Of Donkeys and Robots

So I'm reading ANCIENT JEWISH MAGIC and Gideon Bohak, the author, is telling of an "erotic spell" in which a charm is written on a piece of tin, to which he adds the parenthetical statement "it's a tin line between love and hate!" Let me explain. This is nothing like the Gideon Bohak I know. Well, there is a footnote in which he makes a fond, gently humorous allusion to his hometown. But the violent whimsy of "it's a tin line between love and hate!" is present nowhere else in this academic... some might say dry as burnt toast... work. Well! Gideon Bohak does favor a jaunty exclamation point in his parenthetical statements (as seen in the example already given), which might count as whimsy if you are a scholar of ancient esoterica. Before I continue exploring this thought, I want to say that I wonder what Gideon Bohak's editor thought of "it's a tin line between love and hate!" Did Gideon Bohak have to fight for it? I am developing an enhanced sense of respect for Gideon Bohak. Anyway, so, yes! In the very next paragraph we have an example of Bohak's penchant for parenthetical exclamation points. He has moved on to a spell which requires the magician (or is it the client?) to "take meat of a donkey in your mouth." I'm sorry I told you that. But I had to! Because Gideon Bohak presently adds the parenthetical statement that putting donkey meat in your mouth is "not very kosher!" Exclamation point his, I reemphasize. He goes on to examine cultural depictions of donkeys as "stupid, stubborn, and lazy," which reminded me, by way of contrast, of the other book I am reading right now, THE ILIAD, in which mules have been put forth more than once as some of the greatest animals you'd ever want to meet. They're always plowing fields faster than an ox, or pulling a big tree trunk down the side of a mountain. Those are the two things I can remember mules (in both cases, metaphorical mules) doing in THE ILIAD. Which brings me to another subject! Last night in bed, as I read THE ILIAD and Dr. Theresa worked a crossword puzzle, I suddenly shouted, "Hey! There are robots in this book!" Let's let that hang in the air for a while. Because I also want to say that I ran into Kelly Kornegay in Jackson, Mississippi, a couple of weeks ago, at the 50th anniversary party for Lemuria Books, which I didn't even tell you about, because why should you know every single thing that goes on in my life? Anyway, Kelly and I were talking about THE ILIAD, and she mentioned living in a new place where she can look out the window and see a donkey, and I got to tell her about the heroic mules of THE ILIAD. Pretty soon it got dark and Ace Atkins and I were standing in front of a stage watching 92-year-old bluesman Bobby Rush, of whom I took a photo with my very own phone and perhaps I will "post" it below. Also, there was a guy dressed as a cowboy who did some of the greatest dancing I've ever seen. He was up there all by himself dancing in his cowboy suit while opening acts played, and finally I thought, I should go dance with this guy! Let's get this party started! And Ace took a video of it, which I texted to Dr. Theresa (who had stayed home) so she could see my moves, and she immediately texted back "Have you been drinking?" And that's an interesting question but I bet you want to get back to the robots I read about in THE ILIAD last night. "They were made all of gold, but looked like living women." So you know I immediately thought of the DC comics characters the Metal Men, just as Homer intended. Furthermore, I checked Emily Wilson's endnote, and she calls them "robot women," so I'm not just coming to crazy conclusions. In fact, I think somebody installed A.I., because "They had a consciousness inside their hearts." And as I was lying there marveling about the golden robot women with consciousness in their hearts, I remembered thinking that I had noticed robots in the RAMAYANA as well. And I didn't just lie there and think about it for a change. I hauled my sorry carcass out of bed and went upstairs and found the RAMAYANA and refreshed my memory about these hydraulically powered automatons: "mechanical men, silently driven by falling water in some hidden way." And much like them, I am now running out of steam.

Books Don't Help

I got out my TRAVELS OF WILLIAM BARTRAM, which maybe I’ve never opened before, to do some research on swamps for an unpublished novel, which will remain unpublished if I know my unpublished novels, and if I don’t, nobody does. I was reminded by a sticker on the back that I bought TRAVELS OF WILLIAM BARTRAM at A Cappella Books in Atlanta during the time I was working on my second book, which, in its initial stages, was supposed to be a novel called THE ALABAMIAD. See, old William Bartram had tromped around Mobile in the 18th century, so I thought it might be helpful, but it wasn’t. Anyway, I opened it up yesterday and I was thumbing through it and I thought, boy, old William Bartram surely knows about every kind of squirrel and every kind of frog. I wonder if he knows about owls! The answer turned out to be yes. He knows about the great white owl, and the great horned owl, and the great horned white owl, which was the order in which he mentioned them, and I could imagine Cliff Clavin saying it on CHEERS: “You see, Sammy, you’ve got your great white owl, and your great horned owl, and then you’ve got your great horned white owl.” And then Carla would push him off his stool. Best of all, Bartram mentions “the whooting owl,” which is, I believe, our first sighting of that variation upon the hoot-owl. Whooting! The whooting owl! I love you, whooting owl! Hey! Do you know what happened after I had written all of the above? I picked up an Elmore Leonard novel I’ve been reading and one character immediately asked a cowboy, "What do you call it when you're on the dodge? Riding the owl hoot trail?" Now, you’ll certainly recall my puzzlement over the owl-hoot versus the hoot-owl, and, of course, “the hoot-owl trail,” which I seem to have first encountered in TRUE GRIT. By the way, the cowboy in question is impressed by his friend's knowledge of the term "owl hoot trail," which he apparently considers the correct rendering. I close fondly as always by saying go to hell.

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.

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.

McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits: No. 8 in a Continuing Series

Welcome back to "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits," the only place on God's whole wide "internet" for all the latest, littlest bogie bits! McNeil recently read about Humphrey Bogart being stabbed in the back by his wife, which reminded him of the time - as reported by this very "blog"! - that John Wayne pulled an apple corer out of Bogart's - or "Bogie's" - back. Now, is the incident mentioned by McNeil the same one previously remarked upon? Well, there are similarities and discrepancies. The weapon in question, for example, is a knife in McNeil's telling, not the more anecdotally colorful apple corer put forth by Scott Eyman in his Wayne biography. Furthermore, to quote McNeil's paraphrase of the Bogie bio he is reading, the wound was "patched up by a doctor who would do such things on the QT for $500," not extracted by a movie cowboy in a bar! I got my John Wayne book off the shelf and cross-referenced a few things. First, yes, in "both" cases (or the single case, as it may be), it was Bogart's wife Mayo Methot who did the stabbin'. (This reminds me of the only good advice I ever gave a student, back when I was teaching. She announced that she was hitchhiking across the country with a kitchen knife for protection, and I said, "You need a stabbin' knife." Now you understand why I'm not teaching anymore. I suggested something with a serrated edge, as I recall. To be clear, if such a thing is possible now, this was after she had insisted that nothing I could say would dissuade her from her plan.) The Wayne bio contains compelling details, such as the name of the restaurant into which Bogart wandered with something sticking out of his back (Eugene's, which was on the Sunset Strip), and the name of the maitre d' (Al Murphy) who didn't want to let Bogart in because he owed the place $600. In perhaps the most telling detail of all, after Wayne removes the apple corer (putting "his foot on Bogart's back for leverage"), he takes Bogart "to the hospital to get stitched up." Now, this could be where the biographies converge. The book McNeil is reading even includes the name of the family friend (Mary Baker) who recommended the shady doctor. Both versions seem so plausible! I suppose we may conclude that they are describing the same event, unless Mayo Methot stabbed Humphrey Bogart on two separate occasions, once with an apple corer and once with a plain old knife. Now, is this unlikely? Or is it likely that if your beloved sweetheart stabs you in the back once with one thing, she might stab you on another occasion with some other kind of thing? I have no statistics on that. In the end, maybe if you choose to believe it was an apple corer or a knife tells a lot about what kind of person you are. Like one of those "personality quizzes"! One thing is for sure: there's always plenty to ponder when you get stabbed figuratively in the brain with another episode of "McNeil's Li'l Bogie Bits"!

A Whisper in the Night

"I heard something like a hoarse whisper behind me while walking the dog the other night, and when I turned around...THIS..." So goes McNeil's caption for the above photo. Now, if this "post" were more artfully presented, I would have moved McNeil's photo of the owl down below the text alluding to it, so that the owl might work as an astonishing revelation, worthy of the drama of McNeil's caption. The fact remains, however, that though I no longer claim to have "stopped 'blogging,'" I am still very, awfully lazy. Just to let you know, in a possibly related matter, I continue to read old comic books every night in bed as a perhaps superstitious ritual tied to my recuperation. I've been reading a few issues of one with the poorly punctuated - not to mention misleading - title KID COLT OUTLAW. Mostly, this "outlaw" seems to go around helping cops, based on the little I've seen of him in action. Can't say I care much for Kid Colt. He's no El Diablo! In fact, as I was texting to Tom Franklin a while back, though DC had the milquetoast reputation and Marvel was theoretically what the cool kids enjoyed in the 1970s, the DC western comic books feel meaner and grittier than the Marvel ones. Yes, yes, I'm as shocked as you are. Let's all calm down. The main takeaway is that one Kid Colt character blurts out, "Well, I'll be a double-dyed hoot-owl!" Why anyone would dye a hoot-owl once, much less twice, is a mystery I intend to leave unexplored. In conclusion, between typing this sentence and the one before it, I happened to find a typo on page 1,256 of JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS: "world" where "word" is clearly meant. Ironically (?), a fitting typo for a translation of Mann. (See also.)

Weird

I never read the western-themed comic books as a kid. This is the kind of information you want from me! But let me get to the point. As you know, Tom Franklin brought me a bunch of old comic books while I was in the hospital, and then he brought me even more old comic books after I got home, and the western ones turned out to be among my favorites, because, among other reasons, they had the most owls in them - a longstanding and inexplicaple concern of the "blog," of course. Here's the update you've been craving: I bought even more old comic books for myself! One I especially like is called WEIRD WESTERN TALES. Often, the back pages of WEIRD WESTERN TALES will contain a story about a superhero I never heard of prior to the recent events elucidated above, the mysterious El Diablo. He's great! Anyhow, in one of these WEIRD WESTERN TALES of El Diablo here, there is a character named Wise Owl. He's not an owl, he's a guy! I don't read talking animal comics! I'm a 60-year-old-man! I only read comic books about magical cowboys.

Outlaw Pants

As you know, I tell you every time I read a book with an owl in it for secret reasons that no one except we (as I believe is gramatically correct) will ever understand. As you also know, Tom Franklin brought me a bunch of old comic books when I was in the hospital, and in one of them, the masked cowboy known as Vigilante met up with some real rascals (spoiler alert! they were reformed and had been framed!) known colloquially as "owlhoots." I don't suppose any of us will ever forget that. But what you DIDN'T know was that after I got home from the hospital, Tom brought over a fresh stack of old comic books! I was lying in bed reading one of the new batch last night and this character the Two-Gun Kid shoots Jesse James's pants off him! He does it in order to embarrass Jesse James in front of a bunch of schoolchildren. It's an odd choice, but hey, he's the Two-Gun Kid. He uses his two guns to shoot off Jesse James's pants, what's the big deal? Here, let me give you a direct quotation from the Two-Gun Kid himself: "LOOK, YOUNGSTERS! THE OWLHOOT WHO HOLDS UP STAGES IS HAVING TROUBLE HOLDING UP HIS JEANS! AND NOW, JESSE... DANCE!" What may we conclude? Let us consider: Vigilante is a DC character, while the Two-Gun Kid was created by Marvel. Therefore, though these mighty giants of comics publishing were adversarial in every other way, the term "owlhoot" was universal enough to bridge the immense gap between them. Can't we all learn a lesson from that in these trying times? Sidenote: I was going to title this "post" "I Shot Jesse James...'s Pants," an allusion to the Samuel Fuller film I SHOT JESSE JAMES, but no one would have understood or, had they understood, cared.

Unattributed Owl

I was convalescing this weekend in a MAGIC MOUNTAIN style medical facility when Tom Franklin dropped by with an armload of old comic books to help me pass the miserable hours. Now, one of these comics was a Gold Key publication about a superhero called THE OWL, and he seemed vaguely familiar. Soon enough, I remembered that I had run across a panel or two of the Owl subduing his foes with the use of his gun that shoots out rainbows. I had no context, and I passed it along to you without context, you're welcome. Somehow it never occurred to me - until now! - that a comic book called THE OWL should go on my long list of books with owls in them. After all, I have included other comic books on the list... off the top of my head, THE DEMON by Jack Kirby, DAREDEVIL, and Grant Morrison's THE INVISIBLES. Not trying very hard, I couldn't find details of authorship in my copy of THE OWL, save for a splash page signed by "Siegel & Gill." And you know what? That's all the effort I'm going to put into it. Old me would have scoured the "internet" for more information. But in case you can't tell, I've been sick. Get off my back! I will tell you that the Owl has a robot owl named Owlo. That seems important. In fact, he has an endless supply of robot owls named Owlo, in case something happens to one of them. During Tom's visit, we discussed many things, such as whether Deadman, a ghost superhero who shoves his soul into the bodies of other people, could inhabit Superman, who is, after all, not human, but some kind of freaky alien. Then Tom brought up the obscure cowboy superhero Vigilante... yes, I believe "superhero" is an accurate term. Vigilante (pictured above) doesn't have otherworldly powers, but neither does Batman. Case closed. Anyhow, imagine my delight when, after Tom had left, I found this on the cover of a WORLD'S FINEST comic: "VIGILANTE ROUTS THE 'REFORMED OWL-HOOT CLUB.'" Please note, that's owl-hoot, not hoot-owl, as I originally misread it. The story itself begins with this narration: "DYED-IN-THE-WOOL WESTERNERS WILL TELL YOU 'ONCE AN OWLHOOT, ALWAYS AN OWLHOOT!'" That's right, the cover used a hyphen but the actual comic did not. All this, perhaps, sheds some light on a phrase from TRUE GRIT that I seemingly found mysterious ("click" here for details. You usually ignore such exhortations, but I've been sick!). In conclusion, it seems that I have never mentioned on the "blog" - though it hardly seems possible (that I haven't mentioned it, I mean) - that I had a letter to the editor published in WORLD'S FINEST COMICS when I was a kid. It was a pretty sarcastic letter.

Hoot

As I am sure you think about all the time, my friend Megan and I have read 60 or 70 or 80 books about celebrities together and we show no signs of stopping until one of us (I) drops dead. Well, we ordered Brian Cox's diary (ha ha! I don't know why that's funny) from the time he played King Lear, and mine came, but Megan's still hasn't yet, are you taking notes? Because we each have a copy of the new oral history of Hollywood edited by Jeanine Basinger and some dude. So we decided to read that while Megan waits for Brian Cox's diary (ha ha!) to show up. Anyhow, and now we are getting to the really good stuff, we start in the silent era, of course, a section including reflections from Hoot Gibson (pictured, above), a very famous silent-era cowboy star as I am very sure you know. Before he was a cowboy star, Hoot worked as a delivery boy at the Owl Drug Company, which is how he got his nickname! People called him "Hoot Owl," which was shortened to "Hoot," because in those days, people were too tired to say the whole thing.

Unconscionable

I hate to tell you, but the book I'm reading now has an owl in it. The book is all about the making of MIDNIGHT COWBOY. A NYC boutique called The Owl and the Pussycat is given the scantest possible attention as part of a long list of boutique names. That's how the owls are these days. They just sneak into the books through the back door. The owls aren't even trying anymore. It's unconscionable.

Unrequited Owl

Tom Stoppard, as we learn from this biography of him, wrote many letters to the object of his unrequited love, in some of which he playfully referred to her and himself as "the Owl and the Cat." The author of the biography does not specify which was the owl and which the cat, nor is any mention made of the possible influence of Edward Lear on Stoppard's whimsical entreaties. The one thing we know for sure is that this biography of Tom Stoppard is a book with an owl in it. As long as you are here, I think I should tell you about some developments. Do you remember when I rewatched the film EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE and took note that Mel Tillis sang "sexy smile and Robert Redford hair" in the chorus of "Coca Cola Cowboy," rather than the song's actual lyrics, "Eastwood smile and Robert Redford hair," possibly out of deference to the film's star Clint Eastwood? Why, of course you do. Well! According to wikipedia, the lyric in the movie is "sexist smile and Robert Redford hair." I have done nothing to either refute or confirm wikipedia's claim, but it doesn't make any sense at all. Why would Robert Redford's luxurious, shining locks, which are famously attached to a head encasing a left-leaning brain, be associated lyrically with sexism? Furthermore, the eponymous "Coca Cola Cowboy," one would imagine, drinks Coca Cola, in contrast with the rotgut favored by "authentic" cowboys in disreputable saloons, whom one pictures harrassing barmaids and whooping it up in a sexist fashion. Therefore, the "Coca Cola Cowboy," I would argue, whatever he harbors in his heart, presents a smooth and shallow front, all empty calories and fizz, his immaculate, gleaming teeth as well-tended as his much-brushed coiffure, and is less likely to reveal a "sexist smile" than the fictionalized version of a cowboy to whom he is presented as a contrast. Having done no investigation whatsoever into the matter, I would like to state that I am right and wikipedia is wrong. But in the interest of justice, I couldn't keep the existence of wikipedia's questionable interpretation to myself.

A Vital Clarification

As you know, I don't "blog" anymore, but sometimes I am compelled... for example, if I need to issue a correction or clarification about something previously "blogged." Like, I just watched EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE again, and I was right when I said that Mel Tillis performs "Coca-Cola Cowboy" in it - the chorus of which mentions the film's star Clint Eastwood by name, theoretically causing the universe to fold in upon itself! How can Clint Eastwood, the actor, exist in a world alongside this character in the movie, who is clearly Clint Eastwood in every way, aside from his name? Upon this viewing, however, I noted, in the one time I found the line completely audible, that Tillis changes the part about the eponymous cowboy's "Eastwood smile," singing, in its place, "sexy smile." The word "Eastwood" is replaced with the word "sexy"! Now, this brings several things to mind. To name but a few, in the original song, "Eastwood smile" is something of an insult, it might be argued, denoting, perhaps, a kind of Hollywood phoniness. So that really makes you think. It also brings up the question as to whom decided that "sexy" was the proper synonym for "Eastwood." (One notes here that Eastwood's production company was responsible for the film.) Furthermore, is Clint Eastwood known primarily for his smile? I would argue that he is not. Perhaps we have been over some of this before. In conclusion, I don't know if "sexy" replaced "Eastwood" every single time. Based on the relative frequency of my previous viewings of EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE, I promise to pay more attention next time I watch it, in 2027. See you then!

Today Could Be the Day

It's been some time since McNeil sent me a DVD in the mail of an obscure movie about an already remorseful rodeo clown who gets entangled in a murder investigation.

Somebody Did It

The other morning at 4:18 AM I had - and recorded here - the big idea that someone should cast the same actor as both Claudius and the ghost of Hamlet's father. So last night I was watching the 2009 version of HAMLET starring David Tennant, and guess what? It's been done. So I felt the need to tell you I'm not the big brain I thought I was. That seems like too short, and too obvious, of a message, so I'll change the subject and tell you that though I'm just 20 pages into the book that Megan and I are reading about the making of THE WILD BUNCH, the author has already found time and space to call beach movies "stupid," the work of Lucille Ball's production company "idiot-box pablum" and Jim Hutton "annoyingly goofball" in "most of his films." Most of them! So I'm starting to get the feeling he doesn't think very highly of comedy, humor, jokes, general happiness, and the laughter of innocent children. I'm no stranger to the opinion. Someone expresses it to me nearly every day. But comedy - particularly its relative importance in art - has nothing to do with this dude's book as far as I can see, so the fact that he feels the need to trash it once every seven pages is fascinatingly perverse.

Familiar Barn Fight

As you know, I never, ever "blog" anymore unless I read a book with an owl in it or for some other reason. But now I have decided I can "blog" about the TV show THE BIG VALLEY whenever I want. Spurred by Laura Lippman's description of it as "gloriously weird," I decided to revisit THE BIG VALLEY, or maybe just to visit it, because I really couldn't remember anything about it. I remembered a promo in which they put a lot of reverb on the announcer when he said the title: "THE BIG VALLEY-ALLEY-ALLEY-alley-alley-alley!" And I remembered, from the same promo, the description of Barbara Stanwyck's character as "Victoria, a woman of backbone and bite!" All I can say is that was a pretty good promo if I still remember it from when I was a kid. So I watched some of THE BIG VALLEY. When a fistfight started raging in the barn, I thought, you know, maybe I did watch this show when I was a kid, because I felt secure in the knowledge that this was a staple of the show, it was all coming back to me, regular fistfights in the barn. But I can't be sure! I think there was something on the other channel I liked better. But here are some things I observed: 1. It all starts with one of the brothers on a bridge and here comes Lee Majors from the other direction and neither fellow will back up his horse to let the other one pass. So they literally just sit there looking at each other until the bridge falls down! I can't say much for the infrastructure. 2. The introduction of Barbara Stanwyck's character. She swoops into the room where her sons are standing and says (I paraphrase, but only slightly), "You're putting on weight, must you shout, here comes a visitor, I'll see you at dinner." And then she's gone. Like she was never there! She spits it all out like a machine gun and disappears in a flash. I thought maybe she was like Fred MacMurray, who supposedly used to come in and sit in a chair for one day and say all his lines for an entire season of his sitcom MY THREE SONS then get up and put on his hat and leave and they had to shoot around him for the rest of the year. My friend Ward McCarthy told me that about Fred MacMurray and if it's not true it's my own fault, because maybe I'm remembering the details wrong and I'm just too lazy to look it up. 3. Lee Majors kneels down at a lonesome grave (the patriarch has been plopped into the ground in the middle of nowhere, right where he was killed, not unlike the sad case of Meriwether Lewis) and then a young woman rides up on a horse and just casually leans down and starts striking Lee Majors wildly and repeatedly in the face with a leather strap, and she doesn't even know him! That's his half-sister, I guess, as they discover later, but there's an extremely weird vibe they've got going on (pictured). In fact they started making me think of Heathcliff and Cathy a little bit, and Lee Majors's name on the show is Heath, so I wondered whether that was on purpose, but my research methods (as noted above) are far too lazy to confirm or deny. Still, Heath is the brash, mysterious outsider who disrupts family life... for instance when he steals some apples! He's just walking around, trespassing, going through their stuff and finally taking an apple and Victoria catches him. So he takes off his hat. And I thought, oh, this brash, mysterious outsider is going to be respectful for a change! We're about to see the tender, gentlemanly side of this brash, mysterious outsider! But no, he was just taking off his hat to cram it full of all the sweet, sweet apples he could carry. And I was like, gee, Lee Majors sure has a hatful of apples now! He's going to have quite a night eating apples. Meanwhile, Audra (Linda Evans) gets a lot of use out of her leather strap, often with good reason, because they seem to live in a nightmarish hellscape. Right now everyone is shooting each other and I haven't even made it to the end of the first episode yet.

Moths

Just caught a little bit of RIO BRAVO on TCM. Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson are walking down the street at night whistling a tune together and there are a couple of little white moths flitting under the lamplight and I wondered whether the studio just had moths in it or Howard Hawks imported those moths.

Angel Face

Sometimes I have a little something that might be helpful to somebody, some little tidbit about how ADVENTURE TIME gets made. Like tonight's episode "Angel Face"! See, at first Kent and Adam and Pen and I were trying to write a MOST DANGEROUS GAME kind of outline about the King of Ooo hunting his subjects for sport, ha ha ha! We hashed it out for days and just couldn't make it go anywhere (though we used a scrap of it in the outline for "Stakes," the Marceline arc from earlier this year). So then one day both Adam and Kent were busy, as I recall it (the latter out of town, maybe?), leaving Pen and me alone, still trying to figure out this "hunting Crunchy for sport" episode, and for some reason I said that Jake could be a tiny horse that BMO was riding... and Pen was like, "Let's go with that." Another good writing lesson from Pen, because he didn't mean "Let's see how we can fit that into our story," he meant "Let's write a whole new outline based on that image." And so we did, over the course of a single meeting, after spending days and days going in another direction. And when Adam came back he strengthened what we had done (adding the surprise identity of the antagonist, just for example) and then of course Somvilay and Seo made it into something solid for real, the way they do, what with their storyboarding and writing the whole dang thing and all (sentient sandwiches, for example). Oh, the only other thing I can tell you is I came up with the name "Angel Face" because of the Robert Mitchum movie of that title (above), which I happened to be thinking about, though it's not a western and has absolutely nothing to do with the story we came up with. So! What's the lesson? Don't be afraid to abandon your original idea, I guess. If you're stuck, shift your focus: it might open the floodgates! And you can always save and reuse scraps of an idea that doesn't work. Latch onto an evocative image. Writing can be fun? And titles don't have to mean anything. Maybe those aren't the lessons.

Heartbroken Mope

I thought I'd un-live-tweet another movie, a Matthew Broderick movie from 1993 - by coincidence, the same year as STRIKING DISTANCE, the last movie I didn't live tweet. It's called THE NIGHT WE NEVER MET and I don't know why I picked it. Certainly not out of disrespect for Mr. Broderick, who plays the Dream Warrior (pictured) on ADVENTURE TIME. Oh, wait, I know why I picked it. I liked this capsule description provided by the satellite company: "An unlikable yuppie shares a Greenwich Village apartment with a frustrated housewife and a heartbroken mope." All right! Who could ask for more? Let's get to ersatz live-tweeting in the new-fashioned way that won't wreck your precious timeline: A guy turns off his alarm clock and puts on some... sandals? There's a glare on the TV screen, so I can't be certain about the footwear. Dirty pots filled with old beans. Matthew Broderick has a beard and mismatched curtains. Matthew Broderick talks out loud to himself, movie style! Bearded Matthew Broderick hits the town on his vespa. He saw a cute nurse and that made him happy! Annabella Sciorra, I do believe. Matthew Broderick is looking for a new apartment. Annabella Sciorra came out of the apartment building so I bet he takes the apartment. EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND's mom is peeking with a surly mien through a crack in the door. Annabella Sciorra and Christine Baranski smoke cigarettes inside a restaurant at the height of the lunchtime rush. Those were the days! Annabella Sciorra confesses her desire to take an "art class." Hey! Is that Louise Lasser? Maybe. They're setting up some weird plot, where people are moving into this apartment for two days a week...? Does that seem practical? A bunch of "yuppies" with neckties and no jackets acting all WOLF OF WALL STREET, standing on desks and making speeches and howling and pumping their fists for reasons I can't understand... EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND's mom puts on hand lotion. The plot gets explained more. I don't understand it. Jeanne Tripplehorn! I always thought that was a cool last name. Matthew Broderick goes to see Tripplehorn (his ex?) in an "experimental play" - a form always treated with sneering contempt in movies. Take that, Samuel Beckett! I missed something. I think she was making out with a plastic snowman? Tripplehorn has a fake French accent. I mean, she's supposed to be French in the movie, though. Well, she took off her sweater in front of Matthew Broderick and that made him feel sad. Now she's singing "Alouette" in the shower! Are you kidding me? "Alouette"! She wants Matthew Broderick to put out her cigarette for her. Is it so hard to put out your cigarette in the shower? I guess it was supposed to emphasize some "character trait." Just throw it in the toilet, French Jeanne Tripplehorn! Oh boy, I didn't see this coming: some kind of unconvincing 50 SHADES OF GREY monkey business with the "yuppie" character. Wait! Was that a dream? Another alarm clock going off. It was all a dream! Back when I was teaching, we used to strongly discourage the use of alarm clocks in short stories. I guess they don't tell you that in screenwriting class. This is the second alarm clock going off in this movie. Is that Justine Bateman? It seems that Justine Bateman and the "yuppie" want very different things out of life. Annabella Sciorra is a dentist, not a nurse. Her patient is Garry Shandling! He seems sleazy. In this movie, I mean. No, Annabella Sciorra is a dental assistant but she wants to be an artist. She has a husband and tropical fish. The husband wants to move to the suburbs. Montage of people eating lunch meat? Hey, it's that guy who always plays a jerk in movies. For some reason, he's pretending to be Louise Lasser on the phone. MB works at Dean and Deluca and hates French cheese! Because of his problems with French person Jeanne Tripplehorn. It's causing work problems! What! Here's what's-her-name from SILENCE OF THE LAMBS! She and MB are on a blind date. "Is that veal?" she says. How could she know? MB is just carrying a serving dish with the lid on it. Does she have X-ray vision? Because it IS veal! She's incensed. A weird thing to cook on a first date, though. Okay! So MB and Annabella Sciorra are sharing this apartment but they never see each other. And yet methinks she's falling in love with his remnants! The "yuppies" are also sharing the apartment. They play loud music and jump around and scream like jerks. EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND's mom is married (?) to Johnny Ola from GODFATHER II! He also peeks out of crevices and makes faces. They are like a Greek chorus. Except they NEVER TALK. So they're not like a Greek chorus. Annabella Sciorra continues to be entranced by the still-unseen (by her) Matthew Broderick. He's leaving notes for her everywhere. It's actually sort of controlling and creepy, despite this mellow "blue-eyed soul" number underscoring the developments, if you want to call them that. One of the "yuppies" pees with the door open. They make pig noises and smoke cigars. Now they're screaming out of the windows and burning pizza in the oven. The guy who always plays jerks in movies lights his cigar with the burning pizza box to show what a horrible weirdo he is. Wait! Have I explained the plot? So the "yuppies" use this place a couple days a week to chillax. MB brings dates there? I guess? Annabella Sciorra uses it to explore her artistic impulses. It's a getaway from the world! All right. Okay, there was a zany mixup I barely feel like getting into, though it may become necessary later. Johnny Ola finally said something but EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND's mom just gravely shook her silent grim head. Annabella Sciorra's husband is shown to be a philistine. The alarm on his watch goes off! Man, this screenwriter loves alarms. Dang! MB's alarm clock goes off! Fourth alarm clock! Jeanne Tripplehorn took a shower with a cowboy and a dog? She loves taking showers. I think the cowboy is feeding her a Pop Tart. MB: "I want you to do what you say you want to do, not what you do do." JT: "No, I do do what I say I do." Ha ha, oh boy. Doo doo. Maybe I should stop here. Is that Dr. John crooning a stirring ballad while the "yuppie" admires his own butt in a mirror? Poor Dr. John! Johnny Ola mugs for the camera some more through the crack of a doorway. I can't believe that Annabella Sciorra is about to do it with the "yuppie," mistaking him for MB for reasons I can't get into here because I don't really understand them. Time to feed the cats, I'm going to miss some of this movie. I hope you're not too disappointed. I came back. Johnny Ola is peeking through a doorway again. Annabella Sciorra's fingernails are painted white and the "yuppie" is climbing all over her. She's not going to put up with his boorish manner for long! Well! I was wrong! They did it. I know because his shirt is unbuttoned all the way and he says, "Man... you came to play." Gross! Johnny Ola eavesdrops on their intimacy through his doorway and checks his watch and rolls his eyes and mugs for the camera like his life depended on it. Reckonings commence. Why the hell is MB so happy all of a sudden? He's walking down the crowded NYC streets tossing an orange in the air as Motown plays. Did I miss something? He has no reason to be happy that I can recall. EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND's mom smokes and glares out of a window. I hope they paid her a lot. MB goes on a date with a character so stupid she thinks he has cooked pasta with dog in it. "Dog?" she says. "Ruff ruff ruff?" Wait! She's on the TV show NASHVILLE! She plays Deacon's doomed sister. EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND's mom speaks! She and Johnny Ola are really spewing out the dialogue. They've been holding it in so long! You can't shut them up. Dr. Theresa says soup is ready. I may miss something. Wait! Is MB going to end up with Justine Bateman? That's coming out of left field! I did not see that coming at all. Kudos... but to whom? Now Johnny Ola has finally brought a chair or stool to put by his door so when he peeps out of it and makes faces he can sit down. Wait! Is the "yuppie" the "nice guy" from SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY? Weird. He went to his "yuppie" workplace and all his coworkers ritualistically cut their neckties in half at the same time, and made pig noises...? I don't know what's going on. This soup is good, though. Hey! Christopher from THE SOPRANOS! One line. Funny shirt. And I could swear Lewis Black walks by in the background: no lines, funny shirt. Well, I could swear this movie was about to end, but things keep happening. I guess you could call it. MB just threw a drink on Jeanne Tripplehorn. Not very gentlemanly! And her character's name is "Pastel," seemingly. Ha ha, Pastel! MB goes back to talking out loud to himself, which he hasn't done since the first scene, so maybe it's a circular thing and we're finally wrapping up. They made the husband suddenly 100,000 times more awful than ever before to justify it when Annabella Sciorra inevitably leaves him for Matthew Broderick. My Justine Bateman speculation was way off base. That would have been a neat twist! MB and Annabella Sciorra meet again. They still don't know each other. Is this movie going to last forever? The "yuppie" comes in and takes off his pants in front of Matthew Broderick, a total stranger, you know, how people do. Annabella Sciorra: "I didn't mean to sleep with him, I meant to sleep with you!" Did the guy from SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY just tweak Matthew Broderick's nipple? Dr. John is singing again.

Drumstick Adventure

You know, just about every Monday, my coworker Ashly Burch asks me "How was your weekend?" and it's a very pleasant and considerate query but I sit there in silence with a dumb look on my face because I can't think of anything to say because nothing happened that weekend. Well, today is gonna be different, says I! Went out to Faulkner's house to play accordion on the Thacker Mountain Radio Show. They never had a radio show there before, and hardly even a radio. Faulkner hated the radio. There's a story about that but you'll have to go to Faulkner's house and ask Bill Griffith. He runs the place! I don't know how Faulkner felt about accordions. Kelly Hogan got in trouble for sitting - with no malice aforethought - on Faulkner's freezer. Because guess what? It's not just a freezer, it's a museum exhibit! Anyway, they had made Faulkner's kitchen into a green room for musicians, which I'm sure stressed out even the chill Bill Griffith. And I was thinking, yeah, but Hogan is probably the first person to sit on the lid of that freezer since Faulkner! It's like their very butts touched through the fabric of time!

Here's a picture that Megan Abbott took of Dr. Theresa (waving her hands in the air like she just doesn't care... but she does!) and Thacker producer Kathryn McGaw York grooving out on the sight of all their crazy hard work coming to fruition. Note Lopez's fetching hat, clearly visible in two photos thus far. Saw David Swider of The End of All Music. He said I should bring my Emmy to the record store for "Touch the Emmy Day," and people will come by and touch my Emmy while I spin records under the name "DJ Emmy." It seemed like a hilarious idea while we drank whiskey in Faulkner's yard and swooned companionably in the blazing hot sun! I feel like everybody sang about ghosts. Is that an exaggeration? I'm not sure! Must have been the unconscious pull of the setting. Or maybe songwriters just happen to like ghosts. I remember once many years ago a friend of mine claimed that she didn't like any song with the word "ghost" in it, which I found stunningly arbitrary. Okay, I'm leaving a lot of stuff out. But later that night, there was another show (not on Faulkner's lawn), and I was happy to hear great musicians like Amy Ray and Laurie Stirratt literally singing Dr. Theresa's praises (well, not literally! They were speaking, not singing, at those moments) from the stage. But before that late-night show, Dr. Theresa, who was in charge, was faced with some emergencies! Like: an amp that shocked a famous session guitarist with its electricity! Or: a drum kit but NO DRUMSTICKS! Jennifer and I were sent out into the night to scour the town for drumsticks. We went to a bar called Proud Larry's, where there is usually a band playing, to see whether the drummer might have an extra pair of sticks. But as we approached the door I noticed that the band's name had been ominously rubbed from the chalkboard outside! And sure enough, the band had been canceled because everybody wanted to watch the University of Mississippi play at Alabama, a big game. BUT! A thoughtful waiter told us that one of the bartenders was a drummer. And the bartender kindly went to check his car and found a drumstick. A single drumstick! It felt like a kind of triumph. A useless triumph! But I encouraged Jennifer to hold the pointless drumstick aloft in a victorious gesture as we returned. By the time we got back they had already found two more drumsticks. So we actually had one more drumstick than was absolutely necessary! Chris Lopez played first, under his solo guise "Tenement Halls." ("Click" here to listen to my favorite Tenement Halls song: you won't be sorry!) He kept taunting us with the first few bars of "Black Ice" (a Rock*A*Teens song which I have written about in the New York Times! or their "web" site anyway) but couldn't remember the lyrics. Finally he called out from the stage, "Theresa, what's the first line?" And we yelled back at him from the back table, but we didn't quite have them right either. Turns out the first line is "In a town up north of Nashville, where the Crackers go to learn how to play..." (I think) But (though we had the second half right) I had always heard it as something like, "In a town outta nada of Naughahooga" or something like that. Anyway, it got Chris rolling! After Chris's set, Rock*A*Teens fan Bill Boyle and I discussed the lyrics of "Black Ice" and how many different, incorrect ways we had heard them over the years. One thing I enjoyed was the fluid spirit of the proceedings. It didn't seem like five or six different bands playing, but more like one larger band that kept undulating and changing its shape in a lovely way. Lopez played drums for Amy Ray and Jon Langford and Hogan... Langford played guitar for Hogan... Hogan sang harmonies for Langford and Ray... like that. I really enjoyed hearing the Amy Ray/Rock*A*Teens collaboration "Black Heart Today." I found an older, milder, more "acoustic" performance of it on the "internet," which is good, but if you "click" here you will miss Lopez's rabid drum fills, for one thing, which had grown in majestic stature as the night drew to a close. I hope somebody recorded it! And all its mystical punk rock vibrations of glory.

I played accordion on three songs for Hogan, I think, including one I wrote a couple of decades ago (ugh! what a thought! decades! "click" here if you'd like to hear it, false starts and all). I played on Hogan's cover of the Magnetic Fields song "Papa Was a Rodeo" (really, I just noodled along) and I got so concerned with my noodling that I didn't even notice that Amy Ray had come up to join in, and I happened to glance out of the corner of my eye to see Amy Ray and Kelly Hogan gracefully two-stepping together.

Here's a still photo of that moment (post-dancing, I think). I stole it from somebody's twitter, sorry! There was a giant in a cowboy hat who was VERY enthusiastic about Langford's set. He whooped with such frightening intensity that Langford had to stop the show and calm him down with vinegary Welsh quips. Later I went to the men's room and found that giant cowboy in there with his girlfriend! They were just hanging out, no funny business, don't get me wrong. But then as he stood at the urinal he was going "OOOHHHHH! OUCH! ARRGHHHHH! AAAAAHHHWWWWWW!" like a person in the greatest human agony, which perhaps he was. Why did I mention that when there were so many nicer things to mention instead? Like breakfast the next day with Julie and Barry and Langford? John Currence surprised us by coming up behind us stomping on the floor, shaking the very building with his mighty tread! What the hell, it's his building, he can do what he wants! Then he bought champagne for the table as you can plainly see from this photo of the occasion.

Currence (not pictured) was pumped up and celebrating the University's triumph over its rival, to which I have already alluded. Sorry, Ashly, a lot of other stuff happened but my mind is going.