Mulberry Panda 96

Rock Bio #13: The Stooges

2012-01-27T15:46:00.000-06:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

Although singer Jim Osterberg, better known as Iggy Pop, set out to create a new form of blues music in the late 1960s, what he and his fellow Stooges ended up with were the seeds of punk rock.

Iggy (he was once in a band called the Iguanas, hence the nickname) formed the Stooges in 1967 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with brothers Ron and Scott Asheton (guitar and drums, respectively) and their friend Dave Alexander (bass). They played chaotic, unpredictable live shows in which Iggy was liable to dive into the crowd, cut his chest with shards of glass, or challenge bikers to a fight, while Ron Asheton employed household items like a blender and a vacuum cleaner to build an impenetrable wall of noise.

Signed to Elektra Records, the Stooges' self-titled debut album (1969) was produced by John Cale, who'd recently left the Velvet Underground, another seminal influence on future punk rockers. The Stooges contains classics like "No Fun," later covered by the Sex Pistols, and "I Wanna Be Your Dog," but it sold poorly and didn't quite capture the band's go-for-broke live spirit.

The follow-up, Fun House (1970), added Steve Mackay on saxophone and came the closest of the Stooges' studio albums to duplicating their sound in concert. Like The Stooges, it didn't sell many copies, but its reputation grew exponentially over the years: Henry Rollins called Fun House the best rock record he's ever heard, and in 2007 Q magazine named it the Loudest Album of All Time.

After Fun House Alexander was fired for being too drunk to play at a festival gig in Michigan in August 1970. James Williamson was brought in to replace him, but the Stooges were soon dropped from Elektra's roster, and the band broke up. Luckily, they had a fan in David Bowie, who was on his way to superstardom in England and used his influence to get Iggy a recording contract with Columbia Records.

With Williamson by his side on guitar, Iggy traveled to London to record Raw Power (1973). They originally intended to use British musicians as their rhythm section but decided to invite the Asheton brothers back into the fold, moving Ron from guitar to bass. Produced by Iggy and remixed by Bowie, Raw Power (credited to "Iggy & the Stooges") ended up being another protopunk touchstone thanks to hard-hitting cuts like "Search and Destroy." Sales were anemic, however, and Columbia soon dropped the band. Suffering from various drug addictions, the Stooges broke up for good in early '74.

Iggy continued working with Bowie and Williamson as a solo artist throughout the latter half of the '70s, and the Ashetons briefly played together in a band called the New Order (not to be confused with the English synth-pop group of the same name). In 1975 Alexander died of pancreatitis-related symptoms at the age of 27.

Twenty-five years later Ron and Scott Asheton teamed up with J Mascis (Dinosaur Jr.) and Mike Watt (the Minutemen) to perform some of the Stooges' songs in concert. Iggy then asked the Ashetons to contribute to his solo album Skull Ring in 2003, leading to a full-fledged Stooges reunion that year at the Coachella festival, with Watt sitting in for Alexander. The Stooges toured off and on for the next three years before recording their fourth studio album, The Weirdness (2007), with Watt and producer Steve Albini (Nirvana, the Pixies).

Ron Asheton died of a heart attack on January 6, 2009, at which point James Williamson returned as the Stooges' guitarist. Scarred but smarter, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010.

The Oscar nominations were announced this morning.

2012-01-24T12:23:00.000-06:00

Being nominated for an award is nice (I mean, I guess it is—nominate me for one and I'll confirm my hypothesis for you), but winning an award is better. Here's the third-place winner of Oak Park Public Library's 24-hour filmmaking competition for teenagers, a project I spearheaded last fall during an internship.

JUMP.
(Created by Keenan Benshop, Scott Daniel, and Jonah Lazarus.)

Here's the film that came in second ...

THE PRICE
(Created by Emma LaSaine and Kendra Murphy.)

And here's the film that took home the figurative gold! (Winners received gift certificates to Oak Park's Lake Theatre cinema.) The rules for the competition were as follows: (1) films had to be scripted, shot, and edited in 24 hours; (2) completed films could not exceed four minutes in length; (3) using Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are as inspiration, participants were required to incorporate the theme of "impulse," demonstrate the action of "leading," and use water as a prop in their narratives.

ROSIE THE HEAD
(Created by Mary Alexander, Felipe Bascuñán, and Christian Kuta-Dankwa.)

Rock Bio #12: Big Star

2011-12-30T13:12:00.000-06:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

Everyone who bought the Velvet Underground's first album in the 1960s ended up forming a band, while everyone who bought Big Star's first album in the '70s became a rock critic—or so the saying goes. Though they were beloved by critics, Big Star also influenced a new generation of bands in the '80s and beyond, from the Replacements, who sang "I never travel far / Without a little Big Star" on 1987's "Alex Chilton," to R.E.M., the Lemonheads, Teenage Fanclub, and Wilco.

The group got its start in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1971 when 20-year-old singer and guitarist Alex Chilton, having abandoned his role as teenage frontman for the Box Tops two years earlier, joined Ice Water, a trio consisting of Chris Bell (guitar and vocals), Andy Hummel (bass), and Jody Stephens (drums). Inspired by the Byrds and the Beatles, Chilton and Bell started writing songs together, and during a break in rehearsal one day at Ardent Studios, the new band decided to name themselves after the grocery store across the street.

When Big Star's debut album, #1 Record, was released in the spring of '72, critics raved; Rolling Stone's Bud Scoppa called it "exceptionally good" and praised the guitar work and harmonies on songs like "The Ballad of El Goodo" and "Feel." Unfortunately, a convoluted distribution arrangement between Ardent's in-house label and Stax Records prevented the album from reaching many listeners: when readers of those rave reviews went to buy #1 Record, it was nowhere to be found. The band's tongue-in-cheek name and their album's wishful title suddenly seemed like cruel jokes.

When a disillusioned Bell quit the band in late '72, Big Star appeared to be finished, but the following spring Ardent held a convention for rock journalists, and Chilton, Hummel, and Stephens agreed to perform. The enthusiastic response from Lester Bangs and other writers convinced them to give it another go.

Thanks to Chilton's love of Memphis soul, Radio City (1974) has a grittier sound than its predecessor, exemplified by the funky "O My Soul" and blues-tinged "Mod Lang." It also features "September Gurls," one of the defining anthems of power pop. Once again, however, Stax was unable to get the album into record buyers' hands.

Hummel bowed out and headed back to college, while Chilton and Stephens returned to Ardent Studios in the fall of '74 and recorded what eventually came to be known as Third, or Sister Lovers. By the time it received a belated release on the PVC label in 1978, Big Star was no more, but the resulting album was a masterpiece, filled with fragile love songs ("Nightime"), furious rockers ("You Can't Have Me"), and bleak ballads ("Holocaust").

On December 27, 1978, Chris Bell died in a car accident at the age of 27. He only released one solo single before his death, the achingly majestic "I Am the Cosmos," the title of which was used for Rykodisc's 1992 compilation of his post-Big Star recordings (Rhino Handmade reissued I Am the Cosmos in 2009 as a deluxe two-disc package).

Chilton went on to have an eclectic solo career, and Stephens was hired as director of A&R at a revived Ardent Records. In 1993 two students at the University of Missouri asked Big Star to reunite for a concert; to Stephens's surprise, Chilton said yes. With Hummel enjoying a career as an aerospace engineer, Stephens recruited Big Star disciples Jon Auer (guitar) and Ken Stringfellow (bass) of the Posies to fill out the lineup.

Big Star 2.0's performance was captured on CD as Columbia: Live at Missouri University 4/25/93, and the group continued to perform one-off reunion concerts throughout the '90s and the following decade, culminating in the first new Big Star album in 30 years, 2005's In Space. It was followed in 2009 by Rhino's four-disc retrospective Keep an Eye on the Sky.

Chilton died of a heart attack on March 17, 2010, three days before Big Star was scheduled to play at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. The concert was then refashioned as a memorial to the iconoclastic musician, with R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, the Lemonheads' Evan Dando, the Watson Twins, and even Andy Hummel paying tribute in song.

book trailers

2011-12-19T23:42:00.000-06:00

Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali by Charles R. Smith Jr. (2007; Bryan Collier, illustrator)

In His Own Write by John Lennon (1964)

Rock Bio #11: Black Sabbath

2011-11-25T11:53:00.000-06:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

When four friends formed the Polka Tulk Blues Band in the late '60s in Birmingham, England, little did anyone know those blues would soon turn black—Polka Tulk morphed into Earth, and in 1969 Earth became Black Sabbath, the fathers of heavy metal.

Teenage friends Ozzy Osbourne (vocals), Tony Iommi (guitar), Terry "Geezer" Butler (bass), and Bill Ward (drums) weren't making much headway with their brand of jazz-blues fusion, so Iommi cranked up the guitar solos and Osbourne let loose his inner banshee, spouting lyrics about black magic. Suddenly the band's self-titled debut album was climbing the UK charts in early 1970, and Sabbath was being mentioned in the same breath as Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. Paranoid topped the charts later that year, the title track became a hit single, and "War Pigs" and "Iron Man" earned their places as concert staples.

Black Sabbath could do no wrong over the next three years, solidifying their reputation as masters of metal in the UK and the States with Master of Reality (1971), Black Sabbath Vol. 4 (1972), and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), whose title track became another concert staple.

The band's sixth album, Sabotage, stalled on the U.S. charts in '75, leading the band to question its musical direction: Iommi wanted to experiment, but Osbourne thought they should stick with what worked. Technical Ecstasy (1976) favored some of Iommi's new ideas, such as the addition of keyboards, and in late '77 Osbourne quit the band. He returned just a few months later, but after one more album, 1978's Never Say Die!, he left for a successful solo career.

Black Sabbath replaced Osbourne with Rainbow's former frontman, Ronnie James Dio, whose initial effort with the band, 1980's Heaven and Hell, met with approval from fans, selling over a million copies. Ward then left the band for health reasons and was replaced with Vinny Appice. The new drummer's first Sabbath album was 1981's Mob Rules, but it was also his last (for the time being, anyway)—he departed with Dio after the lead singer fell out with Iommi and Butler over the final mix of Live Evil (1982).

The band then went through many rounds of musical chairs. Ward replaced his replacement, and ex-Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan became Sabbath's new vocalist long enough to record and tour behind 1983's Born Again. Butler quit, and Ward quit a second time, but the original lineup did reunite for Live Aid in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985. By the late '80s groups like Iron Maiden and Metallica were the new reigning metal gods; with only Iommi remaining from the original quartet, Black Sabbath appeared to be on life support.

Against all odds, a move from longtime label Warner Bros. to I.R.S. Records in 1989 reignited the band's spirit, with new lead singer Tony Martin and drummer Cozy Powell adding raw power to the title track of Headless Cross, among other cuts. Tyr followed in 1990, and though Iommi reassembled this lineup for 1995's Forbidden, in between he brought back Butler, Dio, and Appice for Dehumanizer (1992).

Finally, in December of '97 the original lineup reunited for two concerts in their native Birmingham; the results were captured on the live album Reunion (1998). The band toured through the end of the millennium, and in 2007 the Iommi-Butler-Dio-Appice lineup of Black Sabbath toured under the name Heaven & Hell to promote the Rhino Records compilation The Dio Years, featuring three new songs from that lineup. In 2009 Heaven & Hell released their debut album, The Devil You Know.

Whatever the configuration, Black Sabbath continues to keep heads banging with 40 years of classic metal. Never say die, indeed.

Rock Bio #10: New Order

2011-10-28T14:31:00.000-05:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

When Ian Curtis, lead singer of the English band Joy Division, committed suicide in May 1980, the three remaining members of the band—Bernard Sumner (guitar), Peter Hook (bass), and Stephen Morris (drums)—decided to continue, albeit under a new name. With that, New Order began its mission of fusing new wave and electronic dance music to create a sound uniquely their own on the Manchester scene.

Sumner became the band's new lead singer, and Gillian Gilbert was added on keyboards, having previously played guitar on occasion with Joy Division (she was also Morris's girlfriend). New Order's first single, "Ceremony," and album, Movement (1981), didn't stray far from Joy Division's postpunk roots, but after visiting dance clubs in New York, the band experimented with synthesizers and computer-manipulated sounds—and put their love of Kraftwerk to good use—and came up with the singles "Everything's Gone Green" and "Temptation."

In early '83 New Order released the club hit "Blue Monday," which became the best-selling 12-inch single of all time, moving more than three million units worldwide. Power, Corruption & Lies followed, but the band didn't issue any singles from the album, a practice encouraged by their label, Factory Records. (They weren't under contract to the label, either.) They also refused to do interviews, adding to their allure.

Low-Life (1985) was New Order's most acclaimed album yet. The band's innovative blend of dance and rock was being mirrored by bands like the Eurythmics and Pet Shop Boys, and Low-Life helped lay the groundwork for Primal Scream's Screamadelica (1991) and even U2's Pop (1997). In 1986 New Order released Brotherhood, which was split down the middle—one side was filled with rock songs, the other with dance tracks, including the fan favorite "Bizarre Love Triangle." The band crossed over to American audiences in '87 when "True Faith," from the singles compilation Substance, cracked the Top 40.

While recording on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza in 1988, the band became inspired by house music (some would argue the style was inspired by their music) and assembled Technique (1989), their most dance-oriented album, featuring "Fine Time" and other beat-driven club tracks. New Order recorded "World in Motion," England's 1990 World Cup anthem, then took a long break so its members could focus on solo projects. Sumner teamed up with ex-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and Pet Shop Boys for Electronic, who had a minor U.S. pop hit in 1990 with "Getting Away With It," and Hook formed Revenge.

Factory Records went belly up in '92, so New Order's sixth album, Republic (1993), was distributed by London Records. "Regret" crept into the top 30 in the U.S., but the band then went on another hiatus: Sumner did a second Electronic record, Hook formed Monaco after Revenge collapsed, and Morris and Gilbert got married and recorded, cheekily, as the Other Two.

In 2001 New Order released their first new album in almost a decade, Get Ready. A more guitar-oriented effort than either Technique or Republic, it found the band collaborating with acolytes Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins. For 2005's Waiting for the Sirens' Call, Phil Cunningham replaced Gilbert, who chose to stay home with her and Morris's children.

The band has no further plans to record. Sirens' first single was "Krafty," a reference to Kraftwerk's influence on the band, but it also makes for a fitting full-circle coda to New Order's career, one that influenced other bands to embrace technology and take risks with rock and dance.

It's a trap! No, wait, it's a gift!

2011-10-03T16:40:00.006-05:00

I like reading about the creative process and how various people working in various mediums go about making something out of nothing. Here, in an excerpt from an Associated Press article by Frazier Moore published earlier today, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, discuss the genesis of each episode:

By some accounts, the world was created in six days.

On the other hand, it takes Matt Stone and Trey Parker seven of them to create a "South Park" episode. But then they get no day of rest before they start on the next episode.

As you're reading this, Matt and Trey and the "South Park" team are back from their midseason break in their 15th year and are under the gun. The episode they started from scratch last Thursday morning will be finished just hours before it's delivered to Comedy Central for premiering Wednesday at 10 p.m. EDT.

How do they do it? And why do it that way?

Not long ago, while in New York to bask in the triumph of their smash Broadway musical, "The Book of Mormon," Matt and Trey took a few minutes to look ahead to the seven episodes of "South Park" facing them this fall.

"Comedy Central would love it if we did the shows ahead of time," Matt said. "But we just don't work as well that way."

"Our best ones," said Trey, "are always the ones where we come in on Thursday with nothing, and we come up with something and we get this energy — 'Ah, that's funny! That's funny!' — and we roll with it. The other way, we over-think things too much."

"I like the process of getting really excited about an idea on Thursday or Friday," Matt said, "and then there's a whole drama to the week: We jump into it, then on Saturday we go, 'Hmmmm. I don't know about this idea.' And you start questioning it."

"But you don't have a choice," Trey interjected.

"You're trapped!" Matt agreed.

Rock Bio #9: Frank Sinatra

2011-09-30T16:18:00.000-05:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

Before Michael Jackson, the Beatles, or even Elvis, the biggest pop star in America was Frank Sinatra. In a career that spanned nearly 60 years, the baritone crooner from Hoboken, New Jersey, captivated audiences with a suave, almost conversational style that cut straight to the heart of each standard he made his own.

Francis Albert Sinatra dropped out of high school to chase his dream of being a singer, and in 1939, at age 23, he was hired as the vocalist in Harry James's big band. After six months he left to join Tommy Dorsey's outfit, and together they had more than a dozen top-ten hits, including "I'll Never Smile Again," which was number one on July 20, 1940, the day Billboard published its first chart.

Sinatra stepped out on his own as a performer in 1942 with Cole Porter's "Night and Day," becoming America's first teen idol later that year when he opened for Benny Goodman at New York City's Paramount Theater—young girls went wild. Columbia Records signed him as a solo artist in '43, and although a lengthy musicians' strike prevented Sinatra from recording again until the end of the following year, the label reissued a 1939 recording of "All or Nothing at All" by Harry James and Sinatra that shot to number one on the heels of the singer's newfound superstardom.

Sinatra appeared on popular radio shows like Your Hit Parade, and by 1945 his acting career was on the rise at MGM. He had eight top-ten hits that year, including "Saturday Night (Is the Loneliest Night of the Week)," written by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn, and he made sure the duo were hired by MGM to write tunes for his first musical, Anchors Aweigh, costarring Gene Kelly. It was a box office smash.

"The Voice" left Columbia Records at the end of '52 and concurrently had no radio, TV, or film work lined up. At 37, Frank Sinatra was unemployed—but not for long. He signed with Capitol Records and was back on the charts soon after with "I'm Walking Behind You," and his film career was at its peak with a plum role in From Here to Eternity (1953), for which Sinatra won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

At Capitol he collaborated with arranger Nelson Riddle on albums like Songs for Young Lovers (1954), which featured standards centered on a romantic theme ("They Can't Take That Away From Me," "I Get a Kick Out of You"); they were, in effect, pop music's first concept albums. Ol' Blue Eyes, as he was affectionately known, also recorded dance LPs—Swing Easy! (1954), Songs for Swingin' Lovers! (1956)—that continued to rule the album charts even as rock 'n' roll was taking over the singles charts.

In late 1960 Sinatra started up his own label, Reprise Records, and put his "Rat Pack" friends Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. on the artist roster. Calling his own shots during this period, Sinatra worked with Count Basie ("Fly Me to the Moon"), Antonio Carlos Jobim ("The Girl From Ipanema"), and even his daughter Nancy on the number-one duet "Somethin' Stupid." He also won the Album of the Year Grammy for 1965's September of My Years on the strength of "It Was a Very Good Year."

The Chairman of the Board closed out the '60s with "My Way," the lyrics of which were written specifically for him by Paul Anka; it quickly became a standard. Sinatra cut back on recording and film roles in the following decades, but in 1980 he created yet another standard out of "Theme From New York, New York," originally performed by Liza Minnelli in Martin Scorsese's 1977 film.

Once compact discs were adopted as the standard format for music in the early '90s, Sinatra's back catalog was lavishly remastered and reissued. He then returned to the studio for Duets (1993) and Duets II (1994), which teamed him up with singers like Bono, Aretha Franklin, and Willie Nelson (though none of them recorded in the same studio as Sinatra). Both discs were hugely successful.

Sinatra retired from performing in 1995, just shy of 80. On May 14, 1998, he passed away, leaving behind a rich legacy as one of the greatest performers of the 20th century.

everything in its right place

2011-09-17T12:32:00.004-05:00

"Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say."

—Raymond Carver, "On Writing," 1981 (from Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose, 2001)

the two faces of America

2011-08-31T10:25:00.010-05:00

The following is a sonnet from Marilyn Nelson's A Wreath for Emmett Till (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), a poem written in the form of a "heroic crown of sonnets." I read it this week for my Multicultural Literature and Resources for Youth class at UIUC.

Trillium, apple blossoms, Queen Anne's lace,
woven with oak twigs, for sincerity ...
Thousands of oak trees around this country
groaned with the weight of men slain for their race,
their murderers acquitted in almost every case.
One night five black men died on the same tree,
with toeless feet, in this Land of the Free.
This country we love has a Janus face:
One mouth speaks with forked tongue, the other reads
the Constitution. My country, 'tis of both
thy nightmare history and thy grand dream,
thy centuries of good and evil deeds,
I sing. Thy fruited plain, thy undergrowth
of mandrake, which flowers white as moonbeams.

Rock Bio #8: a-ha

2011-08-26T10:36:00.000-05:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

To many Americans, a-ha were a one-hit wonder who reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985 with the synth-pop megahit "Take On Me," then quickly faded away. But like fellow European acts Simply Red and Jamiroquai, a-ha's popularity around the world continued to grow, dwarfing whatever chart success it enjoyed in the U.S.

Paul Waaktaar-Savoy (guitar), Magne "Mags" Furuholmen (keyboards), and Morten Harket (vocals) began collaborating in 1982 in Oslo, Norway, eventually moving to London to pursue a recording contract, where they signed with Warner Bros. Records. The original version of "Take On Me" was released as a single in the UK in 1984 but failed to chart. It was then rerecorded but failed to chart again, at which point the American arm of Warner Bros. invested in an innovative music video that combined live action and pencil-sketch animation. It became a huge hit on MTV and the song finally charted in the UK, peaking at number two.

The accompanying album, Hunting High and Low (1985), produced one more Top 40 hit in the U.S., "The Sun Always Shines on T.V.," though the song went all the way to number one across the pond. The band's next LP, Scoundrel Days (1986), featured a harder-charging sound on cuts like "Cry Wolf" and "Manhattan Skyline."

In 1987 a-ha recorded the theme song for The Living Daylights, the first James Bond film to star Timothy Dalton; it was another top-five UK hit for the group. Their third album, Stay on These Roads (1988), went platinum in Brazil, and in January 1991, while touring behind East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1990), a-ha played to a crowd of 198,000 at Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. It was the largest paying concert audience of all time.

After 1993's Memorial Beach, which included "Angel in the Snow," a song Waaktaar-Savoy wrote for his wife as a wedding gift, a-ha went on hiatus, with each member concentrating on solo projects. Then in 1998 they reconvened for the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, performing a new song Waaktaar-Savoy wrote for the occasion called "Summer Moved On." Two years later the track appeared on the platinum-selling Minor Earth Major Sky (2000) and went to number one in 17 countries, a triumphant comeback for the Norwegian trio.

Lifelines (2002) and the live disc How Can I Sleep With Your Voice in My Head (2003) followed in quick succession, and on the 20th anniversary of Hunting High and Low, a-ha released Analogue (2005), featuring guest vocals from Graham Nash. The single "Analogue (All I Want)" became the band's first to crack the UK top ten since "Stay on These Roads."

They continued their upward climb with 2009's Foot of the Mountain, which debuted at number five in the UK. With the '80s revival in full swing and Coldplay naming them as an influence, a-ha returned to their synth-pop roots on Foot of the Mountain while incorporating 21st-century influences like Arcade Fire.

That fall the band announced a farewell world tour for 2010, including dates in the U.S. The title of their final album notwithstanding, the "Ending on a High Note Tour" finds a-ha at the top of the global pop-music mountain.

Rock Bio #7: Led Zeppelin

2011-07-29T12:03:00.000-05:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

Led Zeppelin "wrote the book and all of us are just trying to write a page," said Paul Stanley of Kiss, in Danny Goldberg's Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business. "They are the template and the road map that everyone else follows." Anyone who first heard "Stairway to Heaven" as a teenager and dreamed of being the next Jimmy Page would likely agree.

By 1968 Page was the last man standing in England's Yardbirds, after members like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck had flown the coop. That summer he tried to recruit Terry Reid for a new band, but the singer's schedule was already full. Reid recommended another vocalist, 20-year-old Robert Plant, who then convinced drummer John Bonham, a longtime friend, to join Page's group with him. Bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones rounded out the lineup.

Fulfilling a contractual obligation, Page's new band played some European dates as the New Yardbirds in September of '68, then switched their name to Led Zeppelin and recorded their eponymous first album in roughly 30 hours. Led Zeppelin (1969) included two Willie Dixon blues standards as well as future rock standards like "Communication Breakdown" and "Dazed and Confused." The band's thunderous approach to rhythm and blues and their interest in mythology—several of their songs contain references to J.R.R. Tolkien works like The Lord of the Rings—helped create the template for heavy metal and hard rock in the 1970s.

Led Zeppelin II was recorded at various studios while the band was on tour in 1969; it hit stores near the end of the year. "Whole Lotta Love" was a top-five hit in the U.S., where Zeppelin was becoming a major concert draw (shows sometimes lasted up to four hours and included 30-minute "Bonzo" drum solos), but the group didn't release singles in the UK or grant many interviews to the press, adding to their overall mystique.

Though 1970's Led Zeppelin III kicked off with the propulsive "Immigrant Song," the album showcased the quartet's acoustic folk influence on tracks like "That's the Way" and "Gallows Pole." Their next release had no title, and Zeppelin refused to edit the eight-minute "Stairway to Heaven" down to a single-friendly size, but 1971's "Led Zeppelin IV," as it's commonly known, still ended up selling 37 million copies over the next four decades, with "Stairway" becoming the most requested song of all time on rock radio stations. The untitled disc also featured instant classics like the riff-heavy "Black Dog" and "Rock and Roll," and the epic folk-rock number "The Battle of Evermore."

By 1973 Led Zeppelin was the biggest band in the world, allowing them to stretch out on that year's Houses of the Holy with playful stabs at reggae ("D'Yer Maker") and funk ("The Crunge"), while 1975's Physical Graffiti was a double album that contained Eastern influences ("Kashmir") alongside touches of country ("Down by the Seaside") and pop ("Houses of the Holy," left off the album of the same name).

The band launched their own Swan Song label through Atlantic Records in 1974, and their concert film The Song Remains the Same was a hit at the box office in '76, but Presence (1976) and In Through the Out Door (1979) arrived in record stores as punk and disco were dominating the musical landscape. On September 25, 1980, John Bonham died of asphyxiation. Led Zeppelin announced their breakup shortly thereafter.

Various one-off reunions have taken place over the past 30 years, including the band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. With Bonham's son, Jason, on drums, Zeppelin performed on December 10, 2007, as part of a tribute to Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, but the band has been silent ever since. Fortunately for fans new and old, Led Zeppelin's timeless music continues to speak for itself.

Accept no substitutes.

2011-07-27T23:52:00.014-05:00

This blog is not this blog.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, offending sir or madam, but ID theft feels like a particularly aggressive yet nonverbal way of saying "f**k you," so please come up with another name for your "internationally broadcast scratch paper" (that phrase is mine too—I'm calling retroactive dibs on everything). For instance, I have no qualms with the name Wineberry Koala 69, so think it over and get back to me. You have five seconds. (What do you think this is, a Capitol Hill debt-ceiling negotiation? I don't have that kind of patience.)

Also, in case anyone out there is confused, I've written for Popdose and Popblerd, but not Popdust, PopCrush, PopCrunch, PopSugar, or Pop Candy. Believe me, there have been days when I've felt like a fraud, but I'd still like to think I'm no one's carbon copy.

Welcome to Mulberry Panda 96, your one-stop shop for music-producer sleaze.

2011-07-18T09:50:00.013-05:00

Thanks to Blogger's behind-the-scenes "Stats" feature (it hasn't always been there, has it?), I can find out which search-engine queries bring people here. My favorite so far is "'david gates' and 'producer' and 'sleaze.'"

Hey, the man from Bread ain't no sleaze. Or maybe you know something I don't about his business ethics and/or personal life, searcher. I'll allow you that Gates put a particularly innuendo-licious line in "If," but it took Telly Savalas's 1975 cover of the song to coax the sleaze out of its soft-rock shell.

If you're not sure what line I'm talking about, read this excerpt from Lester Bangs's review of The Best of Bread for Rolling Stone (May 24, 1973):

But the real payoff is side one, all those mellow yellow David Gates love ballads. "Make It With You" is the Seventies strawsippin' successor to "I Want to Hold Your Hand." It still melts my heart into a puddle of treacle. And that's because I'm treacle, not Bread; they're honchos!

... And they got plenty of sex in their songs too, don't let nobody tell you they're puds when they hit ya with lines like: "And when my [love for] life is running dry / You come and pour yourself on me." Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

Now read these posts from last year that I recently rescued from their "draft" prisons (Lester Bangs shows up again, as does a much more juvenile sexual reference):

12/17: authors and other fools
10/10: I like your style, CyborgQX38.
9/24: My face is an open book.
8/2: Before Columbine, there was RoboCop 2.
8/1: Lisa Simpson's (imaginary) wedding day
6/11: Help us, Roger Ebert. You're our only hope.

My consciousness is gone with the wind.

2011-07-01T10:02:00.003-05:00

"We still feel that color is hard on the eyes for so long a picture."

That's what Frank S. Nugent had to say about Gone With the Wind, the most successful film of all time (when its gross is adjusted for inflation), in the December 28, 1939, edition of the New York Times.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I feel the same way about black-and-white movies. They make me sleepy. Is there a psychological diagnosis for this "condition," or am I just too accustomed to the faster pace of modern movies (specifically, everything from Jaws onward)? Then again, as my girlfriend says, "You think the pacing of the dialogue in His Girl Friday [1940] was slow?"

shortcut to movie limbo (or scenic route to movie oblivion?)

2011-06-27T16:59:00.019-05:00

"I'd be a great film critic," Alec Baldwin says in the June 24-26 edition of USA Weekend, as part of a two-question interview (pace yourself, you hardworking Sunday supplement!) promoting his role as host of the Turner Classic Movies series The Essentials. "Most film critics make a huge mistake. The movie business is a director's medium. The actors actually have the least amount of responsibility for the film. It's really incumbent on critics to understand who is responsible for what's on screen."

It's true that film actors are generally at the mercy of their directors, not to mention the editors who shape performances in postproduction and sometimes discard them entirely on the cutting-room floor. But it sounds like Baldwin may still be irked that his career as a leading man went south in the '90s along with critics' opinions of box-office failures like The Marrying Man (1991), The Shadow (1994), and Ghosts of Mississippi (1996).

Baldwin started to gain weight around the time of 1997's The Edge, meaning he quickly transitioned from money-losing leading man to the more financially secure status of "character actor" (the talented Russell Crowe, whose metabolism seemed to give up on him after 2008's Body of Lies, appears to be entering this career phase himself, having been cast in a supporting role as Marlon Brando—I mean, Superman's biological dad—in the upcoming Man of Steel). It suits him well—Baldwin had great comic timing even before he entered John Belushi's weight class, having hosted Saturday Night Live 15 times since 1990, but it's certainly helped him pay the bills the past five years—and win a couple Emmys—as Tina Fey's boss on 30 Rock. He's the best thing about that show.

(The actor discussed his time near the top of the Hollywood food chain in a New Yorker profile three years ago. "In Hollywood, the success of [1990's 'The Hunt for Red October'] earned him 'an all-access pass that lasts for five years,' Baldwin recently said. 'You have to capitalize. And, if the movies you make don’t make money in that period, your pass expires.'" I'd never seen a former A-list leading man be that honest about his career before. It made me respect Baldwin even more.)

In 2001, after his big-ticket starring roles had dried up, Baldwin put his money where his mouth is and directed a film based on an old perennial of high school English classes, Stephen Vincent Benet's short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster." It starred Anthony Hopkins as Webster, who defends Baldwin's protagonist in supernatural court against the Devil (Jennifer Love Hewitt, an intriguing choice at the very least) after the struggling writer sells his soul to her and then decides he wants it back.

Sounds somewhat promising, but the film languished in postproduction limbo, appropriately enough, for more than five years after its funding dried up—Baldwin told reporters in 2004 that his investors' checks bounced while the film was being shot—leaving "The Devil and Daniel Webster" unfinished and potential distributors wary of picking up the tab.

Yari Film Group finally bought the film in 2007 and released it that July as Shortcut to Happiness. As proof of how many different hands the movie passed through on its way to (a handful of) theaters, 19 (!) producers are listed on the film's poster, including Baldwin, who chose to use the pseudonym "Harry Kirkpatrick" for his director's credit, having washed his own hands of the project.

So the next time you think Alec Baldwin has phoned in a performance, remember, it's not his fault. Blame it on the Devil if you have to, but even then keep in mind that it wasn't the Devil's idea to cast Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Rock Bio #6: Faces

2011-06-24T14:44:00.000-05:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

Ever been to a raucous party that didn't end, it just changed locations? After the Small Faces' frontman, Steve Marriott, announced his resignation by walking offstage during a New Year's Eve performance in 1968, the rest of the group—Ronnie Lane (bass), Ian McLagan (keyboards), and Kenney Jones (drums)—decided to carry on with new members Ron Wood (guitar) and Rod Stewart (vocals), both of whom had recently left the Jeff Beck Group.

Having ditched the Marriott-led configuration's brand of mod pop for a more blues-based rock sound, the Small Faces shortened their name to signal that they were a new band and quickly got down to business, releasing First Step in early 1970. Stewart, meanwhile, had already begun a solo career, releasing his debut album, complete with contributions from Wood and McLagan, just a few months ahead of First Step.

Long Player followed in early '71. Its live covers of Paul McCartney's "Maybe I'm Amazed" and Big Bill Broonzy's "I Feel So Good" emphasized the Faces' growing reputation for sloppy, liquored-up concerts—punk rockers on both sides of the Atlantic took notice in the latter half of the '70s, as did the Replacements in the '80s—and Lane showed off his songwriting talents on "Richmond."

By the time the Faces' third album, A Nod Is as Good as a Wink ... to a Blind Horse, hit record stores at the tail end of '71, Stewart had been crowned a solo star thanks to Every Picture Tells a Story and its number-one hit "Maggie May," which spent five weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. The Faces' own "Stay With Me" was lifted into the top 20 on the heels of "Maggie May's" success.

Stewart didn't tour separately from the Faces during this period, but because he also played his solo hits in concert, tensions arose between him and the rest of the band, who began to feel (ahem) faceless, mere backing musicians in the eyes of Stewart's newfound "Maggie May" fans. The singer was absent from some of the sessions for the band's next album, Ooh La La (1973), whose second side was dominated by Ronnie Lane compositions, including the wistful title track ("I wish that I knew what I know now / When I was stronger"), which featured Ron Wood's first-ever lead vocal.

After Stewart gave his low opinion of Ooh La La to the press, Lane quit the group and was replaced with ex-Free bassist Tetsu Yamauchi. The Faces carried on for a couple more years, releasing a live album and a few singles, but Stewart's solo career showed no signs of slowing down. As 1975 came to a close, the boys from England called it a day.

Wood replaced Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones that year, while McLagan and Jones recorded two more Small Faces records with Steve Marriott, fresh from his tenure in Humble Pie. Lane sat out the reunion but kept busy by collaborating on albums with Wood and Pete Townshend before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the late '70s. When the Who's drummer, Keith Moon, died in 1978, Townshend asked Jones to take over.

The Faces reunited in 1986 and '93 for one-off performances, but in September 2009 McLagan, Jones, and Wood played a charity event without Stewart (Lane died in 1997), adding new faces like Simply Red's Mick Hucknall to the mix. Only time will tell if Rod the Mod can be coaxed out of the house for one last pint.

kiss of death

2011-06-03T14:31:00.005-05:00

Actress Jane Lynch has apparently aged quite a bit since I last saw her on the small screen, but I respect the fact that she refuses to "glam it up" for awards ceremonies. Good for you, Jane!

Rock Bio #5: Television

2011-05-27T11:28:00.000-05:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

When Television took the stage at CBGB on March 31, 1974, it was a new club in Manhattan's Bowery district and they were a new band. But over the next six months, both gained a sizable following in New York music circles. Television's Sunday-night residency at CBGB lit a fire under the nascent genre of punk rock, which became the club's calling card in spite of its initials standing for "Country, Bluegrass, and Blues."

Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, née Tom Miller and Richard Meyers, met in boarding school in Delaware in the mid-'60s. Verlaine wanted to be a musician, Hell a poet, and by 1967 they were both living in New York City. Verlaine's passion for John Coltrane and the saxophone eventually gave way to the Velvet Underground and electric guitar; Hell couldn't play any instruments, but Verlaine taught him some basics on the bass, and together they formed the Neon Boys with drummer Billy Ficca in 1972. The group wanted to add a rhythm guitarist but couldn't find anyone to their liking (Dee Dee Ramone and Chris Stein, soon to join Blondie, auditioned), and after recording six songs they called it quits.

Finally, in the fall of '73, Verlaine met Richard Lloyd and discovered a guitarist he could spar with onstage. Rebranded as Television (Hell's idea), Lloyd and the ex-Neons began to carve out a name for themselves on the New York club scene, attracting the attention of established stars like David Bowie and Lou Reed. But Hell's lack of experience on the bass was becoming a hindrance to the rest of the band, and in March of '75 he left Television, merging with ex-New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan soon after to form the Heartbreakers. He then left that band the following year to create Richard Hell & the Voidoids, whose song "Blank Generation" became one of the defining anthems of '70s punk.

Once Hell was replaced with Fred Smith, who defected from Blondie, the new lineup of Television recorded a single, "Little Johnny Jewel." Elektra Records liked what they heard—the inspiration for Television's sound was equal parts garage rock and free-form jazz—and in 1977 released Marquee Moon, considered by many to be one of the greatest debuts in rock history. By the time the band entered the studio to record it, they knew the album's eight cuts, including classics like "Friction" and "See No Evil," backward and forward. Rumor has it they recorded the ten-minute title track, which features exquisite intertwining guitar work from Verlaine and Lloyd, in one take.

Marquee Moon sold more copies in the UK than in the States, but Television quickly followed it up with Adventure (1978). Though it lacked the high-wire tension of its predecessor, the sophomore effort still produced memorable pop-rock tracks like "Foxhole" and "Glory." But after the album's supporting tour, Television disbanded. Verlaine and Lloyd pursued solo careers in the '80s, and Smith re-upped with Blondie.

In 1992 Television reunited for a third, self-titled album and their most extensive tour to date, but aside from additional concert and festival appearances in 2001 and 2007, the band hasn't recorded again. Nevertheless, the influence of Marquee Moon and Adventure's dynamic musicianship on artists like Lloyd Cole, Matthew Sweet, Echo & the Bunnymen, and even U2 and R.E.M. over the past 30 years has proven immeasurable.

What a long, strange title it's been.

2011-05-19T14:44:00.014-05:00

Many people believe that Hollywood produced more great movies in the 1970s than in any other decade. It certainly allowed some oddball titles to get through the system. Here's a sample:

Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971): Dustin Hoffman plays a famous songwriter in director Ulu Grosbard's comedy-drama. Its title was referenced for the 2010 documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?, which is appropriate since Nilsson himself was a songwriter for hire—the Monkees recorded "Cuddly Toy" in 1967—before he found fame as a singer. His first Top 40 hit as a performer was "Everybody's Talkin'," the theme song to Midnight Cowboy (1969), which starred Hoffman. The song was written and originally recorded by Fred Neil, however, and Nilsson's biggest solo hit, 1972's "Without You," was a cover of a Badfinger song.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (1972): Paul Newman directed his wife, Joanne Woodward, in this family drama based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Paul Zindel, who went on to write young-adult novels with similarly odd titles, such as My Darling, My Hamburger (considered a classic of YA literature), Harry and Hortense at Hormone High, Confessions of a Teenage Baboon, and Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball! Alvin Sargent penned the screenplay for Gamma Rays as well as Robert Redford's directorial debut, Ordinary People (1980), which is a movie with an ordinary title, but he also wrote or cowrote films as diverse as Paper Moon (1973), Unfaithful (2002), What About Bob? (1991), and Spider-Man 2 (2004), an accomplishment that isn't ordinary at all.

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973): One of Sargent's lesser-known films (along with 1978's Straight Time, another collaboration between Ulu Grosbard and Dustin Hoffman) is this romantic drama starring Maggie Smith and Timothy Bottoms (The Last Picture Show) and directed by Alan J. Pakula, his follow-up to 1971's Klute. In Peter Bart and Peter Guber's book Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in Hollywood, Pakula is quoted as saying that the movie's title accurately described how he felt about opening weekend: "I wish I could make movies but never have to release them."

A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich (1978): My favorite of the four titles spotlighted here, director Ralph Nelson's drama centers on a 13-year-old heroin addict and is based on a young-adult novel by playwright and author Alice Childress. Her name is the title of a song on Ben Folds Five's 1995 self-titled debut album, but it isn't about her—Anna Goodman, the song's cowriter (along with Folds), named "Alice Childress" after a patient of the same name at the mental institution where she once worked. The film version of A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich stars Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield, and Larry B. Scott, who's still probably best known for his role as Lamar in Revenge of the Nerds.

If you go too fast and furious, Roger Ebert will get lost.

2011-05-02T12:16:00.006-05:00

In his April 29 review of Fast Five for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert wrote:

The "F&F" titles got confusing with the unrelated "Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift" and John Singleton's "2 Fast 2 Furious," which is why, I suppose, "Fast Five" drops the "furious." But it isn't technically the fifth "F&F" unless you count the outliers. So I don't know what "Five" refers to. That doesn't bother me.

Maybe the titles did get confusing since only two in the decade-old series employ numbers—it doesn't help that the first and fourth entries essentially have the same title—but if Ebert had checked his facts he wouldn't be so confused. (Perhaps he should have visited Mulberry Panda 96 for a refresher course on the highly profitable street-racing saga.)

The series' second entry, 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), stars Paul Walker, who was also in the first film, The Fast and the Furious (2001); his costar in the sequel was Tyrese Gibson, who returns in Fast Five. Vin Diesel skipped 2 Fast 2 Furious but showed up in a cameo at the end of 2006's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—which didn't feature any other characters from the first two films—then returned to the series full-time, along with Walker, for Fast & Furious in '09.

See, Roger? They're all connected, and Fast Five really is the series' fifth installment, even if it sounds more like the name of a lotto game than a movie. And since it had an $86 million opening weekend, it's a safe bet that "Grandmaster Fast and the Furious Six" will be crashing into a theater near you sometime in 2013.

Rock Bio #4: Bee Gees

2011-04-29T13:53:00.000-05:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

Unless you were living under a rock in 1978, the sound of the Bee Gees was inescapable. The brothers Gibb—twins Robin and Maurice and older brother Barry—were all over the radio that year thanks to "How Deep Is Your Love," "Stayin' Alive," and "Night Fever," their number-one singles from the record-breaking Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album. Then there were the smash hits they wrote for other artists, including "If I Can't Have You" (Yvonne Elliman), "Emotion" (Samantha Sang), and "Grease" (Frankie Valli), not to mention the singles they penned with their little brother, Andy, who rocketed to the top of the charts himself with "(Love Is) Thicker Than Water" and "Shadow Dancing."

The Bee Gees may have become the poster boys for the American disco explosion of the late '70s, but their origins were much different. Born in England, the Gibbs started performing together as children in 1955. A few years later their family moved to Brisbane, Australia, where a local DJ started playing their songs on the radio, leading in short order to club gigs, TV appearances, and a debut album in 1965. Emboldened by the Beatles' success in the United States, the Gibb brothers returned to England the following year, where manager Robert Stigwood heard their Australian LP and signed them to a five-year contract with Polydor Records.

In the beginning the Bee Gees' music had a psychedelic, Beatlesque feel; some American DJs and listeners even mistook the group's first hit, "New York Mining Disaster 1941," for a new single from the Fab Four. However, their knack for blue-eyed soul was already evident—their second stateside hit, 1967's "To Love Somebody," was originally written for Otis Redding to sing.

The Bee Gees continued to pick up steam in the U.S. with hits like "I Gotta Get a Message to You" and "I Started a Joke," but a disagreement over which song from 1969's Odessa should be released as a single led Robin to quit the group for a brief period. After the brothers regrouped in late 1970 they scored their first number-one hit in the U.S., "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart," but for the next three years their soft-rock balladry and Moody Blues-style progressive pop failed to generate much interest.

It wasn't until Stigwood introduced the Bee Gees to producer Arif Mardin in 1974 that the second phase of their career began to take shape. Their first collaboration, Mr. Natural, pushed the group in more of an R&B direction than ever before, and on the follow-up, 1975's disco-flavored Main Course, Mardin utilized Barry's now famous falsetto for the very first time on "Nights on Broadway."

Main Course's "Jive Talkin'" went all the way to number one, as did "You Should Be Dancing," from 1976's Children of the World. The disco boom was coming to an end in the States when Saturday Night Fever arrived in movie theaters in December of '77, but the John Travolta film and its iconic soundtrack album, which eventually sold 40 million copies, revived disco's fortunes and then some. When the Bee Gees released their next album, Spirits Having Flown, in early '79, it yielded three more consecutive number-one hits: "Tragedy," "Too Much Heaven," and "Love You Inside Out."

The Bee Gees kept a fairly low profile in the first half of the '80s, contributing new songs to the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever's sequel, Staying Alive (1983), and writing hits like "Heartbreaker" for Dionne Warwick and the Kenny Rogers-Dolly Parton duet "Islands in the Stream." In 1989 they proved they could still scale the charts themselves when their single "One" landed in the Billboard top ten, a fitting comeback for three brothers with one unforgettable sound.

My infatuation with Three Days of the Condor is forever (dot dot dot).

2011-04-26T19:02:00.020-05:00

Film critic Juliette Small invites her daughter, Erica, and Erica's friend Katherine to join her for an advance screening of a new Robert Redford movie in chapter 14 of Forever..., Judy Blume's controversial 1975 novel about young love, which I'm reading for a grad-school research paper on young-adult fiction.

After the picture Mrs. Small asked me, personally, what I thought of it.

"Well ..." I told her, "I just love Robert Redford."

"Don't we all ..." Mrs. Small said, "but I mean about the story."

"Oh, the story ... I liked it ..."

"But ..."

"I don't think it could happen that way in real life ..."

"Exactly!" she said. "But you wanted it to, didn't you ... you were hoping it would turn out just that way."

"Yes," I told her.

"You see ... that's the whole point."

"It's going to be a smash," Erica said.

"In spite of my review, you mean?"

"In spite of anybody's review."

"I agree with you, completely," Mrs. Small said.

In 1975 Robert Redford starred in two films, The Great Waldo Pepper and Three Days of the Condor. The former was scripted by William Goldman and directed by George Roy Hill, who previously collaborated with Redford on 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the latter was helmed by Sydney Pollack, who, prior to Condor, had already directed the California native in three films, including the western Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and the romantic drama The Way We Were (1973), costarring Barbra Streisand.

The Great Waldo Pepper is a period piece in which Redford plays a 1920s stunt pilot, but Three Days of the Condor is a contemporary thriller that asks audiences to believe that a guy as handsome as the Sundance Kid is employed by the CIA as a bookworm rather than a dashing James Bond clone. As Katherine says, "I don't think it could happen that way in real life." But you want it to.

Waldo was released in March of '75. Condor came out in September. When Katherine, the protagonist of Forever..., takes a train from Westfield, New Jersey, into New York City with Erica and her mom to see "a preview of a new Robert Redford picture," it's either late March or early April in the book's narrative. I'm fully aware of the possibility that Blume isn't talking about any Redford movie in particular—for one thing, I don't know when exactly Forever... was published in '75 (spring, summer, etc.), or if she even had a particular year in mind besides "right now, whenever that is" when she wrote the book, or if copyright issues prevented her from using the title of an actual Redford movie—but a boy can still dream, even when he's no longer a young adult.

another comic strip about piracy (not the "arr, matey" kind)

2011-04-09T20:20:00.029-05:00

In Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury this week talk-radio host Mark Slackmeyer asked pop star Jimmy Thudpucker for his thoughts on musicians who perform private concerts for dictators, à la Beyoncé performing at a 2009 New Year's Eve party thrown by Moammar Gadhafi's son Hannibal in St. Barts.

Is it wrong? Should fans be offended? Will I post a new comic strip each month about the music industry's financial woes, gradually exposing myself as someone who can't comprehend economic issues unless they're illustrated—literally—with cartoon characters and joke-filled word bubbles? (Answers: Maybe, screw 'em, and God willing if one of The Lockhorns suddenly has a bone to pick with the iTunes Store come Mother's Day.)

Rock Bio #3: The Smiths

2011-03-25T09:28:00.000-05:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

When Morrissey (vocals) and Johnny Marr (guitar) started writing songs together in 1982, they picked the Smiths for their new band's moniker, partly as a reaction to extravagant group names like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. But though the Smiths' name was ordinary, their impact on British pop music—which up to that point in the '80s had been drenched in synthesizers—was not, lighting a path for the Stone Roses, Oasis, Blur, and many other bands.

Morrissey and Marr filled out their lineup with Mike Joyce on drums and Andy Rourke on bass, and after six months of club gigs the Smiths signed with London's Rough Trade Records in 1983. Their first single, "Hand in Glove," failed to ignite the interest of radio programmers, but the follow-up, "This Charming Man," cracked the top 30 on the UK singles chart. Despite his often heartsick lyrics (evinced by song titles like "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" and "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now"), which continue to speak to many a lonely, tortured adolescent on both sides of the pond, Morrissey was an invigorating, hip-gyrating presence in concert, not to mention an eccentric one—the frontman was known for wearing a hearing aid onstage and putting gladioli in his back pocket.

The Smiths' self-titled first album was released in February 1984 on a wave of tremendous buzz. It was also met with controversy when British tabloids interpreted "Reel Around the Fountain" and "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" as endorsements of pedophilia, an allegation Morrissey vehemently denied.

Meat Is Murder followed a year later, with the Smiths producing the album themselves, gaining confidence and moving beyond jangly guitar pop to embrace rockabilly ("Rusholme Ruffians") and even a bit of funk ("Barbarism Begins at Home"). It was their first number-one album in the UK.

After their third LP, The Queen Is Dead, was completed at the end of '85, Rourke was fired, allegedly because his heroin use was affecting his performance. He was replaced with Craig Gannon, but just a few weeks later Rourke was rehired, with Gannon moving to rhythm guitar (he wasn't "the fifth Smith" for long—by the end of 1986 he'd left the band). Queen was released in June of '86, delayed by six months because of a legal dispute between the band and Rough Trade, and since the label appeared incapable of pushing the band's singles up the charts in either the U.S. or the UK, Morrissey and Marr decided it was time to move on.

Bucking their "independent" reputation, the Smiths signed with major label EMI in 1987, but by the time Strangeways Here We Come, their fourth album and Rough Trade swan song, was released that fall, the band was no more. Marr quit after the album was finished, frustrated by Morrissey's immovable obsession with 1960s pop melodies, and though the rest of the band tried to continue as a trio, it didn't last long.

Morrissey went on to a successful solo career, and Marr formed Electronic with New Order's Bernard Sumner. A reunion isn't likely: in 1996 Joyce sued Morrissey and Marr for recording and performance royalties and won. But never say never. As the Smiths' frontman once sang, "There is a light that never goes out...."

Please and Liquor

2011-03-11T16:01:00.011-06:00

Thanks to my friend and fellow improviser Michael, who's currently traveling and performing in and around the Gulf of Mexico, I've learned what Please has been up to lately.

Thoughtful as always, Please. Michael also informed me that our mutual friend (and enemy) Liquor has gone into business.

"Obviously, my dream of making millions through poetry is dust."

2011-03-03T23:51:00.006-06:00

My dad sent this Tom the Dancing Bug strip to me the other day, reminding me that I'd originally sent it to him in August 2000 after it appeared in print and online. Tom creator Ruben Bolling is wickedly funny and smart, and he gave good e-mail when I wrote him as a fan later that year.

Now that I'm studying library science this strip is even funnier, although the record industry's fate now seems much more dire than it did a decade ago, when Napster was the only music-pirating bug that needed to be squashed. And these days e-publishing, aided by ambiguous forces of good and/or evil such as Amazon.com, threatens to wipe out the traditional publishing industry, taking down bookstore chains like Borders in the process.

Everything's cheaper now, but we're all paying the price.

Rock Bio #2: Stone Temple Pilots

2011-02-25T12:23:00.000-06:00

Part of a series of brief artist biographies I wrote for Rhino.com in the spring of 2010 ...

After more than two decades together, Stone Temple Pilots have proven themselves to be one of the most resilient bands in rock 'n' roll. Initially dismissed by critics as Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains wannabes, the San Diego quartet were a hit with listeners from the start, and despite various breakups, side projects, and internal squabbles over the years, STP continue to record and tour, proving they've still got fuel to burn.

The band's origins date back to 1986, when Scott Weiland (vocals) and Robert DeLeo (bass) met at a Black Flag concert in Long Beach, California. Quickly realizing they were dating the same girl, they moved into her apartment once she left town and decided to form a band. With DeLeo's brother Dean on guitar and Eric Kretz on drums, the band named themselves Mighty Joe Young and slowly built a following in San Diego's clubs. They kept their distance from the L.A. music scene and its corporate influence, but by 1992 Atlantic Records had come calling, and that fall the group released their debut album, Core, under their new name, Stone Temple Pilots.

Core was an immediate success, and the tracks "Sex Type Thing," "Plush," and "Creep" became staples on MTV and alternative radio stations. Though STP's sound was accused of being derivative of grunge, it was closer in spirit to '70s stadium rockers like Led Zeppelin and Kiss, tethering hard-rock riffs to concise melodies. The band's winning streak continued with 1994's Purple, which spawned the hits "Vasoline," "Interstate Love Song," and "Big Empty."

In the spring of '95 Weiland was arrested for possession of cocaine and heroin and ordered to enter rehab for his drug addiction. Upon completion of his treatment program he joined the rest of STP for the recording of their third album, Tiny Music ... Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop, which debuted at #4 on the Billboard 200 in March of '96. It didn't reach the same commercial heights as its predecessors, though, partly because Weiland relapsed that spring and had to return to rehab, forcing the band to cancel its summer tour.

At that point Stone Temple Pilots went on hiatus. The DeLeo brothers and Kretz formed Talk Show with singer Dave Coutts and recorded a one-off, self-titled album (1997), and Weiland worked on his first solo LP, 12 Bar Blues (1998), in between arrests and trips back to rehab. STP reunited to record No. 4 in 1999, after which Weiland spent five months in jail for violating his probation.

To the surprise of many, the band soldiered on, following up No. 4 and its hit single, "Sour Girl," with Shangri-La Dee Da in the summer of 2001. But after Weiland and Dean DeLeo almost came to blows onstage in the fall of '02, it looked like Stone Temple Pilots had finally crashed and burned. Weiland then joined Slash in the hard-rock supergroup Velvet Revolver, while the DeLeo brothers formed Army of Anyone with Filter lead singer Richard Patrick.

In 2007 Weiland reconciled with his former bandmates, and after quitting Velvet Revolver because his new bandmates reportedly nixed the idea of him doing reunion concerts with the old ones, he joined STP for a 65-date tour in the summer of '08. Their chemistry reestablished, the band entered the studio a year later, with their self-titled sixth album set for release in May 2010.

"What's hard is knowing that KeeKee may be six or seven now but that in three or four years she'll be thirty."

2011-02-08T15:12:00.014-06:00

Last week in my Literature and Resources for Young Adults class we were assigned Christopher Paul Curtis's Bucking the Sarge (2004, Random House), which is narrated by a 15-year-old named Luther T. Farrell who works for his mom, "the Sarge," and is forced to grow up fast. Below are two excerpts I particularly liked.

"There's always something desperate and fake when you have to deal with someone who's about to get evicted. They'll say anything to try and get another rent-free week or two. That makes it easy not to listen to what they have to say, 'cause you know there's a pretty good chance they're lying. It's nothing to make your heart hard to that. Even if you feel bad for them odds are they're not doing nothing but playing you, and who wants to get played?

"People will throw their babies in your face or have their sick, dying mommas cough on you or they'll tell you the check's in the mail or that the Department of Social Services computer is down or that they've got the inside word on what next Thursday's number is going to be or any of a million other stupid excuses as to why they haven't paid the rent in three months. It gets real easy to let those excuses slide right by you 'cause it's real obvious that they are what Ms. Warren calls rhetoric, or speech designed to influence.

"What's hard is a stupid little picture drawn by a little mostly-As student who's got a dope fiend momma. What's hard is knowing that that girl was gonna be living in a busted-up Impala until her momma drags her into some other hole to live. What's hard is wondering, and I know some philosopher somewhere has wondered this and probably figured it out to the day, how much longer that little girl has before she's beaten down so bad that being room C's Citizen of the Month doesn't mean a thing. What's hard is knowing that KeeKee may be six or seven now but that in three or four years she'll be thirty." —pg. 61-62

"Once you get some years on you and a little experience under your belt it turns out that those things you have great expectations about are just as tired and played out as anything else in your life. I don't know why so many of the fools I go to school with can't wait to get older, it seems like with age fewer and fewer things are exciting. And it seems like the more excited you are about something, the more time you spend dreaming and wondering and fantasizing what it's going to be like, the more disappointing it turns out to be.

"Which has got me seriously worried about sex." —pg. 68

a Wayne Shorter-free weather report

2011-02-02T16:45:00.003-06:00

On the morning of February 1, just a few hours before the biggest blizzard to hit Chicago since 1999 kicked in, SmoothChicago.com sent me an e-mail with this subject heading: "Weather Advisory - Chicago & Vicinity."

"Here in the Midwest, we know how to deal with the snow," the e-mail said. "The BIG STORY is that very soon, things will be heating up in Chicago.

"The SmoothChicago.com Weather Center has issued a HEAT ADVISORY for Saturday February 12th at the DuSable Museum in Chicago. It is going to be HOT."

Needless to say, this fake severe-weather warning was no help earlier today when I found myself wading through 18-inch-tall snowdrifts in shorts and flip-flops.

Vengeance shall be mine, SmoothChicago.com.

In case you still think punk never went mainstream ...

2011-01-30T10:36:00.003-06:00

I've now heard the Ramones' 1978 song "I Wanna Be Sedated" twice while shopping for groceries. Usually you're being sedated in supermarkets with soft rock (which is fine by me, of course), but now the Ramones do the trick just as well, apparently.

Rock Bio #1: Pantera

2011-01-28T15:47:00.000-06:00

Last spring I was hired by Rhino Records to write a series of brief artist biographies for its website. Without a doubt it was the best freelance job I've ever had, but some of the bios weren't used, so in the spirit of not letting good research go to waste, I now present each one in its unedited entirety, starting with Pantera.*

Check back next month for a new entry, and in the meantime visit Rhino.com for the best collection of music on this planet or any other! (Admittedly, I'm trying to stay on the label's good side, but since I've been buying their CDs since the early '90s and still own a Rhino catalog I sent away for in January of '97, I hope it's obvious that I'm not just blowing smoke.)

* After I turned in the first three entries I was asked to not mention death, drugs, or depositions if at all possible in subsequent write-ups, so "unedited" became a relative term.

Though Pantera's first four albums found them emulating the glam-metal stylings of their heroes, Kiss and Van Halen, by 1990 they'd reinvented themselves as the kings of groove metal on their major-label debut, Cowboys From Hell. When Far Beyond Driven debuted at the top of Billboard's album chart four years later, their status as the biggest band in heavy metal was all but confirmed.

Formed in Arlington, Texas, in the early '80s by brothers Darrell and Vincent Abbott, better known as "Diamond" Darrell (guitar) and Vinnie Paul (drums), Pantera was rounded out by singer Terry Glaze and bassist Rex Brown for the band's first three albums, the independently released Metal Magic (1983), Projects in the Jungle (1984), and I Am the Night (1985). Once Glaze quit, it paved the way for singer Phil Anselmo to join in '87 and Pantera's classic lineup to jell over the next decade.

After Anselmo's initiation into the group on 1988's Power Metal, the boys ditched the spandex and the Aqua Net and stopped trying to beat Mötley Crüe at their own game. Signing with Atco Records in '89, Pantera released Cowboys From Hell the following year and never looked back. (In fact they've disowned their first four discs, all of which are out of print.)

The band's punishing new sound, stripped down to allow for maximum aural assault, featured militant riffs and bluesy solos from Darrell's guitar, a percussion style that earned Vinnie Paul the nickname "the Brick Wall," and guttural growls and barks that made some listeners question Anselmo's mental health. Vulgar Display of Power, their 1992 follow-up, went even further, providing proof of the art of noise on tracks like "Mouth for War" and "Walk."

By the time Far Beyond Driven debuted at number one in 1994, Darrell had changed his nickname from "Diamond" to "Dimebag," signaling that Pantera was by the metalheads, for the metalheads, even if they were now making platinum records.

After Driven the band explored side projects, with Darrell appearing on Anthrax's Stomp 442 (1995) and Anselmo forming the metal supergroup Down. Pantera reconvened for 1996's The Great Southern Trendkill, which showed off a more subdued side of the band on songs like "Suicide Note Pt. I," but because of tensions between Anselmo and the Abbott brothers, the singer recorded his vocals in one studio while the rest of the band laid down their tracks in another.

Official Live: 101 Proof followed in '97 once Atco realized a new studio album wasn't forthcoming. Indeed, it wasn't until two years later that Pantera put aside the side projects—Eibon and Viking Crown for Anselmo, the David Allan Coe collaboration Rebel Meets Rebel for the Abbotts and Brown—long enough to record Reinventing the Steel (2000), which turned out to be their final album. Realizing the communication breakdown between Anselmo and themselves was beyond repair, Darrell and Vinnie Paul announced Pantera's breakup in 2003.

Any hopes of a reunion were crushed a year later when the Abbott brothers' new band, Damageplan, performed in Columbus, Ohio, on December 8, 2004. Shortly after the band began playing, a disturbed fan named Nathan Gale jumped onstage and shot Darrell at close range, killing him and three others before being fatally shot by a police officer.

children's literature and its "recognition that there is much in daily life beyond our reach"

2011-01-17T17:24:00.022-06:00

David L. Ulin wrote a terrific article recently for the Los Angeles Times's books blog about George Selden's The Cricket in Times Square (1960), which I've never read:

"My favorite books for kids are those that start out naturalistically and then go quietly, gently off the rails. 'Charlotte's Web' is a perfect example: E.B. White's descriptions of New England farm life are so precise, so deftly rendered, that it seems entirely believable when the animals start talking and Charlotte begins to spell out words in her web.

"This, of course, is one of the wonders of children's literature, its sense of the world as mysterious, even magical, its recognition that there is much in daily life beyond our reach. At its best, childhood is like that also, although more often, it can be a landscape of arbitrary rules and inexplicable adult tension, in which too much happens (literally and figuratively) above our heads."

authors and other fools

2010-12-17T16:45:00.108-06:00

Before his recording career took off in 1975 with The Art of Tea (one of my favorite albums), jazz-pop singer-songwriter Michael Franks composed scores for the films Cry for Me, Billy (1972), Zandy's Bride (1974), and the Roger Corman-produced cult classic Cockfighter (1974). It wasn't until 1982, however, that he lent his voice to a movie theme song: "Coming Home to You," from the Al Pacino vehicle Author! Author!

The song's music was written by Dave Grusin, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the husband-and-wife team who penned lyrics for "The Way We Were" (1973) and "The Windmills of Your Mind" (from The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968), both of which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. (Grusin and the Bergmans had previously collaborated on the theme songs for Maude and Good Times, among other TV series.) In 1982, in addition to their work on "Coming Home to You," the Bergmans wrote the lyrics for the following Best Song nominees: "It Might Be You" (also with music by Grusin), from Sydney Pollack's Tootsie; "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" (Michel Legrand, music), from Norman Jewison's Best Friends; and "If We Were in Love" (John Williams, music), from Yes, Giorgio, starring Luciano Pavarotti.

Three nominations for three different songs. They had good odds, but the Bergmans ended up losing to "Up Where We Belong"—music by Jack Nitzsche and Buffy Sainte-Marie, lyrics by Will Jennings—from the Richard Gere-Debra Winger drama An Officer and a Gentleman. (The fifth nominee was Rocky III's "Eye of the Tiger," written by Jim Peterik and Frankie Sullivan III of Survivor.)

"Coming Home to You" obviously wasn't on the Oscar short list that year. That's probably because it's not a good song. In fact it's often cringeworthy.

In 2007 a blogger at Cinefile Video wrote, "Upon listening to this song, you get the distinct impression that Mr. Franks had never uttered a note in his life before stepping in front of the mic to record it, for it is just a wretched, wretched performance."

It's certainly not his best, but he's a hired hand in this scenario working in a strictly pop vein, and having exclusively sung his own lyrics up to that point in his career, he may have felt off balance trying to breathe life into the Bergmans' words, which aren't their best either ("Whenever there are days / It feels as though the world / Is coming to an end / We close the door behind us / Where it's always milk and cookies / And a friend"). But the biggest crime here is committed by Grusin, who unabashedly lifts the keyboard riff from the Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes" (1978). (He also steals from his arrangement for "It Might Be You," or maybe it's the other way around—Author! Author! was released six months before Tootsie.)

Grusin wasn't the only one ripping off Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins's Grammy-winning composition in those days. In 1980 Robbie Dupree somehow avoided a lawsuit with "Steal Away"—is it because he secretly is Loggins?—while the keyboard riff was put to more subtle use in the Pointer Sisters' "He's So Shy" later that year (unfortunately, the same can't be said for Tom Monroe's 1981 cover of Petula Clark's "Downtown").

Dave Grusin and the Bergmans

Maybe Grusin was simply burned out after scoring both On Golden Pond and Absence of Malice as well as portions of Reds in 1981. In addition to scoring Tootsie and Author! Author! (he was brought in after the film's original composer, Johnny Mandel, was fired) in '82, Grusin composed the theme song for TV's St. Elsewhere and released a jazz album titled Out of the Shadows. You could say his plate was full at the start of the Reagan era, so he can be forgiven for stealing from the Michael McDonald playbook.

That's what this fool believes, anyway.

Movie titles are fair game.

2010-12-07T19:25:00.123-06:00

Fair Game, the fact-based thriller directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) that opened last month and stars Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, is based on Valerie Plame's 2007 memoir Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House.

It's not to be confused with Fair Game, a 1995 action movie starring William Baldwin and Cindy Crawford that's based on the fact that Crawford is very pretty but also the myth that she can act. Fair Game is adapted from the novel of the same name by Paula Gosling, but it was first adapted for the big screen in 1986 as Cobra, starring Sylvester Stallone as supercop Marion "Cobra" Cobretti and his then-wife, Brigitte Nielsen, as a government witness he must protect from the bad guys. Say what you will about Nielsen as an actress, but she does a great job in Cobra pretending she's not half a foot taller than her ex-husband.

That same year, according to Wikipedia, an Australian action film titled Fair Game was released, but its protagonist is "a young woman ... who runs a wildlife sanctuary in the Outback [and] is menaced by three kangaroo hunters who have entered the sanctuary looking for new game." (Remember, the late Steve Irwin was a crocodile hunter, so he wasn't a suspect in this case.)

The young woman is played by Cassandra Delaney, not Naomi Watts, whose family moved to Australia when she was 14, but since I need a good complete-circle ending for this blog entry, let's just say it was the star of Peter Jackson's King Kong remake and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. As Watts's latest film makes clear, the truth is fair game, right?

CBS has canceled Medium.

2010-11-19T16:37:00.005-06:00

After having its seventh-season episode order cut from 22 episodes to 13 last month, Medium was officially canceled this week by CBS, with its final episode set to air in January. The supernatural drama, which stars Patricia Arquette as a psychic who helps the Phoenix DA's office solve crimes, spent its first five seasons on NBC before being rescued from cancellation by CBS. Now its luck has finally run out.

This is a golden opportunity, however, for Medium creator and executive producer Glenn Gordon Caron, who previously created the network series Now and Again (CBS, 1999-2000) and Moonlighting (ABC, 1985-1989), which was my favorite show when I was growing up. He was also the brains behind "When I Grow Up" (a.k.a. "Fling"), a series that never aired despite six episodes having been completed by the time Fox pulled the plug in 2001; a pseudo-update of Moonlighting, it featured Amy Sedaris, one of the funniest people on the planet, playing the Ms. DiPesto receptionist role, and was reportedly axed because Caron wouldn't take input from network brass. Now, with the cancellation of his latest—and longest running—network series, Caron finally has a chance to create a series for HBO. (C'mon, guys, schedule a meeting already!)

One of the main reasons I loved Moonlighting when I was growing up was because it didn't follow the rules of other shows. The main characters, private detectives Maddie Hayes (Cybill Shepherd) and David Addison (Bruce Willis), occasionally talked to the camera and acknowledged they were characters on a TV show; overlapping dialogue was common; and comedy, drama, and romance were often combined in the same episode in equal measures. In its third season the episode "Big Man on Mulberry Street" showcased quietly dramatic moments for Shepherd and Willis that surrounded a stylish dance number choreographed by Singin' in the Rain codirector Stanley Donen; one week later "Atomic Shakespeare" featured iambic pentameter and a full-dress parody of The Taming of the Shrew.

For a while anything was possible on Moonlighting. It was wildly creative and had an energy no other show could match. No wonder it burned out so quickly.

Though Caron and company were supposed to complete 22 episodes of Moonlighting each season after the first, the most they ever delivered was 18 in the second season. Even the show's abbreviated first season ended up one episode short of ABC's six-episode order. Caron did complete 22 episodes of Now and Again for CBS more than a decade later, but rumor has it he went overbudget on the last few episodes of the show's one and only season in order to finish them on time. Since the show's ratings had steadily decreased throughout the season, the network pulled the plug; Now and Again ended on a cliffhanger that was never resolved.

I never read of any production delays on Medium, but I'm sure Caron would jump at the chance to produce just 13 or 10 or even 8 episodes per season, which is standard at HBO. Before he created The Sopranos for HBO, David Chase had written for network shows like The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure. Before The Wire and Treme, David Simon worked on NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street. And before Six Feet Under, Alan Ball spent time writing for the Cybill Shepherd sitcom Cybill; he once said that the former Moonlighting star's diva-like behavior frustrated him so much that he decided the best way to deal with it was to channel his anger into a script titled American Beauty, which eventually won him the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2000.

It's my guess that Caron would similarly thrive at a cable network that prides itself on letting inventive writer-producers do what they do best.

The beginning of broadcasting?

2010-11-15T17:35:00.002-06:00

On November 15, 1926, the National Broadcasting Company, otherwise known as NBC, began broadcasting as a radio network with a four-hour "extravaganza" featuring Will Rogers and the New York Symphony Orchestra. Conan O'Brien's grandfather was hired to host the event, but after 45 minutes NBC replaced him with Jay Leno's great-grandfather, setting up a vicious cycle for generations to come.

"I'm not a violent convict, but I've played one on TV, and now I'd like to sell you various types of insurance."

2010-10-31T10:51:00.133-05:00

This has already been noted on another blog, but I do find it interesting that two of the stars of HBO's tough-as-nails prison series Oz (1997-2003) are now hawking insurance on TV. Dean Winters and J.K. Simmons have appeared in other TV series and movies since Oz went off the air seven years ago, of course, and they've both excelled in comic roles—Winters as Dennis, Liz Lemon's disastrous ex-boyfriend on 30 Rock, and Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson in the three Spider-Man movies—but it's hard to shake the image of them as violent criminals. I love that two major insurance companies separately decided, "Now that's a face potential insurance buyers can trust."

Winters, who played Irish-American gang member Ryan O'Reilly on Oz, currently stars in commercials for Allstate auto insurance as "Mr. Mayhem":

And Simmons, who portrayed white supremacist Vernon Schillinger, now headlines ads for Farmers Insurance as Professor Nathaniel Burke:

This curious casting reminds me of commercials in which actors known for playing gangsters reprise their roles, albeit in a more cuddly fashion suitable for TV advertising. Winters and Simmons obviously aren't playing off their Oz personas in their Allstate and Farmers ads, but does this mean Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, a.k.a. Oz's Simon Adebisi, will soon be selling State Farm insurance with a wink and a smile (and a tiny hat, of course)?

I like your style, CyborgQX38.

2010-10-10T23:08:00.001-05:00

(You're not too shabby either, Lester Bangs.)

Creem, September 1975

My face is an open book.

2010-09-24T11:36:00.036-05:00

Here's two years' worth (March 2008-April 2010) of shameless filler gathered from you-know-where. Be advised that prescription drugs and various types of vanity, some of which can be alleviated through the use of said drugs, are reoccurring themes/punchlines.

Robert Cass is bragging about himself silently.

Robert Cass is drinking wine out of a sippy cup. To life!

Robert Cass is eating his words. They're SCRUMDILLYUMPTIOUS.

Robert Cass is asking you how you're doing just so you'll ask him in return how he's doing just so he can tell you how great he's doing!

Robert Cass thinks Australia needs to make up its mind—country or continent? You can't have it both ways, Oz.

Robert Cass wishes he lived in Darfur so he could meet the stars of the Ocean's Eleven movies.

Robert Cass should probably finish cleaning up all that blood.

Robert Cass is thrilled to be expressing dull private thoughts in such an exciting public fashion!

Robert Cass has been stretching the "three-second rule" of food handling to seven seconds or more for quite some time now.

Robert Cass has started throwing his Twix wrappers in his coworker's trash can so the janitor won't think he's the one with all the cavities.

Robert Cass have a dream that one day nouns and verbs will no longer disagree with each other.

Robert Cass is overrated as an underdog.

Robert Cass has enough unearned confidence to power a small country.

Robert Cass is spinning in his grave!

Robert Cass thinks his girlfriend's suicide note would've benefited from a second draft, which he plans to tell her once she comes out of the coma.

Robert Cass is feelin' alright alright alright now that Matthew McConaughey Jr. has been born.

Robert Cass lights up your life.

Robert Cass has read the writing on the wall and wonders if 12 different variations on "penis" were really necessary.

Robert Cass is painfully aware that his best days as a drug mule are behind him.

Robert Cass is learning the hard way that not every woman he kidnaps will automatically fall in love with him.

Robert Cass can't believe you're wearing that but is too good a friend to tell you.

Robert Cass has banged a gong but has yet to get it on.

Robert Cass regrets sacrificing his one phone call at the county lock-up for this status update.

Robert Cass thinks "gunplay" is a funny little oxymoron.

Robert Cass enjoys the bingeing much more than the purging.

Robert Cass smells pretty.

Robert Cass knows he'd make a great deadbeat dad if some single mom with low self-esteem would just give him a chance.

Robert Cass wants Michael Phelps to thank him for not watching the Olympics and therefore not jinxing him. You too, Chicago Cubs.

Robert Cass was hoping Swing Vote would be more like CBS's Swingtown. Aside from Kevin Costner and Kelsey Grammer's steamy love scene, it was not.

Robert Cass had condor for dinner three days last week. It was his own special way of paying tribute to movie-star environmentalist Robert Redford.

Robert Cass is more Robert Carradine than Robert Redford. Life is an endless series of trade-offs.

Robert Cass loves black people, but he expresses it in ways that make every race uncomfortable.

Robert Cass doesn't need your pity. But he doesn't want to see it go to waste, either, so hand it over.

Robert Cass wishes he had the power to disable all cell phones just so he could watch everyone under 35 completely lose their shit.

Robert Cass has never been one of those "reluctant" sex symbols.

Robert Cass has been informed by the FAA that the bags under his eyes are now heavy enough to qualify as carry-ons.

Robert Cass likes when people celebrate his birthday early. It makes him feel even more like Jesus.

Robert Cass became a fan of himself the day he was born. Alright alright alright ...

Robert Cass is on a subliminable trip to nowhere!

Robert Cass wonders if the H in "Jesus H. Christ" is short for "Hussein." See you at the polls, evangelical swing voters!

Robert Cass has nothing to hide from media jackals and ill-informed bloggers like ... well, like himself.

Robert Cass is shaving with one hand and typing with the— OH MY GOD, MY BEAUTIFUL FACE!!!!

Robert Cass hopes you enjoy his impression of every single stockbroker photo from the past two weeks.

Robert Cass don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.

Robert Cass tunes in to The Hills for the ennui, but he stays for the malaise.

Robert Cass just realized that describing himself as "the quiet loner type" in personal ads may be scaring off potential customers.

Robert Cass doesn't drown his sorrows, he waterboards them.

Robert Cass calls himself a "game changer" whenever he flips over a Scrabble board in disgust, while his opponents call him a 12-letter synonym for "incest participant."

Robert Cass is not the man who will fight for your honor.

Robert Cass thinks that if everyone votes for Obama and listens to TV on the Radio, racism will end. (Robert's recent lobotomy was a success.)

Robert Cass didn't realize why everyone was so excited this morning until he opened the newspaper and saw that it's Matthew McConaughey's birthday!

Robert Cass did it! He helped elect America's first black president. In his own small way, Robert is a hero. America loves Robert!

Robert Cass was so happy when ACORN registered his precious cat to vote, only to be disappointed when that vote was wasted on Bob Barr. No, Mr. Snickerbottoms! Bad kitty!

Robert Cass is alone with his thoughts. Quick, somebody call or text him so he can end this existential nightmare!

Robert Cass is Employee of the Millennium! The mug he stole from work says so.

Robert Cass is surprised how many black people are avoiding his spontaneous hugs on the street. It's almost as if November 4 never happened, and that's just sad.

Robert Cass enjoys long walks on the beach, especially if Jesus is there to do the heavy lifting.

Robert Cass thinks Eraserhead might not be the best choice for treasury secretary. America can't just erase its financial problems. What if there's a pencil shortage?

Robert Cass runs a think tank inside the 42nd Precinct drunk tank every Friday night.

Robert Cass is a bottomless refill of nonjudgmental love.

Robert Cass is celebrating his legal victory over corporate fat cats: the judge ruled that sex with a Coca-Cola vending machine is not vandalism!

Robert Cass loves Johnny Hates Jazz. But they've never acknowledged his love. Does that mean they hate him?

Robert Cass should've known better than to trust a governor with that much hair.

Robert Cass is ashamed of Rod Blagojevich, another in a long line of corrupt Republicans. So what if he's a Democrat? Robert is sticking to his talking points.

Robert Cass loves the fact that Facebook status updates are a voluntary invasion of privacy. You're always one step ahead, Department of Homeland Security.

Robert Cass is celebrating America's rich heritage this Christmas by becoming an Indian giver.

Robert Cass is the most critically acclaimed critic of himself.

Robert Cass is doing something incredibly mundane. Before Facebook there was no way to mass-distribute that kind of information. Thank you, technology.

Robert Cass loves telling fans of The Wire that T.J. Hooker covered the exact same ground 25 years ago.

Robert Cass is going to search far and wide for gainful employment. In particular, he's going to keep an open mind about Pacific Rim jobs.

Robert Cass was in a dark place the last few weeks, but now that his electric bill's been paid, he's feeling much better. He thanks you for your concern and your Paxil.

Robert Cass has cut himself shaving so many times in the past month that he's developed a reputation as a shark tease.

Robert Cass can't wait for Inauguration Day, when he gets another chance to pat himself on the back. You're still welcome, America!

Robert Cass wishes the reverse psychology he used in yesterday's impromptu hostage negotiation hadn't backfired so tragically, but as they say, live and learn.

Robert Cass was hoping the kids he's sponsored through Christian Children's Fund would be rich soccer stars by now. Ersatz absentee papa needs a loan.

Robert Cass is seeing Frost/Nixon today. He has $1,000 riding on Nixon winning at the buzzer. Robert hopes God and Ron Howard are listening right now.

Robert Cass is bold. And when he's angry, he's downright italicized.

Robert Cass is licking his wounds, despite his doctor's recommendation that he actually bandage them.

Robert Cass couldn't have picked a worse time to debut his new Death by Peanut Butter cookbook.

Robert Cass is a grown-ass man. But by identifying himself as such, he loses respect from all the grown-ass men who know that actions speak louder than status updates.

Robert Cass doesn't like private jokes. Except for that one Spencer told about you last week. That was hilarious, Spence! High five!

Robert Cass has been told he's the new Hemingway, "minus the talent and any trace of masculinity."

Robert Cass is more than just a gorgeous head of hair.

Robert Cass is a tall drink of water served in a Dixie cup.

Robert Cass has hit a snag. Now he's backing up over it. Now he's hitting it again. Now he's speeding away before anybody sees him.

Robert Cass pretends he's somewhere else when stuck in one-sided conversations with self-absorbed thespians. Acting really is all about make-believe.

Robert Cass has lost his looks! Oh, wait, there they are—it was hard to see them at first under all that back hair.

Robert Cass was crying on the inside until he noticed that crying on the outside gets a more immediate response.

Robert Cass believes that at the end of the day people will still be using that worn-out phrase.

Robert Cass has got to be somebody's baby, he's so fine.

Robert Cass thinks intelligence is sexy, especially when it has nice legs.

Robert Cass has the vapors!

Robert Cass makes sure his presence is always felt, like a pimple inside your nose.

Robert Cass was unable to convince the jury that he ran that international prostitution ring for charity.

Robert Cass is requesting that everyone limit their status updates to five words or less in accordance with the new global attitude toward reading.

Robert Cass is congratulating himself on yet another insignificant accomplishment!

Robert Cass wonders if Zoloft can be prescribed to an economy.

Robert Cass should probably be paying attention to his lawyer, who's giving some sort of speech to the people sitting in the box-shaped thing.

Robert Cass thought your kid would be cuter.

Robert Cass is overrated as an underdog. (In honor of Earth Day, Robert is recycling an old status update.)

Robert Cass is confronted with the limits of his intelligence every time he tries to put the toaster "trap door" back on its hinges.

Robert Cass was surprised when he found out his date for 17 Again isn't 17. If that movie was rated R, he would've been her "adult guardian," and Robert just isn't ready for that kind of commitment yet.

Robert Cass insists that recipients of his mixes listen to them from start to finish, not in "a la carte" fashion on a "shuffle" setting. Robert is apparently unaware that it's no longer 1996.

Robert Cass is afraid his 22-month-old niece's attention span is longer than his own.

Robert Cass wants you to give him cash for ABBA Gold. (Thanks to a typing error while using Amazon.com, Robert now owns 1,111 copies of this album.)

Robert Cass is a man of mystery meat.

Robert Cass wishes he had a job, because then he'd have plenty of time to take important Facebook quizzes just like all of his working friends.

Robert Cass is turning a phrase (into a verbal catastrophe).

Robert Cass is a tastemaker. A badtastemaker, but everybody has to start somewhere.

Robert Cass is taking the rest of the decade off.

Robert Cass just found a missing tortilla chip in his chest hair. Robert is having a great day!

Robert Cass forgives you for not forgiving him, but the odds of him blowing up your pool again are, like, ten to one, so ease up already.

Robert Cass is going to crash a bunch of gay and interracial weddings this summer just to prove how sensitive he is.

Robert Cass isn't crazy about his close resemblance to a spider monkey after he gets out of the shower.

Robert Cass is tired of not being treated like a sex object.

Robert Cass wants to pinpoint the moment when "How are you?" became "I'm just saying hello. Please do not answer as if you were asked a question."

Robert Cass feels much more "mama say mama-sah muh-mah-koo-sah" than "de do do do, de da da da" right now, but that could change.

Robert Cass is taking an ego trip from the safety of his own home.

Robert Cass needs a laugh track that can produce at least five seconds of thunderous applause whenever he enters a room. Maybe Norman Lear has one he can borrow.

Robert Cass would love to be a private investigator as long as he could solve every crime in 60 minutes and only be shot in the shoulder once per season.

Robert Cass was unsure about President Obama's birthplace until he hired a Hawaiian P.I. to investigate. But now he has a nagging suspicion that the P.I. himself wasn't born in Hawaii. Anti-birthers, a new conspiracy is afoot ...

Robert Cass wonders how many anti-birthers are also pro-lifers.

Robert Cass probably wouldn't mind living next to a serial killer since they're generally known to be quiet tenants.

Robert Cass is an old-fashioned guy who prefers face-to-face narcissism over all other kinds.

Robert Cass is not a better man for having stolen the identity and wardrobe of a woman, but it's too late to return all these great pantsuits now.

Robert Cass is watching 1995's Last of the Dogmen on AMC, a modern-day Western starring Tom Berenger and narrated by Wilford Brimley. Robert's testosterone levels are dangerously high, and his mustache is growing at a freakishly rapid rate. Someone call for help!

Robert Cass is going out of his way to get out of his way.

Robert Cass thinks no one should die if they don't feel like it, and no one should go broke as long as Scientologists are willing to pay top dollar to harvest their eggs inside our brains. If you agree, send Robert a blank check.

Robert Cass defends Rep. Joe Wilson's right to express simple noun-verb agreement in response to complex issues.

Robert Cass is just a man with a tear-duct infection and a fetish for greasepaint.

Robert Cass wishes Kanye West would devote more time to noteworthy causes, like interrupting the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony next month. ("Mahatma Gandhi made some of the best peace of all time!")

Robert Cass is turning a blind eye to blind guys who say his hygiene makes them wish their sense of smell wasn't so heightened.

Robert Cass listed his birthday on Facebook as September 25, but it's actually September 35. He apologizes for the error and hopes you'll return with brand-new birthday wishes in ten days.

Robert Cass woke up on the wrong side of the bed on the wrong side of the tracks. But he was in the right time zone for once, so things are lookin' up!

Robert Cass is so excited that Chicago's been selected to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games! (Robert is from the future. Did he fail to mention that?)

Robert Cass is confused. If Chicago wasn't selected to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, does that mean he's a time traveler from ... an alternate reality?! Or does it mean he should cut back on the Ambien? (Robert would prefer the former, not the latter.)

Robert Cass wonders if David Letterman presented a "Top Ten Employees I've Slept With" list at Thursday's grand-jury hearing.

Robert Cass is high on you! So if he eats all your Doritos or passes out in your bathtub or steals one of your credit cards, please take it as a compliment.

Robert Cass congratulates President Obama on winning Rookie of the Year in both the National and American leagues. That must've been one heck of a first pitch at the All-Star Game!

Robert Cass has trouble taking compliments from himself. (They always sound so insincere.)

Robert Cass is I was not a English major.

Robert Cass has miles to go before he sleeps. Robert is pretentious in a high school poetry kind of way.

Robert Cass has turned a corner in his life, wiping out seven innocent bystanders in the process.

Robert Cass is America's (self-proclaimed) sweetheart!

Robert Cass is fuhgeddinaboutit.

Robert Cass misses certain things from his childhood, including summer vacation, trips to his grandparents' house, and drivers using their turn signals.

Robert Cass dreamed he had a ménage à trois with Bruce Springsteen and The Wire: The Complete Series box set. He wasn't impressed, but he knows plenty of white male liberals who would be.

Robert Cass feels bad for all those gorillas that are exploited year in and year out as car-wash mascots.

Robert Cass is happy that Rush Limbaugh received such good treatment from those secretly Kenyan doctors in Hawaii.

Robert Cass just wants to be stalked with the same amount of enthusiasm, showmanship, and (of course) ALL-ENCOMPASSING OBSESSION that he selflessly puts forth EVERY SECOND OF EVERY DAY when he's stalking you. Is that too much to ask? You get what you give, people.

Robert Cass saw Avatar and learned that we should take care of the environment ... on other planets. But Robert lives on this planet, and it's not his fault the ground isn't a "designated" trash receptacle.

Robert Cass comes with cleaning instructions identical to those of his sneakers: "Just brush dirt off and treat surface with leather impregnation spray."

Robert Cass disappoints himself so you don't have to!

Robert Cass is tradin' in his Chevy for a Cadillac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac.

Robert Cass can't stop asking "Who dat?" Specifically, "Who dat revivin' dat minstrel-show slang for the sake of a sports chant?" By the way, Robert has finally made some headway on his dissertation, which is now titled "Jar Jar Binks, Intergalactic Civil Rights Pioneer."

Robert Cass is like a greeting card covered in glitter: charming on the surface, but ultimately a huge mess.

Robert Cass has finally completed his exhaustive photo retrospective, "Bobby and His Middle Finger: Same Pose, Different Party, 1995-2009." Look for it soon at the Art Institute of Chicago. (Did you know that in some languages "at" means "on the sidewalk in front of"? It's a fact!)

Robert Cass takes comfort in knowing that he's still half a foot taller than Chuck Norris.

Robert Cass asks that you keep him in your thoughts and prayers, not the trunk of your car.

Robert Cass thinks those hatemongers in D.C. last weekend should be thrilled—insurance companies can no longer deny coverage because of the pre-existing condition known as "asshole."

Robert Cass is annoyed by loud, public cell-phone arguments, particularly the ones that aren't in English and therefore make it impossible for him to eavesdrop.

Robert Cass believes the size of a store is inversely proportional to the amount of guilt one feels for wasting hours inside said store without ever buying anything.

Can intimidation help my cause?

2010-09-21T00:04:00.009-05:00

Hey, you! Increase my blog metrics or face the wrath of the panda.

Jerry Lewis on the fleeting nature of funny

2010-09-06T16:43:00.006-05:00

The Chicago Tribune published an article today about Jerry Lewis, the 84-year-old comedian-filmmaker-humanitarian who's been hosting the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon every Labor Day weekend since 1966.

Alternating between trash-talking and tenderness, sweetness and snark, conversation about Lewis' future endeavors compelled the star to consider what had brought him here—and the fleeting nature of comedy.

"Funny is fragile. It's elusive," Lewis said. "It's elusive to everyone because you're never going to get a handle on what's funny. And people don't stay funny. As we get older, we lose a spark.

"But I can make somebody laugh when I open my eyes. It's still there when I shut them," he continued.

Yes to funny being fragile, no to Lewis still being able to make people laugh whether he's awake or comatose. (Double no to any comedian who claims he's still funny in his mid-80s right after he says funny is fragile.)

Personally, I've never found his shtick funny. I do admire him for his fund-raising efforts on behalf of those with muscular dystrophy, but just like reporter Chris Lee, I'm curious about something ...

How did Lewis become interested in the disease in the first place?

"That's never been answered by me and never will be!" Lewis snapped, suddenly bristling with indignation. "The important thing is not why, but that I do."

playing with infinity

2010-08-08T11:21:00.061-05:00

I've now been home from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a week. I was there July 21-31 for a "boot camp" semester in which an entire course in the school's Library and Information Science master's program was covered in ten days. Students were told well in advance to have all of the assigned readings completed before arriving on campus. Did the majority of us listen? Of course not.

But it was a great ten days, especially since we got to meet our fellow "distance learning" students before returning to our home cities, where we'll take classes online this fall.

Ten of us went on a tour of the UIUC library's Oak Street facility, where books are stacked 40 feet high and stored at temperatures of 50 degrees Fahrenheit. The first title I saw in those stacks was Playing With Infinity, a book about mathematical concepts by Rozsa Peter.

photo by Mallory Caise

Before Columbine, there was RoboCop 2.

2010-08-02T10:28:00.075-05:00

In the summer of 1990 RoboCop 2, directed by late-career sequel specialist Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back, Never Say Never Again), failed to improve upon the box-office fortunes or critical success of its Paul Verhoeven-helmed predecessor. But it still managed to be extremely violent.

One of its villains is a machine-gun wielding, cop-strangling, curse-word-spewing preteen named Hob, who's pictured on this Topps trading card I found at work a few years ago.

As you can see, the kid meets a bad end, but after a rash of school shootings in the mid- to late '90s—and especially after the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999—I can't imagine any summer action film, even if it's rated R and squarely in the realm of futuristic sci-fi, including a character like Hob. That's somewhat unfortunate from a creative standpoint, but as far as self-censoring goes (did Topps really need to put a dead kid on a piece of cardboard that's meant to sell bubble gum?), it's not a huge loss.

Lisa Simpson's (imaginary) wedding day

2010-08-01T23:47:00.001-05:00

"Lisa's Wedding," a sixth-season episode of The Simpsons, aired March 19, 1995. Li'l Lisa was told her fortune at a Renaissance fair and saw a vision of herself getting married at a future date. Thanks to the magic of animation—and the fact that The Simpsons is apparently immune to cancellation—Lisa remains eight years old. Nevertheless, the future is now.

libraries

2010-07-16T16:26:00.003-05:00

"It was my habit to go very slowly up the low, broad steps to the palace entrance, pleasing my eyes with the majestic lines of the building, and lingering to read again the carved inscriptions: Public Library—Built by the People—Free to All. Did I not say it was my palace? Mine, because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien ... My palace—mine! ... All these eager children, all these fine browed women, all these scholars going home to write learned books—I and they had this glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning. It was wonderful to say, This is mine; it was thrilling to say, This is ours."

—Mary Antin, from her autobiography The Promised Land (1913), describing her visits to the Boston Public Library as a child, after her family emigrated from Russia

belated World Cup fever courtesy of the Commodores

2010-07-12T15:06:00.005-05:00

Lionel Richie has been more popular abroad than in the United States for years now. He's got a huge Iraqi fan base, and my first hint of his fame in other countries came in 1996, after some friends returned from a summer trip to Europe and reported that they'd heard his 1983 hit "All Night Long" wherever they went.

Soccer's also more popular abroad than it is in the U.S., so how come this 1981 video for "Lady (You Bring Me Up)" by the Commodores, Richie's old band, wasn't resuscitated during all that endless World Cup coverage? It's my favorite of all the Commodores' songs—in fact it's one of the Songs That Will Still Blow Me Away Years From Now™—and it ended up being Richie's next-to-last hit with the group before he embarked on his smash solo career. But as Popblerd's Mike Heyliger said earlier today in an e-mail about the music video, "I bet the surviving Commodores wish they could burn it."

More televised vapidity?

2010-06-21T17:26:00.006-05:00

"Can't get no music on my MTV / Can't tell my emotions from reality ..." —The Silver Seas, "The Best Things in Life," 2010

People my age have long complained that MTV doesn't show music videos like it used to, concentrating on reality programming like The Real World and Jersey Shore instead. I used to complain right back at them that it does, just not during prime-time hours or anytime when they happened to be watching. But at some point I stopped paying attention, and this year the network finally dropped "Music Television" from its logo, which implies that they really have given up on videos.

Does this mean the network will stop airing its ultrahyped Video Music Awards telecast each year? Of course not! As long as videos are still shown between 3 and 9 AM each day, MTV can justify throwing a party to honor the best of the year.

It will, however, begin producing more scripted programs, according to the June 14 Wall Street Journal, in an attempt to move away from its recent glut of disposable reality shows. (It'd be fun to compile a list of how many MTV has churned out in the past decade—I'd guess most didn't make it past ten episodes.) Naturally, it's taking baby steps to begin with: the Wall Street Journal reports that "in 'Warren the Ape,' the title character is a poorly behaved celebrity who hopes an MTV reality show will revive his career."

Like AMC, formerly known as American Movie Classics, and TLC, which was once the Learning Channel, MTV is now just an acronym that means nothing. Some would say that makes it FUBAR, but any channel that can survive for almost 30 years in a rapidly expanding cable universe deserves the benefit of the doubt.

stirring the pot

2010-06-17T11:22:00.007-05:00

In January of last year I read that DVD sales of Monty Python's Flying Circus spiked 23,000 percent (!) once Python-approved clips of the show started appearing legally on YouTube. DVDs of the influential 1976-'84 sketch-comedy series SCTV, which are packaged and distributed by Shout! Factory, have reportedly never sold well, but if potential buyers could see sample sketches on YouTube, especially clips from 1981 to '83, when SCTV was firing on all cylinders as part of NBC's late-night lineup, I bet they'd consider spending $50 on a five-disc set.

I e-mailed Second City executive vice president Kelly Leonard, who spoke with CEO Andrew Alexander, one of SCTV's original executive producers, but his reply seemed to indicate that several different companies have rights to the show's footage, thereby creating a lot of red tape to sift through. However, a few months later I noticed that SCTV clips were appearing on YouTube that weren't immediately being taken down through cease-and-desist orders.

The clips that are up on YouTube aren't coming from Second City or Shout! Factory, but it's possible the companies decided to relax their policy on the unauthorized posting of their copyrighted material.

Am I to thank for that? Yes. Yes, I am. But there was a price to pay.

One of the few SCTV-related clips I could find on YouTube in January of '09 was made by a 13-year-old boy doing impressions of his favorite characters from the show, including station owner Guy Caballero (played by Joe Flaherty) and station manager Edith Prickley (Andrea Martin), in costume. I first saw SCTV when I was around that age, so I loved watching this middle schooler's take on the characters. It reminded me how much I adored the show when it aired on Nick at Nite in the summer of '89. And if this teenager gets the humor, which didn't rely that much on topical references aside from popular TV shows and celebrities of the late '70s and early '80s, it seems obvious to me that others would, too.

Sadly, when I went back to YouTube this morning to watch his video again, I found the following message instead: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by The Second City." Well, what about all those clips from SCTV that are now available on YouTube (remember—all because of me, and you're welcome)? There isn't any copyright claim on those? The 13-year-old fan got screwed because his video wasn't helping to sell DVDs?

In that case, I'm sorry I got involved. You can still thank me, of course, and send me money through PayPal as a sign of gratitude, but my mission was never to hurt the little guy. I feel like a morally indignant Bill Needle right now, but what I see in the mirror is a greedy Johnny LaRue.

I read books!

2010-06-14T23:28:00.011-05:00

Correction: I own lots of books, but I'm a slow reader. My books sit on my shelves and silently mock me for being a word turtle. If they don't cut it out, I'll have to read Fahrenheit 451 to them—slowly, of course, but my point will have been made.

I am, however, going to be starting classes next month in the University of Illinois's Graduate School of Library and Information Science as part of its "distance learning" program, meaning I'll be taking all but one of the classes online from Chicago. Graduate school requires a lot of reading, yes? It might be time to retrain my brain.

Meanwhile, here are some recently completed posts with lots of pictures and little text (whew!):

2/28: Coming up with awesome book titles takes practice.
4/18: tiny weirdness on Facebook
5/4: celebrity smiles

Help us, Roger Ebert. You're our only hope.

2010-06-11T11:48:00.067-05:00

On June 9 a reader who identifies himself as "kLO" left the following comment on the Hollywood Reporter's website under Kirk Honeycutt's negative review of The A-Team:

Dear Kirk Honeybutt. Why do film critics, ahem… sorry, I mean hacks, such as yourself always piss and moan about movies like these? I'm really convinced that the bulk of your Ebert aping colleagues (who are largely failed screenwriters themselves) time and time again, overlook or purposely gloss over what a film this is MEANT to be: Entertainment. They're not trying to say 'something' or change the world. It’s not meant to be deep and meaningful. It's meant to entertain people. It's a **** action movie for crying out loud. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less. Maybe you need to go back to film school and learn film. If you don't get the A-Team (because clearly you don't) then why someone is paying you to have an opinion when it's clear to me, you have no **** clue about what an action movie is designed to do, is really astounding. Don’t quit your day job, Kirk. Actually, scrap that – yes, do quit your day job, because you’re no good at it. You’re no more a film critic than my left nut sack.

I thought the male human anatomy came with just one sack, but maybe mine is special. Regardless, what does Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, the one critic kLO seems to respect, have to say about Liam Neeson and Bradley Cooper's newest film?

"The A-Team” is an incomprehensible mess with the 1980s TV show embedded inside. The characters have the same names, they play the same types, they have the same traits, and they're easily as shallow. That was OK for a TV sitcom, which is what the show really was, but at over two hours of Queasy-Cam anarchy, it's punishment.

Well, ain't that a kick in the sacks.

It's not the stars that are falling, it's the skies that hold them in place.

2010-06-09T21:26:00.076-05:00

Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but after seeing another TV ad for Jonah Hex last night, I feel like it faces an uphill battle:

1. It's a western. It's also an action movie with big guns and explosions, and it's got supernatural horror-movie elements, but mostly it's a western, and that genre hasn't produced many successful films in the past 40 years (or, if you'd like a less sweeping generalization, since Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven in 1992).

2. It stars Josh Brolin, who's a handsome guy, but as Jonah Hex the right side of his face is disfigured after he's cattle-branded by bad guy John Malkovich, who probably took this role to pay for some renovations on his Tuscan villa.

3. It's based on a comic book. Normally that'd be a good thing, at least as far as Hollywood bean counters are concerned, but Jonah Hex is a DC title that already seemed old and unhip when I was reading comic books in the '80s.

Jonah Hex opens June 18, the same day as Toy Story 3. That sequel should do very well with family audiences, but it's also being targeted at college students who were toddlers when the first Toy Story opened in 1995. Disney and Pixar even screened the first two-thirds of the film for college kids earlier this year, whetting their appetites for the final third in theaters this summer.

This Friday sees the debut of The Karate Kid, a remake of the hit film from the '80s, and The A-Team, an adaptation of the hit TV show from the '80s. Neither one looks promising to me, though I'd guess the former will fare better than the latter because it'll appeal to family audiences before they jump ship for Toy Story 3 the following weekend.

Richard Corliss has a good article on Time magazine's website about the fact that most of Hollywood's big films so far this summer haven't been as big as predicted. He chalks it up partly to the predictors raising box office expectations too high, but he also points out that ticket prices have increased once again. I paid for my girlfriend and I to see Splice on her birthday last Sunday afternoon—not our first choice, but it'd gotten good reviews (which I now disagree with)—and it cost $19. What happened to matinee prices?

One of the most interesting points of Corliss's article is about the number of movie tickets that are actually sold these days:

The five years from 2005 to 2009 showed remarkably consistent ticket sales, all in the range of 1.39 billion to 1.42 billion, according to movie-stats blog the Numbers. Indeed, in 2009 moviegoers bought no more tickets (1.42 billion) than they did in 1997; the 62% increase in box office revenue, from $6.51 billion to $10.65 billion, was entirely due to the gradual hike in prices. But the bust could be real: if current trends hold, the number of admissions this year will be 1.27 billion, the lowest since 1996. Historical note: None of the recent years comes anywhere near the 4 billion tickets sold in 1946, back before TV gave Americans a free, at-home option for watching entertainment. That's three times the tickets, when the U.S. population was half what it is today.

Seeing those figures reminded me of an Associated Press clipping I'd saved from the fall of 2007, when the Farrelly brothers' remake of Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid was released. Reporter David Germain wrote:

“The Heartbreak Kid” [opened in] 3,229 theaters, about 1,000 more than “There’s Something About Mary,” which still managed to pack in far more viewers [in 1998]. Based on today’s higher ticket prices, “There’s Something About Mary” pulled in nearly 3 million people over opening weekend, compared to just over 2 million for “The Heartbreak Kid.”

Two million ticket buyers translated to $14 million over the weekend of October 5, 2007. By comparison, the number-one show on TV, American Idol, averaged 24.7 million viewers per episode this season.

Just as movie attendance ain't what it used to be before TV came along, network TV ratings have taken a hit over the past quarter-century thanks to cable TV, VCRs, home video-game systems, DVD players, the Internet, and DVRs. Dallas averaged 34.5 million viewers in its 1980-'81 season, which began with the episode that answered the question "Who shot J.R.?"; that alone attracted 83 million viewers, the highest rating for any non-finale episode in history.

Eighteen years later, the top-rated show was ER, with 17.8 million viewers on average. As many media watchers have reported (over and over and over) this year, American Idol's ratings have dropped every year since 2006, but 24.7 million viewers a week is still better than 17.8 million a decade ago.

When ER finished its 1998-'99 season with that number, George Clooney had recently departed the show after five seasons. He'd honored the contract he signed in 1994, but he was also interested in pursuing movie roles, and today he's one of the most popular and respected movie stars around (the Ocean's Eleven franchise, Michael Clayton, Up in the Air).

It can easily be argued that when Clooney was on ER he was much more visible and popular than he'll ever be on a movie screen, yet movie stars are still held in higher esteem than TV stars, and whenever a TV star generates a lot of buzz, like Katherine Heigl on Grey's Anatomy or Steve Carell on The Office five years ago, the question becomes "When are they going to make the leap to movies?," as if big-screen work legitimizes small-screen actors.

Screen size does have something to do with it, of course. I believe it was Clooney who once said in an interview that when he was on ER people would casually approach him on the street and say hello, but once he'd left the show and was doing movies, fans would keep their distance. His reasoning was that when you're a TV star you're invited into viewers' homes each week, and because TV is "the small screen," you're thought of as a regular person. But when a star is on "the big screen," he or she stands 20 feet tall and is gazed upon by an entire room of people, much like congregants in a church.

TV stars are friends, but movie stars are gods. (Speaking of which, Friends's Matthew "Chandler" Perry is one of many TV stars who will forever be known by the name of the character they played on the hit series that made them famous.) And that's how the stars will continue to be aligned, no matter how few people are buying movie tickets or turning on their televisions.

As the Blagojevich corruption trial begins ...

2010-06-03T16:39:00.323-05:00

When Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested and charged with corruption on December 9, 2008, clearing the way for his impeachment and removal from office the following month, I still had the November 28 edition of the Chicago Sun-Times in a stack of newspapers at home. Inside was the headline "Let Ryan Go, Gov Says." The story starts with these two paragraphs:

Gov. Blagojevich, who for years has blasted corruption under his predecessor, George Ryan, said Thursday "it would be a good decision" for President Bush to let the 74-year-old Ryan out of prison early.

"I always err on the side of compassion," Blagojevich said during a Thanksgiving visit to the Chicago Christian Industrial League on the West Side.

The soon-to-be former governor added, "I think people make mistakes," and reporter Maudlyne Ihejirika noted that "Blagojevich was elected governor in 2002, promising to end the corruption that happened under Ryan." Were his comments a signal that he hoped the court would go easy on him?

The story printed next to that one, also by Ihejirika, speculated about who Blagojevich would choose to take president-elect Barack Obama's empty seat in the U.S. senate. (Blagojevich's alleged plans to auction the seat to the highest bidder are what got him arrested on December 9, after all.) At the Christian Industrial League event, the governor said of U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.), who was believed to be in the running for the seat, "I know that he is a good, decent man, and you don't find a lot of that in politics." Because people make mistakes, of course.

Then, on December 9, shortly before the governor was arrested, the Sun-Times published a short article with the headline "Blagojevich: 'It smells like Nixon.'" The governor, responding to a Chicago Tribune report that he was being secretly recorded by the federal government, said, "It kind of smells like Nixon and Watergate. But I don't care whether you tape me privately or publicly, I can tell you that whatever I saw is always lawful."

He continued, "The good news is, if they're going to those lengths and extents—if in fact that's true—that would suggest that all the past has been pretty good." At the very least, the past would turn out to be much better than the governor's immediate future.

Speaking of Richard Nixon, David Greenberg wrote in his 2003 book Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image that Watergate "validated fears of secret government activity. A cycle took hold: popular distrust of authority spawned inquiries into government misdeeds; and the wave of exposés, in turn, amplified the distrust."

The author then mentions a column that former Nixon speechwriter—and future actor and game-show host—Ben Stein wrote in 1984 (sorry, I don't have the source) that argued Watergate wasn't "such a big deal" in hindsight—all politicians and presidents lie—and that the outrage over it made the American public numb to future political scandals. "But the column's logical conclusion," wrote Greenberg, "was the reverse: that while the press might be running wild over third-rate Watergates, the public—inured by Nixonism and subsequent scandals—no longer expected consistency or even integrity from its leaders." Except when it comes to making mistakes.

It's no secret that Rod Blagojevich has idolized Elvis Presley from a young age. So did John Lennon. In the April 11, 2004, edition of the New York Observer, Anna Jane Grossman wrote about Leon Wildes, the immigration lawyer who defended Lennon in the 1970s after President Nixon, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and Senator Strom Thurmond spearheaded an effort to deport him for a drug conviction—possession of cannabis resin, or hashish, to be exact—from his years in England.

"In 1972, President Nixon was a little paranoid," Grossman wrote. "It was the first year that 18-year-olds could vote, and because it seemed that American 18-year-olds liked rocker/activist John Lennon, and Lennon's politics were left of Nixon's, 18-year-olds might therefore not vote for Nixon. Thus, to prevent such a crisis, Lennon should be kindly removed from America, thank you very much."

The tipping point, according to film critic J.R. Jones in his 2006 Chicago Reader review of the documentary The U.S. Vs. John Lennon, was when "Lennon and radical activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin began planning a concert to coincide with the Republican convention in Miami ... the prospect of a concert to mobilize the youth vote was apparently more than Nixon could tolerate."

In his various interviews since his arrest, Blagojevich has come across as a guy whose grip on reality might not be as firm as his lawyers would like. Perhaps Rod thinks he's being persecuted because he's a rock and roller like Presley and Lennon.

Or because he's black. In January of this year Esquire published an interview in which the former governor, chatting about his former profession, said, "It’s such a cynical business, and most of the people in the business are full of shit and phonies, but I was real, man—and am real."

As for President Obama, he complained, "This guy, he was catapulted in on hope and change, what we hope the guy is. What the fuck? Everything he’s saying’s on the teleprompter. I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.”

Is that why, when the Illinois House of Representatives voted whether or not to impeach Blagojevich on January 9, 2009, state representative Milton Patterson—who's black—was the only member of the House to say no? "I went by my own gut feeling, simple as that," he told the Sun-Times, explaining that his vote didn't mean he supported Blagojevich.

However, as Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, who's also black, wrote in the paper two days later, "African Americans are a fiercely loyal group when it comes to supporting those in political leadership. I know that is a sweeping generalization ... but it is rare for the black community to turn its back on a politician who is viewed as 'inclusive.'" She added, "Too many black families have been nearly bankrupted trying to defend loved ones against false charges."

In other words, Blagojevich is innocent until proven guilty, even if he has made lots and lots and lots of mistakes.

Please keep your opinion of the Baldwin brothers semi-private when you're in public.

2010-05-17T08:57:00.007-05:00

Yesterday I passed a man on the street who was standing in a doorway and talking on his phone. He was facing the door, as if waiting to be let in, as he complained that actor/born-again Christian/conservative talk-radio host Stephen Baldwin is an idiot, "but that whole family is a bunch of idiots."

my a-ha moment

2010-05-11T17:44:00.040-05:00

Two weeks ago, as part of a freelance assignment I thoroughly enjoyed, I wrote a short biography of the Norwegian band a-ha (the 1985 hit "Take On Me") for Rhino Records' website. Yesterday I was alerted by my contact at the label that the bio had received praise from a completely unbiased source!

I'm lying, of course, but it's nice to see that my purple prose has an a-ha fan's approval. Give me a mountain metaphor and I shall climb it.

However, the band's success outside of the United States in the past 25 years, much like fellow European acts Simply Red and Jamiroquai, is impressive. For one thing, a-ha played to 198,000 paying customers in Rio de Janeiro in 1991, and no, you can't just dismiss that huge number by saying Brazilians have lots of free time and money to burn.

celebrity smiles

2010-05-04T08:46:00.041-05:00

USA Weekend, the Sunday-supplement rival of Parade, has a thing for toothy celebrity grins. But in the process of showing them off, the publication's printer often manages to make the owners of those smiles look cartoonish due to heavy color saturation and a few other factors I can't quite put my finger on.

Here are four from last year. First up, Dennis Quaid (click on each picture for a closer look), who's apparently made of rubber and plastic, which probably came in handy when he filmed the 2009 G.I. Joe movie.

Leslie Mann is one of the stars of Funny People. And she is a funny person, but here she just looks funny.

Samuel L. Jackson has appeared in approximately 5,861 movies in the past two decades. That kind of schedule would stress out anyone, which is probably why Jackson looks like he's about to eat the football he's holding in the photo below. Take a half-decade vacation, Shaft 2000—you've earned it.

Hilary Swank is known for her big grin, a la Julia Roberts, but on the cover of USA Weekend hers looks smaller than the other three celebrities'. She doesn't deserve another Oscar for this particular feat, but it's impressive nonetheless.

Finally, this picture of action director Michael Bay (Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and the two Transformers movies, with a third on the way) wasn't taken for USA Weekend—it merely appeared inside the June 19-21 issue as part of an ad for M&M's. It doesn't require Bay to show a big, toothy grin either, but since it actually does portray him as a cartoon, it's worth mentioning, especially since his cinematic crimes against humanity make me fantasize about seeing him crushed under a shoe on the floor of a movie theater.

big-screen superhero fact sheet

2010-04-23T11:14:00.065-05:00

Ryan Reynolds's new movie, Paper Man, in which he plays Jeff Daniels's imaginary friend, a superhero named Captain Excellent, opens today. Last year Reynolds played the comic-book superhero Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and in 2011 he'll star as Green Lantern in a big-budget adaptation of the comic book of the same name. (Six years ago he costarred with Wesley Snipes and Jessica Biel in Blade: Trinity, his first foray into movies adapted from comic books.) Reynolds may also reprise his role as Deadpool in a spin-off of Wolverine, which itself is a spin-off of the first three X-Men movies.

Chris Evans's new movie, The Losers, also opens today. It's based on a comic book, albeit one in which the good guys don't possess superpowers, but Evans did play a man with telekinetic powers in last year's Push, which, at first glance, looked like another X-Men spin-off. He also starred as the Human Torch in Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007), and now he's set to play Captain America in a big-budget adaptation of the comic book of the same name. He'll also be playing Captain America in a big-budget adaptation of the "supergroup" comic book The Avengers.

Ryan Reynolds is married to Scarlett Johansson. She plays Black Widow, who's something of a superhero, in Iron Man 2, opening May 7, and she'll be in The Avengers with Evans and Robert Downey Jr., a.k.a. Iron Man.

With great power comes great responsibility, or so the Spider-Man movies reminded us again and again. And with great paychecks come great anxiety, I presume, about being a talented actor faced with the prospect of playing superheroes again and again for the rest of your career.

tiny weirdness on Facebook

2010-04-18T22:10:00.051-05:00

Occasionally the advertisements on the right-hand side of Facebook pages will catch my eye because of the small pictures that are used:

The caricature of Paul McCartney on the right is a thousand times more flattering than the photograph on the left. The paparazzo who's responsible must be a John fan. (Typical.)

"He's got the whole hospital nursery in His hands ..." (I just hope God realizes those aren't peanuts.)

This image was attached to an ad about new fathers earning money from home, I believe. Never tell a man what he can't do, even if the activity in question is breast feeding.

soul of the son

2010-04-02T06:52:00.009-05:00

I first heard D.J. Rogers Jr.'s "Lonely Girl" in June 2002 while waiting for The Sum of All Fears to begin at a movie theater in Hendersonville, North Carolina. It was part of the piped-in music provided by United Artists Cinemas, and Rogers was identified as the "hot new artist" behind the song after it played. I was immediately struck by "Lonely Girl's" smooth hooks, and I still think it's one of the best songs of the past decade.

Unfortunately, the album that housed the song, Emosoul (an awful title that seemed to piggyback off the "emo" subgenre of pop-rock that was popular at the time via groups like Dashboard Confessional and Jimmy Eat World), was barely released at the end of 2002. In fact I'm not sure if anything more than promotional copies were pressed by Rogers's label, Motown.

"Lonely Girl" should've been a hit. And because I liked it so much I ended up asking for a greatest-hits compilation by D.J. Rogers Sr., an R&B-gospel singer who was popular in the late '70s and early '80s, for Christmas in 2005. Ask and ye shall receive, and so I did—Golden Classics is well worth a listen.

the Alex Chilton-Michael Jackson connection

2010-03-25T18:00:00.005-05:00

Last week as I read obituaries for singer Alex Chilton, who died on March 17 at the age of 59, reportedly from a heart attack, I realized he had a few things in common with Michael Jackson.

Chilton didn't end up becoming the biggest star in the world—he was a fairly obscure artist compared to Jackson—but he did have a #1 hit on the Billboard Top 40 at the age of 16 as the lead singer of the Box Tops. "The Letter," which hit the top of the charts in 1967, was the Box Tops' first single, just as "I Want You Back" was the Jackson 5's first single two years later, when frontman Michael Jackson was only 11 years old.

Listeners couldn't believe "The Letter" was sung by a tenth grader when they first heard it; Chilton's gruff vocals sounded like they were coming from a much older (and some would say blacker) set of pipes. Similarly, Jackson was noted for sounding mature beyond his years when he sang hits like "ABC" and "The Love You Save," and when he died last June many writers observed that he spent his childhood being the breadwinner of the family only to spend his adult years acting like a child.

One of the tributes to Chilton that I read on the Internet mentioned that he had covered Jackson's "Rock With You" in concert in recent years. In a video shot in Haiden, Austria, in August 2008, the month Jackson turned 50, Chilton introduces the 1979 smash hit by saying, "I honestly love this tune. Nobody else even realizes it's good yet, but I swear to God this is a great song. He didn't write it, but ... that's probably why it's great."

Okay, so Chilton wasn't a fan of Jackson's songwriting, but Rod Temperton, the Englishman who penned "Rock With You," deserves all the praise he gets. "Rock With You," like Chilton and Jackson, is an enduring classic.

a movie poster that could've spent less time explaining itself

2010-03-19T13:19:00.052-05:00

Welcome back to my infrequent series (some would call it "abandoned" or "not substantial enough to even qualify as a series," but let's not nitpick) in which I play Monday-morning quarterback for movie-studio marketing departments and therefore justify my existence in this universe.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, adapted from the book series of the same name, opens today, and recently I've seen posters on the sides of buses that feature this tag line:

"IT'S NOT A DIARY, IT'S A MOVIE."

Of course it's not a diary! How stupid do you think I am, Hollywood? Nobody advertises their diaries in public. Duh!

But even if they do, they're called blogs. Or Facebook status updates. Or tweets. And they help justify our existence by letting everyone else in the universe know what we think of, you know, stuff, or how bored we are or how fat we think we are (which is the cue for the rest of the universe to say "OMG, you are so not fat!").

You could learn a lot from people like me, Hollywood. In fact, yesterday when I was trying on some new jeans that felt a little tight and I decided Levi's has really taken a nosedive in popularity, I thought, "This would so make a great movie!"

Trash can be just as inspiring as art.

2010-03-08T08:03:00.048-06:00

Thomas Mars and Laurent Brancowitz of the French band Phoenix were interviewed by Melena Ryzik for the March 7 installment of the New York Times's Playlist feature. Here are two excerpts:

Ryzik: On your list you also put a painting, "Guacamole Airlines" by Ed Ruscha.

Mars: He's just the coolest artist alive. Whenever you hear him talk about art, his approach to it is very contemporary, it's very pop, and that's something we've always wanted to do. That's why I put Us Weekly in there [too]. Why you want to create music can be because you hear something beautiful, and you're thinking, I could be inspired by this. But sometimes you see something disgusting, and you think, O.K., I have to make something better than this.

Ryzik: How do you hold on to ["teenage abandon," as Brancowitz calls the recurring theme in Phoenix's music] as adults?

Brancowitz: It's not hard. I mean, it's not related to age—I say teenage because it's something you experience with the most force when you are young. You know this emotion you have when you see a movie that's so beautiful or you hear a piece of music that sounds perfect? It's this kind of anxiety and joy. So it's very easy, actually. You just have to see the right piece of art.

Everyone needs a theme song.

2010-03-05T21:09:00.011-06:00

Plenty of songs are named after women, but men have needs too.

Thanks for finding this one, Sini!

Coming up with awesome book titles takes practice.

2010-02-28T23:16:00.052-06:00

Sometime last year I saw this book cover on a friend's Facebook page:

In Hendersonville, North Carolina, two months ago, while visiting my parents for Christmas, I saw the book's title again, this time on a postcard at a local grocery store called the Fresh Market (possibly the best-smelling place on earth).

Luckily, it's not the only memorable title Lorraine Peterson, an author of books for young (Christian) adults, has come up with over the years:

Answer: He's paranoid about getting mugged, so He never carries cash, but He can light up your life with a lightning strike if you'd prefer.

Answer: Your hair is proof enough that you can't be trusted to do the right thing.

Answer (in the form of bitter, sarcastic rhetorical questions that reveal a little too much about the person writing them): Who ever said God loves forgetful teenagers? Who said God loves teenagers, period? I mean, look at your face—if God loved mankind, why would He create pimples?! And why would He let grown men go bald in their early 20s but still give them pimples in their mid-30s? That's just cruel!

Most accidents occur in the home.

2010-02-12T19:21:00.009-06:00

Last night I opened one of my kitchen cabinets to put away some dishes, but I forgot to close the door.

I have a short attention span, but I've only found it to be a problem since I graduated from college 12 years ago. Still, that's a dozen years, and the rise of the Internet as a part of everyday life probably hasn't helped.

In case you're just tuning in, I'm blaming the Internet for my short attention span, and I'm blaming my short attention span for my decision to interrupt the activity in progress—putting away dishes—in order to dust my breakfast table.

At the time I was thinking, "I'd better do that before I forget." But in the process of not forgetting, I forgot to close the kitchen cabinet door. That's why, when a spine from the little cactus on my breakfast table (my only table, and it doubles as a desk) pricked my finger, I walked over to the sink to rinse it off.

That's when I ran right into the kitchen cabinet door.

I didn't turn around and bang my head into it. No, I walked directly into it. How did I not see it?

It reminded me of when I was six and was jumping into a pile of leaves with a friend at his dad's house after kindergarten one day. On my second or third jump I was running toward the pile of leaves when suddenly I fell backward onto the ground—I'd hit a metal bar that was right above my line of sight. That accident left me with some stitches and a scar above my left temple. And now that I'm bald, the scar is in plain sight on my forehead.

I don't think last night's accident will leave a scar, and the cleanup didn't require more than a Band-Aid or four, but I was left with a gash* on my right temple, and over the next few days I'm sure I'll get lots of reactions like "What did you do to your head?"

Well, clearly I got in a fight with one of my kitchen cabinets. Unfortunately, it won.

* The gash above John McClane's (Bruce Willis) right eyebrow in the featured promotional still from 2007's Live Free or Die Hard doesn't resemble mine at all in terms of point of impact. His postaccident facial expression, however, is a perfect match.

expressions of love

2010-02-05T11:32:00.092-06:00

My girlfriend, Tamara, took her daughter on a trip to Los Angeles last weekend to look at colleges. She brought me back a "Music We Like" in-store booklet from Amoeba Records, which lists employees' favorite music and movies. I especially liked these two write-ups:

EvelynMarie
The Best of the Moments: Love on a Two-Way Street (Rhino): Wow! ["Sexy Mama"] goes beyond sexy. Harry [Ray, lead vocals] says, "This afternoon I know you liked me, by tonight you're gonna love me." He had me at his parents' conception! It is eight minutes long & good. My only wish was to have been in the studio at this recording. Be careful you might get pregnant just listening! Always practice safe listening!!

Rachel W.
Paper Moon soundtrack (El/Cherry Red): "Drink your Nehi and eat your Coney Island!" No surprise that my all-time favorite movie is also my all-time favorite soundtrack ... Leo Reisman, Dick Powell, Ozzie Nelson, Hoagy Carmichael and friends ease you into the joyful, alien land of Depression America where snappy patter wards off poverty and sickness, and you can wrap your troubles in dreams.

Also, last month my dad sent me the following xkcd comic strip by Randall Munroe:

antidefamation defamers

2010-02-03T09:56:00.094-06:00

In Monday's Chicago Sun-Times the wildly popular, heavily spray-tanned MTV reality show Jersey Shore was called "nothing more but a 'Sopranos' for teenagers" by Robert Allegrini, the vice president of communications for Hilton Hotels in North and South America and "a major player in various Italian-American groups" that protest cultural stereotypes in movies and TV shows, according to the Sun-Times.

I haven't seen Jersey Shore, which reportedly follows the exploits of underachieving, fame-seeking twentysomethings who drink a lot, then argue and/or hook up with each other. (Sooo, pretty much like The Real World ever since that 2002 season set in Las Vegas?) But to compare it to The Sopranos, one of the richest, most entertaining TV series ever created, is an insult. In fact I'd say it's defamation—and anti-defamers who defame disgust me!

I'll cut Allegrini some slack, though, since he's employed by a company whose profits have allowed Paris Hilton to never have to worry about getting a "real" job. Underachieving fame seekers probably aren't his favorite kind of people.

Bruce Springsteen is haunted by the ghost of Tom Joad.

2010-01-27T17:37:00.008-06:00

And why shouldn't he be? One year after the release of his last album, Working on a Dream, we're still in a recession. (Okay, fine—technically, the Great Recession may have ended a few months ago, but the job market is still pretty bleak here in Chicago.) Even the Boss's drummer in the E Street Band, Max Weinberg, got laid off from his job as Conan O'Brien's bandleader last week. It's rough out there, y'all.

Any-hoo, am I the only one who sees an apparition behind Bruce on the passenger side of that old car?

Great Moments in the History of Bad Proofreading

2010-01-25T16:54:00.012-06:00

A playbill isn't just a desolate landscape filled with random names and credits and people thanking their pets for supporting their artistic dreams. It's also a minefield laced with bad proofreading and faulty logic! Here's a favorite of mine from the playbill of a community-theater musical I saw in 1995:

In her spare time she loves to write plays and hopes to one day write her own play.

Ingebrigt Håker Flaten

2010-01-22T23:06:00.020-06:00

Tonight I was told that Norwegian free-jazz bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten is my doppelgänger.

My girlfriend and I were at the Dusty Groove America record store in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood when a man to my left looked up from the soundtracks section (alphabetized by composer, not by movie title—Dusty Groove don't mess around, y'all) and said, "Ingebrigt?"

I wasn't sure at first what he'd said—I didn't recognize any English in the question he had posed.

He followed it up with "Håker Flaten?"

Again, confusion. I was wondering where the hidden camera was located.

"You're not Ingebrigt Håker Flaten?"

At that point I remembered the bassist's name from the five years I spent proofreading the music listings at the Chicago Reader. According to the gentleman at Dusty Groove, Håker Flaten doesn't live in Chicago anymore, so it's a good thing I'm still around for false sightings.

(This is my "actor" head shot. If I don't land the role of Ingebrigt Håker Flaten in The Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Story, I'll have to fire my agent. Of course, before I take that drastic step I'll have to find an agent, but why sweat the details?)

a poem I wrote when I was seven

2010-01-04T19:13:00.032-06:00

In 1983 my dad, an English professor at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, let me sit in on a creative writing class he taught for grade school students that summer. I wasn't yet a second grader, but he let me sit in on the class.

Over the holidays I discovered one of the poems I wrote that summer. I was such a killjoy.

THE PEGASUS PAPERS, 1983

Selected works from the "Words! Words! Words!" class (grades 2-4), July 18-22.

FEAR

Running along

As fast as you can:

Nothing beside me,

You think in your head.

Don't worry, child,

Fear is right here.

Thinking for awhile ...

Sounds begin to talk,

Fear is with you

The rest of the way.

Music is worth talking about.

2009-12-27T13:48:00.007-06:00

"Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just, and beautiful, of which it is the invisible but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form." —Plato (source and date unknown)

"Music is the healing force of the world / It's understood by every man, woman, boy, and girl" —Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, "I Love Music," 1975, as performed by the O'Jays

"Music is the naked cry of the human heart longing to be with God. Yo!" —Dion, at the 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert on October 29, 2009, at Madison Square Garden in New York City

the generation gap

2009-12-26T23:49:00.010-06:00

Earlier tonight my dad was scrolling through his iPhone while my mom sat beside him on the couch and looked at her friends' Facebook postings on her laptop.

I sat opposite them and read newspaper clippings I've collected over the past few months.

true, but it's fiction

2009-12-24T19:54:00.004-06:00

On December 18 of last year I discovered I was being laid off from my job at the Chicago Reader. On December 18 of this year I discovered that my first attempt at (very short) fiction was being published in the Reader's annual fiction issue. Despite the past year being difficult in many ways, I liked the timing of this news.

decaying masterpieces

2009-12-01T21:39:00.019-06:00

If actor Tim DeKay wastes an entire weekend watching the fine programming on USA Network, does that qualify as "time decay"?

It's good that apartheid has ended, not so good that proofreading has gone the same route:

pretty bloody

2009-11-29T15:33:00.039-06:00

An Associated Press story about Katey Sagal (Married ... With Children, Futurama, 8 Simple Rules) and her role on the FX series Sons of Anarchy was reprinted in yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times. I have no idea when the word "not" got deleted from the following paragraph, but I like the result:

Season 2 of the FX drama "Sons of Anarchy" is primed to end with bloody payback. It's likely to be pretty.

in between

2009-11-23T12:24:00.019-06:00

On the run from government assassins after a botched attempt on his life, and looking for a place to hide, CIA bookworm Joe Turner (Robert Redford) kidnaps a stranger, Kathy Hale (Faye Dunaway), and forces her to drive him back to her place, in Sydney Pollack's 1975 film Three Days of the Condor.

Later, at Kathy's apartment, Joe uses a rare moment of quiet to look at the black-and-white photographs on her walls.

Joe: Lonely pictures.
Kathy: So?
Joe: You're funny. You take pictures of empty streets, and trees with no leaves on them.
Kathy: It's winter.
Joe: Not quite winter. They look like ... November. Not autumn, not winter. In between.

White Guys in Suits: 1989 vs. 2009

2009-11-21T15:11:00.023-06:00

Alessandra Stanley wrote an article in the New York Times earlier this year about Jimmy Fallon taking over for Conan O'Brien on NBC's Late Night that month, and O'Brien getting set to take over for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in June, and Leno taking over for the majority of 10 PM drama series on the network in the fall, and how every other late-night network talk-show host is a white guy in a suit, and why isn't there any diversity?

On November 9, TBS debuted Lopez Tonight, hosted by Mexican-American comedian and former sitcom star George Lopez. (Sorry, ladies—you're still confined to hosting daytime talk shows.)

When The Arsenio Hall Show started its syndication run in January 1989, it garnered a lot of media attention, mainly because its host was the only minority hosting such a show at the time. But it also had much more of a party atmosphere than Johnny Carson and David Letterman's shows on NBC: Hall didn't sit behind a desk when interviewing his guests, he featured many R&B and hip-hop musical acts who weren't getting booked on the NBC shows, and he had a section of audience members he referred to as "the dog pound" because they responded "Woof, woof, woof!" when commanded to do so. (Sadly, Ivan Pavlov's late-night talk show never got off the ground in the late 1800s due to TV not having been invented yet.)

Yo! MTV Raps debuted a few months before Arsenio and helped bring hip-hop into the musical mainstream by exposing white suburban youth (including myself) to the relatively new genre. But 20 years ago MTV was a cable channel that was still expanding its own audience, whereas Arsenio was mostly syndicated on non-NBC network affiliates on "free TV," so its exposure of hip-hop to mainstream audiences helped rap expand even further, and possibly faster, into white America. And similar to The Cosby Show five years earlier, Arsenio didn't need a white sidekick in order for its host to cross over to white audiences. It was broadcasting without the stench of narrow-minded focus-group research or "niche audience" goals.

One problem, though—Hall wasn't funny. I loved Letterman's on-air persona and Late Night's conceptual humor (courtesy of writers like George Meyer, who's something of a legend among his fellow writers on The Simpsons, and Chris Elliott, who later cocreated and starred in his own conceptual-humor masterpiece, the early-'90s sitcom Get a Life) when I was growing up, and reruns of Carson's Comedy Classics prove that the late Tonight Show host's comic timing has stood the test of time, even if ABSCAM references haven't. Hall, on the other hand, laughed at everything he said, which made his jokes even less funny. On top of that, he was a lousy listener during interviews.

I remember Hall's cameo in Eddie Murphy's directorial debut, Harlem Nights (1989), being the only funny thing in that horrible film (Murphy hasn't directed a movie since), but unlike Murphy, Hall didn't have effortless charisma as a performer telling jokes to an audience. (He recently returned to movie acting with a role in the blaxploitation spoof Black Dynamite.) His show was a party, but nothing more.

Similarly, I think any actress who's lost an award to Tina Fey since 2006 has every right to roll her eyes and gnash her teeth. (Jimmy Fallon and she continued the irritating trend of laughing at one's own jokes when they anchored Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" segment in the first half of this decade, though they preferred the self-satisfied smirk above all else.) To her credit, Fey has admitted she's more comfortable as a writer than as an actor, and I'm not saying she's the worst actress on TV by any means, but the fawning admiration this woman gets for her acting is ridiculous. Hollywood and all of my friends have been brainwashed, and it doesn't look like they'll come out of their trance anytime soon.

At least I can take comfort in Nancy Franklin's review of 30 Rock in the December 8, 2008, issue of The New Yorker, where she wrote, "Fey's Liz has become a bit looser over the show's forty episodes, and it may be that winning two Emmys in a row for Best Actress in a Comedy has freed Fey up as a performer; in which case, I'm all for giving out awards before people fully deserve them. (Yoo-hoo, Pulitzer Prize committee, over here!)" Likewise, Franklin can take comfort in knowing that I flattered her by unknowingly stealing that Pulitzer joke of hers last month over at Popdose.

In Fey's defense I'd assumed ever since 30 Rock began in '06 that as the creator and executive producer of the show she was responsible for all the low-cut tops her character, Liz Lemon, wears, even though Liz is a self-described awkward nerd, both socially and sexually. But if that's the case, wouldn't she cover up her breasts in the workplace? I don't think there's a subtle, multilayered joke I'm not getting here.

It turns out 30 Rock costar Alec Baldwin is responsible, at least according to Maureen Dowd's Vanity Fair article about Fey in the magazine's January 2009 issue. "There is Liz Lemon and there is Liz Lemon as portrayed by a leading actress in a TV show," Baldwin said. "It's not a documentary. Tina's a beautiful girl ... Tina always played the cute, nerdy girl. Tina on ['Weekend Update'], the glasses. There was not a big glamour quotient for her. Now there is." So Baldwin wants to exploit Fey even if it doesn't fit her character, which in turn makes the jokes less honest and the show less interesting. But I'm not an Emmy voter, so what do I know?

Getting back to actual late-night programming, instead of the fictional kind portrayed on 30 Rock, right before Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson in the spring of '92, Hall told Entertainment Weekly, "No one put the late-night silver spoon in my mouth. I earned every drop of mine. And I'm gonna treat him like we treated the kid on the high school basketball team who was the coach's son. He was there because he was anointed too. We tried to kick his ass, and that's what I'm going to do—kick Jay's ass."

Hall didn't seem to appreciate Leno telling the press they were "friends." Branford Marsalis didn't look like he wanted to spend any more time than was necessary with Leno when he was The Tonight Show's bandleader, and George Lopez called him "two-faced" in 2007. Then there are the stories about how David Letterman, a former friend, can't stand Leno now. (But he seems so nice. Is it a case of Leno not having any sincerity to back it up?)

Well, Hall didn't kick Leno's ass. In fact, two years after he laid down the gauntlet, his show was gone, due in part to CBS affiliates dropping his show for Late Show With David Letterman once it began airing on the network at 11:30 PM in the fall of '93. "Too much too soon" and a shift in the zeitgeist also factored into the decline of The Arsenio Hall Show's popularity.

I don't think Hall got much respect from fellow comedians in the early '90s the way Letterman and Carson did. Below is part of a Bill Hicks interview from a 1992 issue of The Nose magazine in which the revered stand-up comic tells interviewer Jack Boulware how he really feels about Hall.

(Hicks died in 1994, three months before Arsenio ended its run. Hall can be consoled by the fact that Hicks also had a beef with Leno, who he once considered a mentor of sorts, because he appeared in TV commercials for Doritos; in his stand-up act, Hicks pondered whether Dallas's Patrick Duffy or Blossom's Joey Lawrence would be the celebrity to push Leno over the edge and force him to shoot himself in the head on national television, regretting what his life had become.)

You really piss people off sometimes.

Well, it's funny, but I just have this weird theory. The best kind of comedy, to me, is when you make people laugh at things they've never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people's minds and exposing them to the light.

Man, I don't know—I always felt that's what the point of it all was. I don't think it makes you sympathetic to mass murderers so much as maybe ... I thought the whole point of it was to make you feel un-alone. Many thoughts I do have are not my own thoughts, you know what I mean? They're not secret thoughts.

In your act, why do you refer to Dick Clark as the Antichrist?

The only point of that whole thing is just about mediocrity and lowering the standards of the world.

Who else falls into that category?

(pause) Arsenio is the most dangerous one of all. Everyone is going on that show. It is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Jesus is gonna do that show when he comes back. (as Arsenio's announcer) "Tonight on Arsenio: Paula Abdul, Della Reese, and Jesus of Nazareth. Let's get busy!" (as Hall) "Jesus, tell me the truth now. Mary Magdalene—didja do her?" (as the audience) "Arf, arf, arf, arf." (as Hall again) "We'll be right back."

I can't believe it. I mean, Robert Duvall—I've never seen him do an interview, never seen him do a talk show. Comes out to promote what? Days of Thunder. I'm watchin' him with fuckin' Tom Cruise, and [he's] just, "Tom Cruise. I had to work with this man. Oooh. Well, let me tell you something, Arsenio—Tom Cruise is the young talent of today. Better make sure of it."

What the fuck is happening? Did they all get transfusions from Merv Griffin in the green room? This is fuckin' Duvall, man! De Niro did Arsenio! Do we have some sort of huge white guilt or something? Or do these people—did they all just drink Merv Griffin's blood in some alley? What the fuck is going on here? The guy is the child of fuckin' Merv Griffin and Little Richard, man.

Sales & Sons

2009-10-26T05:13:00.013-05:00

Cynthia Turner provided a nice memory today of Milton Supman, better known as comedian Soupy Sales, in her daily Cynopsis e-mail digest of media-related news:

"And a nod to Soupy Sales, who passed away at the age of 83 late Thursday night. When I was 10, I was stuck at the JFK Airport in New York with my mother for three days and two nights—a result of a massive snowstorm. We had the good fortune to spend the time in the American Airlines Admiral's Club, in relative comfort, much different than most of the stranded, who were in the main airport areas downstairs. There were two celebrities also staying at the Admiral's Club—Goldie Hawn, TV's current It Girl on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and Soupy Sales. Goldie Hawn didn't speak to anybody, and clearly did not want to be spoken to, either.

"Soupy was wonderfully approachable, for both the adults and me. He stayed awake for most of our 60-hour detention, spending the overnight hours downstairs putting on free stand-up shows for the throngs of people. I liked him on his television show, because I was just a kid. But I liked him better for what he did to make so many people's uncomfortable predicament altogether bearable, memorable, and even fun."

I don't remember Sales much from my own childhood except for an occasional pie hitting his face on Saturday-morning TV. However, I've always found it interesting that his sons, Hunt and Tony, are rock musicians who played drums and bass, respectively, on Iggy Pop's 1977 album Lust for Life and later formed the rhythm section of the David Bowie-fronted Tin Machine in the late '80s.

Before all that, though, the Sales brothers were two-thirds of Runt, Todd Rundgren's first band after he left Nazz. The two Runt albums, 1970's Runt and 1971's Runt. The Ballad of Todd Rundgren (my favorite album of all time), have since been reissued as Rundgren solo albums—he did write, produce, and sing every song on the two albums, and he played most of the instruments, and he's the only member of Runt who gets any face time on the album covers—so perhaps he felt overwhelmed at the time by the prospect of releasing anything under his own name, especially if it were to bomb. Rundgren, after all, was only 21 when he recorded that first album. And if Wikipedia is to be believed, Tony Sales was 18 and Hunt was 16 when they recorded Runt.

Rundgren, it turns out, was the oldest runt in the litter.

serving up a silent birthday wish

2009-10-23T10:33:00.018-05:00

The October 3 TV listings in the Chicago Sun-Times offered a preview of that night's episode of Saturday Night Live:

"Saturday Night Live" (10:30 p.m., WMAQ-Channel 5): Ryan Reynolds ("Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story") hosts, with Lady Gaga providing musical and visual entertainment.

Never mind that Reynolds starred in two of the summer's biggest movies, the superhero adventure X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the romantic comedy The Proposal, or that he's signed up to play the Green Lantern in his own big-screen superhero franchise—as far as the Sun-Times is concerned, he'll never be better than he was in a TV movie that aired on NBC in February of '95. The stars of Serving in Silence were Glenn Close and Judy Davis, but an 18-year-old Reynolds really must have impressed someone in the Chicago newspaper's fact-checking department.

Coincidentally, Reynolds turns 33 today, but I refuse to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RYAN REYNOLDS! YOU'RE SO CHARMING AND FUNNY AND IMPOSINGLY MUSCULAR! I MEAN, I GUESS THAT THIRD QUALITY IS WHY YOU GET HIRED TO PLAY SUPERHEROES, BUT I DON'T REMEMBER HEARING STORIES ABOUT MICHAEL KEATON OBSESSIVELY HITTING THE GYM BEFORE HE PLAYED BATMAN 20 YEARS AGO! BUT MAYBE HE DID AND I JUST DON'T REMEMBER! IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, OBVIOUSLY! WE'RE ALL GETTING OLDER! AND IF IT SOUNDS LIKE I'M SOMEWHAT JEALOUS OF YOUR PHYSIQUE, WELL, SURE, I'M MAN ENOUGH TO ADMIT THAT! YOU KNOW, I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE TURNED OFF THE CAPS LOCK AND STOPPED USING EXCLAMATION POINTS AFTER THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THIS BIRTHDAY WISH, BUT I'M ALMOST FINISHED, SO BEAR WITH ME FOR A FEW MORE SECONDS, OKAY?! LET ME JUST CONCLUDE BY SAYING YOU'RE SWELL, RYAN REYNOLDS, AND I HOPE YOU HAVE A TERRIFIC BIRTHDAY, AND I ESPECIALLY HOPE YOUR WIFE, THE LOVELY SCARLETT JOHANSSON, TREATS YOU TO SOME ADULT SITUATIONS AND PARTIAL NUDITY!

Yep, I refuse to say any of that. The part about Reynolds's wife is inappropriate, for one thing.

By the way, you can read more about Wolverine and other freaky creatures in a few entries I didn't finish writing on the dates listed below:

4/10: "No, my brother—you've got to buy your own."
7/6: the boomerang of satire
8/20: sassy cannibals spawning, preaching, living, and loving

lists

2009-10-11T11:21:00.005-05:00

I used to like making lists of things when I was younger: favorite movies, biggest-grossing movies, favorite songs, favorite TV shows, girls I liked. It went on and on.

I don't like making lists of things anymore. Now I waste my time in more mature ways, like endlessly moving stacks of old newspapers and newspaper clippings around my apartment.

I'm proud of myself.

the realistic and the impossible

2009-10-09T17:42:00.014-05:00

Back in June I saw a postcard in a bookstore that had Che Guevara's face on the front—one of those painted reprints of Alberto Korda's famous photo of the Cuban revolutionary, to be exact—and the slogan "Let's be realistic: try the impossible!" underneath. Close by was Spain Rodriguez's graphic novel Che: A Graphic Biography (2008); last fall Publishers Weekly deemed it "for the most part unalloyed hagiography, which can seem more like something produced by revolutionary committee than an artist."

Six years ago Lawrence Osborne wrote about Che worship in the New York Observer and attempted to set the record straight:

Of course, it was Che's role in the Cuban Revolution that turned him into the poster boy we all know. But it was a quixotic participation in many ways. Che was known inside the revolution as a strict disciplinarian, ready to sign death warrants and mete out sundry brutalities. And yet, for all that, he was spectacularly ineffective. From 1961 to 1965, Che was Cuba's Minister for Industries; before that, from 1959 to 1961, he was the head of the national bank. Both stints ended in farce. A Cuban expedition to Congo to prop up the anti-Mobutu forces fighting there ended similarly.

Che, in fact, failed at anything requiring real ability and perseverance. He was a charismatic dilettante, like most professional revolutionaries, but in between he lived the activist high life: the Bandung-generation Third World conference circuit, dramatic speeches at the United Nations, clandestine peregrinations from country to country, murky deals, love affairs and connections in high places. None of it amounted to anything, however. In the end, Che had to foment real revolutions or nothing.

While attempting to spur a revolution in Bolivia in 1967, Guevara was captured by that country's military on October 8 and executed the next day.

In January I saw Steven Soderbergh's two-part, four-hour biopic Che, starring Benicio Del Toro. As Soderbergh told the Chicago Sun-Times, he split the story into two films—part one is subtitled "The Argentine," part two is "Guerrilla"—because "one, you didn't understand why [Guevara] thought he would succeed in Bolivia if you didn't see what happened in Cuba. And two, you had to go back to Cuba to answer the question: How did he become the Che that is the guy on the T-shirts?"

Del Toro isn't the only movie star in the film, but he's the only one who has a lead role, and it's interesting to see how Soderbergh, one of the most intelligent and unpredictable filmmakers around, uses other famous faces.

I recognized Julia Ormond in the first part of Che as an American journalist interviewing Guevara, but I’m not sure if that will be the case for every viewer, mostly because it's been over a dozen years since she had a lead role in a high-profile American movie—1995's Sabrina. Besides, you hear Ormond's voice several times in Che before you see her face, but since she’s using an American accent I didn’t recognize her voice. (Ormond also had roles in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008.)

Guevara was a world-famous figure by the time he made his trip to Bolivia. A celebrity, even. When he arrived people wanted to shake his hand; they were awed by his presence as well as the myth that surrounded him. But he was afraid most peasants would be suspicious of a foreigner trying to rally them to revolution, even though he was an Argentinean who was able to rally Cubans to revolt against Batista’s government nine years earlier. (In Bolivia he was worried about being labeled a Cuban, which he was by that point, of course.) He was a stranger in both countries, if not exactly a stranger in a strange land. His fame turned him into an outsider once again.

When Lou Diamond Phillips and Matt Damon show up in part two of Che for brief cameos, it has a jarring effect—you lose focus of what’s happening in the story at those particular moments as you stop and say to yourself, "Is that who I think it is?" just as Guevara’s revolution lost focus in Bolivia due to his celebrity status. It’s a canny move by Soderbergh that parallels the on-screen action.

Yes, I do love Die Hard, but I also love my memory.

2009-10-08T19:39:00.007-05:00

And what I remember of that 1988 classic doesn't sound anything like the new Jamie Foxx-Gerard Butler movie Law Abiding Citizen, at least not according to this description from an advertisement on Facebook:

Love DIE HARD? Click for Law Abiding Citizen where a man turns raging assassin, avenging the murder of his family.

That sounds more like Death Wish. But since Bonnie Bedelia hasn't appeared in a Die Hard film since the first sequel in 1990, why not kill her off for the fifth installment? It can go into production once Bruce Willis gets bored with his career again or needs a new yacht or needs to prove to himself that he's still in shape.

John McClane has to be tired of saving the world from terrorists by now, even if they do occasionally threaten members of his family. He needs a more, shall we say, personal project to complete next time around.

I'd like to suggest that the Die Hard series return to the template of the first two films, in which all the action takes place in a central location: a skyscraper in the first film, an airport in the second. And to make things topical, how's about Holly McClane (Bedelia) loses her home in a foreclosure and goes to the bank to set things right when an insane lender blows up the place with Holly inside?

Cut to John McClane in ... wherever he's living (we'll figure that out later) as he learns his ex-wife is dead! He goes into a rage! He still loved her, see! It's not fair! Why not him?! Nooooooooo!

So he goes to ... another bank ... where he finds the lender ... lending in a new position ... and ... look, we'll figure all of this out later. The main points are: (1) Holly dies; (2) John seeks revenge; (3) banks blow up so Americans feel better about this miserable recession.

Save a seat for me!

thirty-four

2009-09-27T15:19:00.010-05:00

I turned 34 on Friday. And right before I went to bed that night I noticed something about the "wallpaper" on my computer screen, which changes every 30 minutes at the MacBook's whim.

For those of you without a magnifying glass, the photo on the left features Michael McDonald and the stars of 1986's Running Scared, Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines; it's a still from the music video for McDonald's "Sweet Freedom." That photo's been in the wallpaper rotation for several years now, but I didn't notice the number on Hines's jersey until Friday night. It also happens to be the number worn by Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton, who in 1986 led his team to a Super Bowl victory. Running Scared is set in Chicago and was filmed there during the Bears' 1985 season, when they lost only one of their 16 regular-season games.

Shortly after I turned 33, I read a newspaper article that quoted statistics from The Death of the Grownup: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, including this factoid: "The MacArthur Foundation has funded a research project that argues that the 'transition to adulthood' doesn't end till age 34."

When I read that last year I thought, "Woo-hoo! One more year!" Of course, one year later, with almost nine months of unemployment taking a bite out of my self-esteem, Officially Authorized Adulthood® isn't making a strong first impression. Lucky for it, I believe in second chances.

We are the invisible people. (Springsteen, write us a song.)

2009-09-09T16:39:00.013-05:00

Last week I was leaving the grocery store when a woman approached me and asked if I'd like to buy a copy of StreetWise, the local magazine sold by homeless and at-risk vendors. She said she was trying to get off the street and that selling StreetWise allowed her to not have to panhandle anymore.

I've been volunteering as a proofreader at StreetWise since March. I tried mentioning this to the woman for the sake of small talk, i.e. "Here's something we have in common," but she just looked past me and said, "Uh-huh." As I handed her my two dollars and she gave me a copy of the latest issue, I tried again, thinking maybe I should point to my name on the masthead on the inside cover. "Okay," she said. She wasn't listening.

It's hard being a proofreader. People pretend you don't exist, but the "problem" isn't just going to go away, no matter how many of us you don't employ.

Which movie currently in theaters is a sequel to a remake and a remake of a sequel?

2009-09-01T20:54:00.017-05:00

The correct answer is Rob Zombie's Halloween II.

What will you think of next, Hollywood?

"Halloween 3D," as it turns out, because even though Halloween II opened in third place last weekend, far behind The Final Destination (another horror sequel, with the "The" apparently indicating that this is the last installment in the series, i.e. "This is the end for you rubberneckers who love watching teenagers die gruesome yet imaginatively staged deaths"), Hollywood can't have enough sequels or 3-D movies or "reboots" in theaters.

I have a feeling "Halloween 3D" won't be a remake of 1982's Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a sequel that ditched the Michael Myers character from the first two films to tell a story about unrelated characters who have to stop a Halloween-mask manufacturer from killing millions of children with its black-magic-enhanced product. Halloween III wasn't well received by moviegoers or critics, so my script for "Halloween 3A: Season of the Witch 2" never came to pass, with our heroes from the first Witch harassing the neighborhood dry cleaner until he agrees to stop using plastic bags.

the day Dustin Hoffman met George Clooney's uncle

2009-08-27T17:36:00.010-05:00

On Tuesday night I watched Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982) at Butler Field in Chicago's Grant Park. It was the final film in this summer's Chicago Outdoor Film Festival (in July I saw Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard), and the first time I'd seen Pollack's best film on a big screen, with an appreciative audience.

Yesterday I discovered the following Late Show With David Letterman clip from December 22, 2008, on YouTube.

sassy cannibals spawning, preaching, living, and loving

2009-08-20T22:10:00.020-05:00

Gospel According to Harry is a 1994 art film by Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski that debuted on DVD last year courtesy of Kino Video. The back of the DVD box says, "Years before the Lord of the Rings trilogy catapulted him to international superstardom, Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence) played Wes, a young husband locked in co-dependent discontent with his beautiul and needy wife Karen (Jennifer Rubin — The Doors)."

Once you watch the film, though, Wes comes across as much more needy than Karen, praying to God that she'll return to him after she moves out. In the early scenes he's portrayed as an anger-prone layabout who refuses to buy life or health insurance, so it's not too hard to side with Karen when she leaves. And once she returns, he quickly takes her for granted again. Is she considered needy simply because she needs love?

The Gospel DVD contains audio commentary by Majewski, who doesn't acknowledge Rubin when she first appears on-screen, but once Mortensen shows up a minute or two later, he has plenty to say about the actor and the experience of working with him.

I snagged my copy of Gospel last year at the Chicago Reader, where I used to work. More recently I came into possession of a DVD of C.H.U.D. (1984) and a VHS copy of Piranha II: The Spawning (1981), which delivers the kind of quality you'd expect from the title, even though the Jaws rip-off was directed by Oscar winner James Cameron. (The video box uses a comma in the title instead of a colon. It's the idiosyncrasies I love the most.)

Avatar, which is set for release this December, will be Cameron's first feature film since 1997's Titanic, and it appears to have elements in common with Aliens (1986), the second sequel he directed for which he had nothing to do with the original film. (He did direct 1984's The Terminator and its first sequel, 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but not the subsequent two installments.) Similarly, Piranha II has elements in common with Cameron's The Abyss (1989) and Titanic—namely, scenes where characters explore ships that have sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

I watched my found copies of Piranha II and C.H.U.D. back to back last Saturday. I got a kick out of the fact that the killer flying piranha and the Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers weren't the real bad guys in either film—the good ol' U.S. government was the true source of all evil. (Sorry to ruin it for you.) In Piranha II a military experiment in the Caribbean has gone awry, and in C.H.U.D. the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been storing toxic waste below the streets of New York City, turning homeless "mole people" who live in the subway tunnels into CHUDs.

I also watched a Reader-appropriated copy of My Sassy Girl (2008), an American remake of a Korean romantic comedy, starring Elisha Cuthbert of 24 and Jesse Bradford of the upcoming I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which, judging by the trailer, will be shown in hell on a constant loop for eons to come.

In one scene Cuthbert's character, Jordan, whose "sassiness" extends into the realms of complete self-absorption, binge drinking, irrational anger, mind games, and borderline mental illness, demands that the stationmaster at a New York City Subway stop broadcast an announcement over the station's loudspeakers to Charlie (Bradford), who's on the platform below. The stationmaster begins to make the announcement when Jordan interrupts her to ask, "What kind of diction is that? How could anyone possibly understand you?"

The stationmaster is black. Jordan is white. But it's not a racial insult, alright? This is a bad romantic comedy, after all, where everyone gets along with everyone else unless they're fighting about love. It is a class thing, though, because Jordan is the daughter of a rich doctor and the stationmaster works nights in a loud, smelly pit just to keep food on the table.

The stationmaster sarcastically informs Jordan that she doesn't have to make the announcement at all, at which point Jordan barges into her booth and says, "I would rather if you're going to do something nice for someone that you do it properly—and well." C'mon, be a friend, lady!

The stationmaster replies, "This PA system is 50 years old. If the queen of England made the announcement, you wouldn't understand it." Jordan volleys back with "The queen of England wouldn't step foot in this shithole." But the queen of Sassy would, and she's not happy with what she sees, not to mention the customer service she gets when she makes "nice" requests.

The microphone is left on during this exchange, and director Yann Samuell cuts to the reactions of the people on the platform below. A few look confused, but most of them are heard laughing, with white faces dominating the screen. It's a racially charged scene, if unintentionally so.

Jordan then delivers a drippy personal message over the PA to Charlie, who, instead of cringing and covering his face with his coat, races to the stationmaster's booth to find her. Right before he gets there, Jordan shows her gratitude to the stationmaster by calling her a "rat-faced woman," her voice still ringing out over the PA system.

This scene doesn't take place at the end of the film, when desperate moves are often made by characters in rom-coms to ensure that they end up with the boy or girl of their dreams. It's just another instance of Ms. Sassy wanting what she wants right now and expecting someone to give it to her.

Gospel According to Harry director Lech Majewski might charitably describe Jordan as "needy," but if by the end of My Sassy Girl you're ready for the "rat-faced woman" to turn into a human-size rat and team up with a CHUD to devour her, you're not alone.

the unfunny father of humor

2009-08-16T18:20:00.070-05:00

Every month the management staff of my apartment building slips a bulletin under each tenant's door to let us know about holiday celebrations, shopping excursions for the senior citizens, "movie night," and other community events originating in the building. The bulletin is often padded out with "this date in history" trivia that's always worth reading, including the following factoid:

Aug. 16—The Original Funny Man. By many accounts, English comic actor Joseph (or Josias) Miller of London's Drury Lane Theatre was a popular favorite, known for his boisterous wit. When he died on this date in 1738, leaving his family in poverty, his friend John Mottley decided to collect all the jokes attributed to Miller and publish them. The proceeds from the book were to go to Miller's family. Joe Miller's Jests, first published in 1739, was 70 pages long, contained 247 jokes, and represented the first published professional humor. After numerous revisions and expansions, it contained more than 1,500 jokes that some experts cite as the foundation of all modern movie, television, radio and stage humor. Some are reluctant to give Miller all the credit, however; they say Miller wasn't a true comedian at all, but that he was always credited with everyone else's wit. According to one historian, Miller's friends gave him credit for jokes because he was actually quite grave and humorless.

America's first daddy-daughter anchor team

2009-08-11T18:25:00.033-05:00

There once was a little girl named Sophie, who became the world's youngest news anchor at the tender age of two. Though she was just one half of WGCM's latest anchor team—the other half being her dad, Michael—it was still a lot of pressure for someone who couldn't read yet or even pronounce the last letter of "anchor."

Luckily, Sophie was up to the challenges that lay ahead.

For one thing, she was mighty cute, which always helps on TV. She was also a natural when it came to "happy chat," an essential part of any local newcast. Sophie loved to talk about puppies and trees and twinkling little stars and the sounds barnyard animals make, not to mention her grandparents and her mommy and daddy and her big sister, Olivia, who was four. Olivia was Sophie's biggest influence when it came to being informative, inquisitive, and mighty cute.

Plus, Sophie had an advantage that older news anchors would never have: she could make any piece of bad news seem okay just by smiling or laughing.

Has the economy got you down? Just let WGCM cut to a tight close-up of Sophie telling you the numbers she knows.

Tired of hearing how high school literacy rates keep dropping? Listen to Sophie as she recites her ABCs in her own unique fashion.

Infuriated by stories about crime and punishment being followed by silly "lighter side" items about water-skiing squirrels? Well, at the very least, Sophie is much more adorable than a squirrel, especially when she's splish-splashing in the tub with her rubber ducky.

When she heard that people were accusing WGCM of putting her on the air as some sort of stunt to boost their ratings—"a shameless attempt to trivialize serious issues," said one newspaper columnist—Sophie laughed. Then she cried. She didn't know what "stunts" or "ratings" or "issues" were.

Sophie was confused!

Were people mad at her? What did she do wrong? She didn't want anyone to be mad—ever—especially not at her. (Besides, she had no idea she was editorializing when she said "I lahhv you" at the end of certain stories. She was just expressing herself.)

Sophie knew what she had to do. After just one six o'clock newscast, she retired from journalism. But in a surprising turn of events (some in the TV news business would even call it "shocking"), a story in the local newspaper implied that she was forced out—not by WGCM, but by her fellow anchor.

Michael defended his actions in a written statement: "I don't know why, but I forgot for a minute that Sophie has to take a bath and go night-night by eight o'clock. I wouldn't be able to look her in the eye again if I kept her up for the eleven o'clock news every night. Besides, she'd probably be pretty crankypants at that hour."

Sophie's mom, Heather, responded in a phone interview: "I finally find time to take a short nap while Michael's watching Sophie, and the next thing you know I'm watching her—on TV!"

And so a brilliant career ended almost as soon as it began, but that was okay. There would be plenty of opportunities for Sophie to shine in the years ahead, just like her big sister, who was well on her way to becoming a prima ballerina.

In fact, Olivia gave Sophie the best compliment of all: "You are the bestest little sister and local news anchor in the whole wide world, and I love you very very much, even if you never win a local Emmy."

That made Sophie very very happy. And then she went night-night.

[The writer would like to make the following correction to the third paragraph: Olivia is four and a half. The writer regrets the error and any inconvenience it may have caused.]

Sunday is a day for prayer, quiet reflection, and macho posturing.

2009-08-08T13:50:00.008-05:00

"51 Going on 15"

2009-08-01T22:52:00.014-05:00

I run my own business. I make my own hours. I'm my own boss and my own man.

There's this coffee shop down the street from where I live. I go there when I need to get out of the house for a few hours. Or sometimes I'll stay the entire day. It's great—I'll buy one cup of coffee and stay for eight hours. And sometimes on the weekends I'll come in for a few hours and not order anything at all. Nobody says anything. It's mostly college girls behind the counter, so they're not gonna say anything. Sometimes I put on my sunglasses when I'm there so I can check them out without them knowing. The one with the black hair—I'd definitely fuck her.

The woman who runs the place is this tiny Chinese lady, or Vietnamese or Korean or something. I told her I own my own business, so we have that between us. You can tell she's impressed.

Get this—lately I've been taking my shoes off and propping them up on the couch in the back. I swear to God, nobody says anything. It's great.

There was this one time when a guy behind the counter told me to watch my language when my Mac started fucking up. But that prick was a fucking asshole. Trying to prove himself or something, show me who's boss. Yeah, you're a big man, mister minimum wage plus tips. I go through computers like some people go through underwear. Guess who can't afford a new computer every six months? You, motherfucker. Maybe if you kept your mouth shut, you'd get more tips. What do you think?

When he told me to stop saying "fuck," I left. I didn't have to take that shit. I'm my own man. So I went home.

My wife was out of town again. The house can be kind of lonely without her. When the cat died back in January she was out of town, so she blames me for it. I never liked that cat. But he kept me company.

I make a lot of calls. Not everyone calls me back.

Wipe your feet on me. I deserve it.

2009-07-29T17:00:00.014-05:00

Back in February I wrote about an alt-weekly called Doormat that used to be published in Charleston, South Carolina. I had run across an issue from the fall of '94 while I was home for Christmas and going through a box of stuff at my parents' house. I was struck by comments in two different columns about technology circa 1994, specifically how the Internet was starting to become a household word. But when I went online to find out what became of Doormat, I found nothing.

The other day I received an e-mail from the writer of one of those columns, whose writing I'd called "mediocre." The column in question was mediocre—I assumed he was still in college when he wrote it—but could I have done any better in my early 20s? No.

I used to think some of the columns in the Red and Black student paper at my alma mater, the University of Georgia, were pointless exercises in whining about how hard the library is to use when you've waited until the last second to start a research paper, but I know what it's like to be under the pressure of a deadline, and sometimes you come up empty. And even now, at 33, I don't always make my point clear when I write.

The Doormat writer contacted me because he wasn't sure what my point was in writing about his former labor of love. Was I saying I was glad it no longer existed or that it deserved its comeuppance in the digital age since it was wary of new technology? Not at all.

"Or, here in 2009, were you acknowledging that the ever-expanding horizon of modern communications is foreign and undesirable to you," he asked, "and in so doing, were you identifying with our 1994 desire to eschew innovation, in favor of the more comfortable status quo?" Yes and no.

My last paragraph in that February 6 entry was weak, no doubt about it:

But technology seems to have changed so rapidly since ‘94 that I'd imagine there's some ten-year-old out there right now saying, "Now I can program the DVR with my phone? I just learned how to program the DVR period." Then again, probably not. I’m just old. The upside is that I'm thankful it's not November 1994 anymore.

I meant to go back and expand on that paragraph or fix it in general, but I forgot, which is unfortunate—it's not smart to call someone's writing from their 20s mediocre and then churn out some unfinished mediocrity of my own in my 30s.

In November of '94 I was a freshman in college at the North Carolina School of the Arts. It was a terrible school year for several different reasons, and I ended up transferring to UGA the next fall. That's why I'm glad it's not November of '94 anymore. I should've just said that, but I was trying to avoid whining. Don't get me wrong—I'm great at it—but the first year of this blog is full of self-absorbed bitching and moaning, and I want to avoid that now whenever I can.

I worked for an alt-weekly for five and a half years here in Chicago before being laid off in January. Every newspaper in the world has been hurt badly by profit-draining websites like Craigslist and consumers who now expect news to be free on the Internet. They still read newspapers online, but they don't want to pay for the content in print, and if people don't pick up a paper, advertisers won't want to waste their time placing ads there. Back in 1994, of course, the Internet didn't pose any kind of threat to newspapers.

For the first eight-or-so years after college I didn't feel older, but technology mercilessly dated my memories. How'd we go from blank tapes to "burned" CDs in that amount of time? Technology seems to have advanced so much since the late '90s, when no one I knew owned a cell phone. Now some people have no idea what it feels like to have both hands free while walking down the street.

But maybe in the summer of '69 my parents were still getting used to the idea of commercial air travel right as Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. Life just speeds up at a certain age even as it simultaneously slows down: we settle into careers, we begin long-term romantic relationships, we raise children. And if we blink, a year has gone by without much having changed, or so it seems.

New technology can make certain things in life more convenient—the remote control, the laptop computer, the cell phone—while making us lazier at the same time and more scattered in our thoughts, e.g. writing e-mail or typing out text messages while watching TV. So yes, I somewhat miss the status quo of 1994, when I was a pretty smart guy because I knew how to program a VCR and make a decent mix tape for a girl. But I also enjoy having an iPod and being able to access the Internet at a coffee shop and improve my writing through a blog that people can see and critique and make me think about the words and thoughts I'm casting out into the world.

After all, if it weren't for new technology, the guy from Doormat never would've found my mediocre blog entry.