Days limbo. Anyway, one for two isn’t bad. And plus, Fonzi seems to learn from mistakes.
- Could probably give you good advice at scamming chicks and scamming free meals from nice, midwesterners.
- Could give you pointers on water skiing and all-night danceathons.
- Would definitely take your side if some asshole cop was trying to run you out of town.
- He showed patience and restraint despite years of hanging around annoyances like Potsie and Ralph Malph. I would guess the actions of little children would be a picnic compared to those two.
- Knew the prime spots at Inspiration Point.
- Would be able to fix a jukebox with a swift punch.
- Learned at the feet of the Mr. Miagi of Dads, Mr. Howard Cunningham.

Cons:
- Would be in constant fear that he would leave your mom for an Aloha Pussycat.
- Would be in constant fear that he’d have sex with any and all of your girlfriends.
- How could you live up to your father, the Fonz? I bet every day Dale Berra heard people tell him that he wasn’t Yogi Berra. Dale Berra turned to cocaine and sucked at baseball. Though the two things weren’t related.
- For all of his bravado of being “cool”, often he freaked out pretty easily.
- You’d have Uncle Potsie over your house every Sunday. Worse yet, he’d probably break into song at any possible moment.
- He punches jukeboxes to fix them. Maybe he thinks kids work the same way?
- He has no family, the dude cuts ties easier than Don Draper. What makes you think that you’d last?
- He’s an expert at everything, your self-esteem would be destroyed.
- Would hang around your hang out.
- Could never say that he was “wrong” or “sorry”. WTF, Fonz?
- Would probably call you “Shortcake”--which would doubly suck if you were his son.

Even though this Pro/Con list is knotted at 11, I have to say that the gravity of the Cons outweighs the Pros. It’s best that Fonzi keep his status as a 30-something bachelor only interested in high school girls.

Your Music Sucks! or It's Not You, It's Me

2010-08-17T16:00:00.002-04:00

For many years I've always thought that I had the best music taste around*. I liked rock, both old and new, I liked hip hop (mostly older stuff, but I wasn't afraid of the new stuff), I could dig on a well-done pop song, country wasn't a dirty word and I also liked the older stuff like Sinatra and Dean Martin. I was pretty impressed with what I thought was a wide swath of choice music taste.

* I don't think that I was being egotistical in my thinking. I believe that everyone thinks that they have terrific taste in music. Once in a while you'll hear someone self deprecatingly say that they have bad taste in music but that's because they know that they listen to crap and want you to know that they know that it's terrible. But underneath that self deprecation, they love what they listen to and think that it's pretty good. Because otherwise, why would they subject themselves to music that they don't like?

And as someone who thought that they had great taste in music, I thought that people who had tastes opposite of mine were terrible. Looking back at that time in my life, I can honestly say I was an insufferable prick about this. Who was I to judge another person's listening habits? As a music fan, I had purchased tapes and CDs or downloaded the following groups (unironically, I might add):

Limp Bizkit
The Dave Matthews Band
Billy Joel
C+C Music Factory
Not one but five CDs crammed full of TV theme songs
Above the Law
Winger
White Lion
The Doors

There are a ton more, but looking over this list there are reasons why I bought these songs. White Lion and Winger are when I was into hair metal, I had a pretty good inkling that these bands sucked, but that's what people were listening to at the time. Same thing for Above the Law, I was so into West Coast/gangsta rap, that I would have purchased anything by anyone in a Raiders or Kings hat.

The C+C Music Factory tape was lame and I always felt dirty listening to it; I never would turn the stereo up too high for fear that one of my friends would come busting in and find me grooving to the sounds of Freedom Williams. As for Dave Matthews, it was the early 90s and those stupid jam-heavy, hippie bands were starting to really take over the radio. Plus, my roommate at the time liked them and Phish and since all I did was complain about the latter, I'd have felt like a complete dick crabbing about the DMB. I kept my mouth shut and actually started to like it and saw them a few times in concert before the DMB magic wore off.

Billy Joel tapes that I have, I blame on youthful indiscretion and the fact that I was in fifth grade and didn't have an older brother or sister around to steer me to cooler bands. I originally bought the TV theme CDs as kind of a gag for parties. It was not funny.

This leaves the list (which is much larger, but I could only think of these ones right now) with two bands. One that I will defend and the other I have no defense for.

I'll go with the latter first, Limp Bizkit. Much like C+C Music Factory, when I bought their CD (the one with “Nookie” and “Break Stuff” on it – I have no desire to even look up the disc's name on line) I knew that it was a stupid album by an even dumber band fronted by a complete idiot. Just thinking about giving that dopey, backwards Yankee cap wearing, frat boy rapist leader Fred Durst even a dime makes me angry, but I talked myself into it for two reasons: 1. I needed some up-tempo music to listen to while I was working out and 2. Method Man was on it and he seemed cool.

But it wasn't cool, it wasn't cool at all. I didn't even have the decency to buy this CD from Colombia House or something. I actually bought it at a Newbury Comics and I could feel the gaze of disappointment from the counter jockey as a paid for my purchase. I felt like I was buying scat porn or something. I think that this may have been my worst overall music experience ever. It's like a black mark that I can never wash away, no matter how many showers I take.

It feels nice to get this off my chest.

As far as the other group goes, the Doors, I like them. A lot. I know that pretty much every hipster in the world considers the Doors to be the worst band on the face of the planet, but I don't know what to tell you, I think that they're good. I have every album, I have one of their box sets, two of their Greatest Hits (which is completely superfluous and a waste of cash), a couple of live albums, I even have the soundtrack to the Oliver Stone movie (which I also own on DVD and VHS) and at least three biographies of the band.

I agree that their lyrics are trite, their music is a bit over-complicated yet simple at the same time, Jim Morrison is a lousy singer and that his myth far outweighs reality. The guy was an alcoholic junkie who had the fortune of being born good-looking and not being able to care that his poetry was garbage. His stage antics were obnoxious and the live shows could turn into literal riots if Mr. Mojo Risin wasn't “feeling it” that particular night. Their music is often ponderous navel-gazing that sounds like it was written by four guys who flunked out of an Intro to Buddhism course. And worst of all, they're a favorite of aging hippies and boring baby boomers who love to tell you how “dangerous” they were.

Jim Morrison once said “fuck” on stage! Who gives a shit, pops. I just saw Ernie toss Bert's salad on Sesame Street.

Having said all of that, I still like the Doors, a lot actually. What I like most about them is that they take back to a time in my life where I thought that it was “deep” to like these guys, that they had something different to say. I like thinking about one of the most embarrassing acts of my life occurred under the influence of the Doors*. I like that I got interested in the Doors because a hot girl told me that she liked them and I went home and listened to their Greatest Hits over and over and over again just so I'd have something to talk about with her.

And their music isn't that bad either. Sure, Morrison can't carry a tune in a bucket, but he fits into the group. Someone once told me that they didn't like the Doors because they didn't have a bassist in their band and I thought that was the strangest reason to not like a band. Never mind the fact that they do have a bunch of songs with bass lines in them, but facts shouldn't get in the way of a good rant.

* My Doors-inspired embarrassment goes something like this: I was a sophomore at college and at that point I pretty much listened to the Doors 24/7. I thought that I was Jim Morrison, if Jim Morrison was too afraid to do any drugs, kept his hair short, loved sports and was kind of afraid of talking to good looking girls. One Friday night I got completely blasted and decided to go downstairs to the freshman girls hallway and look for some ladies. One door was slightly ajar and as luck would have it, a Doors song was playing. I had no idea who these girls were (there were a handful of them in there) and I didn't care. I sort of did a Jim Morrison like dance into the room, slurred a few Morrison witticisms and waited for them to drop trou.

Of course it never happened and I had to slink back to my room, alone. My plan was doomed to fail for a number of reasons: 1. I do not look like Jim Morrison 2. when I drink I am not charismatic, in fact one could say that I am the opposite of charismatic and 3. at that point in my life, I could barely handle one girl never mind five. Epic and total failure.

Why am I writing all of this stuff? The long short of it is I'm writing this entry because my wife and I were talking about music a few weeks ago and she said, “You have much better tastes in music than I do.” And I don't, but then again, who really does have good taste in music. It's far too subjective and even the most hip music fan has some sort of skeleton in their closet.

Maybe it's because I haven't bought any new music in about ten years, aside from the new Pearl Jam and comedy albums, the White Stripes' “Elephant” could be the last new release that I purchased, or maybe it's because I've mellowed a bit since I got older but I don't care what other people listen to any more. If listening to “Under the Table and Dreaming” on a continuous loop is what you love, and as long as I don't have to listen to it, knock yourself out.

A few weeks ago I finished reading “Eating the Dinosaur” by Chuck Klosterman and he talks about how he's not interested in arguing about stupid things. The example he brings up is KISS. He's a big KISS fan and as such he said that a lot of people often come up to him to debate the merits of KISS. He said it's a no-win situation for himself because he knows that KISS is kind of a crappy band, but he loves them anyway.

So he's not going to get into a discussion and go point-for-point against the other person's band because chances are they're going to be right. And in the oft chance that Klosterman “beats” this person, that same person isn't going to become a KISS fan. He's still going to hate them just as much, if not more than before.

I guess that the bottom line is this: it's useless arguing about music. But television on the other hand, that's a whole different story.

25. King of the Hill

2010-07-20T16:06:00.002-04:00

It's fashionable (and easy) to champion various instances of pop culture as either “over rated” or “under rated”. Depending on your feelings towards “Beavis and Butt-head”, its creator Mike Judge may have been one of those qualifiers when “King of the Hill” debuted in 1997. He was riding pretty high with “Beavis and Butt-head” after six seasons on MTV and a movie. He had made headlines when he said that he was walking away from the show in order to work on “King of the Hill” which left some fans perplexed. Why was he leaving “Beavis and Butt-head? Why was he going to Fox?

Fox was quick to jump on this buzz and in many of “King of the Hill” promos they would routinely trumpet, “From the creator of 'Beavis and Butt-head'” as a way of getting viewers to watch their new show. Obviously, this is not a new marketing scheme. Hundreds of television shows and movies have used this trick as a short-handed way of making the new show, movie, record, etc. seem cool. It works on me all the time, I enjoyed “Clerks” a lot, so I saw “Mallrats”. I love “The Simpsons” so I tune into “Futurama”. I liked “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” so now I'm reading “Eating the Dinosaur”. You get the point.

But there is an inherent problem when using this tactic; what if the old show that you're comparing is nothing like the new show? There is a danger of turning off a potentially large chunk of you audience if they feel that they were fraudulently sold a bill of goods. “King of the Hill” (KotH) is nothing like “Beavis and Butt-head” (BaB). It's smarter, more subtle and more nuanced than BaB ever was. This was a different take than what we were used to, after all one of the first episodes of BaB was called “Frog Baseball” that showed the duo playing baseball with a frog.*

* Don't get me wrong, BaB is a funny show. It really is, and while there is a bit of social commentary bubbling under the surface, it's still a stupid-funny show. And that's ok. However, in the years since BaB, Judge has proven himself to be such a great writer (“King of the Hill”, “Office Space” and “Extract” leap to mind) that it's almost as if BaB were written by a completely different person.

KotH was such a completely different show from BaB that it took me awhile to adjust. I remember being so hammered with Fox's references to BaB that when I first watched the premiere, I was looking for signs that this was a prime-time, different network cross-over.* I was expecting Beavis and Butt-head to walk down the streets of Arlen, push Bobby Hill around or mess with Dale Gribble's shed.

* What made me even more confused is that lead character Hank Hill sorta looked and sounded exactly like BaB next-door-neighbor and main foil Tom Anderson. During the first half of the first show I thought that Judge was spinning off Anderson without any explanation of where BaB went, which I found jarringly strange.

What also worked against this type of promotio (for me at least) was that I was at my absolute saturation point with BaB. Even though it was a year or two past its prime, it was still run on MTV constantly. The movie had come out the previous winter with a gigantic media blitz and the overarching joke was being run into the ground (I get it, everything sucks). I didn't know much about Judge's background, but I was initially worried that he was going to do another version of BaB which I was convinced would have sucked. (Heh-heh)

My fears were elayed. KotH didn't play anywhere near the BaB universe, which was a very risky gamble. If Judge and Fox wanted to hedge their bets, they could have had BaB guest star in a couple of episodes, jack up the ratings and see what happened. But they took a more dangerous (and ultimately more satisfying )path in letting Judge team up with veteran TV writer (“The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live”) Greg Daniels to let the show build on solid characters and great scripts.

And it worked as KotH lasted on Fox from 1997 to 2009 (actually, some unaired episodes were broadcast on Fox affiliates in 2010 too) and during the first few seasons the show was a major hit on the network, sometimes outperforming “The Simpsons”. As the newness of the show wore off, KotH settled into a nice rut. Not time-wise, in the early part of the new millennium there were weeks when the show was simply not broadcast without explanation, as it was often preempted for the national late Sunday afternoon football game. The rut (and this isn't used as point of derision) that the show settled into was in the story telling and the characters.

And this is why the show was so successful.

At first glance, I would have nothing in common with the characters from “King of the Hill”. I'm as East Coast as can be, my views skew liberal, I'm not afraid of technology, I'm not middle aged and I've been to Texas a grand total of twice in my life. Yet I was able to identify with many of the KotH characters who were a complete 180 degrees from my every-day life and beliefs. Add to the fact that the characters are cartoons and it's quite a neat trick that Judge pulled off. He was able to make his cartoon characters more realistic and more universal than most sitcom characters.

How did he pull this off? To be honest, it wasn't a trick. Trick implies that there was some sort of underhandedness or luck involved and it's clear that there wasn't either. Because of his own creativity and skill, Mike Judge was able to sketch these characters out really well and he (along with the writing staff) were able to craft stories that played to his characters' strengths.

Unlike a lot of writers, Judge wasn't afraid to let his characters grow and did not let them fall into the same old clichés. Yes, every character had his or her own perspective and a catchphrase or two and would sometimes fall back on their time-worn behaviors. But they were never defined by the catch phrase. However even 10 or 12 seasons into the show there were still surprises where characters did something out-of-character that still made sense.

An obvious parallel to what I'm talking about is “The Simpsons”, as the seasons move along Homer has gotten dumber and dumber and dumber, ultimately culminating in doing things no real person would ever consider (Jerk Ass Homer). It can be argued that Homer is a cartoon character so it shouldn't matter, but one of the things that was so endearing about Homer Simpson (and the rest of the family) is that they were the (slightly cracked) mirror held up to society. Because we see a yellower verison of ourselves, that's the reason why we loved them.

But Hank Hill and the rest of his brood never wavered in the years the show was on the air. Aside from a minor difference or two, the character of Hank Hill was as consistent in 2009 as he was in 1997. And that is pretty awesome feet. If you have a revolving group of writers penning a show for 14 years, there are bound to be diversions from the original. Through erosion of truly understanding the characters or the writers wanting to simply add their own flair, the character at the end of a long-running TV show is usually not the same character that began it.

When changes were made, they were usually done to strengthen the characters. For example, Dale Gribble's wife Nancy. For more than a few seasons she was having an extramarital affair with John Redcorn that was known to pretty much everyone on the show. Redcord would sometimes interact with Gribble, who would be blissfully unaware of what was transpiring between the two. Gribble was so clueless he never noticed that his own son (Joseph) looked exactly like Redcorn. In one memorable episode, Nancy ended the affair saying that while Dale might not be the most conscientious person around, he was still her husband and she owed it to both him and her son to make it work.

The clueless cuckold is a comedic staple that has been around since Shakespeare took up a quill, so it takes a pretty strong will to stop mining this comedic gold and show some sort of respect for three characters. One, it makes Nancy look better. Two, it makes Dale less of a complete moron (Jerk Ass Homer in reverse). Three it makes John Redcorn seem like more a sympathetic figure as he still pines for Nancy and knows that he is much more a man than Dale will ever be. Plus it also eliminates a lot of Three's Company type situations that can grate on the nerves of experienced TV watchers.

Judge was also careful to make sure that the the guest voices were as timeless as the stories. In other words, he didn't have a lot of guest stars appear as themselves to take immediate cash grab of their current popularity. Tom Petty was a featured voice in later seasons as he played Luanne's husband Lucky. Even when it seemed like it was the flavor of the week guest starring on the show, Judge and company made them go the extra mile and play someone other than themselves. And in most cases, the character was completely different than the public perception of the celebrity.

This timelessness is what's going to keep KotH fresh. I'm sure people may get a chuckle remembering a guest star as unique to the 2000s as Kelly Clarkson, but they will no doubt (who also guested on the show) know who Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston or Snoop Dogg are.

Speaking of voices, Judge was able to assemble quite a vocal cast as he, Stephen Root (Bill), Kathy Najimy (Peggy), Pamela Adlon (Bobby), Johnny Hardwick (Dale) and many more brought a ton of depth to their characters. It's not always easy to animate emotion and if you don't get the right people to connect with the characters, then they're going to fall flat. All of the characters are fleshed out here, you can almost imagine them as real people. And while a lot of the credit goes to the writing staff, you need to also credit the people who make the characters believable.

I mentioned this earlier, but another reason why the seasons were so strong is because like the philosophy behind the guest stars, the writers made sure that each story wasn't filled with jokes that dated the episode in years to come. There weren't a lot of Monica Lewinsky jokes or George W. Bush guffaws that seem clever at the time but age quickly. Most episodes revolved around a situation that could happen today or 10 years ago or five years from now.

Another thing that Judge and his writers did was respect their audience. While this wasn't "Nova" or any other "deep thinking" show, it wasn't dumb either. There was a logic and a cause and effect for most of the situations the characters got themselves into and they did bring up some issues. Whether next-door Laotian neighbor Kahn was calling Hank and his buddies hillbillies* and ultimately becoming friends with them or finding out that Dale's father was gay, these story lines were done with a sort of sensitivity and mature attitude that other shows are afraid to do. Yes, it's a funny show but not everything has to be done with knee slap and a spit take.

* I always thought that Kahn being the racist towards Hill and his alley mates was a brilliant twist on the generic notion that all Southerners are racist hicks. Bigotry comes in all shades and Judge was able to portray this without smashing it over the viewer's head. Very subtle.

Parents aren't going to understand their kids, husbands and wives will butt heads, friends and neighbors will anger the blood and the world at large is a confusing place. But in the end, if you have a good family, good neighbors and a good head on your shoulders things will work out. That's the underlying message of the show. That's why even though Hank Hill has a narrow urethra and a solid middle-class life, he's always going to be “King of the Hill”.

Searching For Mr. Scary*

2010-07-13T12:11:00.003-04:00

* Yes, I used the name of a Dokken song (and the name of lead guitarists' guitar) as a basis for one of my entries. I wish that it didn't have to come to this, but here we are. I'll never reference Dokken again. I promise.

When I was younger there were legion of pop culture boogey men (mostly musicians) that freaked parents out. This wasn't a product of the 80s, if you look back far enough, you'll see that just the idea of rock n' roll music was enough for parents to lock their children in their homes. You've seen the B-roll footage in scores of TV shows and movies: the small (usually) Southern town, the bonfires, the broken records, the town preacher yelling fire and brimstone. It's a complete cliché now, but it really happened.

As the late 50s/early 60s progressed into the Age of Aquarius and the mid 70s, the “pillars of the community” came to the realization that rock n' roll wasn't going anywhere and began to turn their attention to specific artists. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison of the Doors, among others were all public enemy number one when it came time to protect the fragile minds and squash the budding libido of America's youth. When the 70s bled into the 80s, parents were afraid of bands like KISS*, Alice Cooper and heavy metal before setting their sites on Madonna.

* As a junior high school student, I was an altar boy. During this time I was given a job which required me to be at the church for the mass on Saturday and three masses on Sunday, one of which I served. The other three masses required me unlocking the doors before services started, closing them after it ended and getting the altar ready for the day. Since I wasn't scheduled to work all the time, I'd hang out in the sacristy and listen to my Walkman. BTW, the sacristy is the room behind the altar—it's quite a boring place to hang out. Nothing to read except the Bible.

One day a priest walked by, saw me rocking out (as the kids say) and asked me what I was listening to. Stupidly, I told him that I was listening to KISS (and not classic KISS like “Destroyer” or “Love Gun”, but their piece-of-shit, we-don't-give-a-damn, we're-only-in-it-because-we-have-a-record-contract, 45-minute-harmonizing-group-vomit of an album “Crazy Nights”). He looked at me, got real quiet and said seriously, “You know that KISS means Kids In Satan's Service, right?”

Say what you want about Gene Simmons or Paul Stanley or Peter Criss or Ace Frehley or Eric Carr or Bruce Kulick or any of the other musicians that wore grease paint or spandex, but these guys were not Satan worshipers. They may be sex fiends, drug abusers, attention whores and money grubbers, but worshiping Lucifer was not on the bill.

As a kid, I was pretty naïve about a lot of things, but even I knew what the priest said was in no way true. It was then that I pretty much stopped taking the advice of adults about popular culture.

The thing about Madonna is that she really worked hard to get people all riled up. From her boring-ass book about sex (what a shock!) to her sexual overtones with religious icons in her videos, she was trying to get people to notice—and most importantly hate—her. And it did work. Pepsi dropped her as a spokesperson when the video for “Like A Prayer” came out and there were anti-Madonna protests in certain cities. But like most things Madonna, it never seemed genuine or visceral. It felt as if the right-wingers HAD to protest Madonna because she was working so hard to push their buttons.

The real anger of parents at that time settled on hip-hop. Man, did older people absolutely HATE hip hop. That's the main reason why I was so drawn to it when I was in high school. I felt that by buying an Ice Cube or an Ice-T tape it was like giving the finger to society. And as a white, middle-class kid living in a town where the only hassles were the police occasionally breaking up an outdoor party, you need an outlet for any type of antisocial behavior. Hip hop was that conduit.

And apparently there were a lot of disillusioned (about what, I don't know) white boys because hip hop pretty much dominated the angst and anger of middle America for a long, long time. From NWA to the Geto Boys to Public Enemy*, if there was an angry black man on an album cover, chances are someone was protesting it.

* When I was a senior in high school I worked at Friendly's Ice Cream with my mother. I became pretty good friends with a bunch of people in their early 20s, especially this girl Shelly. Shelly knew how much I loved Public Enemy (I'd draw that B-boy in a scope logo on so many things, I'm surprised I wasn't pegged as a future serial killer) and told me that her favorite band (Gang of Four) were playing in Boston with PE and wondered if I wanted to go. Of course, I wanted to go.

However, since my mom worked at the same place I did, she got wind of this idea and before I could put any spin to it, she said no. “Those concerts are just too dangerous!” So, I didn't go.

The postscript on this story is two-fold:

1. Now that I'm a 35-year-old man, I am going to see Public Enemy in concert, in Boston and I don't have to ask my mother's permission. Take that, mom!
2. A scant two years later, this same woman who was scared of a Public Enemy concert, let my brother (a sophomore in high school) travel to see a Grateful Dead show. I didn't get the logic then and I still don't.

After people realized that much of this black anger was an act, the hip hop anger cooled, rock took center stage again with Marilyn Manson doing his damnedest to scare America. The dude did everything he could to rile up the right-wingers: sexual ambiguity, drinking absinthe, bestiality, claiming to worship Satan, fake mutilations, the works. He took all of Alice Coopers' theatrics (BTW, Cooper's quote on Manson is pretty awesome, “He (Marilyn Manson) has a woman's name and wears makeup. How original.”), turned them to ten and repackaged them for the 90s. It drove a lot of people crazy, sold a ton of records and ended up flaming out.

In fact, the Onion did an awesome parody on Manson back in 2001: .

The last real Mr. Scary was Eminem. Here was the ultimate nightmare: a poor, white-trash kid from bombed-out Detroit who rapped (this wasn't Vanilla Ice) about killing his girlfriend, taking a ton of drugs, homophobia and just being a gigantic pain in the ass. And, to top it off, he had major street (read black) cred which means this wasn't some white asshole pretending to be black. Marshall Mathers was the real thing.

And Eminem held the crown for a few years until the throne was abdicated. There aren't any music Mr. Scarys any more. Sure, for a little while, we got angry at Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera for their sexy ways. But we weren't actually angry at them, we were angry at ourselves because we found those young women so good looking and it ultimately confused. We weren't supposed to be looking at girls that young, we weren't supposed to be sexualizing teenagers, but here we were. And since we couldn't get angry at ourselves, we got pissed at the people who were giving us exactly what we asked for. The American public is a Mobius Strip of stupidity.

Aside from that brief jail-bait, pop-tart hiccup, there isn't anyone who the older generation warns their children about and tries to shield them away. And here's the thing, I am in that older generation, I'm supposed to be the one gnashing my teeth, beating my breast and wondering why our country is going to hell in a hand basket. Only I don't know who to direct my anger to.

I'm not big on the music scene any more, but pretty much anything I've heard on the radio is both bland and inoffensive. I'm not going to get worked up over the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus or Bon Jovi or any of the other bands that sound like watered-down versions of Matchbox 20, excuse me, I mean Matchbox Twenty. Even hip hop isn't shocking anymore. The last time we were outraged by a hip hop artist is because Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Awards.

Oooh that Kanye! How I hate him!

And while it sounds like this would be a good thing (the elimination of popular music as a way to get parents angry), it's not. Pop music and rock and hip hop are genres that are made for young ears. It's supposed to angry up the blood of the old. As Pearl Jam once put it, “this (meaning their music) is not for you (meaning old timers).” It's supposed to be a language foreign to anyone outside the 18-34 year-old demographic.

And Lady Gaga, bless her little heart, is trying so hard to be confrontational. She walks around half-naked, she flips off the camera at CitiField (in Jerry Seinfeld's private box, no less!), she got banned from the new Yankee Stadium, she sings about something that sounds sorta angry. But it's not the same. She comes from the Madonna school of shock; it's all too canned, too planned, too ... boring. I've seen how this show ends. Wake me when she gets to the pointy bras, making fun of Kevin Costner stage of her career.

The age-old dance of a parent banging on their child's door to “turn down that damn electric twanger” is supposed to elicit a teen's eye roll followed by a bellowing sigh and maybe an argument of misunderstanding. Now, my two-year-old daughter annoys me by playing that stupid Black Eyed Peas song over and over and over again.

A few things that I realize about my daughter:

1. She's two-years-old. In 15-years I pray that her taste in music gets better. Hopefully she finds something that will get my blood riled up because of something “shocking” and not because her music choices are so shockingly lame.

2. I would much rather listen to the last band she was obsessed with, The Wiggles, than the Black Eyed Peas. They are less packaged, can sing better, their songs have better lyrics and make more sense. “Fruit salad, yummy, yummy” is a far more interesting lyric than anything that Fergie yelps, while trying not to publicly urinate on herself.

Why don't we have any musical bad guys any more? My thought is that the real world is in such a quagmire, that we have bigger fish to fry. How can one care about Marilyn Manson when there is 9% unemployment rate in this country? Why is Eminem such a big deal when the Gulf of Mexico is essentially destroyed? Does MC Ren or Gene Simmons really provoke any sort of serious thought than that of the recent financial crisis or the dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the death of the automobile industry?

The gist of this entry is this, the next generation needs bad guys that the previous generation can focus on because that means we're living in worry-free times. We can worry about some rich Midwestern guy claiming that he owed his entire existence to Satan and the effect that it would have on our children. We can worry that an angry black man could rile up a nation full of apathetic white kids to some sort of revolution.

But right now, we can't because there are only so many tears you can cry.*

* God damn it, I did it again. Another Dokken reference. Crap.

Is Selling Out Still a Four-Letter Word?

2010-06-22T16:17:00.003-04:00

I haven't written in awhile, mainly because I've been busy and I haven't had a lot of interesting thoughts that I wanted to jot down. One could argue that I never really had a lot of interesting thoughts and that this Blog is nothing more than public mental masturbation about topics that no one cares about, but in order to save my sanity, I think I'm going to put that thought out of me gulliver.

Much better.

I've been watching a crap load of TV lately and there were a few things that struck me odd about two completely different shows that caught my attention. My wife loves E! much the same way I love McDonalds. We both know that both are terrible for you: it's full of empty calories, it rots your brain and ultimately it's not that satisfying but damn if it doesn't feel good while we watch/eat it. Anyhow, she was watching a show called “Kendra” which follows the trials and tribulations of Kendra Wilkinson. She's the former girlfriend of Playboy publisher and octogenarian Hugh Hefner's who is now married to Indianapolis Colt and Super Bowl goat Hank Baskett.

“Kendra” is a celebrity reality show and just about every episode is the same as the E! celebrity reality show that aired prior to this episode. Each show starts off with a problem or situation that Kendra has to figure out—and that's pretty much it. This particular episode dealt with the “leaking” of Kendra's sex tape that she made with a former boyfriend many years ago and how it affects her family. As part of the resolution to this problem, Kendra speaks with the ghost writer who's writing her autobiography.

This is where the fun begins because the guy interviewing her for the book is in his middle 30s and looked absolutely petrified. Not because Kendra Wilkinson is unbelievably gorgeous thus becoming tongue-tied—actually it was the opposite, she looked terrible. She had no make up on, had an infant on her hip and was inhaling three platters of room service while she spoke. The terror came from him asking her questions and Kendra giving the most insane, rambling, incoherent answers ever.

For example, he asked her what it was like growing up in San Diego without a father and she took him on a discombobulated word tour of how she once got in trouble for drinking while in class to illustrate how much of a handful she was. The key line was, “I was all wasted and then damn, I see the vice principal come in and oh man, I knew that he was just looking for me and then he's all like 'Kendra, come here.' and when I went I knew that I was in trouble.”*

* That's how she explained how her life was without a father. She's not intelligent enough to realize that she has major daddy issues which is why she shacked up with a senile old man who spends 95% of his life in his jammies and thinks that he's a ship captain on the other five percent.

Maybe I identified with this guy because I have been in his shoes many times. When I worked for the paper (The Revere Journal) there were plenty of times when I was doing an interview and the person answering my questions were careening out of control. What I would try to do is keep them talking and hope that once I got back to the office I was able to pull some sort of story out of this collection of nonsense and non-sequitors. Unfortunately for this writer, he has to write an entire book. And the worst part is that when the book is published and even though Kendra will see umpteen revisions and sign off on them, she's still going to say that she was misquoted.

This brings me to my second observation while watching a show that is also not geared to me or my demographic. My daughter loves PBS Sprout; from the detestable “Cailou” to the terrible “Dragon Tales” to the not-so-bad “Thomas and Friends”* she will watch this channel from morning until night if we let her. Since our parenting is that bad, we let her watch a few shows here and there OnDemand.

* “Thomas and Friends” is actually a pretty good show in that it shows kids that they aren't special, they're just a cog in the wheel and that if you don't do your job no one is going to feel sorry for you. Also, it teaches them people are going to make fun of you a lot for anything that is perceived as different or weak. The show was created by a real fire and brimstone English reverend who seemed to believe in John Stuart Mill and the utilitarian way of living. Everyone has a purpose, everyone must work towards the same goal, everyone must be useful. In fact, that is the highest compliment an engine can get on “Thomas and Friends” -- “You really are a useful engine!” The next generation of Socialists aren't coming from the White House, they're coming from Sprout.

Before the shows run, there is usually a commercial for something baby related. The one that has caught my attention and has wormed its way into my brain is one for diapers called the Potty Dance. It's pretty much this one old-ish, rocker dude who has a guitar and he implores kids to “Do the clap, clap potty dance!” for Huggies Pull-Ups. The song is as infectious as any pop song I've heard in years. And the weird thing is that the guy singing and strumming the guitar moves with the gait of a person who has been in countless bands that are just good enough to get signed, but not good enough to break through.

He actually seems as if he's enjoying himself when he's dancing around with a bunch of kids.

What's the point of these two anecdotes other than I need to learn to ignore the television when my wife or daughter have control of the clicker? The point is that both of these guys sold out at one point in their careers. And is this a good thing?

Writing diaper jingles and shit books (see what I did there?) pay the bills, I know that. They probably pay a lot of cash, but one of these guys looks absolutely devastated by his life choice while the other seems to be making the best out of it. You can see that Kendra's ghost writer possesses the 1,000-yard stare of a man who knows he made a huge mistake. I imagine that this guy worked his ass off in high school and college, writing, rewriting plays, shorts stories, a novel or maybe a screen play before he summoned up the courage to head out to California and try to sell his life's work.

And where did it get him? Listening to a celebrity whose only talent is fucking an 80-year-old guy without puking on him trying to justify her white-trash life and coherently explain why she's famous. And not only that, but he's got to take that insane jumble and fashion it into something interesting and cohesive. You know that he has hours and hours of Kendra listing out the food she has stocked in her cabinets. The tragedy of this is that the writer looks as if he's in his late 20s or early 30s and he knows that he's going to be resigned to a life like this. Because if he does well, he's got more idiots to interview. If he doesn't do well, then it's back to where he came from and selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.*

* I know that this is a short-handed cliché for nebbish failure, but was there ever really a time when a person sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door? Why vacuum cleaners? I don't get this at all.

On the other hand, the guitar guy doesn't look that unhappy with his choice. He's a bit older, I bet that he's at peace with his life and the choices that he made. Now's the time he can settle into a cushy gig where he writes and performs jingles and not get too stressed out, it sure beats working in a cubicle every day where his only musical release is playing guitar to a bunch of ingrates at the local saloon.

When I was young and more idealistic I remember having a heated conversation with one of my roommates over the Led Zeppelin Cadillac commercial. My take was that Led Zeppelin didn't need the money (and really, who the fuck was I to decide that?) and that they're completely ruining their reputation (what?) by selling-out to Cadillac. My roommate's argument was basically, there's no such thing as artistic integrity in popular music and a song that I hold dear may be just a piece of crap to someone else. Turns out, my roommate was completely and totally right.

To me, this was insanity, real artists NEVER sold out. They just went from one commercially under-appreciated project to the next happy with the fact that while their talents may never garner them much in terms of money, they have our respect. What a load of crap. No one believes that though if they do, it's because they aren't famous and rich yet. At some point in a life, everyone sells out. Whether it's dropping the dream of becoming a famous writer or becoming your generation's guitar god, the bills have to get paid.

"I want people to say I’m a sellout. I sell out every night! As soon as you charge for a ticket, you’re in the game. As soon as you sell your first T-shirt, you’re in the game. And then you’re not just a musician—you’re a performer."

Gene Simmons of KISS said the above quote and while it's pretty disgusting in terms of artistic integrity, he does have a point. As soon as an artist sells something, he's sold out there are powers that he has to answer to. No one can do things independently, but there are roads that are less duplicitous to selling-out than the one good old Gene took.

What intrigues me about the two scenarios I wrote about is that one person looks (and this is the key word, folks) like he sold out a bit too early and the other person looks as if he sold out on time. When is the best time to cash in your chips? Ultimately, that is simply something that you have to figure out for yourself.

Hit Me Orsillo One More Time

2010-04-13T20:46:00.003-04:00

This was originally published on the new Sons of Sam Horn.com site. You can check it out here and get a lot of cool Red Sox news too. It's going to be a great site, you should bookmark it.

Every Red Sox season there seems to be one commercial that runs constantly during the baseball season. After the third out is made; there is a one-in-four chance that you're going to see this ad and even though you can recite the copy by heart, you're going to watch the entire thing.

The good thing is that it changes from season to season.

The most popular ad ran at the beginning of the decade: the infamous Foxwoods commercials*. You remember that one, don't you? “Take a chance, make it happen. Pop the cork ...” The first time you saw it, you sorta liked it. It had a swinging beat that invoked memories of the spring of 1998 when the country was briefly obsessed with swing music. It was inescapable, as the melody got inside your head and rattled around your brain for a few days.

But you loved it.

After about the 100th time, you began to detest every fiber of its being. You hated the first note, you hated the tag “Meet me at Foxwoods! FOX-WOODS!”, you hated that smiling jerk begging you to forfeit your hard earned money on games of chance. Not only did you want Foxwoods to burn to the ground, but you wanted the entire state of Connecticut burnt, its fields salt and its men castrated.

However, by mid-July, something funny happened. Not only did you fall back in love with the ad, but you couldn't face your life without it. That smiling jerk was your new best friend. You were practically hocking your mother's lungs to get a few bucks to blow in Connecticut. You wanted to meet everyone at Foxwoods. FOX-WOODS! A Red Sox game without the Foxwoods ad was like an autumn day without orange leaves.

* John Pizzarelli is the singer of those old Foxwood ads. As you may recall, in the late 90s and early 2000s these commercials were insanely popular. Pizzarelli was not some studio hack or an actor who lip-synced the tune. This guy is a lounge singer without a lot of fame. He took full advantage of this uptick in his popularity and began closing all of his performances with the Foxwoods theme. It was like his “New York, New York” or “Stairway to Heaven”.

I understand where Pizzarelli is coming from. He was an F-list lounge act who made it (relatively) big in New England and New York. But to close your show with a jingle? Even for someone who sings other people's songs, isn't this a bit tacky? Before fronting Pearl Jam, what if Eddie Vedder was a struggling jingle writer who hit with the Oscar Meyner wiener song. Would you want to see him close every Pearl Jam show with that? (Actually, now that I mention it, I would like that.)

ANY WAY, my point isn't to wax nostalgic about John Pizzarelli and Foxwoods, my point was to talk about the new crop of commercials that have been airing on NESN and their unlikely star:Don Orsillo. He has the distinction of being the first person (at least that I can recall) to be in two different ads for two different products that will probably end up being the soundtrack of the 2009 and 2010 summers.

It all began last season when Red Sox announcer Don Orsillo began to pop up every other inning with ancient Boston knuckler Tim Wakefield. The duo were engaged in a spirited one-ups-menship of who could out-Red-Sox the other. Throughout the ad, each guy would buy something from the Red Sox team store that would inevitably prove their Boston allegiance while at the same time shaming the other person for not sharing the same rabid fandom. Hats and shirts were the opening gambit until Orsillo pulled out the big guns and donned (no pun) a Sox jacket.

Admit it, you gasped the first time you saw this commercial. It was an expensive and outlandish piece of Red Sox gear, clearly there was no way that Tim Wakefield could ever hope to outmaneuver our hero.

Ho, ho, ho! But the ever-crafty Wakefield had the trump card, a Sox water bottle which proved that the was the joke was on Orsillo—or “announcer boy” as the triumphant knuckleballer condescendingly called him. The dejected play-by-play man realized that not only was Wakefield the better Sox fan, but the more practical one too.

Lackey and Orsillo

This year's 30-second passion play has our hero chancing upon newly acquired John Lackey (presumably) in the Red Sox' spring training locker room*. It seems that Lackey has found a map of Massachusetts and can't make heads or tails of this crazy state.

* I say presumably because it looks as if Lackey could be in a bus station. But why would Orsillo and Lackey be in a bus terminal? Has Lackey had it with Boston already, did management send D.O. to talk him our of leaving baseball? The fact is, I like it better that they're in a bus terminal, let's have that be our own little addition to the commercial. It gives the men and the ad a bit more depth, sort of lends an “Urban Cowboy” type of gravitas to it.

Orsillo begins explaining the intricacies of the state to Lackey who is growing more and more befuddled as the spot nears its ending. Finally Lackey gives up trying to “get” Massachusetts and Orsillo seems to have thoroughly confused HIMSELF, despite being born, going to college and working in the state for most of his life. Cue the sad trombone.

What strikes me most about these commercials isn't the snappy writing or the witty rapport between athlete and announcer, it's how far Don Orsillo has come since he started in 2001. That was his first year as the lead Sox announcer and it looked as if he was pushing the current play-by-play guy, the well-liked and insanely connected Sean McDonough, out the door. In conspiracy-mad Boston this was because McDonough was “too tough” on the Sox, he and partner Jerry Remy were having a bit too much fun in the broadcast booth and worst of all, McDonough was “calling it like he saw it” without a filter.

It was widely assumed that Orsillo was being brought in to be the anti-McDonough to rein in Remy and be more laudatory towards all things Boston. McDonough was simply a loose cannon, while Orsillo was more of a professional. In other words, he knew who his bosses were.

His big-league career got off to a shaky start as new acquisition Hideo Nomo no-hit the Baltimore Orioles in only the second game of the 2001 season. The last inning was simulcasted nation-wide on ESPN and Orsillo was obviously very nervous. All anyone could talk about the following day was the low-key call on the final out.

“He has no hahht!”
“Orsillo's got no passion, no personality!”
“This guy's a robaht! Typical Sawx.”

Orsillo took a lot of guff from the fans (as the above made-up cliches show) and from some of the media. They may have been a bit angry that McDonough got the shaft. It should be remembered that McDonough was the son of the Godfather of Boston sports reporting, Boston Globe columnist Will McDonough. Also during that time period, McDonough had his own daily radio show that included a revolving panel of Boston writers. He certainly had a legion of supporters.

As one season bled into another, Orsillo began to loosen up more (with the help of Remy) and the worm began to turn a bit. No longer was he referred to as the Orsillo-bot 3000 (ok, maybe me and the guy whose quote I made up were the only ones that called him that) and I think that people began to like the guy more as they grew more familiar with his cadence and the way he called games. And while he leaned on Remy to bring out the chuckles in the early part of his career, it seems that in the last season or two he learned to bring the funny himself.

This was most evident last season when he was paired with 10 different color commentators while Remy took most of the summer due to health problems. There was some good (Dennis Eckersley being the best example) and a lot of bad (Dave Roberts, Frank Viola, Nick Cafardo), but Orsillo was the guy holding the ship together. When paired with Eckersley, the duo had an excellent chemistry that was better than the one Orsillo has with Remy.

All of this leads back to my original question: just how did Don Orsillo go from a guy who was pretty much reviled to a guy that's making the season's most enduring commercials? And how did he go from being the Orsillo-bot 3000 to being “the funny one” in these ads? Watch these ads again, he's the Lou Costello to Tim Wakefield's Bud Abbot, he's the David Cross to John Lackey's Bob Odenkirk. The story lines don't go anywhere without Orsillo.

And as amazing as the Red Sox' recent run of success is, what's even more amazing is that during that same time Don Orsillo has become a comedic tour de force.

We're Becoming a Nation of Morons

2010-03-30T10:56:00.004-04:00

Before I start, the above image is pretty awesome, isn't it? And I really like Barack Obama.

The other day I happened upon a Roger Ebert Tweet* that linked to this article.

* Before I go any further—and I know that I'm completely late to this party—I have to say that Twitter is amazing. I initially resisted signing up because I didn't like keeping my thoughts to a 140 characters and the people that I knew that were using Twitter (Ashton Kutcher being the most famous at the time) made me think that it was a medium for idiots. While I don't tweet much, the pool of people tweeting has gotten much, much deeper and their output is prodigious. It's become a daily occurrence for me to go on and see what my favorite comedians are saying, keeping up with friends and what writers are reporting on—as it happens. The Ebert Tweets are consistently among the best. They're a mixture of politics, humor and well-reasoned thoughts. If you haven't signed up, do so now.

There is a large portion of Republicans (almost 25%) that think that our President, Barack Obama, is the Antichrist. You may remember the Antichrist from such books as the Bible. He, along with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (not the backfield from 1924 Notre Dame football team), that's going to bring about the end of the days by spreading disease and famine and destruction all over the world.

The Bible is a terrific book, but it's full of hypocrisies and stories that may not be exactly true, nor were they really intended to be taken as Gospel (see what I did there? HUMOR!) fact. This is because a lot of the stories in the Bible have been written as allegories or metaphors or stories that were just not meant to be taken literally. Add to that, that the Bible was written thousands of years ago, translated from one dead language to another and then massaged by rulers with God complexes and one can see where this might not be the most factual group of pages ever assembled.

In any event there is a pretty large contingent of people who look at Barack Obama, see that he's trying to give them health care for free and have determined that this action is going to bring about the LITERAL end of the world as described in a book written thousands of years before he was alive.

Who in their right mind actually thinks that anyone is the Antichrist, much less a person like Obama? Is he perfect? Of course not, he's a career politician and those are among the most dirty swine there are. But the Antichrist is supposed to be a person who has caused thousands and thousands of deaths and is pretty much the opposite of JC in all ways and Barack Obama fills this bill?

Remember, there is only one Antichrist in the Bible so Adolph Hitler doesn't fit the suit.* Idi Amin doesn't qualify. Neither do the scores and scores of truly insane, sadistic and detestable leaders since 33 AD. None of them are even being considered for the nomination of Antichrist, yet Barack Obama is the guy? Really? He's not even the craziest leader on the planet. With a stable of nuclear weapons and the biggest Napoleonic complex since Napoleon, Kim Jong Il should get branded as the modern-day Antichrist way before Obama.

* Thirty-eight percent of those polled said Obama is “doing the same things that Hitler did”. THE SAME THINGS THAT HITLER DID. Read that sentence again, I can't even fathom what this means.

Say what you want about our current President, but I don't remember Barack Obama putting millions of people in concentration camps and executing them simply because their day of rest was on Saturday instead of Sunday. And while I've long considered our preivous president to be the Anti-Einstein, I've never gone biblical on his ignorant ass.

Aside from the Antichrist charge, there are a few other interesting nuggets that Americans believe about Obama:

1. He was not born in America! I thought that we laid this issue to rest? The man is American as the Statue of Liberty ... uh oh!

2. He's Muslim! I'm still not sure why this is a huge deal. I mean, I get the implication that being a Muslim equals being a terrorist, but there hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world. A small percentage of one percent are terrorists. That's like saying a Catholic shouldn't be trusted because of any Irish bombings.

3. He's a socialist! Here's the thing, Barack Obama is definitely not a socialist. He just isn't, aside from offering healthcare, I don't know what else he has done to be deemed a socialist. And if by some WWE-style swerve, he does turn out to be a socialist, than the chances are pretty damn good that he's not a Muslim. Most countries that are predominantly Muslim don't really subscribe to the hammer and sickle way of living. So you have to choose one or the other. This line of thinking reminds me of “The Simpsons” episode where action hero Rainier Wolfcastle had to fight Commie-Nazis.

It seems that every day more and more people are getting dumber and more scared, which is never a good combination and it's causing a mishmash of ignorant arguments at increasingly loud volumes. These people are joining the Fox News Kids Klub, AKA the Tea Party movement and are getting louder and louder and louder.

During the last decade or so, being considered intelligent is considered a bad thing. When George W. Bush “won” the presidency many people said that the reason why they voted for him is because they could see themselves having a beer with the guy. Whatever his foibles were, Bush did seem like a pretty nice, albeit completely misguided, person. I think that he would have been an awesome commissioner for Major League Baseball. That being said, he was one of the worst presidents ever. Everything from domestic policy to foreign policy to environmental issues to education has been left in ruins since his two terms in office.

The people I share beers with are good and intelligent people, I do not want any of them to run the country.

And Fox News knows what they're doing. They're masters at whipping the gullible into a lather and are pretty much behind the organization. From Wikipedia (as trust-worthy as the Bible):

“On February 11 ( 2009) talk radio host and Fox Business Network personality Dave Ramsey appeared on Fox and Friends, waving tea bags and saying "It's time for a Tea Party." He was on the show criticizing newly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, who that morning had outlined his plan to use the $300 billion or so dollars remaining in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. He intended to use $50 billion for foreclosure mitigation and use the rest to help fund private investors to buy toxic assets from banks.”

This resonated with conservatives and Fox began playing it up at every possible opportunity. From Sean Hannity to Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh (who's not on Fox, but is a conservative) these people have jumped on the Tea Party bandwagon and are driving it at breakneck speed. The news organization that compared anti-war protestors in Bush administration to traitorous terrorists are telling their viewers to essentially destroy the fabric of America.

In the last few months Tea Partyers have disrupted sessions of Congress, have shouted racial and anti-gay slurs at elected officials, turned last summer's healthcare town meetings into shouting matches. For a group of people who consider themselves “patriots” Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Sarah Palin are ripping this country apart and they know it. They all have that same smug look of satisfaction when they come back from a Tea Party clip where some person is just screaming nonsense and Fox talking points.

For all of their caterwauling about the influences of the “liberal media”, the conservative media has much more influence and always has and they love it. They are the ones that further the mistruths against Obama by providing incredibly vague headlines (“Is Obama a Muslim? We aren't saying if he is or he isn't!”) and distorted facts (“Death panels! Your grandmother is going to die!”) knowing that most people want a soundbite and not read the entire story. What is most infuriating is they love to play the role of the underdog, despite the fact that these conservative icons have more money than most of the world. And yet they still get the poor to go along with their plans that will only improve their lives. It's a very ingenious plan that these swine have put over on the American public.

And that's what sucks the most. America is being torn asunder by a not-so-clandestine group of people who want to save a few sheckles on their tax returns. They have no compassion for the working man, but pretend to sound like they do. They're just using them and once their plan works so that regulations on every industry is rolled back, healthcare is something only the rich can afford and a free society is only afforded to the wealthy, then the American people will realize that they've been bamboozled.

Only then it will be too late. I love my country, but the American people are being used like a two-dollar whore by the rich. The poor have an enemy, but it's not liberals. It's the rich and the sooner they realize that, the better off this country will be.

New Look!

2010-03-18T11:34:00.001-04:00

Didn't expect to do this, but I hope that everyone enjoys the new look of 19 Thoughts.

It's been about five years, and even someone as adverse to change such as me needs to spice things up now and then.

Hope you enjoy it and the search functions, lay out and the black text on white background is easier to read.

BTW, one of the cool new features is that I can now link other Blogs. So, if you like reading me, chances are I'm going to like reading you too. Drop a line and let's be Blog Buddies.

Ugh, that didn't sound so lame when I originally thought it.

Larry King Part III or Tucson! Hello!

2010-03-11T11:23:00.002-05:00

From time to time Larry King drops by 19 Thoughts and regales the readers with his some of his thoughts, like he would do back in the day when he wrote for USA Today. Not sure why he chose an anonymous Blog like mine to itch his writin' scratch, but I'm very happy to run his odds and ends.

Oranges are the most disappointing fruit ... The sun shines in Florida, but Vero Beach is completely empty ... I ran into Marty Scorsese the other day and he let me in on a secret: his next picture is going to be about the underworld ... Lots of self-help books on the shelves these days. What did we do before them? ... When I was a lad I was glad to be poor. I thought that you could catch polio by playing polo ... If all sewer workers were as nice as Art Carney, I'd be in hip-high boots right now ... The Saints are Super Bowl Champions, I remember when New Orleans was completely flooded. What a world! ... The other day I spotted a man with a belt and suspenders, he's the person you want when driving cross country ... They called him Henny Youngman because he liked to dress in woman's clothes. Otherwise he'd be Rooster Youngman ... Avatar this and Avatar that ... The internet is a fascinating place, every where you go there's an argument. It reminds me of my third wife ... The President smokes and wants free health care? Methinks that the presidency has a terrible HMO ... Go to the dictionary and look up the definition of up-and-comer, you'll find a picture of Drew Barrymore ... Why send a pool boy to do the work of a pool man? ... You can cram it, Jerry Seinfeld ... In my day the home calculator was the size of a bus. Now you can carry them in your pocket ... Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but his gall bladder is at Cedar Sinai ... Just kidding Tony, you know I love ya ... New-born babies are great paper weights ... Raquel Welch could really fill out a loin cloth ... I'm still trying to figure out how to hook up my son's Atari video game ... A piece of driving advice: keep moving forward no matter what ... Bob Hope once owned a piece of the Cleveland Indians. What team would he buy now? ... Mirrors are reverse windows on the soul ... I'm glad that trees don't cry because I love my morning newspaper ... Know what I like best about waffles? The squares ... I wouldn't mind being a cow, you get to stand ankle-deep in your dinner every day ... The color blue is suspicious ... There really isn't anything on Earth like a hamburger made the way you like it ... Scotch tape seems sort of racist to me ... I hope that ghosts are real ... Keep a compass with you at all times. One day you'll thank me ... I know which part is the string, but I can't tell which part is the first yo and which part is the second yo ... Radio, telephones, television, movies, the Internet. I've conquered them all. Up next are holograms ... We really could do without eyebrows or so says Michael Dukakis ... Have you ever heard “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” performed live in your own living room? Tremendous, I highly recommend giving Cher a call ... Baseball is right around the corner, watch out for those pesky Florida Marlins ... Asparagus. What's the point? ... No glass containers for me, I get my pickles from a wooden barrel ... A day without a watercress sandwich is like Fidel Castro without a beard ... Five minutes of Dr. Phil and I've had my fill ... The love of candy is the great equalizer ... Talk to you soon, folks!

Thanks again, Larry.

Death From Above or the Ultimate Spoiler Warning

2010-03-09T11:25:00.003-05:00

Warning: this is an extremely long entry.

Today I happened upon an interesting article that put to rest the debate on how dinosaurs were wiped out. Some scientists have theorized about a gigantic volcano in India that released a mega-explosion that essentially turned the world into one gigantic lava pit. Biblical scholars theorize that the dinosaurs missed Noah's last call and were all drowned. Gary Larson thinks that smoking was the cause of the downfall.

Turns out all of these ideas were wrong. According to a 20-year study, a nine-mile wide asteroid slammed into Chicxulub Mexico traveling at a speed of 20 times that of a speeding bullet and hitting the Earth with force that is akin to one billion (with a B) atomic bombs.

The dinosaurs that weren't impacted by the impact were soon dead because of the drastic climate change. Basically the entire planet went Hoth in a matter of days because of the debris that kicked up pretty much blotted out the sun. And since dinosaurs were mostly warm-blooded, they died pretty quickly*.

* The week before my brother left for college he took all of the money that he made working during the summer and told my mother that he was buying a bunch of stuff for college—all of which she vetoed. One of the things on the list was a snake, for some reason he wanted to be “that guy” on your freshman year floor who had a snake. My brother went crazy saying that it was HIS money and he was going to do what HE wanted with it and there was nothing that she could do to stop him.

ANYWAY, he went out and spent a couple hundred bucks on the snake and the heat rock and the tank and brought home the snake. My parents put both of their feet down and told him that he can bring the snake with him to college, but there was no way in hell that it was living under their roof. And since my brother made such a big deal about it being HIS money, he couldn't argue with their logic about THEIR roof and he kept it at his friend's house.

His friend was a moron and felt that since it was August in Massachusetts the snake would be perfectly fine if the tank was near an open window. The snake was dead by morning and my brother was left with a heated rock and an empty tank.

What does this dinosaur story have to do with anything? I'm glad you asked. What if an asteroid was bearing down on us at this very minute and we didn't have a handful of brave Texas oil riggers to blow it up? Would you really want to know that you and everyone that you knew and cared about was about to be wiped off the face of the Earth in a very, very painful way?

And I'm not talking about snarky radio station programming directors playing Def Leppard's “Armageddon It” on a continuous loop.

I'm talking about the intense and insane amount of fear that your life was about to end. And this wouldn't be a plane-crash realization that you were among a small-group of people that were going to die, this is a world-wide cataclysm. I can't think of anything that would effect 100% of the world's population and observing what would happen would be extremely—is interesting the right word choice here? because that's the word I'm going to use—interesting.

The first thing that I would assume that would happen is that there would be no looting, because what's the point? An asteroid is six hours away from blowing the planet to smithereens and you're busy trying to hook up a 60inch flat screen that you swiped from Best Buy? There's going to be nothing on TV and you want your last flickering memory to be a Judge Judy rerun? I don't think so.

Secondly, you'd have to assume that all churches, synagogues and mosques would be jam-packed. Even the atheist and agnostic sets would be heading for the houses of worship—though I bet that there would be one or two who would spend their last moments arguing, “If there was a God, why is He hurling a gigantic boulder at us? Doesn't He love us? How could something who supposedly love us want to wipe us all out.” At that point, you'd be begging for the asteroid to speed up.

While in your house of God, the priest or rabbi or cleric or shaman would probably start trying to calm everyone down, but wouldn't be able to resist getting a few barbs in—especially if the guy is Catholic or Jewish. “Oh, I see that some of you finally remembered where the church is located. Seems pretty convenient that you remembered this once a big rock was hurtling towards the Earth. I'm sure that these last few moments will save your eternal soul.” He'd also probably wish that he had the foresight to bust out the collection plate. At this point, you'd also be begging for the asteroid to speed up.

There would also be a segment of the general population that just won't give a fuck, no matter what happens. These are the people who will be laying in their pools or sitting on a beach chair on their front lawn or roof with a beer in one hand, goading the asteroid into hitting them. “Come on, you stupid space rock, hit me! I dare you to do it, you chicken shit lunar pebble. You're nothing!” After a few hours of screaming at the sky, these are the folks that will be crying the most.

So if you aren't screaming at the sky or going to some sort of church, what would you do? I'd wager that there would be all sorts of arguments amongst the married: “Why do we have to spend the rest of our lives with YOUR family?”

“What do you mean? What's wrong with MY family and why do you think that we'd spend our last hours with YOUR family? Maybe your mother can get one last dig at me.”

Seems like a lot of fun.

Of course as the asteroid is getting closer and closer and people are fearing their impending dooms, a world-wide soul cleansing like no one has ever seen will take place. Remember the scene in “Almost Famous” when the band Stillwater thought that their airplane was going to crash and they just shouted out the worst things that they ever did or thought? It'd be just like that, except on a much, much, much larger scale.

“I' had sex with your brother!”
“Those jeans DO make you look fat!”
“I've always wished that you had a bigger penis!”
“I never understood the plot to 'Synecdoche, New York', I didn't want you to think that I was stupid!”

So not only are you about to die, but you're going to die knowing what everyone really thought about you. Again, at this point you're on your knees begging for that asteroid to speed up.*

* What if the asteroid misses Earth and everyone is saved? Like Stillwater, wouldn't your life be one long, awkward moment after these revelations? There would probably be a ton of newly single people after this near-disaster. “I have a small penis? Well me and my small dick are leaving your gigantic ass!”

All of these reactions are happening on the micro-scale, what about the macro-scale? What if you were stuck at work when the asteroid was falling, you'd have to assume that you'd leave your cubicle and find your family, right? But you know that there would be one jerk boss who would tell you to go back to your desk and finish your project or insist that you punch out.

Every once in awhile you run into someone with a story about their boss that would not admit that 9/11/01 was a different day. People are huddled around computers, radios and TVs while he's screaming at you to get back to work. Its really a very sad defense mechanism and I'm sure that the same type of people would be screaming at their employees to return to their jobs.

Would people who need to be at their jobs stay there? Women would still be in the middle of giving birth or someone might be in the midst of a heart transplant or cancer surgery, would the doctors and nurses stick around or just leave without question. Would cops and firefighters stay at their posts in the case that they're needed?

Twitter, Facebook and any social interactive site would be a complete mess, with people spilling their guts about everything they've ever done and telling everyone how much they love them. Although there would probably be a few of your Facebook friends who would try to get the very last Facebook post before everyone went away.

For some reason, I think that I would be fascinated with what famous people would Tweet. I think that you would finally get to see what celebrities are like when all of the crap is taken away. I'm not sure why that matters to me or what that says about me, but it would be a silver lining in the dark cloud of destruction.

The point of this Blog entry isn't to detail what I think would happen during the end of days, it's centered more around the question: would you rather have the brain capacity that you have right now or would you rather have the walnut-sized brain of a dinosaur and not know that the universe was hitting the reset button?*

* This is probably going to be a long aside, so you can skip over it if you want, but I was thinking about it today and I felt like I had to write it down. Again, if you don't read this self-indulgent part—no offense will be taken, we're still good buddies. When I was in junior high school there were two things that I loved: arcades and baseball. Since I lived near Salisbury (MA) and Hampton (NH) beach there were about a half-dozen arcades within five miles of my house, each had scores of video games. One vacation, my family and I went to visit my cousin in Mt. Vernon, New York and we went to an arcade where I came face-to-face with RBI Baseball.

This game was my 12-year-old fantasy: you could play any of the 26 Major League Baseball teams and instead of random names, they had the actual all-time stars on each team. For example, the Red Sox had Ted Williams in left, Jim Rice DH-ing, Wade Boggs at third, Carlton Fisk catching and Jimmie Foxx manning first base. It was awesome. The only problem was this was literally the only place that I could find this arcade game. They didn't have it any of my home arcades (and I looked high and low).

Aside from liking the stand-up arcade games, I also had the eight-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. It was the one that came with Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt and R.O.B. (the Robotic Operated Buddy – and really what the hell good was that thing anyway?). I found out that RBI Baseball was being released as a cartridge and I begged my parents to drive me to Toys R Us and let me spend my Christmas money on it. They did and I remember staring at the box for the entire half-hour it took us to drive home from the Fox Run Mall.

I got home and it was pretty awesome, it wasn't the arcade version (there were 10 teams, eight of which were the 1986 and 1987 division winners and two All-Star teams) but it was awesome none-the-less. For over a year, I played that game every single day and became quite good at it. I got so good that when I would screw up, I'd hit the reset button and start the game over again. I'm not sure why I did that, I probably did so because I was such a geek that I was writing down the stats or something in a notebook, but that's not the point of the story.

One day, I was in a zone. I can't remember the exact day, but I do remember that it was late autumn because I was sitting to the side of my bedroom window and can recall how the light came in. The light shined in my room a certain way in the fall. Anyway, I was the Red Sox and I was cruising past the American League All-Star team. Not only that, but I noticed that I was throwing a perfect game which was at the top of my accomplishments (so sad).

Twenty-six up and twenty-six down, all I had to do was face the AL pitcher Brett Saberhagen (an easy out if there ever was one) and I'd be the master of RBI Baseball (in my own mind). Roger Clemens was mowing people down and I hummed a fastball to former Royals pitcher Brett Saberhagen which he promptly deposited in the right field seats. In all of my games of RBI Baseball, I have never seen a pitcher leave the infield, much less go yard, but there it was: good bye perfect game, good bye no-hitter, good by shut out.

I got the next batter out rather easily, but the game was never the same. An 8-bit video game handed me my first true, punch-in-the-gut, are-you-freaking-kidding-me, monumental disappointment. As pathetic as that sounds, I was really obsessed about this game like nothing before or since.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, would you rather know about your impending doom or would you rather just have it smack you upside the face without any warning? Because I can pretty much guarantee that the dinosaurs weren't completely freaking out when that nine-mile wide asteroid hit. They weren't in some prehistoric church or trying to tweet on their iPhones (stupid lack of thumbs). Most dinosaurs woke up that fateful day, chomped on some leaves or ripped a smaller dinosaur apart, walked around and only paused to look up when the rock was about to hit their rock.

Then it was over.

That's probably the way that I'd like it too. Like I've blogged before, for me, the waiting is the hardest part. I would probably go insane wondering when our time was up and the anticipation would be horrible. I'd probably die a thousand deaths, each more excruciating than the final one--which would probably happen so quickly that we wouldn't even feel it.

I suppose that sometimes ignorance IS bliss.

26. The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

2010-03-05T15:01:00.002-05:00

The adultification (I made that word up, BTW) of cartoons did not being in 1989 with “The Simpsons”. It began in 30 years earlier with a show called “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” that revolved around the misadventures of a flying squirrel (Rocky) and his slow-witted, yet very zen, moose friend named Bullwinkle. Created by Jay Ward, this show was not just years ahead of its time—it was generations ahead. Without this show, not only is there no Simpsons but one could argue that there is no show that have any sort of subtle comedy hidden behind overly zany plots.*

* Two things: 1. do not get this show confused with the live-action Robert DeNiro flick based on these characters. This show is brilliant, that movie couldn't have sucked more. 2. During this Blog, the chances are very high that I am going to refer to Jay Ward as Jay North. As you may recall, Jay North is the kid who played “Dennis the Menace” in the old black-and-white, live-action TV show that was on Nickelodeon reruns ad nauseum during the 1980s. I apologize in advance to Mr. Ward and Mr. North if either are still alive and read Blogs.

The interesting thing is that the way the show was originally broadcast is pretty different from how future generations saw it. From the bastion of truth, Wikipedia:

“When first shown on NBC, the cartoons were introduced by a Bullwinkle puppet, voiced by Bill Scott, who would often lampoon celebrities, current events, and especially Walt Disney, whose program Disneyland was the next show on the schedule. On one occasion, "Bullwinkle" encouraged children to pull the tuning knobs off the TV set. "In that way," explained Bullwinkle, "we'll be sure to be with you next week!" After the network received complaints from parents of an estimated 20,000 child viewers who apparently followed Bullwinkle's suggestion, Bullwinkle told the children the following week to put the knobs back on with glue "and make it stick!" The puppet sequence was dropped altogether”

None of this stuff was ever shown in the hacked-up syndication version—it was just the cartoons. And that was ok. While the puppet sounds really funny (especially the riffs on Disney) not seeing it didn't take anything away from the show. I suppose that “Rocky and Bullwinkle” was anti-authoritarian enough without the puppet and his anti-Disney rhetoric.

While the overt displeasure of Disney was missing, the subvert anti-Disney stabs was certainly present in the animation. Unlike the Mickey Mouse style of fluid, elegant lines with expressive face, Rocky and Bullwinkle were drawn with more of a rough-around-the-edges style. It was as if the show wasn't interested in making high art like Disney. The style certainly had a sort of simplistic beautiful quality, but I think that Ward was more interested in telling a better story and crafting a better joke. Essentially the cartoon medium was a conduit for Ward's words that was not possible with live-action actors.

And it worked.

No matter if it was the Rocky and Bullwinkle shorts that were the centerpiece of the show or myriad other shows that surrounded it, Ward was spot on with his voice and humor. Among the other vignettes that hit the mark were “Peabody's Improbable History” which centered on a time traveling dog, Mr. Peabody and his boy, Sherman. Each week they'd travel back to a historical event and find out that things didn't happen quite like the history books said they did.

“Fractured Fairy Tales” took centuries old stories that we've all head one hundred times and set them on its ears. These cartoons were exquisitely narrated by the Seussian named Edward Everett Horton and his voice added a lot of gravitas to the shorts. “Aesop and Son” was a lot like “Fractured Fairy Tales” but these episodes revolved around the cartoon version of the ancient Greek story teller and his wise-ass son. “Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties” was another cartoon short that ran with Bullwinkle and it was about a dim-witted Mountie who foils his nemesis Snidely Whiplash. This wasn't something that I was a big fan of but the premise was to satire the old serials where the handsome hero sometimes needed help.

Aside from the titular characters, the shorts were rotated so that while the format was known, nothing ever really got stale.

Like a lot of shows on this list, the thing that I admired most about “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” is that Jay Ward never treated his audience like a collection of idiots. He was the first person to use the televised cartoon as satire, as the two characters cleverly joked about politics, sports and pop culture. While the Red Menace was at it's height, R&B's main bad guys were the bumbling Bolsheviks Boris and Natasha.

Even now, the direct (and indirect) influence of Jay Ward can be felt in a lot of television, both animated and live-action. Simpsons creator Matt Groening has gone on record saying that the initial J in the names Homer J. Simpson and Bartholomew J. Simpson are a tribute to Ward. And since “The Simpsons” have spawned off a legion of satirical, sarcastic shows during its 20 year run, the grandfather of them all is Mr. Jay Ward and his moose and squirrel.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm or I Just Want to be Popular Again

2010-02-23T14:22:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the really hack-y title, but the other day I was thinking about C+C Music Factory—I apologize for letting you know about that too—and I was wondering where they all scattered. If you're not aware of “The Factory”, they were a group that had a bit of success in the early 1990s with dance hits like the aforementioned title of this Blog entry (the first part), “Make You Sweat” and there was another song whose title I can't remember, but the video was set in a factory where everyone danced and sweated.

Actually wondering is a bit of an exaggeration. I had a few brief thoughts about them and how at one point in my life this faceless band was as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola and then one day they were gone. And I never really gave them much thought after that. It got me thinking about the fickleness of popularity and how you can be at the top of your game, like C+C Music Factory and the next day you could be erased from the memories of the American public.

C+C Music Factory were about as big as any producer-driven, dance band could get. I'm pretty sure that their album was in the top ten (it peaked at number two, according to Wikipedia) and they had a bunch of singles that made it to the Top 10. Then the group got into a little bit of a problem when it turned out that the female lead singer (the model known as Zelma Davis) was lip-syncing the group's hooks. Turns out the real singer was someone by the name of Martha Wash who once sang Homer Simpson's favorite song (“It's Raining Men”) as a part of the duo the Weather Girls.

C+C (which stood for the first letters in producer's last names David Cole and Robert Cilvilles) decided that Wash didn't fit the right image of the Factory, so they hired this model to do the lip-syncing and everyone was pretty happy. Until Wash got pissed when she realized that the reason why she wasn't asked to be out front is because she was, well, uh, fat and Davis was not. In the wake of the Milli-Vanilli scandal, this was a big deal so they went to great lengths to let everyone know that while Wash sang the hooks, Davis visualized the vocals. This was even explained in the lower left-hand corner of the video when “Make You Sweat” aired on MTV.

The point of this entry was to lionize C+C Music Factory, it was to talk a bit about popularity. When C+C were at their apex, front man Freedom Williams* was on a lot of different shows sometimes by himself and sometimes with the group. He was on the Arsenio Hall Show, all over MTV, different awards shows and popped up on network TV shows. When on MTV, a lot of times he wasn't even on to discuss his music or dancing, it was to talk about other things.

* Not sure why he chose Freedom as his stage name, there was nothing overly patriotic or pro-American about the man. I don't think that he was from Philadelphia either. About the only thing that he seemed to want freedom from were his shirts, the guy was always walking around half naked. He was like a rapping Incredible Hulk.

MTV had a long-running “news” show called “Sex in the 90s” where they would interview kids, experts and celebrities about sex. Most of the times, the kids would say something generic (“All kids have sex in my school”) that would shock local parents. The experts were the reason why this was a “news program” and they would rattle off statistics or say something about AIDS and using a condom. These words, juxtaposed with what the youth of America said, would also shock parents even more.

But the celebrity part was usually the comedic element. Most celebrities would try to say something amusing (“There's nothing better than a bit of bump and grind, if you know what I mean!”) although there were a few “sage” celebrities that would try to give advice to the kids (“Always wear a condom!”) that was usually pretty obvious, but they tried to impart this wisdom with great gravity. A guy like Steven Tyler was the latter type of celebrity, while Freedom Williams was the former.

And that's what popularity gets you: people hanging on your every word. It allows you to go on television and talk about things that you don't have more knowledge about than the average person, but seem like an authority. Aside from knowing that he (presumably) enjoys sex, what does Freedom Williams know about the subject that most people didn't know when this show first aired? Probably nothing, but since he was semi-famous, somewhat popular and I assume had some free time in his schedule, MTV shoehorned him into their shooting schedule. And whatever he said (whether it made sense or not) made the final cut and was broadcast world-wide scores and scores of times.*

* I'm not even sure if Freedom Williams was on “Sex in the 90s”, I assume that he was but that isn't the point. The point is someone LIKE Freedom Williams (maybe one of the dudes from Trixter or Toni!Tony! Tone!) held people's attention because of their views on sex(or any other subject, really) when they didn't have any credentials other than their name. They're just regular people who know the same things that most Americans know. They just happen to dance better or play the drums more proficiently.

I think that's the most intoxicating thing about popularity. People genuinely care about what you have to say, even if you have nothing new to add to the conversation. While the money and the excesses are nice, the majority of people simply want a voice. They want to be heard and they want their opinion to matter. Even the most introspective, shy and withdrawn person wants to be validated. To be recognized above the din. And being popular gives you that voice and you can say whatever you want and be taken seriously.

Because their opinions matter when they're famous, most celebrities whose 15 minutes are up will do just about anything that they can to get back into the American consciousness. Even if it means completely degrading themselves by appearing on a celebrity reality show that are nothing more than glorified, televised car crashes. Aside from Ozzy Osborne, I can't think of one celebrity who has gone on a reality show and come out of the experience with more credibility or popularity than when they went in. And the reason why Osborne was able to make this transformation is because he (or, more accurately, his wife Sharon) created the template.

For many celebrities, they looked at Ozzy Osborne and thought that he was playing a role on his show. What they didn't realize is that the stage version, the public version of Ozzy Osborne was more of a character than the private Ozzy. The other celebrities saw what the show did for Ozzy's Q-ratings and attempted to do the same thing*. As a result each reality show became more and more scripted than a typical sitcom. This meant that each celebrity tried to play themselves as if it was a role which leads to the multiple personalities of the pubic celebrity, the “private” reality celebrity and the true private celebrity. And most viewers can see right through the charade of the first two personalities and are usually never privy to the third.

* Once it reached the level of its mondo-popularity, “The Osbornes” fell into the same trap too. What was so interesting about the first season of the show is that aside from Ozzy no one else in the family was famous nor did they seem to want any sort of fame. But once more and more accolades started rolling in, the family began to realize that the cameras were around and they began to put on their act. Eventually, the show was canceled and the family (minus Ozzy) has been chasing the dragon ever since. And yes, I know how wrong it is to use a heroin reference in regards to a family where most have spent a significant amount of time in rehab.

The strange thing about wanting to get back to being popular is that those who have fallen from the mountain, don't use the tools that got them back to the top. When an actor or a musician achieves popularity it's normally because they do something completely different or put a new spin on an old idea. When they fall from grace they start grasping at straws and try to jump on the latest trend, which is usually fading away.

Perhaps I'm giving celebrities way too much credit, maybe most of these celebrities only had one really good idea or just enough talent to matter for a brief period in time—there are literally millions of Americans who don't even get that far. And that's probably the crux of the issue, sustaining popularity, the never-ending process of trying to stay fresh and relevant never ends. And once it does, the real problem isn't spending their days in relative obscurity, it's that washed-up celebrities have been to the mountain top and they will continue to try and get there.

And after they've been spit out of Hollywood and there isn't anyone around to take their calls, most of these celebrities returned from where they came. Every few months a car dealership will give them a call asking for them to sit at a card table and sign autographs or VH1 will send an email letting them know that they're doing a retrospective on the 80s and they need them to reminisce. And these people are happy—damn near overjoyed—to do so. Why? Because even if they are sitting at a card table in a brand new McDonalds in Backwater, North Dakota someone less famous than them is going to stand in front of them rapt in awe as the celebrity tells a story. They'll get a taste of that wonderful popularity back on their lips and though ultimately it will be fleeting, it will taste oh so good.

And no matter what you choose to call yourself, that's not freedom.

Two Guys Talking Tiger

2010-02-18T13:23:00.005-05:00

Back in October I posted a piece called “Two Guys Email Review of 'Inglorious Basterds' “ with my friend Jamie. Today my friend Nick emailed me asking my thoughts on tomorrow's press conference where Tiger Woods addresses the media about his adultery for the first time.*

* I was getting a bite to eat earlier today and as I was driving to Burger King, I happened to hear the SportsHub's (Boston's new-ish sports radio station) mid-day anchor Gary Tanguay say that tomorrow's press conference is going to be as big as the moon landing. He went on to say that kids (yes, literal children) are going to huddled around the television set or “their iPhones” (direct quote) watching this press conference. Really? Are you fucking kidding me? Tiger Woods gets caught having sex—consensual, straight sex with an adult woman—and is going to apologize for it and this is bigger than MAN LANDING ON THE FUCKING MOON?

And he was absolutely, 100% , no-I-am-not-being-ironic, serious.

This is how Nick and I see it. And yes, I already wrote about this once before.

From: Nick
To: Byron
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

So you interested to hear Tiger tomorrow?

From: Byron
To: Nick
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

No.

I have a feeling that I already know what he's going to say. It's not going to be from the heart or honest, it's something that his PR team is meticulously going over right now making sure that there isn't even a
chance that someone can misconstrue what he's saying. Like everything else about Tiger (except the recent troubles) it's going to be airtight.

I would be shocked if he took questions.

From: Nick
To: Byron
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

I am interested. But I think it will be a joke.

From: Byron
To: Nick
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

Do you think that he's going to say anything of any substance?

And BTW, that last email wasn't an indictment against Tiger. I think that most athletes and celebrities don't say anything that hasn't be scrubbed over dozens and dozens of times by professionals. I think that's why when a famous person does say something that doesn't sound scripted we're all legitimately surprised.

Remember when Tom Cruise jumped up on Oprah's couch and told her how he loved Katie Holmes so much? It wasn't that it was a very strange action by a 40-year-old man who has been married twice before, but it was all so obviously choreographed. I mean, I can pretty much remember the exact moment where I figured out that I loved Aly and had a natural outburst of joy. It wasn't something that I could replicate ever again, it was an epiphany.

I doubt that Cruise was sitting on the couch with Oprah, in front of millions of people and just then realized that he was in love with Katie Holmes. It's all fake and these people think that we're morons and will buy anything (which is true for amount of the population) but it's all so insulting to everyone involved.

Tiger knows that he's full of crap, the reporters know that he's full of crap and we know that he's full of crap. But we all just play along and on Sunday's SportsReporters (among other shows) people are going to parse each and every word like he's speaking from the heart. It's a complete sham.

From: Nick
To: Byron
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

I agree. I would like to think of I was ever famous I would just speak my mind and be honest. Be real.

Sadly I still will cheer for Tiger when he plays. Guess that's not a good thing.

From: Byron
To: Nick
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

You wouldn't be able to. The problem with athletes, celebrities, etc is that they're essentially small companies. You know how Coca-Cola doesn't really publicly comment on stuff that doesn't concern them, famous people follow that line too. And like Coke, celebrities have to worry about the public not "buying" what they're selling--which is themselves.

If you give people enough reasons not to see you in a movie, buy your music, etc eventually they're going to take it. And obviously that lessens your net worth and suddenly you tooling around in a Honda and hoping to get picked for Celebrity Apprentice.

It's best to try and be all things to all people and not worry about the small percentage of the population who don't like you because you aren't "real". The strange thing is that works against you in subgenres of music and entertainment like hip-hop, rock, independent movies, etc. but that's a different topic for a different day.

Why isn't it a good thing to cheer for Tiger when he's on the golf course? Just because he cheated on his wife? How does that effect his game or your joy of watching it? To me, the only thing that his cheating has interfered with is if someone was a huge fan of celebrity marriages. On Thanksgiving I didn't care about Tiger's marriage and I don't care now. I just want to see him crush a golf ball.

BTW, I'm really interested in hearing your opinion because I don't care about this story at all and feel like I'm missing something.

From: Nick
To: Byron
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

Good point. I think once you become famous you give up your freedom to speak your mind. Especially if it could effect your bottom line. I think your better off just flying under radar.

I'm interested in the story probably because it is such a train wreck. I NEVER believe celebrities are perfect. They live in a world we will never understand. And I think in the majority of the cases they are not faithful and their "marriage" is not real. So the fact that Tiger cheated doesn't surprise or disappoint. I think my interest stems from the fact that it's SO out of control.

That being said. I will continue to cheer for him as a golfer because he is one of the best ever. His off the course antics doesn't bother me.

From: Byron
To: Nick
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

I was interested because I know that you were such a big fan of the 90s Cowboys and they were such a debauched group of individuals, I wanted to hear how you balanced the two.

And you're right, it is so out-of-control, which is really the main story here. Tiger Woods fires people because they breathe too loud in front of the press. Any chink in his armor is immediately covered up and brushed aside. He has 95% of the sports media in his hip pocket and most of the fans*.

* Do you know anyone who hates Tiger Woods? I mean, really hates Tiger Woods. Unless they're just being a contrarian or a jerk, most sports fans love Tiger Woods, which in itself is strange because we're so programmed to root for the underdog. And Tiger Woods is in our face constantly, you'd think that before this there would be a backlash, but there wasn't. Everyone loves the guy.

Where was I? Oh yeah, this is the first time that he's lost control or people have been able to peek behind the curtain and see that Tiger really isn't as bright and calculating as we originally thought. He's an idiot around women, just like we are. In a weird way, I wouldn't be surprised if this situation humanized him a bit more.

From: Nick
To: Byron
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

I think I was a lot younger and kinda caught up in loving the Cowboys. But I have always avoided calling ballplayers role models or putting them on some pedestals. I would say the majority are screwing around etc.

From: Byron
To: Nick
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

I agree with that assessment.

Why do you think that it matters to people whether or not an athlete screws around? Isn't it immaterial to his performance on the court? Why do athletes and actors have to be model citizens as well as excellent at their crafts?

From: Nick
To: Byron
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

I think because people feel like they know these people on a personal level. So they act as if they have some type of bond or something in common. So when they go out and act in a way they can't relate to they feel like they were betrayed.

From: Byron
To: Nick
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

I can buy that. Good observation.

And that's really the crux of the issue isn't: people feel betrayed because they think that they know these people, when in actuality they have no idea who they are what makes them tick. We see a dude like Dustin Pedroia for three hours a night 175+ nights a year and we think that we know how he is or in the very least we think that we know what he's like.

I can guarantee you that what we are "so sure" of what we know about Dustin Pedroia or whomever isn't reality at all. And when we find out about our reality, we're pretty bitter and distraught about it and that manifests into knocking a celebrity down a peg. I keep going back to it being strange that we are so fascinated by the private lives of public strangers.

BTW, I was thinking of using our exchange on my Blog. You ok with that?

From: Nick
To: Byron
Subject: Tiger's Press Conference Tomorrow?

Sure. Use away!

You and I should be given a radio talk show. We would rock.

Meditations on a Life Spent Slacking

2010-02-02T14:21:00.003-05:00

From college until pretty much the time that I got married, I was a slacker. Most of my friends were slackers and most of the pop-culture that I absorbed was from a slacker-based perspective*. I don't think that it was entirely wrong to laze about for a good portion of a decade and a half, because that was essentially who I was. But, I'm not sure it was the absolute best choice that I could have made at the time either. I think that the time period that I slacked through life was the perfect era to be a slacker because it was a bit more culturally tolerated.

* I still am very keen on slacker-based pop culture, which is basically stuff from the mid-90s. For some reason, no other decade really tolerated and celebrated the slacker lifestyle as much as the 90s did. The one thing that I understand is the inherent hypocrisy that permeates from this cultural oeuvre. I intend to get more into this as this Blog rolls along.

Another trait that I have is that I am a chronic second-guesser and overly nostalgic*, so it was really no surprise today that I was thinking back on my slacking days with a degree of warmth and also one of wasted opportunity. This stirring of nostalgia was stirred up primarily because I've been rereading Chuck Klosterman's “Fargo Rock City” which is the perfect combination of who I was when he wrote it (20-something, living on my own) and what he wrote about (a kid who liked metal back in the day).

* First off, every other paragraph in this entry is not going to be referenced and explained by a footnote, but I felt like I had to expand a bit on this statement. When I say that I'm overly nostalgic, I don't mean that I wish that I was not living the life I am presently leading. Far from the truth, considering that I can remember romanticizing about the past during the periods that I am currently romanticizing about.

For example, in high school I would fondly remember the feeling of being sheltered in elementary school, especially when a test or major project was due. Not that I wanted to go back there, but there was a certain feeling of warmth and naivety that I didn't (nor could I ) have while I was a teenager. When I was in college, there were times when I waxed about being in high school. And when I got out of college, I thought that it would be awesome to relive those “carefree” days.

Every time I move on to a new place in life, I look back fondly on the one that just took place. And I am completely aware that what I'm doing is complete bullshit, but it's still something that I do. From the time you're born to the day you die, every person is saddled with problems. Looking back on those problems, they don't seem so bad especially when compared to the problems that you have today. But they were still problems that stressed you out.

ANYWAY, when I think back to the early part of the 90s there was a movement in the culture that needed to be rectified. The 80s excesses—symbolized by Michael Douglas' “Greed is good” phrase from the Oliver Stone movie “Wall Street”—had bled into a new decade. However, all was not right with the country and this line wasn't really holding up any more. There was the Persian Gulf War I, the AIDS epidemic and a recession, suddenly watching metal bands and hip-hop acts live the glamor lifestyle seemed sort of stupid, pointless and most of all it pissed people off. No one had the money to buy Dom Perignon, audacious genie pants and have random sex with models. The pendulum was beginning to swing the other way.

That's when musicians grabbed a t-shirt and flannel, rappers dressed down or were clad in black. There was a general feeling of “fuck it” in the air. Artists wanted to express themselves, but didn't want to entertain. The overall mood was, “If you like it, cool. If you don't, whatever.” And that last word, “whatever” was the generation's overall new philosophy.

You notice that I'm only really focusing on the music because that is usually the harbinger of popular culture. Movies and television don't usually arrive on that cultural wave until later and when they do, that particular wave has crested or is on the verge of breaking. And with movies, it's usually the smaller films that understand the day's fads. Cameron Crowe's “Singles” got the whole grunge-Gen X thing way better than “Reality Bites” ever could. “Reality Bites” seemed to be too calculating and too slick to be taken seriously, it desperately wanted to be “Singles” but fell short. Another example is John Singleton's “Boyz in the Hood” which brought home the plight of the urban 20-something to the masses (read white audience) more than any other black film released after that could.

As 1992 took shape, many of us took the obnoxious clothes that we wearing (the Zubaz or Z. Cavarrici pants) and threw them in the back of the closet and found our worn out jeans, flannel shirts and t-shirts. It was fashionable to look like you didn't give a shit. And for the next four or five years, that's how it stayed.

Ultimately people got bored with being depressed.

Once Bill Clinton was elected president and had enough time to turn the country around and people began to prosper again, did young America's mood change. A lot were sick of dressing like slobs, listening to depressing songs and not having sex. Almost over night, the culture seemed to change and excess was back. P. Diddy and Ma$e were waving their Rolexes from side to side, bands like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit were trying to rekindle the early 80s debauched styles of Motley Crue and Van Halen. In 1998, journalists were trumpeting that Glam rock was making a comeback (though it ultimately never did, except for Marilyn Manson's “Mechanical Animals” which most of his fans didn't like too much—but is the only Manson CD that I own).

But I was among a group of people that didn't change. I was stuck in my slacker ways and the atrophy was my security blanket. Anything that took an honest-to-God effort was pushed away. At the time I wasn't seriously dating anyone, but I was hooking up when I could. While other, more motivated colleagues were making a killing in the first dot com boom, I was working a 9-5 fund accounting job that I absolutely hated (I spent more time perfecting the art of sleeping at my desk and trying to come up with the layouts of new golf courses than figuring out how to be a better employee). When I did get a job that I liked (reporting) I worked hard, but I wasn't super motivated and the pay sucked.

For recreation, most weekends my friends and I would hit a bar, get shitfaced and come home. Or we'd get a case of beer and watch TV or play Sega Genesis. Even my favorite movies at the time were about unmotivated slackers: “Office Space”, “Swingers”, “Clerks”, “Mallrats”, “Boogie Nights”, “Dazed and Confused” any Tarantino flick. All of these movies were about people who float through life where things happen to them. They're protagonists in the sense that they just happen to be the vessel that encounters the rough seas of life's storm.

And to me, that was a great way to live your life.

I never knew how rudderless my 20s were going to be. When I was younger, I thought that I'd have things all figured out and I would have a pretty good map of where I was heading. I spent a good portion of my 20s half-heartedly trying to find that magical map and I would get frustrated because I never could seem to figure out where it was hidden.

An era of uncertainty is romanticized after much time has passed. When you're young, poor and living this type of life day-to-day, it's not paradise. There were many days I'd bring sandwiches to work that I wouldn't even think about eating now. The cold winter months after I quit my fund accounting job and sat around a quiet apartment with nothing to do but watch “Mannix” reruns and wonder if I'll ever get a job just sucked. But there are times where I look back with fond remembrances of that past.

I shouldn't. I spent an awful lot of time doing nothing and now that I don't have that free time, I wish that I had done things differently.

When I worked at the paper, I was friends with a guy named Tom Abrams who was a few years younger than me. He told me that the summer after he graduated college, he packed up a back pack and bummed around Europe for a few months by himself. I have always wanted to do that, but never had the stones to do so. The summer after I graduated I delivered pizzas and laid around in my parents' swimming pool.

To be honest, it was a great summer as I had a kick-ass tan and had zero responsibilities, but following that summer I wish that I had gone to Europe and had that experience. Even if it was by myself. I wish that I had run with the bulls in Pamplona, seen the Louvre, gone to Amsterdam and Rome and Prague and Athens. It angers me that I spent my time ringing door bells and handing idiots pizzas. I wasted a prime opportunity because I was too lazy or too afraid to do anything.

And I'm not trying to blame the slacker culture for not being a self-starter because that's not my point. There are literally thousands of self-described slackers who have become big stars while it looked like they were sitting around doing nothing. Comedians like David Cross, Patton Oswalt and Brian Posehn or directors like Richard Linklater, Kevin SMith and Quentin Tarantino, writers like Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman make it seem like they spent all day on the couch, but they had to be self-motivators to get to where they are. Constant writing and performing, the ability to move from one city to another to get to the level of where they want to be.

They spent a lot of time and hard work to achieve a position where they could spend a lot of time doing nothing. And that's the paradox that I never understood until later in life.

Note: I have no idea where the image I got for this post came from, I did a Google search for "Slackers" and aside from the incredibly late-90s movie, that picture came up.

Where We Are, Where We Were and Where We Will Be

2010-01-13T16:32:00.003-05:00

My wife's grandmother is going to turn 90-years-old sometime next month*. She still lives in Manhattan, (though that is going to change soon), in Little Italy (which is now China Town since most of the Italians fled the city decades ago) roughly two blocks from where she was born. She's an amazing woman who has seen a lot and most importantly, remembers most of it. If I'm as lucid at 60 as she is now, I'll consider myself lucky.

* I am a rotten grandson-in-law because I don't know the exact date, I think that it might be February 2, but I'm not willing to bet my paycheck on it. All I know is that it's not February 29.

This isn't an entry about her necessarily, this is more about what she has seen technology-wise in the last 90 years. One can argue that anyone over 85-years-old has probably seen the greatest technology boom in recorded history. Everything that was invented during the last century was pretty much has been improved upon exponentially and that which was invented before 1920 was improved upon too.

-- The telephone went from being a large box bolted to a wall in your kitchen, where you have to ask a person to connect you to another person to something a bit more portable that you can keep on an end table while losing the person-to-person interface. Then it became a device where you don't need the wire connecting the headset to the body, it was portable. Then it became a device that you can keep in your pocket—and you can watch movies or television shows on them.

-- The automobile went from a means of transportation that was only afforded by the rich to something that most people now own two of.

-- Air travel progressed so much that you can fly from New York to San Francisco in less than five hours and it's the preferred travel option of the masses.*

* Put yourself in the shoes of someone who lived in the early part of the 20th Century, the act of flying was completely impossible. There was no way a person could do it, or if they could (like the Wright Brothers) they couldn't sustain themselves enough where it would be a practical mode of transportation. Now people fly all over the place, you probably know someone who goes on enough business trips that he or she is in a plane more than they are in their car.

-- Movies have certainly gone up in price (as has most other things) but now you don't have to walk to the corner to see a film. You can actually have the US Postal Service bring the latest hits to you. And soon you won't even need the mailman. A person can plug a wire into an outlet and get the latest flick instantly.

-- First it was radio then it was television, but the bottom line is being at home no longer meant being cut off from the outside world. With a flip of the dial you could hear a ball game as it occurs or listen to the latest songs buring up the chart. While some people argue that this compartmentalized people, I think that it brought them together, a shared spirit of the American zeitgeist was formed. “Did you hear the new Frank Sinatra record? I did too, it's a gas.”*

And TV blew the game wide open as it tackles the senses and forms opinions. From the early black and white sets to color to today's high-definition sets, watching an event on television is truly like being there. And in some cases, its better.

* Did people back in the 40s say “It's a gas”? I have no idea, I thought it sounded kind of cool and retro.

-- Computers weren't even thought of when she was younger, but here it is less than 100 years later and people have shrunk something that was the size of a SoHo loft and put it in their pockets. And the tiny machines are more powerful than their Brobdingnagian predecessors too. Right now, I can think of at least five different ways of instantly contacting someone with my iPhone (call, text, email, connect through a social media portal or through instant messaging). You're connected to millions of people every day, sharing ideas and thoughts.

-- And perhaps the most inspiring and truly revolutionary technological feat of the past 90 years is that man went to the moon. For thousands upon thousands of years, man has always wondered what it would be like to step foot on the lunar surface. Scores of poems and stories have been written about the moon, but one day back in 1969 we did.

People in my generation take it for granted because for our entire life we have lived with the knowledge that a few years before we were born there was a guy hitting a golf ball on the moon. It didn't really seem like a big deal, but it is. It's a huge deal. The only two things that I can think of that will match this is if an alien landed in Washington DC and made contact with our President or cancer was somehow cured.

Other than that, we're chasing that lead dog in terms of a generation-defining moment.

And there are more things that haven't even listed (improvements in boat or train travel, how a person gets their music, the relative ease of shopping, advances in medicine) that have been completely transformed during the last 90 years. I can't even imagine the technological advances that mankind is going to made in the next 55 years (when I'm 90) or the next 88 years (when my daughter is 90).

The one thing about the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” that always struck me is the reaction old Brooks after the parole board deemed him reformed and released after he had been in prison for (I think) 50 years. In the history books, the years 1910 (when he went in) and 1960 (when he was released) will probably be grouped in the same era. But that's incorrect, the only thing that those years share are the first two numbers and the last.

I'm not talking about the scene where he realizes that he's been institutionalized and figures out that he'll never make it on the outside. I'm talking about the scene where he walks down the street and almost gets plugged by the car. One of the lines that best underscores the difference is when he says that he saw an automobile once when he was a boy. It was implied that back in 1910, a car was something like a blue moon or Haley's Comet, something not seen too often. But when he was released cars were as commonplace as pebbles or mosquitos.

The time when people were amazed by the car passed and that is what will happen with us too. It's a slow and seems to happen by osmosis, but it will occur. I can only hope that when I'm older and reflect back on mankind's achievements made during my life, I look with the original wonder and awe.

A Few Words on Privacy

2010-01-12T14:39:00.002-05:00

There is going to come a day where the idea of privacy is going to be a quaint reminder of an era gone by.

During the last decade, the American public has embraced the media as a tool for the public, not just the lucky few who can make news. It began with the rise of reality television and pretty soon the average American was sharing prime time with Hollywood A-listers. Their every foible and whim was captured on tape and was beamed to a growing audience. However, there was still a filter (called editors) that colored perception.

In the mid part of this century, that lens went out the window and even more people wanted to take a piece of the stage. With social interaction sites like Twittter or Facebook, video sites like YouTube and Blogs, everyone in America has a chance to creep back into the consciousness of long-forgotten acquaintances or become minor celebrities.*

* Remember the “Star Wars” kid that was popular a few years back? He was a chubby teen with glasses who posted a video of himself having a lightsaber duel with no one. The dude was everywhere, even “Arrested Development” did a cut-away joke about it. And the latest internet celebrity is a three-year-old boy who memorized the speech that Herb Brooks gave to the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team.

The point as my two-year-old daughter grows up, the idea of privacy is going to be change so much that within 20 years, people of my generation aren't going to recognize it. I'm 35-years-old and most of my peers have adapted to the idea of posting pictures of themselves on Facebook or writing their thoughts in a public Blog, but there is always some level of trepidation; what if the wrong person sees/reads this? Do I really want scores of people knowing that I enjoy Steelheart's awesome power ballad,“Never Let You Go”?

The second-thoughts come from a still burgeoning technology. We're still on the forefront of social interaction and the fear of the unknown is going to dissipate by the time my daughter gets into Junior High School and my warnings will probably fall on deaf ears; “Yeah, ok Dad. Like someone is really going to care that I posted that my teacher a stupid whore ... it's the Internet!”

The point I'm trying to make is that with the very idea of privacy quickly dying, Americans are becoming increasingly interested in what goes on behind closed doors. Does the public persona of an athlete or a movie star match their every day actions? Case in point, Tiger Woods.

A day after Thanksgiving Tiger Woods was involved in a one-car automobile accident outside his home in Florida. While police were called to the scene, there were no injuries and the matter should have been dropped. However, the Internet media (gossip sites like TMZ) were on the case. As details were being leaked—Tiger and his wife were fighting, turns out he has a harem of women, his wife tried to slug him with a nine iron—the American people's appetites only grew and the mainstream media jumped into the frenzy.

Not only did we know that Tiger Woods had a bevy of beauties; but we knew the names of some of them, occupations of others, and we heard voice messages of a confused, befuddled Tiger telling one of them to change her phone number because his wife, Elin, had gotten wise to the whole deal. As the reports slowed to a trickle, the public's uproar grew louder and louder. Why would Tiger Woods cheat on his wife, he's a family man? Tiger Woods is a sex addict, he doesn't look like one? Who is Tiger Woods?

And this is the problem, who is Tiger Woods. A few years ago, Nike tried a marketing campaign that centered around the phrase, “I Am Tiger Woods”. In one of the memorable TV comericials, there was a minute of people repeating “I am Tiger Woods” over and over as if it was a mantra, finally ending with Woods himself saying, “I am Tiger Woods”. The point was, Woods is an every man and that if anyone works hard enough they can be as good as Tiger Woods.

And that's what his entire public persona is: he's everything, but he's nothing. The Tiger Woods brand stands for excellence, but that stance means nothing. Woods has always been the ultimate cypher, you couldn't even pin him down on something as simple as his ethnicity; he created his own that was some combination of Asian-Caucasian-Afro-American. Even on his web site FAQ, he listed his favorite music as “Soundtracks from the 80s and 90s”.*

* I picked this tidbit up from Joe Posnanski's excellent blog post and share the same befuddlement. The soundtrack to “Amadeus” was released in this time frame as well as the soundtrack to “Judgement Night”. The former soundtrack is filled with concertos and movements from Mozart, while the latter is nothing but rock/rap colaborations from people like Biohazzard and Onyx. I'm not saying that a person can like one style of music, but not the other, but this is a bit extreme. And again, is an example of Tiger trying his best to appeal to everyone.

So for people to get pious and upset over Woods' actions left me a bit confused. We never knew Tiger Woods, even at the apex of his popularity—his privacy was so guarded that anyone who showed even a brief glimpse into Woods' “real life” personality was fired from Team Tiger. This got me thinking about what was the American public so upset about.

I think that many people feel that his carefully sculpted image was his true personality. He was the man who had at all: a great job, a gorgeous wife, two kids, a dump truck full of money but in reality his image was just a mirage*.

* It's kind of cool how the word mirage is just image with an extra “r”. Am I right, or am I overthinking this?

Privately, Tiger Woods was just as fucked up as everyone else. He cheated on his wife, she got angry with him, smashed up his car, took her kids and went back to Sweden. He is everyman, but he's not the everyman that everyone wants to be. And this is where the subject of privacy comes in, when the curtain was peeled back and Woods was revealed to be as flawed as anyone else, the nation went bezerk. Companies dropped him as a sponsor, he became the butt of every hacky email you received in December, outraged writers called for him to be dropped from the PGA.

And for what? He cheated on his wife. While that doesn't put him on the short list for husband of the year, who did it really hurt (aside from his wife and children)? I didn't give a damn about Tiger's personal life before Thanksgiving 2009 and I don't care about it now. The only reason why I like Tiger Woods is because he can consistently drive a golf ball 300+ yards and that he can make a putt with the pressure of the Master's on his back. I never looked at Tiger Woods, or any celebrity, as a template for my behavior. And the reason is this: we never know what's really going on.

Sure, we have hints: Charlie Sheen seems like an asshole, Gilbert Areanas is probably a moron and George Clooney seems like a cool guy, but do we really know? The answer to this can be summed up in two letters and a last name: OJ Simpson.

If you are old enough to remember what happened in 1994, a celebrity doing something stupid should never be a “shocker”. On June 12, 1994, the entire notion of a public persona was hacked to death by a charismatic and “family-friendly” former All-Pro running back. Simpson was considered such a nice guy that James Cameron turned him down to star in “Terminator” because he felt that no one would believe that OJ Simpson could kill anyone.

So while our own personal privacy is going out the window by one of our own hands, the other is trying to rip down the privacy of others. At the very least, America has always been a land of interesting dichotomies.

Gut Punch Time

2009-11-24T15:12:00.003-05:00

See this guy? A few months ago, I wrote this blog post:

This Man Could Be Your Father

Today I was watching the local news and came across this story:

Adopted Son Traced Biological Parent to be Charles Manson

I tried to put myself in this person's shoes.

It wasn't the best day in the world when you found out from your kid sister that you were adopted. And while you have accepted this information as fact, not a day goes by when you don't wonder who your real parents are. Eventually, curiosity gets the better of you and through a lot of hard work you are able to track down your birth mother and are able to get her contact information. One day you finally get the nerve up to reach out to the woman that put you up for adoption. It's awkward as hell at first but you strike gold, she wants to have some sort of relationship.

Nice.

You exchange letters, emails ... finally your life is beginning to make a bit of sense. Reasons for why you act a certain way come into focus. You get pictures of family members and the face staring at you in the mirror every day starts becoming less of a stranger; I have grandpa's eyes, that cleft chin is from Uncle Tommy. The puzzle of you is coming together, however it's only half-way completed.

After finding out about your mother, you want to know a bit about your father. Mom knows who the guy is, but she isn't telling. You keep pressing to know, begging to know, demanding to know until she finally relents and tells you that you were conceived during a drug-fueled orgy/rape by none other than Charles Manson.

“The Charles Manson,” you ask.

“Yes. That Charles Manson,” your mother answers.

Rockford, IL resident Matthew Roberts, who is the spitting image of his infamous father, has predictably slipped into a depression about who has daddy is. And while he isn't the Zezozoze Zadfrack that I referred to in my original Blog post, it still must suck.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Easy for me to say, I know who my parents are.

The Return of Aquaman

2009-11-03T11:27:00.003-05:00

Every few days I get an email from the Underwater King of the Deep Aquaman begging for a chance to write for 19 Thoughts again. If you're a new reader to 19 Thouhts, Aquaman used to write for the Blog at a pretty regular clip. You can see some of his examples in some of the earlier posts, beginning with August of 2004. He was a pretty good writer, but a tad bit caustic. I've decided to give him another shot and without any further adieu, here is Aquaman:

Thanks, asshole. It's me, it's the A to the Q to the U to the A to the man and I'm back where I began. Kickin' it old school with a rhyme, that's just how the AM rolls.

First off, I have no idea what Byron is talking about. Caustic? What does that word even mean? If you're saying that I write in the nude, you're wrong. Dead wrong. I always write with my pants on. Always. Or at least most of the times I do. Anyway, I'm not here to talk about that mouthbreather Magrane, I'm here to drop a little Seven Seas knowledge on your asses.

The other day I was swimming close to the shore and looking at some of the finest bathing-suited ladies when I stopped cold in my tracks by a familiar sound that was coming from the beach.

“Argh matey! Tis a fine ale you brought me and reminds me of me favorite kind of socks ... arggggh-yle!”

Then there was a gale of laughter. But to me, this was no fucking joke. There were pirates on the beach and only one person could stop them from their raping and pillaging, Aquaman!

I quickly pulled up my pants, got out of the ocean and ran up the beach. There was the foul-mouthed pirate himself taunting his victims with cruel jokes about “Aargh-rated movies” and how his favorite TV show is “Aargh-rested Development”. I thought that was strange because I am a gigantic AD fan and I had no idea that they had a show. Have you ever heard that song “Tennessee”? That song kicks fucking ass, shit where was I? Oh yeah, the pirate.

I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and said, “Listen here, you barnacle-balled dog, I'm in charge of the ocean and I won't have it befouled by you or any of your rapscallion bunch!”

A quick aside: you have to talk like that to a pirate because those motherfuckers don't understand nothin about the street, which only makes sense because they don't have streets in the ocean. They have straits, but not streets ... gigantic difference there, my friends.

Anyway, this guy turns around and says, “What the fuck are you talking about? Who the hell are you? Why aren't you wearing any pants?” I told him that I'd ask the questions in this little play and he was to tell me who he is now or risk a beat-down that would humble Poseidon himself.

The pirate's prisoners sat agape and then began chuckling. “I know who you are,” one said. “You're Aquaman.” And the chuckle turned into a deafening laugh. It's always a plus when your legend proceeds you and people are aware of the good times you bring. I was glad to have found a group of sympathetic souls but there was to be no Zima to be chugged until after I saved them from this merciless pirate.

I saw the pirate say something to one of the captors who then said to me, “Aquaman, it's a good thing that you're here! The pirate Mike Nessmith was about to dig a sand pit and bury us up to our necks! He said that the seagulls would have a fine time feasting on our eyes!”

I told them not to worry and that I was there to save them. “Since you were going to bury these poor people, I think that you should be the one to be buried! An eye for an eye, that's how we do on the seas. That's why seamen say 'Aye-aye', that's a nice piece of trivia for all of you.”

And with that, I began digging like I've never dug before. After about three hours, I had dug a hole deep enough to fit this Mike Nessmith up to his bastard pirate head. Gentle reader, I have heard of Stockholm Syndrome but I had never actually seen it before. The pirate and his prisoners were playing volleyball, when I announced to them that I was through with the hole.

Nessmith and walked over to the pit and said, “Tis a fine pit, Aquaman, but I don't think it will hold me.”

He and I were about the same height, so to assuage his fears I jumped in to show him that the pit was indeed deep enough. Just then his prisoners started scrambling like mad and began to bury me—their hero!—in the very pit that I created for their captor! I was so angry I couldn't move as the shovels of dirt fell on top of me.

“Aquaman, you're a chump,” Nessmith said. “I'm not a real pirate. I'm just a guy who likes to make shitty jokes and wear a bandanna. I don't even have a ship.”

He was right, I neglected to look for a vessel. God damn it, this always happens to me , which is probably why Hawkgirl won't return my phone calls. Fuck her though, she's a bitch and so are her stupid wings and pointy nose.

“But you're a moron. Good luck trying to use your ocean telepathy to get you out of this one, dick squeeze. Oops, looks like the tide is coming in! Let's go guys ... back to the streets.”

Fuck! It's one thing to be fooled by a person who was pretending to be a pirate, it's another thing not to recognize someone from the streets. I've spent my entire life on the streets, how could I not recognize that this guy was from the streets? Cocks and starfish!

As they sped off the water began inching closer and closer to my face. I can breath under water, but the salt water ravages my beautiful skin. This is a fate worse than the time Apache Chief decided to become Jewish and tried to perform a circumcision on himself. Though, I will admit that I managed to stay a lot drier this time.

I summoned forth all of strength and was able to break out of my own pit and not a moment too soon as the waves came trickling in! The bad news was that I was fooled and humbled by a bunch of punk kids, the good news is that there are no pirates raping and pillaging on this beach (because that's my job, mofos!) so I jumped back in the water and went to tell my wife Mera, Aqualad and my walrus buddy Tusky about how I saved the world from pirates.

Don't tell anyone the truth, ok?

A Dabbling of David Cross

2009-10-30T14:45:00.004-04:00

Last Monday night my friend Jamie and I journey to Wilbur Theater in Boston to do something that I've been wanting to do since 2002: see my favorite comedian David Cross live. Cross has been in two of my favorite shows of all time, as himself in the greatest sketch show of all time: “Mr. Show” and as never nude psychiatrist Dr. Tobias Funke.

I have both of his comedy CDs: “Shut Up You Fucking Baby” and “It's Not Funny” and I pretty much have memorized each of them—especially SUYFB. His take on America post 9/11 was as acerbic and spot-on funny as any that I've heard. Not only has his views on the world entertained me, but it's also helped me look at our planet with a different perspective. This tour was to promote his new book of essays, “I Drink for a Reason”, which I am going to purchase very soon.

Like I said, I've been wanting to see Cross ever since I listened to SUYFB for the first time and I've scanned Pollstar and the Boston Phoenix at least once a week to see if he was playing a show in the Boston area. It wasn't until a few months ago that I found out that he was going to be in Boston. Needless to say, I grabbed those tickets quickly.

The Wilbur Theater is a pretty cool place to see a comedy show as it's an old theater with a palpable sense of history behind it. The seats are old-school straight backed ones that aren't very comfortable, but that's ok it makes the listener all that more alert to check out the act. Also there are two over hanging balconies and two private hanging boxes. Jamie and I were in the third to last row in the second balcony, so we were far away, but it didn't matter the old theater has great acoustics.

Last year, my friend Steve and I saw Stella at the Wilbur Theater (Michael Showalater, Michael Ian Black and David Wain) with Eugen Mirman opening for them. Since Steve grew up with Wain, we got awesome seats. Needless to say, that was amazing experience too.

After a warm-up comedian, Cross came on at 7:25 and performed for about two hours. I would have been happy with an hour of material, but this was a solid set of new bits that stretched on for double my expectations. Was ever joke a hit? Of course not, there were some bombs here and there, but for the most part it was really an awesome show.*

* He also showed a five-minute clip of his show that's going to be aired on the BBC called “The Increasing Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret”. It looks awesome and it sucks that it won't be played in the United States for awhile. The show also had a cameo from Cross' TV brother-in-law GOB Bluth, Will Arnett, which made it even better. **

** What also made the show pretty awesome is that he was taping it for either a DVD release or a Comedy Central or HBO special. I'm not why I find this so great and why I can't wait to buy the DVD, I mean I've already seen about 99% of what I'm going to see again, but for some reason I'm pumped for this to come out.

The one thing that I noticed about Cross is that his fans definitely have a look. Most of them are the true hipsters of the city: black, square rimmed glasses, ironic t-shirts, messed up bed head. And the women are similar too. I'm not saying that it's bad, but I guess that if you were to ask these people why they dress and act the way they do, they'd argue that they do so because they're trying to be different. The one problem is that when gathered together like they were last Monday, their actions of dressing different and being unique turns out to be so similar to each other that it's as if they all went to the same store and bought the exact uniform.

Looking over what I've written so far, it occurs to me that there isn't too much to write about a comedy show except to say whether it was good or not, and that's subjective to a bunch of outside influences: such like I listed above: venue, length of fandom, etc. It's occurred to me it's harder to write a comedy review than it is to write a concert review. A writer can convey the concert experience by listing the songs that were played and how the band sounds, but one can't do that with the comedian. It's hard to describe jokes, and unless the comedian was completely bored (like the time I saw David Spade while in college) there's not really too much to tell.

I'm not going to get the jokes correct and even if I did, Cross doesn't tell jokes per se. They're more wry observations on daily life punctuated with vocal inflections. The humor would get lost in my retelling and will not do any justice to the story. Just take my word for it that he was awesomely funny.

About a week after I saw Cross live I ran across this article. In a few words of summary: basically David Cross told the audience in DC that he and his girlfriend Amber Tamblyn were invited to the White House Correspondent's Dinner. While there, Cross said that he snorted a line of coke within yards of President Obama. He explained that he did this to show his friend that he could be “more outrageous”.

I'm not sure if this story is true, though I'd bet that it is, but if it is I thought that it was pretty lame. It's not the snorting of coke or even doing it in front of Obama, I think what I find most lame about it is that seems like something that Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O would do. And they're morons. “Yeah, I snorted coke right near Obama! Beat that, brah!”

One of the things that appealed to me about Cross is that he isn't an idiot, or if he is, he keeps it private.

The bottom line is this: I'm not going to stop laughing at Cross. But sometimes, I suppose that there is just too much information being passed around.*

* You know what, I don't really know what the point of this last story is. It seems to me that it's about being let down by a celebrity or someone that you admire. The thing is, I don't feel all that let down; Cross has made no secret of his drug use and, really why should I give a shit if he jams heroin needles into his eyeballs. I guess I feel more let down comedy-wise than anything else, the guy has built his standup on subtlety and well-crafted, well-thought out jokes. He shouldn't have to succumb to stupid shock jock crap like this. That's basically what my point is.

Defending the Doors

2009-10-28T11:29:00.003-04:00

Chuck Klosterman, recently released a new book of essays on pop culture. This isn't much of a surprise because, aside from one novel, the only books or magazine articles that Klosterman writes are ones about pop culture. Since he is one of my favorite authors, when I saw that he had an interview with the Onion's AV Club, I was happy to read it. You can read it here too.

One of the questions lead to a Klosterman musing about classic rock radio and how the scope is getting larger when it should be getting smaller. This lead the interviewer to ask which bands should be dumped, and Klosterman suggested the Doors. Here's a bit of the interview:

AVC: Are you scared of a world in which Weezer is viewed as part of the classic-rock canon? You write about them in the new book.
CK: I would like that, although I would have to concede that if that happened, the rock canon would have to be a lot bigger. I’m a fan of Weezer, but if they’re looked at as one of the greatest bands of all time, we must have expanded the definition of greatness. Which is always happening a little bit. The rock canon is bigger now than it was in the ’70s, and it’ll always get a little bigger. We add people more often than we kick people out.
AVC: I can’t think of any that have been kicked out recently.
CK: I feel like The Doors are on the cusp of being kicked out.
AVC: I would kick The Doors out. Would you?
CK: I would be one of the people advocating their removal from the canon. [Laughs.] As if I have any say in it!

It's not just Klosterman, during the last couple of years the backlash against the Doors has grown and I'm not exactly sure why. Are they the greatest group that ever walked the planet? No. Their lyrics are a bit pretentious, Jim Morrison really can't sing very well, keyboardist Ray Manzarek seems like a humorless prick who's way too impressed with himself, you can't really dance to their tunes and their songs are not fun for parties—except for “Peace Frog”.

Having said all that, they're really not a bad band. The drumming and guitar work by John Densmore and Robbie Krieger are excellent. Their sound is unique—it's hard to confuse the Doors with anyone else and that has a lot to do with Mazarek's organ playing—and their lyrics reflect a time in the United States where a lot of people were pretentious. Morrison may not be able to sing very well, but if you look up the definition of a rock star, his picture would be next to it. The man was a larger-than-life counter-culture figure who could be infuriating, but that's rock and roll.

When I was younger, I went through a phase where the Doors were my absolute favorite band in the world. I had a few Doors posters plastered on my walls at home and at school, I played their CDs constantly, I thought that it was awesome to get absolutely plastered like Morrison and I must have watched the Oliver Stone movie at least once a weekend. I bought into the whole image of what I thought that a Doors fan should be.

Yes, there were some embarrassing moments—walking down the freshman girls hall acting like Jim Morrison is not one of my fondest college memories—but for the most part, my infatuation with the band was harmless*.

* Though, I suppose that if you ask my roommates the same question, they'd give you a different answer. Much like they would say that their infatuation with Phish was harmless, though I'd say that listening to “Junta” or “Hoist” 50 times in a row almost drove me mad.

I look back on that portion of my life with fondness (even the embarrassing incidents) as it was a big part of the soundtrack to a great chunk of my life and it made me who I am today. Jim Morrison is probably not the best role model for a young teenager or a father, but for a college kid who just lost the parental shackles, he's one that many have had. And while he lived on excess and being uncontrollable, acting like Morrison wasn't my thing and that's an important discovery to make. Finding out what you like is easy, finding out what you don't like is a bit more difficult and just as important.

To be honest, the reason why I started liking the was band because I wanted to impress a girl. I had never even heard of the Doors until early 1991, and this was after Stone's movie was a hit in the theaters. As luck would have it, the hottest girl in our school had a last name that began with the letter M, which is the same letter that begins mine. We were in the same home room and our lockers were right next to each other. One day she began talking about the Doors and how much she loved them, especially Jim Morrison. She asked me if I had heard of them before and of course, I said yes.

For some reason, my younger brother had the Doors movie soundtrack on CD, so I swiped it that night and listened to it over and over and over until I felt like I was able to talk to that girl about the band. The plan sorta worked, the next day I spoke to her about songs and the band and Morrison and I think that she may have been impressed. However, it never went any farther than that—though the songs wormed into my head and I began to really like them. I kept buying more and more albums, read more books, watched as many documentaries as I could—by the time I went to college, I knew as much about the Doors as I did about anything else.

It seems that every music fan goes through certain phases as they try to figure out what type of music fant they're going to be: there's the Beatles phase (hardly anyone loses that), there's the Led Zeppelin phase (ditto), there's the KISS phase (that peters out by the end of junior high school), there's the rap and hip hop phase (take that, mom and dad!--especially if you're a white kid in the suburbs.). Somewhere there's a phase for “adult rock” like the Doors or Pink Floyd or Rush. These are bands that to a high school or college-aged kid sounds a bit more sophisticated (both musically and lyrically) than the stuff that they listened to before.

Most of the discussions tend to be about how “deep” and “meaningful” the lyrics are and how Jim Morrison really “could be the last great, American poet”. These conversations between teenage fans seem to be mature because the topics being discussed are high-brow stuff like poetry and the symbolism of lyrics, but most people get past this and move on to other things. And while I did get past these sort of discussions, I never got past the music—so I suppose I'm stuck in this phase, but that's not the worst thing in the world.

Like I said before, the Doors' songs are interwoven into my life and memories, so it's too hard to simply pick that thread out and throw it away. The fact is, no matter how hip a person claims to be and how “into music” that they say they are, there's always going to be a band that a person loves, though many people actively despise. Klosterman is unapologetic about being stuck in his KISS phase, so I'm not even sure why I should be expected to dump the Doors.

27. Chappelle's Show

2009-10-13T11:47:00.003-04:00

Every day, thousands of people from podunk towns across the country migrate to Los Angeles, California in search of one thing: fame. In the last decade, the amount of people who have a desperate need to become famous has grown exponentially. It's not even about fame's partner anymore; fortune. People want to be noticed and known by other strangers. And with the way our society is going (growing smaller, but at the same time people are more apt to get lost) it's not all that strange for folks to want to be noticed.

For the fame flockers that come to Hollywood, there is a minuscule percentage of them that will reach their goal of world-wide popularity. And once they do, they react in different ways. Some take their notoriety very matter-of-factly, like George Clooney or Matt Damon. Others seemingly lose their minds and confuse infamy with being famous, like Paris Hilton or myriad reality TV personalities.

The latter group that don't have a grasp on what fame truly is, are usually the most desperate ones. They are the ones that are void of talent and will do anything to stay in the public eye. The ones that do offer something to the public are comfortable in their own skins (at least publicly) and seem to adjust to their lot in life very well.

That's why when David Chappelle reached the pinacle of his career, it was so bizarre to see him walk away from a reported $55 million dollar payday and leave the spotlight because of principles. But in 2005, that's exactly what David Chappelle did.

This wasn't a decision that came lightly, for in June 2004, during a standup gig in California, a member of the audience was shouting catch-phrases from Chappelle's gigantically popular sketch show. This caused Chappelle to angrily rebuke the audience member and it seemed to change the way he looked at the show and how it had evolved into something that was defining his life. About a year later, during show production in 2005, Chappelle felt that people were beginning to laugh at him, not with him. This was the final straw as he people were not getting what he was doing, so he left.

“The Chappelle Show” was the type of program that was subtly brilliant in that there were two levels: one in which the audience realizes that Dave Chappelle is making fun of social more, be it racism or sexism or class-ism. It really did a great job of satirizing those in power, without doing so in a whiny, PC sort of way. Of course, there was also the second level of watching the show, the sort-of idiot level where the audience laughs at just what Chappelle is doing and don't bother to delve behind the joke to determine why its funny.

For example, in one sketch, there is a white family who happen to have the unfortunate last name “Nigger”. They are a typical 1950s, “Leave it to Beaver” style family who are completely oblivious to their surname. Shot in black and white, which leads the viewer to believe that these characters live in an era where racial integration was nowhere on the radar, the Niggers go through a normal day that endss with the mother and father going to a fancy restaurant. This culminates in Chappelle—who plays the family's milk man—saying that he is happy that a nigger can get a table in that restaurant.

What Chappelle is brilliantly satirizing here is how different words, when applied to different objects, can take on different meanings. Also he's making fun of a group of people's ignorance to a potentially hurtful word. Throughout the skit, Chappelle says their name more than anyone else and is seen laughing at it. He's disarming the word from any hateful connotations—he's taking the power away.

Aside from these reasons, the skit also had terrific writing and made the viewer stop and take a few minutes to ponder that word. I believe that this is what Chappelle wanted us to do with a majority of his sketches. However, there are the steakheads out there who don't get concepts like this and heard the word “nigger” and just started laughing. These are the people that rankled Chappelle and drove him out of the business.

It wasn't all the steakheads' fault though.

“The Chappelle Show” was on Comedy Central for two seasons (I don't include the third “lost” season where Comedy Central grabbed whatever it could salvage and pasted a few episodes together*) and was shown ad nauseam. This show was a big money maker Comedy Central and I understand why they aired the show so many times, but it did take away from the impact. Because once you saw a certain sketch, over and over again, it does lose some of it's subtlety and a viewer just laughs when a catch phrase is uttered.

* I completely understand why Comedy Central ran the last season of "Chappelle's Show" without the blessing of it's star. They have a network to run and it the time, this was their highest rated show, so I guess that some David Chappelle is better than no David Chappelle. But, it's still a pretty crappy move considering that these sketches weren't finished products and therefore did not meet the high expectations of Chappelle.

Had “The Chappelle Show” continued past two seasons, it would be interesting to see how Chappelle approached each season. Reportedly, another part of the reason why Chappelle left his show was because he didn't think that he could keep his standards up. To me, that's an admirable quality. Television history is littered with programs that have overstayed their welcome. The fact that Chappelle was concerned about the quality says a lot for him as an artist.

Because Chappelle cared and took such chances and kept the bar raised were the main reasons why the show was so damn good. It's been boiled down to a cliché, but when “Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories” episode aired (AKA: “I'm Rick James, Bitch!”) anyone who watched that night knew it was going to be an instant classic. While Chappelle's Rick James was a charicature, Charlie Murphy (who is Eddie Murphy's real-life brother) played the role so straight that it was impossible to determine whether the stories were true—supposedly these happened in the early 80s when Charlie was a member of his brother's entourage—or were exaggerations. Also, interspliced throughout the episode was the real Rick James who would explain his actions, giving the vignettes some authority.

Another of “Charlie Murphy's True Hollywood Stories” was aired later in the season when Murphy and his friends were challenged to a game of basketball by Prince (played by Chappelle). Murphy and his cohorts, who all look like they could play serious basketball, were soundly defeated by a gaunt Prince and his bandmates who played a type of “fruity defense”. While not as popular as the Rick James piece, again Murphy played the role so straight that the humor of watching five strong men getting their asses beat by five fey men was extremely funny.

Like many sketch shows, “The Chappelle Show” is a product of its time and there were a lot of pop culture touchstones skewered like MTV's “The Real World”. Chappelle wondered why MTV always stuck one black person in a house with six white people and wondered why the black person was always painted to be the “crazy one”. He flipped the roles and had a white guy (Christian Finnegan) stuck in a house with six inner city black people.

Again, the subtext is what made the whole skit work because Chappelle is right, adding a black cast member to a predominantly white house is not realistic nor is it progressive—despite what MTV wants their viewers to believe. It's actually the opposite and the token minority will never see eye-to-eye with their castmates because of where they come from. And all it takes is some editing to make that person look nuts. Especially when it's the “street” black guy arguing with the “naive, corn-fed” white girl. Yet, it happens in every season of “The Real World”.

These are just some of the better skits, it's impossible to list all of them. Other favorites include "The Player Hater's Ball", "If a Black Guy Was President" and "When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong". While everything wasn't gold (there are a few clunkers), it had the highest hit-to-miss ratio of any sketch comedy show that I've seen (with the exception of "Mr. Show").

Comedians are among the most honest commentators of our society. They see our scabs for what they are and still pick at it. Chappelle (and Chris Rock too) was among the best when it came to picking at America's most tender scab: race. To comment on race in a way where the people that you are making fun of (the majority) are laughing uproariously, as well as tweaking the minority so that they're laughing just as hard is truly a gift.

We were lucky that we got two seasons of “The Chappelle Show” though it is thoroughly depressing that he couldn't soldier on for another few seasons during the Bush administration. That's when we needed honesty and laughter the most.

Two Guys Email Review of: Inglourious Basterds

2009-10-07T13:08:00.004-04:00

About two weeks ago, my friend Jamie and I went to see the Quentin Tarantino film "Inglourious Basterds". We didn't get a chance to really discuss the movie. I did the same thing with "Zack and Miri Make a Porno"*

I like to talk about movies, TV shows, sporting events, books -- any sort of medium a lot. This is obvious because I'm writing a Blog about these sort of things. So, the next day I emailed Jamie and asked him for his thoughts. We went back and forth for a little bit and this is what we had to say:

* Not only did I pretty much use the same opening paragraphs, but I used the same person to email. I'm all about value. BTW, there are a bunch of spoilers, but this movie has been out for six weeks, so be careful if you haven't seen it yet.

Also, I wrote about the experience of going to this flick a few weeks ago. Check it out here.

From: Byron
To: Jamie
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2009 4:38:23 PM
Subject: Inglourious Basterds

You've had about 20 hours to think about the movie, your reaction?

From: James
To: Byron
Date: Thursday, September 24, 2009, 10:09 AM
Subject: Re: Inglourious Basterds

Technically it wasn't 20 hrs at the time of your sending of the email. We did sleep some and I wasn't consciously thinking about that movie. However, When I did get up I was thinking about it andI like it more and more with each passing thought.

As we discussed, the bar scene was very good. I also seem to like Tarantino's formula of scene development -he cool conversations before the climax of each scene.

It happened in Pulp Fiction with Samuel Jackson talking to the guys in the apartment before he and Travolta blasted that kid to shit. "Does Marcelus Wallace look like a bitch?..." "The path of the riteous is beset on both sides by the iniquities of the weak and the tyranny of evil men..."
Kill Bill, From Dusk til dawn... I could quote Tarantino all day..

And now with "Inglorious Bastards" "....we ain't into the takin prisner bid'ness. We inta Nazi killing bid'ness and bid'ness is a boomin."

Even in Chapter one. the talk between large face and the frenchman before the hail of bullets into the floor. All classic stuff.

I even like Tarantino's rewriting of history as to how the war ended. his movies are fun, funny, gripping. It holds you and doesn't let go until the ending credits

That last sentence was strictly for commercial purposes. when you hear the sexy male announcer saying " NY times says 'Tarantino does it again.' 'A Materpiece' hails entertainment weekly. Jamie from nowhere USA says 'gripping. It holds you and doesn't let go until the ending credits'

That's my take. your turn....if you even get this email

From: Byron
To: James
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 1:38:53 PM
Subject: Re: Inglourious Basterds

I agree. I think that Tarantino has a knack for writing the most believable dialogues in Hollywood. He makes some pretty profound points that are not necessarily germane to the plot, but he also is able to expound on the plot a bit too. His words give his characters a very rich background.

I don't anyone in Hollywood can touch him on this. Especially not Kevin Smith. Even though I like Smith very much, I feel that his dialogues are just monologues in disguise. Know what I mean? I think that Richard Linklater does a pretty good job of writing dialogues too. Very believable.

The bar scene was really awesome. I thought that the Basterds were going to get out of it alive ... just by the skin of their teeth. But next thing you know, three are dead and the chick is barely holding on. I liked that Tarantino took my expectation and knocked it on its ass. That's another thing I like about Tarantino, he loves his characters but doesn't fall in love with them, if that makes any sense.

Example: Vincent Vega from "Pulp Fiction" gets blown away while sitting on a toilet. The dude is supposed to be the ultimate hit man and he literally gets caught with his pants down by a washed-up boxer. And the kicker is, he's supposed to be waiting for that boxer. It's an undignified way to die both in terms of the setting (taking a crap) and the scenario. Also, Tarantino didn't make a huge deal out of it. He's dead and the story moves on.

Here, the same thing we have an Englishman who is built up as the greatest undercover man that the Brits have to offer is murdered because he was too sloppy. The one thing that drives a lot Englishmen nuts is that they always have a proper attention to detail. Getting your unit killed like this is akin to Vega's death.

The first chapter was awesome. Tarantino really makes you look at the situation that the French dairy farmer is in. Of course you want to save your neighbors, but when your family's lives are at stake you have to do what's best for your family. I bet that decision haunted that character to his dying day and that he felt a ton of guilt for what he did, but he really had no choice.

The atrocity that day was two-fold: the murder of the Jews under the floor as well as the (figurative) murder of the French farmer. He was probably never the same after that day and one can extrapolate that his three daughters weren't the same either. Today we call it post-traumatic stress disorder, but I'm sure back then there was no one treating that except maybe Dr. Vino.

Going back to my expectations, that was the main reason why I liked when Tarantino rewrote the ending of World War II. I know how Hitler and the rest of his crew die in real-life and I was expecting the bunch of them to be whisked away at the last moment leaving the Basterds and Shoshana's inevitable deaths in vain. But he didn't do that, Hitler's face was riddled with bullets, all of the high-ranking SS guys were burnt alive or shot in the back. It was great.

BTW, I'm going to use our exchange on my Blog much like I did with "Zack and Miri", so:

A. I hope you're ok with that
B. Write more

From: James
To: Byron
Sent: Friday, September 25, 2009

my only question about QT's style is: why do all of his movies have to have chapters or titles for each section? the only one that didn't was his shorter, double-feature film planet terror... I didn't see Hostel II so I don't know if there was any chapter separation in that film..

I'm not complaining. It's actually kind of cool. The only other person who does that is Kevin Smith. So it's funny that you brought him up in the last post... and while I agree with you that QT's dialogue speaks more truth. I also feel you're not giving KS his due credit. I feel there was a lot of truth said in Clerks and Dogma. As for Linklater the only two movies I've seen are D&C and School of Rock. D&C is one of my all time favorite movies BECAUSE of the dialogue. so while your ready to drop to your knees and suck off QT like it's your last meal, I'm not putting him on the same pedestal. I'm only gonig to say his style is different. It's like when I was in high school and the coolest band in the world was Rush. I thought Neil Peart was untouchable. no one could hold a candle to him...John Bohnam, Manu Katche, Buddy Rich, Stewart Copeland.... As i've gotten older I've realized everyone has their own talents, but I digress.

I'm not going to break down every scene like you did. there's no point. I agree with you on every point. Especially on QT's love-but-that-doesn't-mean-I'm-not-going-to-kill-my-character attitude. That's why Bridget vonHammersmark death is still leaving a lasting impression. I was just as surprised as Bridget vonHammersmark when her life was about to end there in that back room of the cinema.

My last issue I have is a general issue I have about any character from any movie. Shoshanna could easily have avoided her death if she simply made the final one or two shots to Zoller's head when he was face down on the floor. I don't get why the sudden sympathy to a man who killed 500 italians in three days. not to mention the fact that she hates Germans enough to meticulously plan to burn down her own cinema, with her in it. she now hears him groan and decides to gently roll him over to....what? what was she going to do?

You can use this in your blog. I don't care.

From: Byron
To: James
Sent: Monday, September 28, 2009

I like that he has chapters or film titles at the beginning of different scenes, it's a different touch. Perhaps he's not proficient at using segues. Also, look at how IB was shown—there is no way that he could have connected that first sequence (in the house) to the second one (the forming of the Basterds). So instead of filming a card that reads, “In another part of France” or “Meanwhile ...”.

I'm not saying that KS doesn't speak the truth. What I'm saying is that QT's dialogues ring true. When people talk there is an ebb and flow to them where someone says something, maybe a sentence or two and then someone responds with a sentence or two. I don't think that what Tarantino has to say is any more relevent to the human condition than what Smith or Linklater has to say.

I liked “Chasing Amy” a lot. But one of the things that bother me about that flick is the most “dramatic” scene where Joey Lauren Adams screams at Ben Affleck for three or four minutes. Think about that for a second, if someone is screaming at you for even two minutes it's jarring but three or four minutes? That's Peruvian insanity peppers, my friend.

No matter how much I “loved” her (and let's be real, this was like a month or two at the most into their courtship) I would have walked away thinking that she was nuts. I'm sure that it looked great on the page, but it came off as crazy and hokey on the screen. It just didn't ring true for me and took me completely out of the movie. I'm not going to get into the whole “no guy would stand for that crap” cliché because a lot of dudes would—and perhaps I would too, but after that crying jag, no matter how hot JLA is she isn't worth it.

You're right about Shoshana and you have to wonder what her motivation for feeling any sort of remorse towards Zoller when he was essentially the poster boy for Nazi Germany—you know, the people who machine gunned her entire family to death. But maybe that was to really drive home the point that while the Nazis didn't show any compassion for the people they killed and because of that were subhuman, Shoshana did.

But after rereading that, that makes no sense too because she just torched a movie theater full of Nazis without much thought of their well-being. So, I agree with you that this was sort of a superfluous scene that some writers put in to give their characters “character”. It's pretty stupid.

BTW Zoller killed 500 Americans, not Italians. The Italians were part of the Third Reich.

You know what I liked about this flick? There was no backstory and no epilogue. Brad Pitt walked around with a rope burn around his neck for the entire movie and no one questioned that. I assumed that he was part of a messed-up lynching, but I don't know. Maybe the dude can't tie a neck tie well.

When this flick came out, there was a brief interview with the lesser-known Basterds like Sam Levine and BJ Novack in Esquire where they said that Tarantino told them to create backstories for their characters, the more elaborate the better. So they had all of these cool stories about what made these guys tick and why they were who they were, but we never got to see why the Jewish Bear carried a baseball bat—according to Wikipedia, he was from Boston and got all of his buddies to sign the bat when he found out he was going to WWII. There was a scene where he got an old lady [Cloris Lecheman] to sign the bat too and supposedly it says Anne Frank on the barrel somewhere. The old lady scene was cut.

And what happened to these guys after they came home?

Tarantino has a great way of showing a slice of his characters' lives. What happens before or even after doesn't really matter. All that matters is the story he is presently telling. To me, that's all what should matter.

- Fin -

28. Justice League

2009-10-05T13:58:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid there were two things that I loved: comic books and cartoons. And when the those two worlds crossed over, I was obsessed. As a Marvel Comics guy, shows like “Spider-man and His Amazing Friends” and “The Hulk” and “GI Joe” were some of my favorite stuff. However, nothing could compare to “The Super Friends”—especially “The Challenge of the Super Friends”. Liking this showran against the grain for me, because as I said I was a Marvel guy through-and-through and this was a DC universe show.

If you watched TV in the 80s, you should remember the CotSF, it's the one that had 11 heroes (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc) that fought 13 villains. I couldn't find the show's opening monologue*, but I did find out that the narrator was a person by the name of William Woodson. That's good to know.

* I think that it went something like, “Banded together from the far reaches of the galaxy are 13 super villains known as the Legion of Doom.” After that there was a bunch of other explanations on why these guys suck and what the Super Friends were going to do to them. What sold it for me was the jazzy music and Woodson's voice. So full of bass and seriousness, there is no way that you'd change the channel—this was important, damn it!

Any how, the show was kind of hokey and the good guys always won mostly because the Legion of Doom (which was headquartered in something that looked like Darth Vader's head in the middle of a swamp, seriously how cool was that?) managed to screw something up. The more important part of this show weren't the story lines, it was that there was a bunch of super heroes on the screen battling a bunch of super villains. It was like a cartoon Wrestlemanina and it was awesome.

Despite its popularity, there was only 16 episodes produced and while DC made a half-hearted attempt to revive the series in the mid 1980s (the original was shown on ABC in 1978 and later syndicated) they never could recapture the original's glory. Even during the comic cartoon boom of the 1990s, for whatever reasons, DC never went back to this well, which I found odd.

In the early aughts, Cartoon Network finally got DC to get off its ass and move ahead with a new Super Friends project. Only it wasn't going to be like the good old, cheesy 1970s version. As the kids from the 70s and 80s grew up to adults, a good bunch of them still watched cartoons. They didn't want moralizing stories, they wanted more action and more gravitas. With the new “Justice League” they got it.

The producer of the show, Bruce Timm, had hits on his hands with the new animated versions of Superman and Batman and wanted the new JL to be done in the same vein both artistically and thematically. The first season was a huge success as fanboys got to see their heroes act like the heroes they read about every month in the comics and kids who are new to the genre weren't lost. That's not an easy tightrope to walk across.

The artwork is the first thing that most be notice. It is absolutely fantastic with bold, smooth lines that accentuate the story telling and also establish that these are some of the greatest legends ever created*. Also, the animation is unlike its 70s predecessor's in that it is not choppy at all. There were some CotSF animation that looked cheap and silly—either a character was painted a wrong color or the background scenes were limited—but not with this incarnation. Everything is done perfectly, you can tell that Timm and his editors took great care to bring these characters to the small screen and wanted to do their best to have a great effort.

The show as a whole had an overall design style that was both unique and simplistic that didn't burden the viewer with too much detail that they got lost. At the same time, it was just enough so that they didn't get bored.

* I read somewhere that comics were society's next generation of myths and legends and it makes sense. Superman is a modern Hercules, Batman is an updated verison of Sherlock Holmes. There will be a day when people realize that and accept comic books for what they are, timeless stories that are meant to entertain.

While the art is legitimately spectacular, the greatest effort went into the writing. Many of the stories were taken from the annals of DC stories, but there were also shaped and rearranged so that it made sense in 22 minutes. Unlike CotSF, “The Justice League” had season-long story arcs and things that happened in past episodes mattered in future ones.

The first two seasons of “Justice League” focused on DC's seven “Big Guns”: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Green Lantern (John Stewart version), Martian Manhunter and Hawkgirl. The last two may not be as well known as the first five, but they have been with the company for decades.

Each character has a different point-of-view and as such there were times when the heroes bickered amongst themselves. Because of this, there were times when the League lost a few battles, but as is customary with these shows, they always won the war. However, this series put a spin on that old axiom. One example occurs in the last three episodes of Season Two where Earth is attacked by Gordanian aliens. Hawkgirl, who is from outer space as well, calls upon her race—the Thanagarians—the lend a hand. Batman realizes that this is a trick and the Thanagarians set this attack up to take over the Earth. Hawkgirl has to decide between her adoptive or her home planet.

As you can see, this wasn't a show where Aquaman needed help battling poachers at the docks because even though Hawkgirl chose the Earth, she was seen in subsequent seasons as a traitor.

According to published accounts, “The Justice League” was supposed to end its run with Season Two, but it was a big hit on Cartoon Network, so more was demanded. Instead of doing more stories with the same seven characters, Timm and his crew decided to do something more adventurous. They took scores and scores of DC characters and added them to the show, redubbing it, “Justice League Unlimited”.

According to Wikipedia, there were “well over 50” characters on JLU—most of which were making their first televised appearances. As a former comic geek, it was cool to see guys like Red Tornado and Green Arrow and Dr. Fate show up and get some action. And with that many characters it would be understandable if the writing or art faltered a bit, but it didn't. It was still up to the same standards as the original Justice League run, which is nice to see.

And that what is so cool about this show. Sure, the writing and the animation is awesome, but the whole show is fun and the producers never lost sight of that. Yes, there are some “serious” issues and it's a bit more dark and adult than most super hero shows, but there are also some great action scenes, terrific interaction between the characters and lots of jokes (both obivous and inside baseball) that keeps the mood light.

My biggest problem with the show is that I can't find it on my cable channels anymore. It now airs on Boomerang, which is Cartoon Network's retro channel, and for some unknown reason; it isn't a part of any package for people who live in Burlington, MA. I've called the cable companies and asked for it—always under the guise of this channel if for my “Yogi Bear obsessed two-year-old daughter”—but they say that there are no plans to add it.

Bummer.

This Man Could Be Your Father

2009-10-01T13:59:00.003-04:00

Last week in a California prison, one of the cult members enraptured with a short, hippie psychotic named Charles Manson died of brain cancer. Her name was Susan Atkins and she was 61-years-old. In recent years, Atkins has become publicly contrite for what she did—she was part of the Helter Skelter bloodbath crew that freaked out much of the nation in August of 1969. After becoming a born-again Christian while incarcerated her last words were, “My God is a great God.” Despite her conversion and attempts at reconciliation with the families of the people that she mutilated, I doubt that there were a lot of tears shed for Atkins—she did repeatedly stab a woman who was eight-months pregnant just to “shut her up” and wrote the word “PIGS” in her blood on a wall—but there is some sort of public feeling towards her.

But I'm not sure what they are.

A few years ago I went through a phase when I was really interested in true crime stories and the more outlandish, the better. I read everything I could about the Maffia and serial killers and strange people who did strange things. There were two subjects that I always came back to: Helter Skelter and the Zodiac killings. I'm not going to talk too much about the Zodiac stuff because there's no need to right now, but there is something about Helter Skelter that I find truly bizarre and even after all of these years, I can't quite put my finger on it.*

* One of the things I find odd is that I have a two degrees of separation with this case as my mother went to high school with one of Manson's girls, Linda Kasabian. She was with the rest of the gang when they pulled up to the house on Cielo Drive, but she didn't kill anyone. Eventually, she testified against them in court. I asked my mom what she was like and she said, “She was sorta weird.” Thanks a lot mom, you're a wealth of knowledge.

I've read Manson prosecutor Victor Bugliosi's book “Helter Skelter” and Ed Saunder's “The Family”* a few times, I've seen a couple of documentaries, so I get what happened. But I guess what I don't understand is why it all went down. And maybe that's the point. It's difficult to find a reason why Manson and his cronies did what they did, maybe it was because he was truly a crazy man with a messiah complex. These people are normally a bit difficult to gauge.

I have no idea, but it got me thinking about the crimes again.

* “The Family” is a very, very good book. If you are interested in any of this stuff—even remotely—I can not recommend this book enough. Some of his writing is a little weird; he writes like a burnt-out hippie—probably because he was—and uses a lot onomatopoeia that takes some getting used to, but it's definitely worth the read. Hippie or not, you have to respect a man who goes camping in the desert with some of the Manson family so that he can gather research for his book.

When I read the books, the things that bothered me the most weren't the killings or even the sheer brutality of the killings, it was the little stuff that made me check my closets and look under my bed at night. In Bugliosi's book, he mentions something called “creepy crawlies” where in the middle of the night some of the Manson clan would dress from head to toe in black, go into the homes of people and rearrange their furniture while the home owners slept. These were essentially dry runs for the Helter Skelter mission and the were told to run if they saw the owners of the house.

Regardless of whether any violent acts were being done that night, how completely freaked out would you be if you woke up one morning, went to the bathroom like any normal day and then went down stairs and all of your stuff was rearranged? I would probably lose my mind. It's the death knell of any sort of any sort of illusion of safety that you may have in your home. When you are in YOUR home and you're asleep, nothing is supposed to get you—your guard is up (locked doors and windows) but at the same time your guard is down (you're asleep).

And what if you stumbled upon these people while getting a late-night snack? Supposedly they were told to scatter, but even still how can you get that thought out of your mind? How many sleepless nights would one have and how far would you jump if a floor board creaked at 2 am?

And these creepy crawlies were supposedly random too, that's what makes these exercises more scary. The home owner obstensively did nothing wrong. Their house was just at the wrong place and looked inviting, I suppose. The murders were supposed to be random or were meant to start a race war (that was foretold by the Beatles), but there's a lot of evidence that states that these weren't true.*

* The only bit of “random” murder that night was of 17-year-old Stephen Parent. He went to visit his an acquaintance who was living in the caretaker's house on the Helter Skelter property, hoping to sell him a clock radio. The guy didn't want it and when Parent hopped in his car and attempted to back out, it was at the same time that Manson's soldiers were beginning their seige. They shot and killed the kid.

These are the things that make one wonder whether life isn't just a set of random coincidences.

Bugliosi hung a conviction on Manson and his woman that said that the race war was the reasoning (he had to connect the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” found at one of the crime scenes to Manson somehow) behind the murders, though it's hard to believe that that was the true motive. Saunders has a few theories on the reasons for the murders including revenge—Terry Melcher was the son of Doris Day and a record producer. He was friends with the Beach Boys who were friends with Manson. Manson hung out with some of the Beach Boys (one of the Wilson brothers, I believe) and he played them some of their songs. They liked the tunes enough to bring them to Melcher, who passed. Melcher once lived at the home where Sharon Tate and her friends were massacred, perhaps Manson was sending a message.

Another of Saunders' theories was that Manson had some non-hippie associates (whom he met in jail) that were known to socialize with the mob as well as some highly powerful Hollywood executives. The reason why the LaBiancas were killed was because of alleged mob ties and the reason why Tate and her Hollywood friends were killed were because of some bizarro sex tapes and secrets that these high-powered people were worried about getting out in the public. Supposedly one movie starred Telly Savalas and someone else (I can't remember who—I don't have my book here) having a three-way with Mama Cass. That last sentence, BTW, is no joke. And to be honest, if someone taped me having sex with Mama Cass, I'd want them dead too. Who loves ya, baby indeed?

The third theory was that Manson was part of some larger Los Angeles devil/death cult and they simply told him to do it for an unknown reason. Supposedly this devil/death cult is one that the Zodiac killer belonged too and they told him to strike terror in Northern California during the same time. There is a book that says that the Zodiac Killer was a member of Manson's family, but I haven't read it. It's out of print and copies on Amazon and eBay are going for hundreds of dollars.

Do any of these motivations make any more sense than the other? No and I think that's why people are absolutely fascinated about these cases and these people 40 years later. I can think of no other crime, other than those of Jack the Ripper, that has people so interested almost a half-century later.

The other thing that I find intriguing, and was the title inspiration for the title of this entry, is that there were a couple of babies born on Spahn Ranch. Quick background: back in the late 60s people that didn't want to conform to society lived together in what is known as a commune. Basically, they threw away all of their possessions and tried to live the simple life. Most of the time, that didn't stick because “the simple life” is really code for “I'm lazy and don't feel like doing shit”, so with a bunch of lazy people lying around doing nothing; nothing got done. Communes folded.

Manson's commune was like that but since Charlie was the king and he saw women as subhuman, he made them do all of the work and their commune thrived for a while (until the cops came and busted them for dune buggy theft and then murder). This commune was also a bit different than the others in that drugs and sex held it together very tightly. Manson gave out LSD like candy and would often pair people up to have sex during orgy time. And accidents happen.

According to her obituary Susan Atkins gave birth to a baby named Zezozoze Zadfrack. He (I guess it's a he, though I wonder if it's a boy's or a girl's name – it's so pretty, it could be either) was born and lived on the commune until it was busted up by the cops and he and a few other kids were taken in as wards of the state. Not surprisingly, the New York Times Obit states that his whereabouts are unknown.

What would it be like to be this person? I assume that you already have a chip on your shoulder because you're in an orphanage and don't know who your real parents are, but to one day do a little research and find that your parents are Charles Manson (or one of his disciples) and Susan Atkins and that you were born in a glorified garbage dump? That has to do a number on you and there is not enough Newcastle Ale in the world to make those self-doubting crazy thoughts go away.

Is this information that you would even want to know?

As the cliché goes, the day that the cops fingered Manson and his hippie crew as the prime suspects for the killings of Tate and LaBianca “were the day the 60s died”. But that's horseshit, I didn't live during that era, but I've watched enough and read enough about it to know that the whole “Free Love” feeling was a crock. For three months during the summer of 1967, people tried to get together and love each other, but it didn't work. Thousands of kids were flooding into San Francisco weekly hoping to find some sort of new consciousness* and utopian way of living.

But the predators realized this too and they moved in with harder drugs, prostituiton and crime—taking advantage of these naive kids and screwing them up royally. Of course, the word didn't spread for awhile and more kids came out and tried to live these ideals and they were taken advantage of too leaving even more broken people.

* If I grew up in the 50s and 60s, had a war raging on that I was going to have to fight and was completely miserable, I'd try to find some way to change my view point too. But the problem with ex-hippies isn't that they tried and failed; it's that they tried and believe that they succeeded. They didn't succeed, they made everything worse.

Manson was one of these predators. He had been locked away in various reformatories since he was 12-years-old and went away for a couple of years during the early 1960s. When he was released, it must have been like walking into a paradise of fools for him. He was obviously charming and quick witted, so lots of women got with him. Where ever there are lots of women, that means that there's going to be some dudes trying to get some action, so Manson had them too. And he had plenty of drugs and had complete control of every aspect of their lives, which turned these middle-class, white bread kids into mini Manchurian Candidates.

For his whole life he had been beaten down and destroyed, now was his chance to lead with the children of the people who put him away. What is surprising is not that it happened, what's surprising is that it only happened once.

Larry King Part II or HOUSTON! HELLO!

2009-09-29T15:19:00.003-04:00