Nine Years in the Making

Hey look everybody, I haven't bothered you too much about ACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, the exciting multi-part interview I did with Ace Atkins about his work on the Pauly Shore magnum opus JURY DUTY, have I? Tell me the truth! But! Back in 2016, I did tease you with a few details of the time Ace was Abe Vigoda's hand double during that production. Well, I'm happy (?) to announce that Episode 4 of ACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD is now available ("click" here), and I was finally able to dig up even more details of the "Abe Vigoda incident," a phrase I just now decided to put quotation marks around. If you think about it, a mere shift from B to C, already so close together in the alphabet, turns Abe into Ace. Think about it! You can find every episode of ACE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD as it becomes available on my convenient "linktree" thingamabob.

Fun with Kafka

Yesterday, as I texted Megan Abbott, I kept singing a phrase from Kafka's diaries in a Bob Dylan voice. It really works! Try it at home. "I keep remembering her ugly huge solemn Renaissance ostrich feather hats from the past"... I know it seems complicated! But just dive right in. Here are some helpful hints as you endeavor to sing the preceding phrase from Kafka's diaries over and over in a Bob Dylan voice: 1. Try to cram "I keep remembering her" into the upbeat. After that, it's a strictly normal rock-and-roll chugging rhythm all the way, as long as you 2. sing "Renaissance" in a triplet configuration. 3. Don't try to sing the phrase to the tune of "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat," though that would be the expected impulse, nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn't quite fit, though. Just make up your own Bob Dylan melody. It's easy! Bob Dylan does it all the time! Okay, now you are ready to have the time of your life singing "I keep remembering her ugly huge solemn Renaissance ostrich feather hats from the past" from Kafka's diary entry of February 13, 1914, in your best Bob Dylan voice. The most important thing is to have fun!

Just Think

This is not what I came here to tell you, but THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES has owls in it: "But just think of those summer nights! The owls whimpering, the night moaning, and when it all got too spooky we both got into my bed so we could go on talking." But no, I came here to say that I watched a Tim Holt western called THUNDERING HOOFS, and... well, first let me say something about these Tim Holt westerns. They're just great. The average runtime is about 65 minutes, I guess, and they all have the same plot. There's some kind of corrupt businessman or official who is messing around with the welfare of goodhearted townspeople, and here comes a stranger, Tim Holt, riding in to save the day. At some point, though, the bad guys twist it around so it looks like Tim Holt is in charge of their rotten scheme! So he gets locked up or ostracized or what-have-you, and things look pretty bleak for a minute, but it's okay, because he figures out how to expose the jerks and be celebrated as the hero he truly is. It's an incredibly comforting formula, and reminds me of some of Julia Pott's observations about the basic template of romantic comedy, but I put all of her thoughts on the subject into one of my unpublished novels, so I won't repeat them, not because I think anything will ever happen with any of my unpublished novels, but just because it seems exhausting to type it all up again. Or even to think about it! The main point is that I mused wisely to myself, regarding THUNDERING HOOFS, "'Hoofs' looks very wrong to me. I always thought it was 'hooves!'" So then I opened up Kafka's diaries, and in the next passage I read, the translator Ross Benjamin used "hoofs"!!!! So, boy, that was something. So I was like, I guess Tim Holt and Ross Benjamin know what the hell they're talking about, I'll leave this matter in their capable hoofs. BUT THEN! I told McNeil all about it, because he had just emailed me to relate his own uncanny coincidence. Oh, you'd like to hear about it too? Okay! You twisted my arm. Ouch! So, McNeil happened to idly pick up his novelization of the Dean Martin vehicle WHO'S GOT THE ACTION? and read a couple of pages. Wait! I must add that McNeil scrupulously clarified that the book may have been a novelization OR maybe the movie was based on a novel with, in its original printing, another title, and then they changed the title of the novel to tie it in with the movie. Nobody knows for sure! Because, like me, McNeil no longer cares to look things up. It's presumptuous of me to say that. Maybe he still likes to look things up. Anyway, he picked up the book on April 11 of this year... then, by chance, a few days later, he picked up an old notebook (a very old notebook) and learned that he had recorded a showing of WHO'S GOT THE ACTION? on... are you ready?... April 11, 1983!!!! You can pick your jaw up off the floor now. Anyway, though, the point is that McNeil issued a statement that he had never once in his young life seen "hoofs" used and he found the very thought of it unacceptable. And I was like, to McNeil, "Now that I've discussed this with you, I won't have to 'blog' about it!" Which, as you can see, was a dirty lie.

Per Se

So anyway you know I quit social media because I never stop yammering about it. Quitting social media means that a lot of times I don't know what anyone is doing, not that it's any of my beeswax. Like, I text Megan something about Kafka's diaries, and she texts back that she's behind on her reading because she and Bill and Jimmy are at the movie theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, watching BLOOD SIMPLE. (To be clear, they're watching BLOOD SIMPLE in the current day, it wasn't on the bill when Oswald was arrested, as it came out many years later.) And I am like, mentally, "!!!" Because I didn't see that coming, "that" being Megan and Bill and Jimmy watching BLOOD SIMPLE in the theater where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Oddly, I was thinking about Lee Harvey Oswald yesterday, before getting that text, because I searched the "blog" to see if I had ever before mentioned Harvey comics, which, to my astonishment, I had not. I kept turning up allusions to Oswald as I searched. I've mentioned several Harvey comics characters here, but not, apparently, the Harvey comics brand per se, before yesterday. Isn't that something? And that reminded me of the time I went to the Dreamworks offices - they own the Harvey characters, or did at the time - and pitched my idea for a show, a show that both embraced and mocked the concept of the "gritty reboot." It had all your favorite Harvey characters, and all your least favorites, every Harvey character I could think of, even such misbegotten creatures as Baby Huey and Sad Sack! Except each and every one of them had been aged up into their 20s (of course, Sad Sack was a soldier and looked fairly haggard; I may have aged him down!) and they were all brooding and sulking and hot and tormented. The hook, which I still think is pretty good, was that Casper starts out the show as a regular guy, but midway through the first season, he's murdered! And that's how he becomes the friendly ghost. Who was I telling about this recently? It must have been Quinn. And I was saying that Richie Rich is in a coma, that's the big reveal at the end of Season 1. Everyone thinks he's running the town as a notorious recluse, but his evil butler Cadbury (not evil in the Harvey comics!) is keeping him incapacitated and... oh, who cares? But Quinn was like, "His spirit could be roaming around like in the movie JUST LIKE HEAVEN!" (I paraphrase. Also, that's a big spoiler for JUST LIKE HEAVEN, sorry. I really am sorry, because it works better if you don't know.) And I was like (responding to Quinn's idea), "No way! That doesn't correspond with my artistic vision!" But now that I've thought of it some more, it's fine. It's a good idea, Quinn! But I guess we wouldn't find out until Season 2. None of it matters, because the meeting was all "Ha ha ha! Wonderful idea! We'll talk soon! You're going to be a big man in this town! You're going to be running this dump one day! We love you! Let's get married! Hooray! Hooray!" and then... nothing. (Hey, that was only eight years ago, maybe they're still thinking about it.) Well, we're getting off the subject, which is that I googled it and found out that Bill and Jimmy and Megan were in Dallas for a festival put on by the Southwest Review. So when I "clicked" on the "web" site of that fine publication, I found an awesome interview that Mary Miller did with hero Lynda Barry! (You can read it, and you should, by "clicking" here.) I didn't know Mary Miller loved Lynda Barry so much! Or it's equally possible that I knew and forgot. But you know what? None of this is why I thought I was obliged to "blog" today. See, I accidentally read a New York Times op-ed that had one of those awful, cloying titles that usually warns me to skip it. But I read it for some reason, and it reminded me that THE GREAT GATSBY has a character in it to whom our narrator Nick refers at one point as "Owl Eyes." So THE GREAT GATSBY has an owl in it. I was like, "So what? My 'blog' readers will never know if I just fail to mention it." But my conscience overwhelmed me! And I knew that even though I read THE GREAT GATSBY many, many, many, many, many years ago, long before I cared (and eventually stopped caring) that every book has an owl in it, I was bound by honor to tell you that THE GREAT GATSBY has an owl in it. My life is a prison I've built for myself!

Art

When Quinn visited, we spent some hours in a coffee shop doodling aimlessly as I breathed in the Covid germs that would soon lay low my household. Anyway, whilst in the midst of doodling in the tragic manner thusly described, I produced this great work of art (above) - art! it thrives in times of adversity (Dr. Theresa and Lee Durkee and I debated this point while eating sushi the other night; Dr. Theresa and Lee were on the side of art, while I held a contrary view regarding its usefulness)! -, which, as you can see (go back and find the subject of this sentence if you can), Quinn wisely framed upon her return to Los Angeles for the edification (the art was) of her cat Gino. It represents Casper and his cousin (?) Spooky, who, if memory serves, and it probably doesn't, was branded by Harvey comics (the latter was) as "the tuff li'l ghost," but I'm not going to look it up because I don't care about looking things up anymore, or about anything else either. Except! Speaking of my lucrative new career in the visual arts, remember how I told you about an art show I'm going to be in and then I listed all the other people who have previously appeared on the "blog" who will also be in the art show, but I wasn't sure I had caught them all? Well, the other day I looked again, and Ako Castuera is right at the top of the list! How could I have missed her? How could have I missed her when she was right there at the top of the list where she belongs?

Breakthrough for an Animal

You know three things about me. 1. I'm sore all over from yesterday's garbage misadventure. 2. I get all my ideas from the obituaries. 3. I like to alert you whenever the New York Times mentions the TV show GREEN ACRES, mostly because they tend to get everything about it wrong. Number 1 came to mind just because I am sore all over, but numbers 2 and 3 were combined today in a way I think you will find most stimulating, yes, most stimulating indeed. So an underground cartoonist named John Peck passed away, and he was quoted on GREEN ACRES in his very own New York Times obituary. From the brief snippet, it is very clear that he understood GREEN ACRES completely, unlike the New York Times, although by quoting him on the subject - and in the limited space of an obituary, of all places! - they nudge themselves into acceptable territory. Mr. Peck, in a 1987 interview (a time when watching TV was considered a hobby for dolts... why, I recall when I was first employed by TBS in 1993, I would go to parties, and people would ask what I did, and I would tell them, and they would say - gleaming like a glazed ham with angelic pride! - "We don't even OWN a TV!" like I was supposed to faint or, maybe, lift them onto my shoulders and carry them around from room to room, blowing a trumpet)... what was I saying? Oh! So, Mr. Peck contrasted that attitude with the "high esteem" in which the GREEN ACRES character Arnold the Pig was held, because watching TV (an activity for which Arnold was famous), while looked down upon in humans, was "a breakthrough for an animal." The New York Times obituary department categorizes his statement as "dry."

The Garbage Story

Well, it's Thursday, the day I take the garbage to the end of the driveway to be picked up, as I'm sure Elon Musk and his doe-eyed teen protégé Big Balls know from examining my personal records. It's no secret anymore! Anyhow, I could barely tilt the garbage can back on its wheels to roll it down. It was like Dr. Theresa had thrown away a burlap sack filled with bowling balls without my knowledge! And then, once I got the garbage can rolling, it was all I could do to hold it back. It was so damn heavy that it was pulling me down the steep driveway beyond - and I'm sure this is no exaggeration - the speed of sound! I was like the Chuck Yeager of garbage cans. So, anyway, I'm sure you'll recall when the tree fell on our house. It turns out that the tree also made a hole in the garbage can lid, so that, in addition to garbage, the can was filled with rainwater, the heaviest substance known to science. I wrote about it in my diary, of course. And I was like, "I can't wait to tell Ace about it on our daily walk around the neighborhood!" But then I was like, "That's not enough! The people need to know my story!" I just wish my grandparents could be alive to know that a kid named Big Balls is helping run the government. They'd be so excited! After washing my mouth out with soap. Speaking of which, McNeil wrote to say that he saw a commercial where a guy sprays deodorant down the back of his pants. Once again, I thought of my grandparents and how much they'd be vomiting all the time and punching holes in walls with their bloody fists if only they could see us now. And they weren't even violent or especially emotional people. They had regular emotions! Still, I doubt George Washington himself would find it any harder to grasp our fascinating modern times when it's so exciting to be alive and guessing what's next. Anyway, I really pulled a lot of muscles and hurt myself in various ways today with the garbage can. Pity me!