The Music Critics

Last night as we were watching the John Wayne movie McQ, Dr. Theresa noted that the theme to McQ reminded her an awful lot of the theme to THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123. She conjectured that Elmer Bernstein "got lazy." I replied that while I agreed with Dr. Theresa's observation about the similarity of the themes, Elmer Bernstein didn't seem like the lazy type to me, and I wasn't even sure which movie came first. So I looked it up, and they both came out the same year! So I suppose there was just something in the air, something that went, "Ba-dum-dum-dum, Ba-dum-dum-dum," and composers Elmer Bernstein and David Shire heard it independently with their magical musical ears. (Dr. Theresa also noted, brilliantly, I thought, when watching McQ stride across a lobby, "They should have had John Wayne play Frankenstein." But that's a different subject!) Here's the thing! WHILE we were watching McQ, I received an email from McNeil, who said that sometimes the music of Hank Williams made him think that ol' Hank "went to too many luaus." I don't know about that, although a lot of his songs that aren't depressing are about fun parties. McNeil's remark rests, however, in my belief, or assumption, mostly on instrumentation. "It's not a criticism," insisted McNeil.

Wolves

I had nightmares about wolves the other night... and let's leave aside for a moment that the very first dreams I recall from childhood are nightmares of wolves... so naturally I was telling my ADVENTURE TIME: FIONNA AND CAKE coworkers about my nightmares of wolves, and believe me, they are always thrilled to hear my descriptions of my inner turmoil. Anyhow, Adam wisely asked whether I had read something about wolves before going to bed. I said yes! In fact, I had read an old comic book in which Dr. Doom plunges to certain death, having been attacked by a pack of wolves. Adam reacted to this news with surprise: "Dr. Doom was defeated by WOLVES? He fights the Fantastic Four!" If I paraphrase, it is only slightly. I did not get into this part, but Dr. Doom had removed his chest shield for reasons too dull to explain. I will (and did) say that he was fighting a character called the Shroud, of whom I had never heard, despite the fact that the comic book in question came out in 1976, possibly the peak of my comic-reading years. The Shroud, by the way, is a shockingly blatant Batman rip-off. Shockingly! However, that need not concern us here. It is much more important that I use the excuse of wolves to mention something loosely related. I was in Square Books the other day, poking around, and I opened up a book called THE SLAVIC MYTHS by Noah Charney and the delightfully named Svetlana Slapsak. In it, I read "Count Jan Potocki was one of Poland's most revered writers and Enlightenment intellectuals. His masterpiece, THE MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN SARAGOSSA..." blah, blah, blah. I knew that already. BUT! "On 23 December 1815, this brilliant, worldly man absconded with one of his mother's silver teapots, made out of it a bullet, had this silver bullet blessed by a priest and then shot himself in the head with it... because Jan Potocki believed he was a werewolf." That's something I didn't know! This revelation caused me to purchase the book. As you know, I consider standing in a bookstore and reading no better than being a sneak thief. As long as I have you here, let's tidy up some "blog" business. I see that this will be my ninth "post" in April. I have not "blogged" with such frequency since October 2020, troubled times during which, as you know, I was required to revive this most decisively defunct "blog" in order to cheer a grateful nation with my wry reflections on the foibles of humanity. I need to reemphasize here that the combo of quitting social media and forced recuperation have left me with little else to do. I told Tom Franklin, "Hey, I've been 'blogging' about those old comic books you gave me," and he was like, "I didn't know 'blogs' existed anymore." And they don't.

Karl Malden Wouldn't Sit Anywhere Else

When I go on a trip I still take my famous jotting book but I hardly jot in it anymore because I don't "blog" anymore, rendering the very act of jotting questionable. And besides, as Adam Muto rightly admonished me last time I won an Emmy (this is my subtle way of telling you that I just came back from Los Angeles with another one!) I should look up and experience the world directly rather than jotting about it while it's right there in my face. In fact, if you "click" on that previous "link" you will see a photo of me with my jotting book open and ready for jotting backstage in the immediate aftermath of the awards presentation two years ago. I'm the problem with America! But you know, I'm glad I brought the jotting book because I AM required to "blog" whenever I read a book with an owl in it, and on this trip there appeared in my path THREE books with owls in them. I couldn't believe it. It was a bonanza! Let's get right to them! Well, first I stopped by Square Books for something to read on the airplane, as I like to do. And I was drawn again to the Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald, though I never enjoy them the way I'm supposed to. But now I guess they say "airplane" to me because of some sick compulsion. I picked up this one called DARKER THAN AMBER and I was like, "This seems familiar." Because they all seem familiar. And the titles are interchangeable. So I put it back on the shelf and went home empty-handed. And I sat there and thought, why do I know that title? And I poked around on the "blog" and saw that my friend McNeil had mentioned DARKER THAN AMBER as being particularly sexist. But as far as I could tell from my own "blog" I hadn't read it, and perversely I decided to get it and see if McNeil was right. And McNeil was right! In fact, I would argue that Travis McGee goes beyond (?) mere misogyny into a psychotic fear of sex. Now, of course, we can't confuse the author with his creation, but I would argue that McGee is presented as an aspirational character. "Jake leaned back on his heels and stared up at me, like a man admiring a tall building," is a typically modest self-description by our narrator. And now please forgive me but I'm going to quote just a smidgen of the misogyny so you won't think I'm exaggerating. You have been warned. Here we find catalogued McGee's disapproval of women who have had too many boyfriends: "she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death." What! What kind of writing do you call that? Moisturous! Moisturous? It has a certain purple tone that KNOWS it has a tone (A CERTAIN PURPLE TONE sounds like the title of a Travis McGee novel)... hmm... a tone approaching parody, but wanting it both ways... what is called in the business "kidding on the square," as I was once informed by Rob Schneider. Ha ha! But "tiny stink of death"? That's one of the grossest phrases I've come across. And later McGee refers to a woman's mouth as a "round horror-hole," okay? A ROUND HORROR-HOLE. Wow, I'm forgetting the owl. Weren't we talking about owls? McGee says that the eye of a corpse is "like a cheap glass eye in a stuffed owl." And you know what color that eye is? "Darker than amber," that's what color. So I was lying in bed reading this in the hotel room and Dr. Theresa was lying there too reading her own book - what a picture of contentment I am sure we made! - and she said, "Hey! This has an owl in it!" The owl in her book, she said, flew right into an inn and caused much consternation and dialogue. So! I finished Travis McGee and started a book of Sam Shepard short stories I had picked up at Skylight during one of our jaunts across the city. And in the very first story, some owls settle into a eucalyptus tree. So anyway that is a lot of owls in a lot of books for one trip. Speaking of Skylight Books! I ran into the actor Steve Little there, forced a copy of my most recent story collection on him (they had a couple of copies) and kind of harassed him until he fled the store. This is an accurate depiction of events. And speaking of Sam Shepard! So, T-Bone Burnett was one of the presenters at the Creative Arts Emmys, and I was determined to meet him at the ball following the show. And I did! Megan Abbott and I had been reading Sam Shepard's ROLLING THUNDER LOGBOOK, in which T-Bone Burnett appears, leading me to make the following brilliant remark to the distinguished musical icon of whom I have been a lifelong fan: "I saw a picture of you dressed up like a wizard!" (See above.) I'm getting everything out of order.

Let me check my jotting book and see which of my sparse jottings I've left out. Oh, went back to Dan Tana's and got the same booth. I was like, "Hey, I liked that booth when I was here before, can we have it?" And the maître d' was like, sure! "Karl Malden wouldn't sit anywhere else," he informed us. So here we are sitting where Karl Malden would be sitting were he still among the living. But he can't do a thing about it now! Photo by my brother. Well, I'm flipping through these pages and I hardly jotted anything, it turns out. I'm not sorry. On the plane ride to Los Angeles I was sufficiently convinced that my Biscoff cookie bore the face of a holy saint to request that Dr. Theresa take a photo of it, which she gamely did.

The Tinder of Our Wishes

Hey remember when my book about cigarette lighters came out? Me neither! But for a while there I would see something and think, "Oh, I should have put that in my cigarette lighter book. If only I had known!" But after a while you stop thinking that because you'd go mad. Mad, I say! But I just read AGNES GREY. To my surprise there were no owls in it, because those Brontë sisters are usually reliable purveyors of literary owls. The closest we get are some rooks who fly away as the sun sets: "For a moment, such birds as soared above the rest might still receive the lustre on their wings, which imparted to their sable plumage the hue and brilliance of deep red gold; at last, that too departed. Twilight came stealing on..." And I was like, "Oh, boy! Here come the owls." But there were no owls. Here's what Anne Brontë DID have: something I would have stuck somewhere in my cigarette lighter book, had I read it in time... "the flint and steel of circumstances are continually striking out sparks, which vanish immediately, unless they chance to fall upon the tinder of our wishes." I also enjoyed (this is unrelated) her elaborate conceit on the subject of a lonely glowworm. Anne Brontë is in great sympathy with nature. The same cannot be said for Arnold Schwarzenegger, I fear. We watched most of ERASER last night. You know, Dr. Theresa and I saw it in the theater when it came out, and I associate it with the very earliest years of our marriage. I did not recall the part in which Arnold is being pursued through a zoo by some bad guys, so he shoots out the glass on a tank full of alligators, and the alligators immediately begin eating the bad guys. "Don't they feed these alligators?" I wondered. Actually, what I wondered was "Don't they feed these crocodiles?" But I decided later that they were supposed to be alligators, for reasons that will soon become clear. So after the alligators eat the bad guys, one of them gets after Arnold, so he shoots it in the head. Hey, these alligators just helped him out! And isn't he responsible for them now? Doesn't he realize their terrible irony? But no, he just says, "You're luggage." That's what he says after he shoots the alligator. I found it unnecessary! First of all, the alligator is already dead. Second of all, even if the alligator was alive, it wouldn't be able to understand what you were saying. Third of all, why are you gloating? Even if forced into a situation in which she was required to kill an alligator (there is some arguable precedent in AGNES GREY), Anne Brontë never would have gloated about it! Fourth of all, why are you staying and making wisecracks to a dead alligator when there are more bad guys coming? In any case, his remark was in extremely bad taste. I decided they were meant to be alligators because I believe shoes and belts and boots and suitcases are traditionally made from alligator hide, not crocodile hide. I don't know the difference. I must sadly conclude by noting that Arnold Schwarzenegger appears in my cigarette lighter book more than once, poor Anne Brontë (as noted) not at all.

A Visceral Sense of Jibbs

As you know, I don't "blog" anymore unless it's about THE BIG VALLEY, which has been off the air since 1969, or if I read a book with an owl in it. But occasionally one has a thought that is too long for twitter - not very often! - and where is one to put it? "Here" is the only answer. So I have finally watched the entire ADVENTURE TIME miniseries entitled ELEMENTS, and I did it through legal means. I paid $9.99 for it! But I shan't say anything about the episodes that haven't aired on normal television for normal people yet. EXCEPT! To make the general observation that there are a lot of great jokes in it, among other things. PASTE magazine said ADVENTURE TIME: ELEMENTS has "a visceral sense of armageddon" and maybe they know what they're talking about but I mainly just laughed a lot. NOW! Roughly ninety-nine percent of the jokes contained in the miniseries are jokes that anyone can enjoy, from the most cantankerous old codger to the rosiest tot, but I also noticed a few things that made me laugh in a smug, knowing, secretive manner with which I feel certain you are longing to become intimately acquainted. For example, in last night's episode "Cloudy," the word "jibbs" was used as a mild expletive, as in "What the jibbs?" And... I may not get this line exactly right... "Calm the jibbs down." So! While we were working on the outline for "Cloudy," ADVENTURE TIME head writer Kent Osborne was simultaneously in rehearsals for a staged reading of some kind of script or another, in which his character's name was Jibbs. For whatever reason, this tickled the rest of us in the writers room no end. On top of that, Kent was required to affect an Irish accent for the role of Jibbs, and as he was just beginning to work on it, our delight was boundless in mocking him unfairly when he tried it out in our presence. These twin pillars of hilarity - the name "Jibbs" and our accompanying merciless jeers at Kent's nascent Irish accent - made it irresistible to include the expression "what the jibbs" in the outline upon which we were currently at work. So I was especially happy to see that the exclamation, or a variation on it, occurred more than once in the finished storyboard, brilliantly executed by Graham Falk and the aforementioned Kent Osborne, and, of course, in its ultimate animated iteration, the toil of countless souls. I hope you feel that you have benefited from this thorough examination of "humor" and its mysterious inner workings laid bare and that my vivid yet clinical dissection of the matter has not robbed you entirely of the magic and joy in your life.

Waaaaahhhhhhhh!

I don't know whether you can tell, but sometimes the faulty camera on Kent's computer bathed everything in a mysterious golden light, as in this "screen grab" of Kent with Julia Pott.

Three days a week for over four years I got to see some variation on this beautiful sight, beamed to me from Burbank as I sat right here in Mississippi, usually with my cat Pan. Today it happened for the last time. I want to thank everybody, but especially my constant comrades from the writers' room: Adam Muto, Pen Ward, Kent, Ashly Burch, and Julia. Here are Pen and Ashly in the writers' room looking serious.

Here are Ashly and Julia and Adam in the writers' room looking smiley:

There's nothing to say! How could there ever be a better job with better people? I want to thank Kent Osborne for recommending me for the position to begin with. I don't know what to say about Adam and Pen, except maybe that they're the Apollo and Dionysus of ADVENTURE TIME. Ha ha, that's horrible. [Here there was excised a long panegyric in which Pendarvis compared Pendleton Ward and Adam Muto to William Blake and John Milton and William Faulkner and Jack Kirby and H.P. Lovecraft and Dante in really flowery and completely accurate ways they'd both hate. - ed.] The brilliant (in every sense) Ashly Burch gave us an electric jolt just when we needed it most. I got truly downhearted when she left the show. I felt like a drug addict when they take away the drugs! But then Julia parachuted in at perhaps the most mind boggling moment in the sweeping arc of the series (no spoilers!), just totally undaunted, and showed incredible spirit and ingeniousness that encouraged us to press forward. What an example she is for everything you'd hope to be, including a dazzlingly original thinker and a true friend. Kent always got us rolling. He created a mood in the room that encouraged deeply personal storytelling and brought out the best in everyone. He's a crafty wizard and he'll lead you to your epiphany by misdirection, you know, like one of those monks who cracks skulls with a stick and BANG! You're enlightened. Only Kent would never do that. He's more like... uh... Chuang Tzu. I don't know, Chuang Tzu didn't hit people with sticks, did he? I don't have time to look it up because I need to go get a drink. If he did, I'm sure it was for their own good! Anyway, Kent would never hit anyone with a stick. If you click back over all my ADVENTURE TIME posts (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!) you'll see the debt I owe to each and every one of these creative people, as well as all the amazing board creators I'm not even mentioning here, many of whom were often in the writers' room themselves, even the ones who left their mark before I came onboard, and all the other artists, and everyone involved in the production of the show, and the nonpareil cast. Well, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. I love you all. To repeat myself one more time, I'll never have a better job with kinder people or be part of something of which I'm prouder. I don't suppose I should tell you who worked on our story for the series finale but I will 1) say that it's a murderers' row and 2) guarantee that you'll faint. For four years I got paid to sit around and make up stories with some of my favorite people. I really can't complain. Okay, I'll be at City Grocery Bar crying into an old-fashioned if you need me.

Doing the Thing

You know, sometimes I reap writing lessons from ADVENTURE TIME meetings, such as who to punch and what not to punch. Yesterday I got a good one! I had typed up a line of clichéd dialogue for Jake, which Adam called out, and I oh-so-cleverly explained that it was SUPPOSED to be a cliché. I had done it on purpose! Adam replied, "If you're doing the thing, you're also doing the thing." Well! That hit me with a certain brilliant force. I stopped everything to jot it down in one of my famous books of jottings, even as Adam started trying to phrase it in what he thought was a "better" way, but it was too late: I had already jotted. And besides, there was no better way to say it. I kept thinking about it for the rest of the day, kind of chanting it to myself. "If you're doing the thing, you're also doing the thing." For a second it reminded me of Beckett, and then I thought, no, Gertrude Stein.

These Potato Chips Aren't Hot

Late last night when I couldn't sleep I had to leave the room for a moment so I paused the TV. Paused the TV! Such a thing was unthinkable not so very long ago, as I have often remarked to an empty room. I paused the TV because I wanted to find out who killed Jay Mohr on a rerun of LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT. It struck me that there was something immoral about my action! Amoral? Problematic. Decadent. And not because I vaguely recalled (accurately) who killed Jay Mohr from the first time I saw it. No, because I couldn't figure out whether my ability to pause the TV was giving me a "choice" or removing one. So during the after-hours LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT reruns there were commercials for things called Xeljanz and Rummikub. The former is a drug and the latter is a boardgame. I realized that "Rummikub" sounded funny only because I hadn't heard it before. That's on me, not on the blameless pastime of Rummikub! But Xeljanz sounded terrible because a focus group probably came up with it. Like, "Raise your hand if you think a medicine that starts with x and ends with z sounds 'real' enough to purchase." I thought about which letter in Xeljanz was the worst, and I decided on 'n.' Ha ha, I like to pretend someone is reading this. The n is close enough to an m that one thinks of Xeljamz, which sounds like a compilation CD of ungodly music, maybe. [It would be corporate slang for "excellent jams"! - ed.] There was also a commercial for a boardgame called Googly Eyes, which nicely ties together Rummikub and Xeljanz, because Googly Eyes requires its players to don vision-distorting eyewear. Now I ask you! Does that sound healthy or safe? Oh, I'm sure it's fine. I recalled that Dr. Theresa had opened a bag of sriracha-flavored "Kettle Brand Potato Chips." I had inquired, earlier in the evening, how they were and Dr. Theresa said, "The bag says 'HOT!' but they're not hot." And she was right. I tasted one and it reminded me of ketchup-flavored potato chips from days gone by. "Ha ha, what dunces we were in the 1970s, eating ketchup-flavored potato chips," I reckoned. And that reminded me of something called "Andy Capp's Hot Fries," which were not hot, and not fries - were, in fact, tough little girders composed of, perhaps, densely compacted corn dust or corn waste - and which had as their mascot the unpleasant Sunday comics character Andy Capp, now long forgotten. So I thought I'd scoot to the "internet" to discover the inevitable nostalgic "chat rooms" dedicated to such grisly and obsolete products. And that is how I found out that both of these things - Lay's Ketchup Flavored Potato Chips and Andy Capp's Hot Fries - are still in production to this very day. (See also.) Thank you for attending to this blistering jeremiad on the subject of contemporary society. I trust your eyebrows were in no way singed by the force of the dynamic fury I unleashed. (Full disclosure: I suddenly recall that as a lad, upon discovering the ketchup-flavored potato chips, I marveled openly at the brilliance of the inventor. And we do love ketchup on our french-fried potatoes, do we not?)

Silver Bells

I'm writing a book about cigarette lighters and supposedly another book, plus look what the producer of SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS put on twitter the other day:

Yeah, so that's going on too! And I just went to Burbank to work on ADVENTURE TIME, so maybe that's why I haven't been "blogging" too much, what, you didn't notice? Gee. And you know I pride myself on taking a little notebook along and jotting down precious memories for you, but the whole first day of my trip I had a dull, aching feeling that there was nothing to jot. I remembered that before I left TEQUILA SUNRISE was on TV,

a movie that I went to see a number of times on the big screen during the callow days of my impressionable youth, and Dr. Theresa came in the room and made a funny comment about the "smokin' hot Kenny G riffs" on the soundtrack, so I jotted that: "Dr. Theresa, sarcastically: 'smokin' hot Kenny G riffs.'" And I closed my notebook and sat there in the hotel lobby nursing my drink like, "Well, I guess that's it." BUT THEN GARRY MARSHALL SHOWED UP. Garry Marshall, creator of HAPPY DAYS! Director of PRETTY WOMAN! Actor in a memorable cameo in LOST IN AMERICA! He was meeting some friends so I eavesdropped on them. The bartender came over and Garry Marshall asked him about "the score of the game" and the bartender said that Tennessee had just scored a spectacular 80-yard touchdown and Garry Marshall said "Eh." Some of his younger friends started trying to explain what ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK is to Garry Marshall and he was slightly ticked off that they didn't think he knew what ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK was. He knows what ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK is! He's Garry Marshall for God's sake. He didn't say it in those words. I'm interpreting. One of Garry Marshall's friends reminisced about his (the friend's) first big job onstage, in which he had to bound out naked for his first entrance. "He was very good naked," Garry Marshall said, which got a big laugh from everybody. Garry Marshall and his friends left the bar area of the hotel lobby so I called Dr. Theresa and told her I had seen the director of RUNAWAY BRIDE and she was very proud of me. Then I told her about how I had accidentally bought a really expensive brush at the drugstore across the street from the hotel. I should have known because it said "By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen" on the handle. That was the slogan of the brush company! But the brush was so small! Whether from pride or embarrassment, I allowed the cashier to ring it up without protest. Dr. Theresa got in some good jokes about me and my expensive brush. Then Verdell showed up! She had been hoping she could come by after work, and she did. These days, Verdell works for a space company that makes space rockets that go into space! Anyway, Verdell sat down and ordered a drink and I told her she had just missed Garry Marshall. AND we discovered that Garry Marshall and his friends had been blocking our view of another actor. I said, "Hey, look, it's the guy who played the mad scientist on FRINGE!" Verdell had never heard of this guy. (Later, Dr. Theresa told me he has a current role on the television program SLEEPY HOLLOW.) The mad scientist from FRINGE was reading a newspaper. "What do you think he's doing?" I asked. "Looks like he's reading a newspaper," said Verdell. Verdell said that there were Christmas carols on the radio on her way over. She doesn't like most of the religious Christmas carols but said she finds the secular "No Place Like Home for the Holidays" acceptable. We discussed the meaning of the line, "Gee the traffic is terrific." Then we talked about "Sleigh Ride" and "Let it Snow" and "Silver Bells." Then I had to pee. I walked into the bathroom humming "Silver Bells." There was just one urinal! So I had to stand behind the guy who was using it. When he turned, he revealed himself to be the mad scientist from FRINGE! He had what I must call a sour demeanor. I also noted that he had an unexpected resemblance, somehow, to the late Robert Preston, a sour Robert Preston. As I peed, I noted that I could hear him over there at the sink washing his hands. Good hygiene! And he started humming! I can't swear to this, but I think maybe he was humming snatches of "Silver Bells"! I could hardly wait to tell Verdell.

Verdell and I had some more drinks. Garry Marshall came back to the lobby! I pointed him out to Verdell. Garry Marshall noticed us noticing him and came over and introduced himself. Verdell said to him, "You look fashionable, are you wearing desert boots?" "I don't know," replied Garry Marshall. Later, when Garry Marshall sat down with a friend of his, Verdell was able to determine that Garry Marshall was most likely wearing "tan suede oxfords." She noticed that Garry Marshall's friend was wearing loafers with no socks. That reminded me of something else I had overheard earlier in the evening, about Garry Marshall and his wife (I think) donating 650 socks to the homeless, or maybe 650 pairs of socks. There's a breakfast place I like across the street from the hotel, and the next morning TV's Andy Richter sat at the counter next to me! I am pleased to announce that he is the trusting sort and left his keys and sunglasses on the counter when he went to the restroom. Needless to say under my watchful eye Andy Richter's keys and sunglasses went undisturbed. Kent and I had lunch with Kent's brother Mark, who happened to be in town directing Jeff Bridges for Mark's upcoming movie! Mark told us how nice Jeff Bridges and Albert Brooks are, and that's what you want to hear, you want to hear that these actors you like are nice people. Dinner at the Tam O'Shanter! Seo Kim came. I got to tell her about a cat she drew that I especially liked. While Kent and I were waiting for the others to arrive (we went there early, right after work), Kent drew me at the bar,

contemplating my favorite curse. Joey and Brian came to dinner! We had Welsh rarebit and deviled eggs to pass around the table and then Kent and I had expensive ribeye steaks! Kent paid! What a pal. I tried to give him the bit of ribeye I had left over and Kent demurred until Joey came up with the brilliant idea of asking the waitress for one of those delicious rolls that came with the Welsh rarebit. "Now you can pop it right in there," said Joey to Kent. Kent thought it was a great idea for leftovers. And that's when I found out those rolls we had been enjoying were "Yorkshire puddings." So that's what a Yorkshire pudding is. I didn't know. Anyway, Joey had been joking that I sounded like a mom, repeatedly begging Kent to take my leftover ribeye so he could "make sandwiches" but SHE is the one who came up with idea of nestling the last bite of ribeye into the welcoming center of the Yorkshire pudding for a tempting taste treat okay I think it is time for me to stop jotting now.

Jerry Epiphany #2

Just before an ADVENTURE TIME meeting the other day I was conversing with my twitter friend Brian about a talk show Jerry Lewis had in the 80s, cashing in on his role from THE KING OF COMEDY. He told Suzanne Somers (pictured) she had "pizzazz," or so I remembered.

I thought Kent Osborne's brother Mark had introduced that clip to me on a privately circulated VHS tape of oddities, but Kent didn't remember that. During the meeting he found Jerry's talk show on youtube and watched it and started cringing. Meanwhile, although (because?) from my end of the video conference I could only hear the audio and see the reactive cringing, I was cringing FOR Kent, or for Jerry, I couldn't tell which, they were inseparable. And I had an epiphany. All of my epiphanies are about Jerry Lewis. Yes, as I've observed, Jerry anticipated Andy Kaufman, and now that I think about it, Jerry's first act, when he was little more than a kid, was lip-syncing to records, mirroring exactly the first performance by Andy Kaufman on the first episode of Saturday Night Live. (Tony Clifton = Buddy Love?) As J. Hoberman observed, Jerry "both depicts and manifests inadvertent disclosure." So he can razor in on the phoniness of show biz satirically while living without qualms the actual life of a show biz phony. That old Fitzgerald thing about the rare ability to hold two opposed ideas in your mind at the same time, blah blah blah. Or as Megan Abbott said in an interview I did with her, "the unconscious and conscious are always this close... I’m putting my fingers together very closely... just this close always and always brushing up against each other constantly. And so we often are thrown into ourselves in ways that are alarming and we often have to see things about ourselves because we can’t completely hide from the unconscious." Jerry's 80s talk show was not art (was it?) but it crystalizes what Manohla Dargis said about Jerry disturbing "all those nice people in all their fancy clothes." Meaning us! So why, for me, Jerry is more powerful an artist than, say, the comedy team (how they'd probably chafe at that old-fashioned term) Tim and Eric, or any other contemporary practitioner of "anti-comedy" (I guess we call it) is that Jerry is doing what they do, but HONESTLY and not ironically. At heart it's helpless and noble. That was the epiphany.

I watched a documentary about Divine, who on some basic level was as non-ironic as Jerry Lewis. For Jerry Lewis and Divine, show biz is a joyous religion in the service of a dark god, ha ha, how dramatic. Jerry Lewis is the father of Divine. There are minor similarities too: each, while young, created an overwhelming and brilliant persona that became a kind of consuming trap. Patterns of paternal fracture and rapprochement. I don't know. Maybe Jerry (who cross-dresses kind of touchingly - like late-period Divine - in THREE ON A COUCH) has a drag queen's instinct (lip-syncing!) for novelty, exaggeration, nostalgia, luxury, disguise and self-creation. And like Divine maybe he's suspicious of (guilty about?) revering some of those things and so turns them on their head. It occurs to me that Jerry has spent most of his life in a form of drag - like Pee Wee Herman! why can't I stop typing? - and maybe like Paul Reubens's some of Jerry's "bad" behavior can be attributed to the emotional violence required to break out of its strictures. Drag as freedom, drag as constraint. Can we call Suzanne Somers hunched over on roller skates a kind of enforced "drag"? Maybe I should think this out. But I don't think I shall. Somebody else on twitter was complaining that he can't watch Jerry because Jerry is "needy." All performers are needy. The glorious thing about Jerry and Divine is that they don't cover it up. They revel in it and they make us face it. Now we're all super smart and in on the big joke. Only when we watch them are our reactions are visceral and true.

Big Baby

Hi! I was in Alabama. A lot of family was there, including four of my innumerable nephews. Sometimes when I am driving I end up taking crazy exits. Like, remember when the grifter tried to grift me that time? And the time I ate some items that may or may not have been chicken livers? Once Dr. Theresa and I got in the middle of police action - guns and everything! - during what was supposed to be a quick bathroom stop in Baltimore, but that's a long time before I knew you, "internet." This time I stopped at a gas station with homemade posters everywhere, just plain white posterboard scrawled with black Sharpie, and they all said, "BUY YOUR STUFF AND GO" - not like a boast of convenience, more like a terrifying threat. That gas station had a surprising number of flies in it. Next door to the station I could see the tall, faded sign for something called the SAFE HOUSE LOUNGE sticking up over the trees. It made me feel nervous! Why would you have to insist that your lounge is safe in its very name? FAST FORWARD. On the way back from Alabama, I stopped at a dumpy little gas station in a town called Wiggins, but the bathroom was so nice! The tiled wall was the color of pistachio ice cream. And it smelled good! The bathroom did. Fresh and clean! The only thing marring it was the name BIG BABY. Big Baby had printed his name fairly neatly on the toilet paper dispenser. That was it! What a clean and pleasant bathroom. I watched the most recent episode of ADVENTURE TIME with the whole family, there in Alabama. Which means I watched the death of Root Beer Guy with my traumatized nephews. Ha ha! They were not traumatized. They got a huge kick out of Jesse Moynihan's action-packed, beautiful and brilliant episode. But you can't blame (congratulate?) Jesse for killing Root Beer Guy. He squeezed that in at my insistence! Did you know I did the voice of Root Beer Guy? So I guess I am sensitive about the character. He became the Captain of the Banana Guards but he never did much to improve them. I felt really bad about his failure on the job. I thought if he were dead I'd feel more comfortable with the Banana Guards staying so dumb. Nobody wants to see a smart Banana Guard. Hey! I know I shouldn't ever talk about "internet" "commenters" because who cares? But I saw this one dude (I guess) on the "internet" who said the episode was "absolutely incoherent." He or she was also just waiting with itchy fingers - maybe! - to be the first commenter on the review, which is fine! What would Freud say? WHO CARES? I just want to say that my four-year-old nephew totally got what was going on in the episode! So did my 17-year-old-nephew and all the nephews in between. Dr. Theresa wanted to "watch it again." She doesn't say that about much of anything. She laughed really hard when Maja the Sky Witch banged her head on that tree and the little x's went over her eyes. Classic! But anyway, it's none of my beeswax and commenters can make any comments they want just as quickly as their fingers can type. It's a free country! Ha ha, it's the Fourth of July! But man, I just loved the episode. It makes sense that someone might see bounty and spiritual generosity as incoherence. Maybe bounty and spiritual generosity ARE incoherent the first time we approach them with our struggling minds. It's kind of like what William James said about St. Paul, oh, forget it, I don't want to get into it. But yes, I am comparing Jesse Moynihan to St. Paul. But Jesse has none of St. Paul's hang-ups. Just a few of his own, probably, like all of us. Jesse's art is full to bursting! Whereas St. Paul preferred to bottle stuff up. Maybe. I got Jesse's book FORMING (I think the sequel is out now) at Square Books, and it's just fantastic. Sorry I started talking about an "internet" comment. I had something else I was going to say, probably about a gas station, but I forgot.

Exultant Radio Quotation

Yesterday we were driving to Chris and Melissa's for some trad collard greens and black-eyed peas and the radio was tuned to the NPR show ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, which promised an upcoming news story about "how a two-year-old overcame his fear of Frankenstein," which didn't sound like much of a story to me, sounded like a Halloween story at best, certainly not a New Year's Day story, but who am I to judge, and there followed an anticipatory soundbite from the story, an exultant woman (the mother?) quoting the child like so: "He said, 'I pooped on the Frankenstein!'" - something I never expected to hear, least of all on NPR, but you can't be mad at me for telling you, because it was on NPR. ALL THINGS CONSIDERED is a good title for that show, yes, they have really considered everything now, I wish they would stop, I'm sorry, lady, I don't care very much about your two-year-old pooping on a Frankenstein, though your connections in the radio business are seemingly extraordinary. Hey! I actually found a transcript of the entire radio story (scroll to the bottom of this "link" - ha ha, who am I kidding? I know you won't!). Anyway, because it's NPR they have a "peer reviewed psychologist" commenting on the whole thing and he says, "My main thought is your nephew is a brilliant story editor. What a nice turn of narrative." Ugh.

RBG

Tonight's episode has aired (except in the Pacific Time Zone, but I don't think there are any spoilers here), so I thought someone might stumble across this "blog" while struggling to answer the vexing question, "Who is this jerk and how did he get to do a voice on ADVENTURE TIME?" I am that jerk and I will tell you. I started writing for the show way back in October of 2012. My old friend Kent Osborne, who is the "Head of Story" for ADVENTURE TIME, called out of the blue and asked if I wanted to give it a try. My first instinct was to say no! I didn't know how to write for cartoons. I knew Kent worked for the show, and I had watched and enjoyed a few episodes with my nephews, because it was their favorite show, but I didn't feel qualified. Kent said not to worry, it was just a two-week freelance job. So I said okay. I have hardly ever turned down a quick freelance job! I didn't know that those two weeks were secretly a kind of audition to see how I got along in the writers' room. I got along fine because everyone was nice as pie. And so the assignment turned into steady employment, for which I am grateful. It's the best job ever! I live in Mississippi. Three times a week I meet with my friends in Burbank by video. We just make up stories and talk about feelings and that's about it. Well, there is also a good deal of typing. One of the coolest parts of the experience for me was when my dad helped out with the "We Fixed a Truck" episode. For some reason I recall with special fondness and clarity a chat that Adam Muto and I had about Klarion the Witchboy and his mystical cat Teekl, two characters from Jack Kirby's comic book THE DEMON, not that it yielded anything for use in the show, nor was it meant to. But as often as not the germs of episodes are contained in such random digressions. Very occasionally I will travel to Los Angeles and go to the office in person. (And once Pen and Kent came to Mississippi.) I flew out to read my "Root Beer Guy" lines for tonight's episode. ADVENTURE TIME is recorded mostly like an old-time radio play, with a bunch of people standing in a booth together, stationed at separate microphones. But how did I get the part? Kent suggested I do it, that's all. I didn't think it would really happen. The name "Stephen King" was bounced around as another possibility, but he was never approached. I think Adam asked me during a conference, "Do you think you could do it?" And I answered with joking bravado, "I AM ROOT BEER GUY," paraphrasing Flaubert on the subject of Madame Bovary, ha ha ha, oh boy, what fun we're having now. I should emphasize that the idea for the Root Beer Guy story was all Pen's - that's Pendleton Ward, creator of the show - and brilliantly fleshed-out and brought to life by storyboard artist/writer Graham Falk. Incidentally, I met Owen King, one of the writer sons of Stephen King, at City Grocery Bar during the annual book conference we have in my town. You should come! Kent came to the book conference once! I almost said to Owen King, "I beat out your dad for a role!" But instead I didn't say anything. ("Click" here for another example of something I didn't say.) In the first place it wasn't strictly true, and in the second place it is usually best to keep your fat mouth shut. The only reason I even thought of it was because of how much Mr. King's voice resembled his father's. Now, how did Anne Heche end up playing "Cherry Cream Soda"? After we finished the outline I blurted (fairly inaccurately) that Cherry Cream Soda's part was something like Anne Heche's in DONNIE BRASCO. And Kent cried out, "Let's get Anne Heche!" Because he's kind of obsessed with her, I guess you'd say, though it is a harsh word with which to describe Kent's gentle fascination. And then they got her! And she did it. She was amazing! The genuine emotion with which she imbued her lines gave me no choice but to actually try. So I tried. And now you know as much as I do about life. How sad.

How I Met Your Sexy Nobility

Hey I was just flipping around on one of these movie channels and came across a movie scene in which the guy from HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER - the one who I believe met the eponymous mother (I'm using the word "eponymous" too much lately; what a jerk!) - was about to make a speech in a diner explaining the problems of the country, which I know because he solemnly announced his intention to enumerate the problems of the country and pinpoint their various sources, and then he opened his mouth but I changed the channel because I was afraid to find out! But I flipped back some minutes later, just in time to see a virginal young woman BEGGING the guy from HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER to initiate her into the mysterious secrets of womanhood, then she wept glycerine tears that sparkled and shone on her delicate face when he refused to sully her purity from being too noble and all. So in THE VERY NEXT SCENE he meets a foxy older lady who is also a brilliant genius and she finds his raw sexiness wildly irresistible. That's when I went to imdb and confirmed my suspicion that this movie was WRITTEN AND DIRECTED by the guy who single-handedly solved the problems of the nation in a diner booth then fended off ardent, quivering admirers from across the spectrum of human mortality. The movie poster shows the guy from HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER and the virginal young woman holding hands and WALKING ACROSS AN ENORMOUS OPEN SCHOOLBOOK REPRESENTING LEARNING. What do you want to bet he LEARNS A THING OR TWO ABOUT LIFE FROM HER BEFORE ALL IS SAID AND DONE? What a twist! He thought HE was the one with all the answers! Looking back, I see that this is my fourth negative "blog" "post" in a row. That's not my laid-back style! And I really shouldn't judge a movie from a few disjointed moments. BUT I DIDN'T INVENT THE REMOTE CONTROL SO IT'S NOT MY FAULT. Also, maybe it's only my third negative "post" in a row because that Jay Leno movie is starting to seem like an exquisite masterwork about now. (See also.)

Currant Events

I went crazy and bought some kind of black currant juice at the grocery store. Must be a midlife crisis! Then I was thinking WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH CURRANTS? So I decided to look them up in the old OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD. But now I'm just confused, because currants "have nothing to do with currants" according to the OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD... I exaggerate through selectively truncated quotation! Still, one kind of currant is nothing but a dried grape. But were the juice made of that, I guess they'd call it grape juice, or raisin juice (the latter not so farfetched! Consider prune juice [Oh God, is this what has become of me?]). Anyhow, turns out there's nothing interesting about currants. Normally when I "google" a terrible pun such as "Currant Events," I do so with fear, anxiety, despair and remorse. In this case, however, I am almost gleeful to find out how many times such a terrible pun has been made on the "internet" (though this one might, to a significant percentage, be a typo rather than a pun). There were 17,200 matches, you will be happy to know, including a "Currant Events Festival" in La Valle, Wisconsin, and a "Currant Events" newsletter from a troupe called the "Red Currant Collective" who appear, based on the picture at their homepage, to do interpretative dance in a breezy glade. In conclusion I will mention this morning's email from McNeil, in which he has a brilliant idea about getaway cars in case we ever decide to commit a crime. I can't reveal McNeil's astonishing plan! (See also, McNeil's surefire system for winning at craps.)

Awful Monkey Lollipop Thoughts to Share

Reading one of these old comic books: a TALES TO ASTONISH from 1967. One of the ads is for a "Sensational COLOR-V screen" that "instantly changes dull, dreary black & white pictures to brilliant, eye-filling colors. Attach it yourself in a few seconds. You, your family, your friends will really enjoy the color effects which, while not to be confused with genuine color TV will afford a wonderful treat to the eyes!" As much as I like the formality of "will afford a wonderful treat" all I could really think about was a bunch of disappointed families. Like, just a crushing sense of doom, dead-end jobs, childhood innocence blighted, marriages torn apart, this cheap screen a symbol of some secret rot settling into the American dream... too much? (See also.) Next page - and as I recall, this one was still being run in the 1970s, when I started reading comic books - offered a pet monkey through the mail. Every thought about that made me feel horrible, but somehow worst of all was the ad's promise that your hypothetical monkey "even likes lollipops." Sad monkeys with lollipops and mange. I can't go on. Those are just the beginnings of the terrible thoughts that haunt my very soul. The Hulk story was pretty good, though. See, the Silver Surfer was about to cure the Hulk of being the Hulk, but the Hulk misunderstood and tried to punch him, so the Silver Surfer flew away in kind of a silver snit.

Dean Martin Epiphany

I was just watching this Richard Pryor documentary on one of these movie channels and it said that when Richard Pryor was first working in Las Vegas he was doing his act and he looked down and saw Dean Martin in the audience and suddenly he saw himself through Dean Martin's eyes, and saw that Dean Martin knew he was a phony, and from then on he stopped doing his regular everyday stand-up act and started doing his Richard Pryor act, the act that let us know he was a genius. And that made me remember that I once taught a "humor" class at the university - ugh! what could be more useless and horrible? - and I divided the students into groups and made them research and write one-act plays about various comic geniuses, such as Richard Pryor and Dorothy Parker. And the class was two little dudes and 12 young women. So a young woman was obligated to portray Richard Pryor, and she was thoroughly committed and did a great job! And as I recall, the play that group came up with was Garrison Keillor interviewing Richard Pryor in heaven. So now I need to tell you that one of the young women was utterly obsessed with Garrison Keillor. She was a goodnatured and brilliant young person who was sometimes late for class because of her piano lessons. And then it turned out that she was trying to be Miss America! She was Miss Mississippi, and her piano lessons were aimed toward the national contest. She was awesome! And she played Garrison Keillor (in the Richard Pryor skit) with aplomb, which is more than Garrison Keillor ever did, ha ha. (Garrison Keillor came to speak to the class but that's another story. I didn't plan or ask for it! The "Honors College" made it happen. In fact, they asked me to design a class around the fact that Garrison Keillor was coming. Garrison Keillor was coming!) I guess that class had the most cross-dressing of any class I ever taught. In the Dorothy Parker skit, a young woman portrayed Parker's BFF Robert Benchley with such incredible verve that I had to ask whether she had ever acted before. She said, "I was in one movie. Have you ever heard of O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?" (That wasn't a rhetorical question; she was just extremely modest.) Turns out she was the middle-sized "Li'l Wharvey Gal" (see below). She gets to tell George Clooney he "ain't bona fide!" You remember that part.

Who's Crazy Now?

So yesterday I sent a document to Los Angeles in which I used the phrase "those tall pointy hats with the gauzy material hanging down." I claimed during the subsequent video conference that I couldn't figure out how to look up the proper name for those hats, and then Kent (who was on the other end of the call) just hopped on the "google" and IMMEDIATELY "googled" it up by entering the search phrase "medieval pointy hat." It's a hennin! And here I am, a guy who prides himself on being one of the world's finest "googlers." You know, I didn't really make an effort. I'm so ashamed. I am trying to console myself with the idea that nobody would know what you meant if you dropped the word "hennin" in a conversation anyway. Like, if you said something about a hennin, they would be like, "What's a hennin?" And you'd have to be like, "Well, it's one of those those tall pointy hats with the gauzy material hanging down," so knowing that word really doesn't do you any good at all, because isn't that how the conversation would go? Learning is for suckers! Well, except for my awesome friend Mary in the English Department. I imagine her always staring into a huge dusty book with a picture of a lady in an elaborate hennin on one of the pages, because I'm pretty sure that's what she does all day and all night too, and if I walked into the cell-like room with a high window where I'm assuming she does this and said, "Hey, get a load of that hennin!" she'd know just what I meant, but she's the only one, right? Also in the video conference, the pronunciation of "conical" came up (in connection with hennins) and I was suddenly and irrationally terrified that I might have been pronouncing "conical" incorrectly all these years, culminating in a video conference where brilliant creative professionals could hear me mispronouncing "conical" clear across this great nation we call home! But later I looked it up in my WEBSTER'S NEW TWENTIETH CENTURY DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, UNABRIDGED, SECOND EDITION from 1974 and it turns out I've been doing just fine with "conical," pronouncing it quite perfectly, in fact, though a glance at the next column informs me I haven't been doing so well with "conifer." There was no animosity involved in the former case, of course, but I am reminded of the time a student - A STUDENT! - called me out rather smirkingly in front of the whole class for mispronouncing "whilst," but I WASN'T. I WASN'T MISPRONOUNCING WHILST. You know who was mispronouncing "whilst"? HE WAS. So who's crazy NOW? Who's crazy now, jerk from several years ago who doesn't read this "blog" and wouldn't even remember what I'm talking about if he did? WHO'S CRAZY NOW?

Tell the World!

Dr. Theresa accidentally happened to catch a few moments of the apparently awful NBC remake of THE MUNSTERS that came on tonight, and boy was she sorry. She called me into the room to rewind it and show me a few minutes that particularly offended her. A little boy irrevocably zipped up in a bright yellow sleeping bag was trying to hop away from a beast who swatted him against a tree in a magnificent explosion of feathers. This, of course, is the most memorable moment in John Frankenheimer's mutant bear movie PROPHECY. It wasn't a homage, argued Dr. Theresa, because it was so obscure. It was a rip-off. "It wasn't THEIR brilliance," she said. She also said, "Tell the world!" Then we watched RED LIGHTS, our second Halloween film festival movie this year to feature Sigourney Weaver. "Hey," I said, "she was in GHOSTBUSTERS [not part of the Halloween film festival - ed.] and now she's PLAYING a ghost-buster. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Get it?" That's what I said. To which Dr. Theresa responded something like, "Yeah." It also starred the creepy guy from RED EYE. And, purely objectively, it was the movie in our festival that (so far) made us say "Aaaaah!" out loud the most, though it wasn't really an "Aaaaah!" kind of movie.

The Hulk Comparison Ends

Mr. Ward writes to remind me that in between being a shoe inventor and a photographer's assistant, Lauren Graham was a brilliant playwright, which is where the Hulk comparison ends, I guess. I guess! I don't want to assume anything. Maybe the Hulk tosses off glittering little one-acts in his spare time. I imagine him in a tattered smoking jacket, holding an enormous ostrich quill.