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!)

Sunny and Red

The book (see yesterday’s “post”) did inform me that Nelson Eddy had a bodyguard named Red Boyles, which I found hilarious for reasons requiring, I believe, no explanation. Furthermore, Jeanette MacDonald, later in life, enjoyed the company of a regular “escort” named Sunny Griffin, which is not a significantly funny name. But Sunny Griffin’s day job? Makeup man at a mortuary! I guess it is, if not funny, something... for a mortuary makeup man to go by a cheerful moniker like Sunny. But maybe I don’t know enough about mortuaries. One time Dr. Theresa and I were in a bar in Decatur, Georgia, I think, and a guy there was like... wait, his girlfriend was writing a big old grimoire by hand at another table. And this guy was like, “Did you know you can just walk in and get a job in a mortuary with no qualifications? That’s what I did!” And he was really happy about it. Now, we don’t have to take his word for everything. Then, as I recall, he said some weird stuff about remembering a photo he had seen on someone’s refrigerator of Dr. Theresa in the gloves she wore at our wedding, and something else weird about what she had done with her hair that day, which I think may have been his job? Fixing up hair at a mortuary? Or maybe I got that from an X-FILES episode. Then he said something funny about his hometown, or he said it in a funny way, which, though I can’t or won’t explain it right now, became the basis of a long-running inside joke between Dr. Theresa and myself. I hasten to add that the joke was not at the fellow’s expense, as you may be forgiven for thinking after he had made startling personal remarks about a photo of Dr. Theresa he had seen once and never forgotten, like he was Dana Andrews in LAURA, while his girlfriend scrawled evil runes in a big, black book (the latter being a detail I drew on, if loosely, for my 2016 story collection MOVIE STARS) but no, it had to do with the musical intonation he struck while saying the name of his hometown, that’s all, a very innocent bit of japery indeed. This little walk down memory lane has reminded me of a song by Bill Taft’s current band. I’ve gone to the trouble of making it the number one selection on the following very manageable 10-song playlist (for you to experience as you read this “post” over and over again) of bands featuring Bill and the cellist Brian Halloran, though another of their bands, Hubcap City, seems to have been scrubbed from the music streaming service entirely, just like Jerry Clower before it. (Hey, just to bring it full circle, which I don’t think I’m actually doing, Bill and Brian were both in our wedding! Brian played his cello as Dr. Theresa, before she was a Dr., came wafting down the aisle on the wings of love, one assumes.)

Of Course She Did!

The rule is that every time I read a book with an owl in it, I have to tell you about it, no matter how the book makes me feel inside. It is my sad duty to inform you that the Million Dollar Book Club is reading a biography of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. You knew it would come to this. But that's not the bad part! How can I say this without alienating all the Nelson Eddy fans who flock to the "blog"? Well, reading this book, Nelson Eddy comes off as a scary monster, despite the efforts of the author to sort of gloss over everything that seems to make Nelson Eddy so very definitely a scary, terrifying monster. And the more she glosses it over, the scarier Nelson Eddy becomes. It makes for unpleasant reading. This is the nadir of the Million Dollar Book Club. Hey! I'll briefly liven things up by mentioning that today, while I was getting ready to take my blood pressure, I read some of that Pessoa biography, and Pessoa had a friend with a "full set of gold teeth." A full set! Not just a couple. All of this guy's teeth were made of gold. Okay, now I feel better. Back to the book with the scary monster. So, a contemporary reviewer quoted in the dual biography doubts that the "night owl clientele" of the Cocoanut Grove are going to dig the restrained decorum of Jeanette MacDonald. Anyway, as I texted to Megan - I don't have my phone here, so I'll approximate my observation - "I never dreamed the most messed up people we would ever read about would be Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy." (I know you don't know who they are. Would it kill you to google something? That aside is to you, the "blog" reader.) Megan texted back that they were more messed up than Salvador Dali. I responded they were more messed up than Tennessee Williams. She texted back that they were more messed up than Errol Flynn. And so on. I'll tell you one good thing. This book caused Megan to dig out the Jeanette MacDonald paper dolls she had when she was a kid. Of course she did!

The Eisenstein Effect

Speaking of TV that has commercials in it, I keep meaning to tell you about an ad for cream cheese that was bothering Dr. Theresa, due to the inadvertent suggestion on the part of the cream cheese company, as Dr. Theresa saw it, that the protagonist of their commercial had eaten her (the protagonist's) cat. "They don't understand the Eisenstein effect!" Dr. Theresa shouted on November 1 of this year, a date I can give you with 100% certainty, as I recorded the plaintive outburst in my diary at the time of its occurrence.

Who?

Hey! Do you want to watch MYSTERY CUDDLERS but you couldn't stay up until 3 AM Central Time like I did? I have good news for you. You can see the whole pilot by "clicking" this "link" to the Adult Swim youtube channel. I watched it on TV just the way people did in olden times. I was sitting through a Dawn dishwashing liquid commercial that came on before it and thinking unironically, "This is nourishing my anticipation!" That is the kind of thing I sit around thinking. Then the middle of the show was interrupted by an ad for generic Viagra. Really, nothing could have made me happier. They (some people at the network) asked us just last week, "Uh, where is the commercial break supposed to go?" and Pen and I were like, "Uh-oh! Hmm! Whoops!" Then Pen thought of a funny place where it could go, which made me laugh when it happened at roughly 3:11 AM Central Time, but now that commercial break is lost forever in the history of broadcast television. Before you "click," I should tell you I play an owl on the show, which I only mention because the casual "blog" observer will think I am obsessed with owls. "And now at last," you will be thinking, "he has become one." But is that guy, the one who seems so interested in owls, the "real" me? This is like when I tried to explain my unicorn pin to Hendrik Hertzberg. It really doesn't matter! What I'm saying is that the owl was 100% Pen's idea, and so was me playing the owl, and by "playing the owl," I mean I sat in our bedroom closet saying "Whooooo?" over and over into a microphone I had borrowed from Ace Atkins. In conclusion, MYSTERY CUDDLERS was inspired in very small part by my novel SWEET BANANAS, which I can say without fear of crass self-promotion because that novel existed only in a limited edition of 365 copies with 365 different covers, which are all off the street, and can only be purchased in alleyways, like in GOODFELLAS, when Robert De Niro is telling Lorraine Bracco, "That's right, keep going, yes, that's it, that dark alleyway just to right, go in there," I paraphrase.

Car

Hey, remember how I told you that my dad has been building a car over the past 10 years of weekends, I mean building it from nothing but an idea in his head into a car? Well, he was asked to be in a car show this weekend and I thought I would show you what the car looks like now (see above). He is almost ready to race it! Which Mom continues to be less than thrilled about. I think that will happen within six months. Please do not concern yourself that Dad seems to have sprawled his car over at least one ADA parking space. This is where he was asked to unload it when he first got to the car show. My dad is in compliance with all known laws!

The Last Patty Melt

I see that word has gotten out about MYSTERY CUDDLERS, a pilot created and written by Pen - that's Pendleton Ward! - and me for Adult Swim. They're going to be airing it in the wee small hours of the 19th, as Frank Sinatra would have said, probably, had he been informed of the matter. As I know from reading a biography of Dean Martin, he (Frank's friend Dean) was up at that hour, watching cowboy movies. Dino couldn't sleep! I would be afraid I had just alienated the potential audience if I didn't know for sure that the people who read this "blog" don't exist. So it's going to be on at 3 AM ET, according to the Adult Swim schedule, or 4 AM, according to other places on the "internet," so you'd best cover your bets. Just like Dean Martin would do, I'm assuming, though I'm not even sure what "cover your bets" means. But here I am sitting on all the most important parts! MYSTERY CUDDLERS has an amazing cast we were lucky to get, including Pam Grier and Randall Park as the eponymous cuddlers. Elsewhere in the cast, Maria Bamford! Michael Winslow of POLICE ACADEMY fame! (We wrote a part especially for him. Then we were like, "What if he can't do it???" but he could.) Brian Posehn! "Weird Al" Yankovic! A little kid named Maverick! That's his real name! I consider Maverick my personal discovery. And the boarders! I didn't discover them. They have already been discovered. Another crew of your dreams! Charmaine Verhagen! Graham Falk! Evan Borja! And Pen himself. Yes, yes, now it can be revealed, it was Pen with whom I went to Bob's Big Boy in May of 2023, after a meeting kicking it all off. There I consumed perhaps my final patty melt, given recent... events. It was good! Oh yeah, and the music is by Joe Wong! To the show, not to the patty melt. Though if Joe wanted to, he could write a good tone poem evoking a patty melt. Looking over my ancient emails I see that interest in MYSTERY CUDDLERS was proclaimed by the network in July 2022, and you know what? From what I've noticed about this business - ha ha! I have noticed almost nothing about this business - this all seems like really fast work (I was just in Los Angeles a few weeks ago for the final sound mix!) and I'm really happy you'll get to see it soon. Everybody who worked on it is great and nice and easy to work with and I hope you will scrutinize the credits frame by frame and appreciate everyone you find there and I'm very sorry that I'm far too lazy to type a complete list here. Wait! Maybe I meant "hedge your bets." POSTSCRIPT! It's definitely 4 AM Eastern/3 AM Central. You see, Adult Swim's "web" site was sneakily, if efficiently, pitying me as a pathetic inhabitant of the Central Time Zone, and automatically updating my "browsing" experience to reflect my location... which I guess it is tracking, and no doubt handing over to the proper authortities.

Everybody's Talking

Last night Dr. Theresa and I were watching a TV show which, despite taking place in our up-to-date modern times, had a plot point about Alexander the Great's horse, then I got in bed and read a book by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis instead of an old comic book, and the narrator mentioned Alexander the Great's horse, then I decided it was no big deal because everybody is always talking about Alexander the Great's horse.

Passing Through

As you know (?), I take my blood pressure twice a day. Before doing so, I sit silently for five minutes, for a ten-minute total per day. And as I sit so silently and still, waiting to take my blood pressure with all the suspense of someone slowly scratching off a lottery ticket, or Charlie Bucket peeling off the wrapper of a chocolate bar, I read a book. To qualify as my "blood pressure book," the book must be a sturdy hardcover with a mighty spine that allows the volume to lie open flat on the table. That is the only requirement. All this you know. But I don't think you knew that my current blood pressure book is a biography of Fernando Pessoa, which is about as long as THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY. Anyhow! And forgive me for going over some of my other reading habits but it's so obviously important. Anyhow! I have also been reading old comic books at night, ever since Tom Franklin brought me some old comic books in the hospital. But I have to say I'm getting tired of the old comic books. Something has... changed. Something in the... I want to say... no I don't... national mood??? I didn't say it! Let's not talk about it! Once I finish the current pile, which is swiftly dwindling, that may be it for old comic books, at least for a while. Old comic books can't soothe me anymore. Anyhow! ANYHOW! I was very surprised, as Pessoa's biographer, Richard Zenith, which sounds like a name young Fernando Pessoa would have made up, analyzed a specific sort of Pessoa poem by saying, and here I quote my blood pressure book, "And the scenes and moods are not only juxtaposed, they also interpenetrate, passing through each other the way Superman passes through walls, without him or the walls losing their structural integrity." Talk about juxtaposing and interpenetrating: at last my blood pressure book and my old comic books had met! BUT WHY? The comparison is striking for a number of reasons, several of which I am about to tell you until you can take no more. First! The allusion does not seem particularly Pessoa-friendly, especially since Pessoa died in 1935, well before the creation of Superman. Now! We must of course admit that the biographer has an advantage, in this case, over his subject... that of still being alive (as far as I know). Therefore, he can draw from any range of examples he likes, including those from a future unimaginable even to his very imaginative subject. BUT! Pessoa is conducting seances just a couple of pages later. Isn't a ghost something that passes through walls? Might not a ghost be a more universally recognizable figure for the average reader, if the average reader pictures something that passes through walls without losing its structural integrity or altering the wall? I hope it is not blasphemous to suggest that one also thinks of Jesus, in his appearance to St. Thomas. But I'm not done! The biographer's Superman example is interesting to me because... do people know Superman can do that? I mean, I do. But I have made a serious study of all his oddest powers. A superhero who is more famous for vibrating through a wall is the Flash, if you know about the Flash, but, of course, more people know about Superman than know about the Flash... yet the question remains! Does the reader with a rudimentary knowledge of Superman realize that he can vibrate through a wall? I have no evidence to back up what I'm about to say, but I suspect that the average reader, if asked to imagine Superman going through a wall, would picture the "Man of Steel" busting right through it with his super fists, like the Kool-Aid man or the Schlitz malt liquor bull, not that my latter two examples were known for using their fists. The Schlitz malt liquor bull, being a hooved quadruped, was not even capable of making a fist! While the Kool-Aid man may or may not have been able to make a fist, I doubt whether he had the arm extension necessary for pounding down a wall with it, especially as he, if I recall correctly, grasped in one hand a pitcher of the same sweet liquid with which his living body was filled. Nevertheless, it can be easily proven with video evidence that both the Kool-Aid man and the Schlitz malt liquor bull BODILY knocked down their walls, as, I put forth, most people would credit Superman with doing as well. (I am including the "beer label" on this "post," even though the Schlitz malt liquor ads issued, according to my hazy memories, the specific command "Don't say beer, say bull!" May the Schlitz malt liquor bull forgive me and not crash through my wall. Amen. Not that I am worshipping a golden calf! Not even a hypothetical one made, unlike the all-too-fleshly Schlitz malt liquor bull, of golden malt liquor, however tempted I might be at this moment to drink a calf-sized container of such a brew.)

Out of the Murk

Well, I've had this copy of MERCIER AND CAMIER on the shelf for 20 years, at least, I bet, without opening it. Probably more like 30! Did I read in a Samuel Beckett biography that he didn't like it much? I don't know. Maybe not. Something kept me away from it. I don't know what. It was on just the shelf where I thought it might be, though. The pages are brown with age. A sticker on the front tells me I bought it used at A Cappella Books. Six dollars! Which seems like a lot. The back cover claims that it is "the first paperback edition" of the work. I knew an owl would be too on the nose, and I was right. I did not find an owl. For a while, the dual protagonists... and that's how I ended up reading it. Tom Franklin texted me, asking about novels with "dual protagonists" (of which he has written a couple himself). That's how MERCIER AND CAMIER popped into my old noggin. Anyhow, Mercier and Camier are stumbling around in the dark for a long time, out in the middle of nowhere, perfect place for an owl... too perfect. "Strange animals loom, giant horses and cows, out of the murk do you but raise your head." Then, on the next-to-last page, as if to taunt me, "We did not meet many animals, said Camier."