Enviable Birds

Hey! Remember yesterday when I was reading a book with an owl in it? Well! What if I told you that last night I was reading another book and it had an owl in it too? Don't get overexcited! So, after I finished BUDDENBROOKS (which did not have an owl in it) - buckle up! This is going to be quite a tale! - I thought at first I might like to read Colm Tóibín's novel about Thomas Mann. I picked it up (off the floor! For real! It's chaos here!) and read a little bit and the tone was uncannily like BUDDENBROOKS, which I am sure Colm Tóibín intended, but, to me, it seemed a little bit like I would be reading BUDDENBROOKS all over again, immediately, and as much as I enjoyed BUDDENBROOKS, I thought maybe something else would be in order as I toddled off to slumberland every night with heavenly angels standing guard over the bed. This story gets better and better! Stay with me! So I dug out what looked to be the opposite of BUDDENBROOKS, one of those slender, elegant volumes I hate so much, ha ha! I kid the slender, elegant volumes. And yet it is true that I would often prefer plunging into a thousand-page saga to opening some jewel-like masterpiece by an exquisite miniaturist sure to make my head hurt with all its simple elegance. But I found a promising volume of that ilk, SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW by William Maxwell, which was sent to me as a medicinal aid by my good friend Allyson during my recent convalescence. And it's good! And not quite halfway through it takes an audacious narrative turn that one does not expect in a volume of such elegant slimness! But that's not why we're here, is it? We are here to observe that "hoot owls" appear in the text, among a list of enviable birds that our narrator imagines populating the countryside, while, where he lives, in town, there are only some nice but sedate birds that, to continue paraphrasing, don't make such interesting noises as the hoot owls, mourning doves, whippoorwills, bob whites, and so on. Or maybe I've named them all! This slender volume of pristine elegance made an impression on me after all. And one more! Because I actually winced at a typo in it! Winced! Don't get me wrong, people. I don't mind a typo. I like them, even. I no doubt commit them frequently and don't even know it. Just the other day, I happened to find an old "post" in which I spelled Katharine Hepburn's name as, of all arbitrary choices, Kathryn! Did I fix it? Hell no. You know, I read some article that quoted Elon Musk - and I hate to mention his name, sorry! - a while back, and he said something like (I paraphrase quite roughly) "Robots will be writing good novels within three years." And I was like, "What's a good novel to this guy? One with no spelling errors?" Which made me throw up just thinking about the question. And so I was surprised at myself for physically, not just figuratively, wincing as I did at William Maxwell's typo. But look. If your book is a slender elegant volume of refined prose meant to be read through a jeweler's loupe, your typo stands out. In this case, we find a fairly large dog lying down in the grass and "resting her chin on her four paws." Now! Certainly our author meant to write "her forepaws." I am not the most imaginative person in the world, but I find it impossible to picture a dog resting her chin on four paws at once... whereas I have seen for myself with my own eyes a dog resting her chin on her forepaws. Would the dog not have to be a contortionist circus dog to do the former? And could such a position even be called "resting"? So either it's a typo or I am showing my ignorance about dogs, as I have shown it over the years about so much else. PS! Just as I expected, I was wrong. I should have known better than to accuse William Maxwell of incorrectly describing a dog at rest. That's a specialty of such writers! Anyway, McNeil, while unable to find an image of his own dog sleeping on her four paws, assured me that dogs do it all the time, and sent me the above photographic proof from the "internet." I guess I just couldn't picture a dog curling up. The commonplace things I cannot picture are without number.

The Ninety Paths to Jerry

Soon it will be Jerry Lewis's 90th birthday. So I have "punched up" an old "post." In the old days there were only fifty, but now there are NINETY different ways to approach Jerry, should you find him unapproachable. I present this as a public service. Choose the path that's right for you! 1. How is Edgar Allan Poe like Jerry Lewis? 2. For that matter, what would Kierkegaard say about Jerry Lewis? 3. Bob Dylan got "deeply into" Jerry Lewis. 4. Jerry was a hero to Richard Pryor. 5. Jerry shares expressionistic instincts with iconic rappers. 6. He made Orson Welles laugh. 7. Freudian aspects of Jerry. 8. He played a gig with Thelonious Monk. 9. A trusted method of immersing yourself in Jerryness. 10. Don't believe me? Take it from bestselling novelist Laura Lippman! 11. Don't believe Laura Lippman? Perhaps famed method actor Edward Norton is more to your taste. 12. Consider Jerry Lewis as the forefather of David Lynch. 13. So can it be a coincidence that Louis CK cast Lynch in a part originally written for Jerry Lewis? 14. As muse to hardboiled Don Carpenter. 15. Jerry's spectacular use of color. 16. Jerry is the inventor of anti-comedy, his aesthetic also appropriated by the cinematic underground. 17. Read the great Jerry monograph by Chris Fujiwara. 18. Jerry a hero to Michael Palin of the Monty Python comedy troupe. 19. Jerry an inspiration for the British version of THE OFFICE that everyone used to love so much. 20. Jerry makes me think of the French painter Henri Rosseau. 21. Do you think Jerry is redundant? No, he is "unfolding redundancy." Joke's on you!

22. Do you like Godard? Well, Godard based some of his scenes on Jerry Lewis scenes. Like this and that. 23. Some maintain that 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY would have been better with Jerry in it. 24. Speaking of which, was Jerry an influence on Boorman's groundbreaking POINT BLANK? I don't know, but he should have starred in it. 25. How about that prescient scene in THE BELLBOY that anticipates Scorsese's THE KING OF COMEDY? 26. The Cinderfella dance! 27. Jerry frequently appears in THE BELIEVER magazine, if that's your cup of tea. 28. I intuit a connection between Jerry and J.D. Salinger. 29. And supposedly Salinger considered Jerry to direct the movie version of CATCHER IN THE RYE, maybe. I said maybe! 30. Jerry's influence on GOODFELLAS. 31. Jerry Lewis is part of Philip K. Dick's mystic vision of the entire universe. 32. You should watch lots of Jerry Lewis so you can practice the fun habit of saying things like Jerry Lewis. 33. Even nature itself aspires to sound like Jerry Lewis. 34. Jerry Lewis is a good singer. 35. Maybe you identify with Jerry's world-weary attitude. 36. He hung out in a diner with Marilyn Monroe. 37. Blair Hobbs detects an aesthetic kinship between Jerry and the photographer William Eggleston. 38. Jerry was an inspiration to Bruce Springsteen. 39. Think of Jerry as a poet. 40. Need a dissertation topic? How about "Medical Ethics in the Films of Jerry Lewis"? 41. In a hilarious practical joke, Jerry ruined Dick van Dyke's meeting with the queen! 42. Jerry was instrumental in getting the great Stan Laurel his honorary Oscar. 43. Jerry is handsome! 44. Maybe you are a "conspiracy theory buff." Well, for real the CIA tampered with one of Jerry's movies. 45. Maybe you're an animal lover. Well, Jerry bought a hearing aid for his dog. 46. Jerry is subversive! 47. Quentin Tarantino + Jerry Lewis = True Love 4ever. 48. (Maybe because he anticipated one of Tarantino's more radical and disruptive narrative decisions by 40 years.) 49. Does he irritate you and make you uncomfortable? MAYBE THAT'S JUST WHAT JERRY WANTS! 50. For example, he once stuck his nose in Frank Sinatra's eye. 51. And took some of the starch out of Tony Curtis by flicking ashes on his jacket. 52. Jerry is complicated. He "both depicts and manifests inadvertent disclosure." - J. Hoberman. 53. Jerry's influence on the Beastie Boys. 54. Jerry appears in works by acknowledged comic geniuses John Hodgman and Michael Kupperman.

55. But perhaps you prefer authors from Mississippi, a chunk of land with a notable literary history. If so, you should be aware that Tom Franklin and Frederick Barthelme have put Jerry Lewis in their well-regarded "Mississippi" novels. 56. So has Don DeLillo, though he is not from Mississippi, nor are his novels set there. 57. ARE you a historian, by the way? Then consider Jerry's breakup with Dean in its implications as "a national trauma." 58. Francis Ford Coppola cites Jerry as an influence. 59. Which reminds me: I recently read an interview that Scorsese did with Lewis in which he (Scorsese) cites THE LADIES MAN as an influence. I always assumed the scene in question was drawn from SATYRICON. But SATYRICON came out after THE LADIES MAN, so maybe SATYRICON was influenced by Jerry too! I just now decided that, while typing this. 60. Jerry's darker side a fruitful subject for literary speculation. 61. Speaking of which, John Waters said Jerry Lewis was "probably a monster!" Can there be a higher compliment? 62. Although (see previous "link") John Waters went on to praise his taste in costuming. So that subject is worth contemplation. 63. Though, intriguingly, to Waters's original hypothesis, Jerry repeatedly acknowledges the collusion of the innocent with the monstrous, especially within a single individual. (See also.) 64. Jerry's art provides some of the same challenges and rewards as Sun Ra's. 65. Jerry envisioned hosting Queen Elizabeth, Jimmy Hoffa and Helen Keller on a talk show. I still want to write that play.

66. Fascinating undercurrents to his on- and off-screen chemistry with Dean Martin. 67. I wrote a pretty good article about him once if you can find it. 68. And this "post" is all right. 69. Try to solve Jerry's universal problem. 70. The complex transparency of Jerry's genius can be profitably compared to Brian Wilson's. 71. Jerry reveals the intrinsic flaws in the very notion of successful human communication. 72. Maybe that's why he's constantly "rewriting his own being." 73. But before he rewrote himself too much, here's a 13-minute clip of young Jerry at his brashest and most engaging. 74. Jerry's anarchic devouring of the hand that feeds him. 75. Maybe you are from the "dance world." Did you know that many highbrow choreographers turn to Jerry Lewis for inspiration? 76. Similarities between Jerry and the great Italian giallo director Mario Bava, if that's your thing. 77. Jerry is a model of tact and restraint compared to the makers of Jason Bateman movies. 78. As Jerry is, so you will be. As you are, so once was he. 79. Jerry, like Elvis, was a target of snobbery and classism. 80. I mean, even when he ended the Oscar broadcast EARLY, the powers-that-be still despised him. He gets under "the man's" skin. 81. For example, when everybody in "the establishment" was dumping on Arthur Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE, Jerry was one of the first to proclaim its greatness. 82. Did he inspire a character in a Wes Anderson movie? Probably not. But I think he inspired a character in a Noah Baumbach movie. 83. Touchstone for towering cartoonists Lynda Barry and Gilbert Hernandez. 84. Jerry deemed a subject worthy of the Savannah College of Art and Design. 85. Jerry cut short his formal education and set out to educate himself. 86. Jonathan Rosenbaum knows a lot about movies and he loves Jerry Lewis. 87. Tough-to-please James Wolcott likewise. 88. Camille Paglia seems happy about Jerry Lewis. 89. Jerry blurs assumptions about gender. 90. Hey, Sandra Bullock likes Jerry Lewis.

Jealous Robot Ray

Maybe I am on my "Kennedy kick" after all. I picked up LIBRA and started reading it. Almost right away we come to the CIA plotting to blow up Castro with "a sea shell that would explode when he went swimming." Now, this is part of that Norman Mailer novel I just read, too. And a tiny bit of "internet" research indicates it was a real plan right here in real life where we all live. But Mailer's narrator wants to train a manta ray to jealously guard the beauteous shell so it will seem more attractive and desirable to Castro. Mailer has him down as a big shell collector. And the "internet" tells me that the CIA did intend to "make the shell brightly colored and unusual looking so it would be sure to attract Castro’s attention." So Mailer's narrator schemes to train the jealous manta ray but finally decides a robot manta ray would work better. I assume the trained or robotic fish idea is all Mailer's... eh... I don't want to know.

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.

Dream Neighbors

Hey remember how you don't care what I dream and I don't care that you don't care? Here we go again! So I dreamed that the neighbors were doing construction (as they are in real, waking life) and one of their machines, parked in our driveway, was run by a small dog that had to walk around and around incessantly on a long leash, tangling and untangling it (that part is only in the dream). So some of the other neighbors gathered (not real ones; dream neighbors) to comment on this little fluffy white dog who had to walk around and around, powering this huge machine. Some, such as Dr. Theresa and I, thought it was awful! Others thought it wasn't so bad. One woman said, "It's the same thing the dog would be doing anyway, going for a walk," and I made a sarcastic remark about how it wasn't the same to get on a merry-go-round and to take a trip to Disneyland. That's what I said in the dream. This angered the woman. She said quietly, to end the conversation, "That's that." I said, "I beg your pardon?" and she hissed, much louder, "THAT'S THAT." And she hissed a great hiss. So then Laura Dern came up! She was on my side. She was like, "Let me handle this." So she did a trick where she took an old rocking chair apart without using her hands - I'm just telling you what I dreamed! - and there were some roller skates concealed in the inner workings of the rocking chair, and Laura Dern put them on and did an "eccentric dance" with skates on. A player piano started playing! (It was a piano from my childhood, and I assured Dr. Theresa it had always been a player piano because I didn't want her to be scared. BUT IT HAD NEVER BEEN A PLAYER PIANO.) Some guy started playing the harmonica, blatantly disregarding that he was playing in a different key than the piano, which I worried would enrage the neighbor even further. But Laura Dern started singing like this: "Wah wah wah!" Somehow it reconciled the piano and the harmonica. The hissing neighbor reluctantly enjoyed the performance, and an uneasy truce occurred, thanks to the antics of Laura Dern! So the neighbors all left and finally we could get back to the wedding celebration that was going on! Yes, one of my older relatives (I guess) had married Phyllis Diller! Who is dead in real life. Also, Pendleton Ward was staying with us. Secretly! He had been hiding out during the dog controversy. Also, there was a casket in the room where the wedding reception was. And someone was inside it! Kind of under glass, Snow White style.

And Phyllis Diller said to me, "You've loved me since you were a kid, haven't you?" And I said, "I've loved you since I was in the womb!" which got a huge laugh in the dream. Ha ha, it's cool to mention wombs in a dream, right? And Phyllis Diller said she was planning on going out on the town with me one New Year's Eve so I could impress my friends. "I'll go dressed as Carol Burnett!" she said, which was some kind of joke - about Halloween, I think? - and everybody else laughed but it took me a second to catch on. I know I dreamed about the dog because I read about the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, right before I went to bed. After they had lopped off her head, a little dog ran out of her clothes, where it had been concealed the whole time! "Yelping, it slid in her blood," writes Peter Ackroyd. Sorry! But that's real life, not a nightmare, though it seems like a nightmare, and I read it before retiring as a violent storm raged.

Fun Facts From Real Life

Tonight Dr. Theresa and I ate some oysters harvested from a place called "Alligator Harbor," which sounded gross to me. I don't even know why. Not the place itself! I'm sure the place itself is nice. It sounds nice! The surrounding area. I'm sure it's pleasant. I can almost picture it, postcard style. Alligator Harbor! I guess what I didn't like was the thought of some oysters that have been lying around in alligator poop...? Is that the image that came unbidden to my mind? Dear Lord, it is all my own fault, forgive me. We have often, and without a care in the world, eaten oysters harvested from a place called "Murder Point." This "post" used to be a lot tighter. Alligator Harbor/Murder Point/Ha ha ha. I came back in and "fixed" it. I felt that I needed to distinguish the almost certainly lovely locale of Alligator Harbor from the slimy oysters I imagined, for no good reason, coming out of the filthy waters (the waters, by the way, are surely not filthy!) surrounding Alligator Harbor (which were, in fact, the actual oysters from Alligator Harbor, I mean, fine and delicious). Maybe I'll just come back to this "post" and make it a little longer every day and that's all I'll do until somebody stops me.

A Pile of Logs

The other night when I couldn't sleep I turned on TCM and saw the last little bit of JEREMIAH JOHNSON. Then TCM host Robert Osborne came out, the way he does, and said that in the original script, Robert Redford was a cannibal! I ain't lying. Robert Osborne said the original title of the script was LIVER-EATIN' JOHNSON. For real! And when Redford brought it to director Sydney Pollack, Pollack was like, "Hmm, are you sure you want the hero you're playing in this movie to be a cannibal, Robert Redford?" (I paraphrase.) So they changed it. I'm sorry to tell you such a horrible thing! But how do you think I felt? So I switched over to a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie but it had been on for eight minutes already and something very vital must've happened in those eight minutes, because I COULD NOT FIGURE OUT WHAT WAS GOING ON IN THIS FREDDIE PRINZE JR. MOVIE! So I changed channels again and there was JEFFERSON IN PARIS, and Thomas Jefferson was trying to impress a woman by jumping over a pile of logs! He literally said, "Why, I'll jump over these logs for you!" (If I paraphrase again, it is but slightly.) And Thomas Jefferson leapt over this pile of logs but his foot caught on something and he took a tumble straight out of "America's Funniest Home Videos." But kind of incredibly it was not supposed to be funny! His wrist (or something) was broken and we cut to scenes of Jefferson wasting away in a feverish delirium because of the injury he sustained trying to jump over a pile of logs to get a woman to like him back. So certainly this must be a real historical fact, huh? It's just too dumb to believe otherwise. I have a book of Jefferson's letters, including many to the woman in question, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

Cat Name

I talk about sad clowns a lot here, but I can't take any credit for the sad clown angle of tonight's ADVENTURE TIME, storyboarded by the wonderful Graham Falk and just concluded in most of our large nation. It was entirely Pen's idea to make the character a sad clown; I was "pitching" (as we say in the business) for him to be a piano player for a torch singer in a seedy mob-run nightclub, like Cameron Mitchell in the Doris Day movie LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME. Strangely, it was also Pen's idea to name the episode "Sad Face" after one of our cats, Sad Face. I even tried to change that title a couple of times on drafts of the outline, but Pen kept changing it back. You may "click" here to see a drawing Pen did of Sad Face, with whom he was quite taken on his trip to Oxford. You will note that the drawing is labeled "Big Boy," which indeed became Sad Face's secondary name for a number of reasons. He was first called Sad Face as an aloof and slender feral cat who lurked mysteriously in the gray mist and shadows half-unseen and for whom we used to put out food. Those who say feral cats cannot be tamed have never seen Dr. Theresa in action. She made friends with Sad Face patiently over the course of several months. We caught him finally (ha ha! I know how boring this is and I just don't care) and took him in for his shots and had him fixed, intending to release him again, which we did, during a rainstorm! How terrible. What were we thinking? He didn't seem to care. But he came in one day and stayed in, this wraith who used to be able to jump over tall fences and run agilely if heart-stoppingly through the traffic in front of our house, back and forth across the busy and treacherous street like a maniac. He lost any desire to go outside ever again, just like me, and got comfortable and fat, just like me. So we took to calling him "Big Boy" instead of "Sad Face," though he still has a sad face, but a "happy head," as our young neighbor once observed. Anyway, I'll have you know Sad Face has lost a lot of weight since Pen drew that picture. For real! For further reading (ha ha! Don't do it!), remember when I was writing that dumb serialized fantasy novel for the Vice magazine and nobody cared? You will note that a daring brigand in it had a faithful horse called Sad Face.

Why Pie Cry

Now I will tell you about the rest of that Red Skelton sad clown movie. Are you excited? Like, remember when I told you that he had a job attacking people at an amusement park with a cattle prod? Okay, well, one guy got kind of mad about it. So Red Skelton's boss comes out and says to Red Skelton, "Hey, we run a family place here!" He's mad at Red Skelton! Even though HE'S the one who hired Red Skelton to attack the customers with a cattle prod. It's a strange business, being a threatening clown. So Red Skelton gets fired. For doing his job too well, I guess. Next he gets a job being a "receiver." That sounds bad! He says, "Don't let my kid see this." So he sits there while a guy gives him an exploding cigar and smashes butter on him and hits him in the face with a couple of pies. And his kid sees it! And silently weeps! Ha ha ha! Doesn't this kid - whose name is Dink (!) - know what a clown does for a living? He's been living with a clown his whole life. The weirdest part of that scene is that Red Skelton gives no reaction whatsoever as the guy assaults him with pies and so on. I mean, he doesn't move a muscle. Put some effort into it, clown! Half the fun of the old pie in the face is the hilarious reaction of the "receiver." I mean, even if you're going to be deadpan about it, you have to be deadpan in a funny way. Like, I don't know, stoically and with economical motions wipe the pie out of your eyes, one at a time. Oh well. And the kid is just crying while his dad gets hit in the face with pies. I forgot to mention he's not just a sad clown he's a drunk clown and a clown with a gambling problem. Charles Bronson (!!) wins all of Red Skelton's money in an all-night dice game and Red Skelton picks his sleeping kid's pocket for a gold watch that means the world to him. I also forgot to say he sent his kid to sleep in the backseat of a random stranger's car! (Remember, now, at the end of the movie, Jane Greer says, "You did a great job raising him, Dodo.") I'll tell you who I liked: Little Julie, a shady operator who does his business out of a diner booth. "Step into my office," he says with self-loathing and also regular loathing. He organizes what Megan Abbott would probably - probably? does! I've heard her! - call "smokers" - smokers with racy entertainment! This guy has a touch of authentic sleaze. The actor's name is Lou Lubin. Let's hear it for Lou Lubin (pictured)! He gets Red Skelton a shameful gig where he has to tell the 1953 version of dirty jokes while ladies take off their clothes. At the end Red Skelton dies from clowning too much. For real! And I skipped over some surprisingly brutal moments like when Red Skelton smashes a pane of glass with his fist and then starts hitting the wall and screaming. That is one sad clown. Okay, bye!

Bilbo Baggins

Hello! Here is a picture of Norman Mailer in a top hat, leather vest, and denim shorts, snapped by Bill Boyle off of Megan Abbott's TV screen. We were watching Mailer's film MAIDSTONE. Ace was there too, and he thought it was pretty good revenge for the time he made Dr. Theresa and me watch THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (which I would like to state for the record here is, I think, about twice as long as MAIDSTONE). "He looks like a hobbit," Ace said of Norman Mailer, and other disparaging remarks. To be fair, when I was in a video conference once, I held up the cover of the Norman Mailer bio to the camera, so that Mailer's face filled the screen instead of mine, and Pen cried out "It's Bilbo Baggins!" - not trying to be funny, more in simple recognition. Megan and I argued that Mailer was a good-looking man. Ace remained unconvinced. Megan Abbott owned up that she saw him once and "he was just a little taller than me." (She's tiny!) I found a number of things to enjoy in MAIDSTONE, but we all agreed that by far the best part of the movie is the famous bloody scene at the very end when the actor Rip Torn goes a little bit crazy and hits Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer FOR REAL and then Norman Mailer tries very hard to bite and rip off Rip Torn's ear. "Click" here to see a demonically grinning Rip Torn on Bill Boyle's twitter feed, in the electrically tense aftermath, gracing Mailer with a startling scatological encomium, unsuitable for printing on the "blog." You will note that Megan Abbott had at that point in the film turned on the subtitles for extra musing and study. Below, another example, from the climactic fight, sent to me by Ace this morning. Ace did admit that MAIDSTONE shares a certain sensibility ("group therapy" he called it) with the original BILLY JACK (which we watched and enjoyed very much, as distinct from its sequel, though, as Ace reminded me last night, THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK had some good parts, such as when there is an all-red Billy Jack and an all-blue Billy Jack and they battle for his soul in a cave, encountering a spiritually significant cobra in a scene that made me wonder if Scorsese hadn't lifted from it for THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. I guess I would say that the main problem with THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK is that they gave Billy Jack too much money and he loved helicopter shots so much.) Another common thread between the Billy Jack movies and MAIDSTONE is the dominating personality of the filmmaker, and the film's existence as a stubborn extension of that personality. Ace said that MAIDSTONE was like BILLY JACK "without the karate." And you know, when he said that, I had to admit that Billy Jack knew what he was doing, putting the karate in there and driving the original film with a good, old-fashioned revenge plot.

Baloney

"On the ninth, pro-Parliament rioters breached the compound of Whitehall, scattering the servants and putting the queen to flight below stairs..." As you can see, things are heating up in this English Civil War I've been reading about. Luckily for the queen, Sir John Suckling's bodyguards were on hand. They were called "The Sucklingtons," ha ha ha! For real. Oh, English Civil War. A pamphleteer calls Sir John Suckling nothing but a "disguised ding-thrift," whatever that is. It doesn't sound good. But now we must lay aside the English Civil War, at least for a time, for the Adrienne Barbeau autobiography has arrived. Baloney, Pendarvis! It arrived on Monday and you haven't cracked either book since then. This English Civil War book has been lying here with the bookmark on the "ding-thrift" page for days, oh yes, I couldn't wait to tell you about that. Fun side note! Whitehall is where Charles I got his head chopped off! My brother went to a wedding there and saw Kanye West. And now you know all about the English Civil War.

Coarsely and Provocatively!

Did you know I quit my job teaching college? This time for reals! Here's the first thing that has made me sad about it: a sentence from THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON. "Immediately she spoke to him coarsely and provocatively and pulled his face down to hers." I would like to tell those kids they can have three adverbs in a sentence if they want. Too late now! I tried to get Elizabeth to read THE SUNDIAL by Shirley Jackson, which is basically the story of her life, but she wouldn't do it because there were too many adverbs on the first page, or so she said! These tragedies must end. Oh well. Not my problem anymore. Next: "he was full of such tender love for her that he held her tight till a stitch tore in her dress." Whoa! All right! That made my heart pop. A few pages later the last tycoon complains, "When I want to know anything I've got to ask some drunken writer." So! I read all this by lantern-light just now during a terrible lightning storm when the power went out. We bought the lantern one night when I thought I might have to scare a fox with a golf club I found in a trash can, so I slept in a tent in the backyard with a bottle of wine, long story.

Secret Powers

I shot the balloons from a different angle this time to make it interesting, ha ha, just kidding, it is not interesting, it is not interesting at all, nothing is interesting. Coming up on eight weeks and those birthday balloons are still floating. It has almost stopped being cute and whimsical. There's a sinister aspect creeping in. It makes me wonder if you notice what is missing from the picture. That's right: the fish. The balloons are where the fish used to be. The goldfish died in April (though Dr. Theresa briefly brought it back to life with her secret powers - for real!) and I didn't have the heart to tell you. Is the ghost of the fish cursing the balloons? That seems like a pretty feasible possibility. Or is their malevolence unrelated? Right now the single deflated balloon (draped blasphemously across my Geneva Bible, already desecrated by savage claw marks [!] from when one of the cats used to try to jump up and capture the fish) is hiding a Yorick skull that Lee Durkee gave me and a statue of a chimpanzee eating a banana that Dr. Theresa gave me and an owl that Ryan brought back from Iraq (where I sent him; long story) and an origami swan that a nice waiter in a terrible sushi restaurant made me out of a candy wrapper on the night I became deathly ill like President William Henry Harrison - tokens of affection, luck and remembrance I may never see again! The balloons begin to oppress me! WHY WON'T THEY FALL? What terrible cataclysm is in store when they do (see the song "Grandfather's Clock")? Or will they just keep their silent watch, grave sentinels, mocking me - always mocking me! - for my myriad failings? I am overtaken by dread. All is lost.

Ouch!

FOR REAL WARNING! The following "blog" "post" contains excruciating violence! In my big book about Hinduism I read a legend about this guy who got impaled on a stake. An angry king jabs this guy onto a stake, but then the king is like, "Sorry! I changed my mind." But the guy can't pull out the stake. He's really jabbed good! So he decides to make the best of the stake he has poking out of him, "thinking it might be useful for carrying things like flower baskets." Talk about a positive mental attitude! "And so he went about with the stake still inside him, in his neck, ribs, and entrails, and people used to call him 'Tip-of-the-Stake' Mandavya." Some nickname! I bet he kind of got sick of people calling him that, but then again, I don't know, this guy seems pretty cool about everything. And then about 20 pages later I read a couple of different stories about some dude shooting seven arrows into a dog's mouth. Not cool! Though nobody in the stories seems to think it's a big deal, nobody but the dog. Well, I take that back, people find the marksmanship notable but nobody gives a dang about the dog. And now all I can think about is Phineas Gage, the real-life historical figure who got an iron bar through his head and was all, "Whatevs." I first heard about Mr. Gage from my friend Bill from Hubcap City, who wanted to write a rock opera about him as I recall, or maybe a normal opera. Of course, Phineas Gage was not really all, "Whatevs." I think he became sort of a jerk. Yes, I just looked it up on the University of Akron "web" site, which says that Gage became "fitful, irreverent, and grossly profane, showing little deference for his fellows. He was also impatient and obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, unable to settle on any of the plans he devised for future action. His friends said he was 'No longer Gage.'" Yeah, but I mean, come on! Give him a break. A THREE-FOOT, THIRTEEN-POUND IRON BAR WENT THROUGH HIS HEAD. You'd be capricious too. (PS In one of those stories a guy cuts off his own thumb and we didn't even get to that.)

Spaghetti Supergirl

Hey so you are probably desperate for more info on how I started buying old comic books. Well okay if you insist! I was looking through one of the Jerry Lewis comic books that Tom Franklin gave me and I saw an ad for an issue of ACTION COMICS. On the cover, Superman was wearing his Superman suit AND his Clark Kent glasses. WHAT? You heard me. And Supergirl was throwing spaghetti at the Batmobile. For real! And I was like, WHOA. I was like, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? So this ad, over 40 years old, did its trick. I checked to see whether the place where Tom Franklin buys his old comic books had this particular issue of ACTION COMICS in stock, and friends, they did, and that is how I started buying old comic books and brought shame and ruin to my family.

In the Land of Richard Dix

Let me tell you about my Tuesday. First, I saw Cher. Then I walked into a room and immediately started acting in a scene with Anne Heche. Finally I sang a song with Joey Lauren Adams and Mr. Belding from SAVED BY THE BELL. Tuesday! Yes, I went on a little trip and believe or not I didn't jot anything at first. I was like, "I am going to be too busy to jot down anything for the folks back home!" Such was my hubris! I did not jot for more than 24 hours! Twenty-four jot-free hours! But then I was sitting in the Starbucks where I once saw the guy from Tenacious D who is not Jack Black, and I was reading the New York Times, and I came across this first sentence of an article: "Forty five minutes of monkey impersonations?" A rhetorical question, I suppose, but one requiring a single answer: a resounding, Joycean YES! And that made me recall something I read in my new book about kings before I left on my little trip: "every chariot had a fierce great mastiff on a leash standing in a cart or walking behind it, and every sumpter beast had a long-tailed monkey on its back..." That's about a procession in 1158, and when I first read it I thought it was about monkeys riding dogs, a subject we have contemplated at some length on the "blog," but rereading it just now, never mind. Then (back to the New York Times) I read an article containing Robert Mitchum's pick-up line to Edna O'Brien (which totally worked): "I bet you wish I was Robert Taylor, and I bet you never tasted white peaches." Mitchum! What a smoothie! And that's when I started feeling bad for not jotting anything. I remembered something from the day before which I had not jotted, for example: we were driving down the street and Kent yelled, "It's the diner where Larry Crowne worked in LARRY CROWNE!" And so it was. We drove by it again a day or two later and Kent suggested that we stop and get a picture of me in front of it and at first I resisted, and Kent said "WHAT!!!!!" and stopped the car and took the photo anyway (below) and right he was to do so. I saw Kent eat a lot of chicken, as usual. He loves chicken! But I also saw him eat a pork chop and a steak. We ate big steaks at a restaurant where Bob Hope used to eat! Taking a stroll after one chicken luncheon, Kent and I observed a young woman communing with two tame rats, which were sitting on top of a Los Angeles Times vending machine. "Don't freak out," she was saying calmly and sweetly to the rats. As this actually very charming person put forth to us the argument that rats are among the most misunderstood of God's creatures, she was engaged in some sort of handiwork - she seemed to be, possibly, knitting some clothes for the rats. Let's see what else I jotted. I ate at a restaurant where they give you a coconut with a straw in it to drink! I guess this is a pretty common thing, but somehow this was my first time. I had previously seen such a way of drinking a coconut only on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. (Coincidence: upon my return home, I found an email from McNeil about the fact that Ida Lupino directed several episodes of GILLIGAN'S ISLAND. McNeil seemed ashamed for not knowing this before!) One of the people at lunch was Ako Castuera, who used to sell coconuts for a living, and she regaled me with lots of amazing coconut lore, including something about coconut water and its use in blood transfusions during World War II, which led to a discussion somehow of the immortal jellyfish (or maybe that came up when we were debating the preferable place to visit: outer space or the bottom of the sea), and Ako - entirely different subject - told about a vacation she took on a cruise ship when she was a little kid and she spent all her time in the library. There was a library! Ako first discovered Edgar Allan Poe on that cruise ship, which put the endearing image in my mind of little Ako in the dark ship's library reading Poe while everybody else was up on the deck playing shuffleboard in the sun. Jottings! I saw my old friend Tom Bissell. He lives directly over the Hollywood Walk of Fame! In fact, he lives almost directly over Richard Dix's star. Oh, Richard Dix! Can I not get away from you? Your inexplicable stardom continues to haunt me. (Pictured, above, Richard Dix.) Tom and I talked about CHRISTIANITY: THE FIRST THREE THOUSAND YEARS and walked down the block to get a Mexican dinner and on the way back we witnessed a car crash! Everybody was okay, but the cars were smashed up. Okay! Now we are back to the fateful Tuesday. I was sitting in my hotel lobby when Cher walked through! I mostly saw the back of her head. Then my ride came and I went off to act with Anne Heche. FOR REAL! In what project, I am not at liberty to say. YOU'LL FIND OUT SOON ENOUGH. Anne Heche was more beautiful in person than you can possibly imagine! She was not "done up" in any fancy Hollywood makeup and finery. You got the feeling she just walks down the sidewalk being all radiant. After we acted in a couple of scenes together she gave me a big hug and discovered, I am certain, that I was covered in flop sweat like Albert Brooks in BROADCAST NEWS. Like Harrison Ford and Johnny Depp before me (a phrase I type with astonishing regularity) I played Anne Heche's love interest. Okay, and then a bunch of us went out to sing karaoke (including Natasha Allegri, the nicest person in the world!) and Mr. Belding showed up and everybody was like, "Oh my God! It's Mr. Belding!" and somehow the last thing I did was sing "Jolene" with Mr. Belding and Joey Lauren Adams. Before that, I saw Joey Lauren Adams and Pendleton Ward do Elvis's "American Trilogy" together, and I thought to myself, well, that is probably the most surreal thing I will see tonight, but I was wrong.

"It's All I've Got!"

... is another line I have to say when I go out to Hollywood (or thereabouts) to act in something soon... FOR REAL. That's a hard one! I don't know how to say that.

Scary Wow Word

Hey did you know I am going to Hollywood to act in something? That is no lie! It is for real 100%. Well, I am going to Burbank, to be completely truthful, so I have already lied to you. But one of my lines starts with the word "Wow," and I have been going around the house saying "Wow" and coming to the terrifying realization that there are thousands upon thousands of ways to say "Wow." I'm in over my head, people! Twice I have said "Wow" in such a way as to make Dr. Theresa respond. That is, she thought I was actually astonished by something and wondered what it was. So I am trying to remember how I did that. Okay.

Four Mistakes

Hey on one of these here movie channels the movie GABLE AND LOMBARD is coming on. It came out in 1976 and I don't suppose I have thought of it since then, when everybody was saying it was one of the worst atrocities known to man. So it starts with a sepia-toned photo of the real Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, which is the first mistake, because who wants to think of the real Clark Gable when you are about to get James Brolin instead? (I like Jill Clayburgh so I am not saying anything bad about her.) But then the photo of the real Gable and Lombard dissolves to a photo of James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh holding the same pose. Second mistake! Because now we can see that they don't look anything like Gable and Lombard, not that they have to, but then why rub our noses in it? And the movie isn't even 10 seconds old yet and we the audience are plagued by doubt. And I was thinking "Also maybe I don't want to watch this because it has a sad ending that everybody already knows." And then they START with the sad ending! Third mistake. Fourth mistake, James Brolin is walking around looking like he smells bad cheese for real, this is either him being Clark Gable or him being sad or him being sad Clark Gable. We are one minute in. (See also.) PS What is going on in this still? I guess I'll find out, God help me.

Real Dead Owl

"... down fell a brown horned owl about the size and heft of a decapitated head..." So RIDES OF THE MIDWAY has a real for sure owl in it.