McNeilileaks

Welcome once again to McNeilileaks, in which McNeil confides his darkest thoughts with me via email and I leak them to the world. And there's nothing he can do to stop me! After watching a crisp and clean movie via streaming, McNeil writes to compare it favorably with the version he used to watch via, in his words, a "VHS copy I recorded from an over-the-air station. A copy where as the movie goes along, static lines appear bolder and bolder as a lightning storm gets closer and closer. Those were the days... trying to squeeze it in before the power went out."

Perfect

Allow me to quote THE POSSESSED by Witold Gombrowicz, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, one of the books I am reading right now: "He drank a shot of vodka. It did him good. He had another. Then a large glass of lager, a herring sandwich and two more shots of vodka. Perfect." Yes! That does sound perfect. And I don't even care for vodka or lager. I miss sandwiches, though. They have me on this special diet and I haven't had a sandwich in many months. Anyway, I had feelings of envy toward the fictional character who was drinking vodka and lager and eating a sandwich. I put myself in his place through the workings of my innocent childlike imagination, and the whole experience seemed pleasing indeed, though the character is in a state of turmoil as he begins his enviable meal. Look, I would be allowed the herring, and even the vodka, but not the lager or the bread. Hmm, this reminds me of when my mom kept saying she wanted to have a slice of pizza and a beer for her 50th birthday, though she had never had even a sip of beer in her life... she just thought it looked so good on TV! In the end, she did not succumb to that temptation, nor has she to this very day.

The Meatballs of Yesterday

To my recollection, four things happened yesterday. 1. I got a text from Laraine Newman! She told me that the New York Times (or a newsletter thereof, to be precise) had some nice things to say about MYSTERY CUDDLERS, the pilot I co-created with Pendleton Ward. They say it has a "bright, appealing oddness," if that's the sort of thing you enjoy. 2. A package arrived from my brother! It contained a giant cookie jar in the shape of an owl. The owl is wearing a straw boater and a bow tie, of course. And the hat cleverly serves as the lid of the cookie jar. Thanks, Will! I stare at this cookie jar a lot! I would put a photo of it here, but I feel my masterful description could not be improved upon. Oh, you know what? Screw it! Pardon my rough he-man language of the dirty streets! 3. A cat sneezed all over me. If you have a cat, one day it will sneeze all over you, a fact taken from real life that we worked into episode one of season one of ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE. I felt the need to change my shirt, which bore tangible evidence of the cat sneeze. So I broke in a shirt that Ace Atkins brought me as a souvenir of his recent trip to New York City. It says "Daddy's Little Meatball" on it. Ace didn't know this, but I once read a New York Times article about such a shirt, which I recall because I put it into one of my many unpublished novels (and subsequently deleted - the detail, not the novel, though I should probably delete the novel). 4. After I "blogged" about Julian Barnes yesterday, I thought of my childhood friend Henry Barnes (no relation, I assume), who dove into the bayou to retrieve a softball once. That was his excuse, anyway. Boy, did Sister Lois chew him out about that! It was 7th grade, the year I went to Catholic school, because Mom had a job there. The school was right there on the bayou. What was Henry supposed to do? NOT dive into the bayou, which was right there? My brother attended the same school and became an altar boy, even though we were Southern Baptists. How did that happen? That has to be against the rules. I hope the Pope doesn't read this! How many masses did my little brother invalidate with his non-Catholic subterfuge? I hate to say it, but there may be any number of souls sitting around in Purgatory to this day, all thanks to my brother. But the point is, Henry grew up to be the mayor of Bayou La Batre, which I believe he still is! I'll have to ask Mom. I haven't seen him in about half a century (see also).

A Walk in the Park

It's too cold to walk in the park right now, but don't you remember the park? The park where Dr. Theresa and I walk? And there's a trash bin of books there? I mean, a "little free library"? Well, a little while back, we were walking in the park and I found a Julian Barnes novel called ENGLAND, ENGLAND. I don't know why, but I thought he was an odd author to find lying there abandoned in the park like that. This book doesn't have an owl in it, at least not yet, but it does have Jerry Lewis in it. I should note that Julian Barnes works a subtle (?) variation on the hoary idea that the French love Jerry Lewis, which is pretty nervy coming from a guy who wrote a novel called FLAUBERT'S PARROT (which had an owl in it), but the execution was deft and casual, so I decided not to cry about it. FULL DISCLOSURE: I say it's too cold to walk in the park, but Ace and I walked around the neighborhood today.

Domes

Last night, Dr. Theresa and I watched FORBIDDEN PLANET - her idea, not that it matters. And now she wants to watch PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES! I ventured that that one would pair well with ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, which I kept suggesting during the Halloween season, but she never quite came around on it. Looks like the winds of change are shifting, though! Just like Bob Dylan said. Sort of. But that's not why I'm here! I just wanted to say that, having been thoroughly conditioned by McNeil's obsession with decorative obelisks in movies, I could not help but note that Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) has a groovy space obelisk in his funky alien living room. You can see it in the image above, which I captured from our TV screen. The obelisk in question sits roughly at his left elbow (his left, your right!). As I cleverly remarked to Dr. Theresa, the exterior of his home resembles Devo's headquarters on Sunset Blvd. As proof, I took out my phone and showed her a photo of the latter building, because that's what we do now as a people, we see things that look like other things and then we take out our phones and find pictures to show people who maybe care and maybe don't. AND! Although you can't tell it from the image above, Dr. Morbius seems to share an interior decorator with Jerry Lewis. Oh! The appearance of Robby the Robot here reminds me of a chapter of SOUR BLUEBERRIES, the novel I deleted from the "internet" when I guess I was "going through some things." A "fictional character" (me?) brings up FORBIDDEN PLANET and another character says "It's boring. I hate it." Then he says that Robby the Robot is no B-9 from LOST IN SPACE. I, I mean, "Chet" naively asks if they aren't exactly the same, at which point, to quote the novel, "'No. Their domes are completely different,' said Jay. He started drawing their domes so Chet could compare B-9’s acceptable dome to Robby the Robot’s dome worthy only of hate." You know what, "Jay"? Last night I really enjoyed watching Robby's robot brains kind of whirling around in his head like he was the Glass Cat from the Oz series of novels. Oh, wait, that reminds me, I also wanted to tell Oz fan Laura Lippman (no monkey fan) that FORBIDDEN PLANET has a monkey in it!

The Last of the Old Comic Books

You know the story. How Tom Franklin brought me a stack of old comic books in the hospital, and even more stacks of even more old comic books when I got home. And how I began to purchase old comic books for my very own self until I amassed quite a pile. How I found it so soothing to read myself to sleep with old comic books... then... something changed in our interesting modern times, or perhaps something cracked in my warped little soul, and I found that I was permanently out of the mood to read old comic books. I've been slowly finishing the few remaining old comic books in my possession. There are two left. One of them, coincidentally, is about Deathlok, the first superhero I ever mentioned on this "blog"... in the "blog's" very first "post"! That exclamation point was forced rather than felt. I just don't care anymore. Anyway, in the old comic book I was grudgingly reading last night out of a sense of duty, there was a guy named Jack O'Lantern, but get this. He was wearing, like, a purple sack on his head. What does that have to do with jack-o'-lanterns? I don't know and now I never will, having given up old comic books forever. But that's not the point. The point is that Jack O'Lantern goes "GOOD WORK, OWL WOMAN." And then you see this character who I guess is Owl Woman standing over there. I don't know who she is, either. She didn't look too much like an owl from the little I saw of her. Now I'm going to ask you to open your mind to some groovy concepts. So, as you will recall, when I really read comic books, back when I was a kid... that is, when I went and bought what were then NEW comic books from Schambeau's grocery store or Red's Drugs in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, I would have thought of this Jack O'Lantern (with a purple sack on his head!) thing as being a weird, amazing COMIC BOOK FROM THE FUTURE! Because it came out in 1988, when I hadn't seen a comic book in at least 12 years. Yes, I stupidly thought those days were behind me. So it's an "old comic book" now but in another way it was... oh, hell, who cares? You get it. I would say I have wasted enough of your time but we both know I haven't wasted nearly enough of it.

Owl Balls

Just read about "owl balls" in a manuscript. It doesn't mean what you think it means. This reminds me of when I read a manuscript in June that had some owls in it and I couldn't tell you about it yet, and I still can't, and I can't tell you about this other manuscript I'm reading right now, either, no, I can't tell you about anything, really, we were never here, you never saw me. Well, as long as we're here, though, because we are here, after all, I can tell you I dreamed about a guy from high school I hardly ever think about. McNeil knew him, too, so I emailed McNeil about my dream, in which this guy we knew in high school dressed a duck in human clothes and the duck didn't like it. Which reminds me. Okay, this creepy bio I read of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald? Well, first some backstory: McNeil asked at some point why the Million Dollar Book Club, which he described in belittling terms, had never read a biography of Lila Lee if we were so damn great, or words to that effect. And I am afraid I emailed back to him in the coarsest of language, something like "I don't even know who the hell Lila Lee is." And I still don't! But she was mentioned in this Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald book as, I assume, some sort of divine retribution. I'll find a picture of her with which to illustrate this "post" just to make my punishment complete. So, to conclude with another subject entirely, last night I got a text from my sister, which said, "What song goes like this 'I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish'?" And I texted back, "I don't know. Is it called... 'I Wish'?" I had no idea what she was talking about. I called her up so she could sing it for me, but it was just her going "I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish" in a kind of monotone, which made us both laugh. She insisted I had put it on a mixtape for her when she was a kid, and that it was the very end of the song she was thinking of. I was afraid the part of my brain retaining that knowledge had been completely over-electrified in a recent episode. She said, "It was on the same tape with that Nick Lowe song 'Lucky Dog,'" like that would help, which made us laugh again. We certainly do laugh a lot. The point is, I had no memory of that Nick Lowe song at all! Like it never existed as far as my brain was concerned! This story has a great ending. Some time later, as I ate chili prepared by Dr. Theresa, I suddenly realized that the song my sister was trying to remember was "David Watts" by the Kinks! So I called her up and sang part of the chorus and we had a celebration of remembrance. (PS Coming back to say I read another page and this manuscript has White Owl cigars in it, too!)