Thank you, South Korea!

Apparently South Korea—you know, the good Korea—named a beer after me. You're the best, Asian country cousins!

You can't have sex when you're dead (even though people can still have sex with you).

From IMDB's news page:

The revelation by Sex and the City's costar Cynthia Nixon that one of the principal characters will die in the theatrical version, due out on May 30, has touched off a wildfire of speculation on Internet blogs about who the character will be. Rumors that a character would be killed off had been circulating for months. When asked about them at the ShoWest convention in Las Vegas last month, another costar, Sarah Jessica Parker, predicted that people will be "very surprised" by what they see on screen. "There's a seriousness about something that happens in this movie," she added, without directly responding to the question. She added that she thought that writer-director Michael Patrick King "wrote the role of a lifetime for me." Bloggers have speculated about each of the female leads as well as Mr. Big.

Or maybe they all get stomped into the ground by the monster from Cloverfield. I guess we'll find out this summer.

snafu

I had no idea until the other day that the word snafu began as an acronym in World War II that stood for "situation normal all fucked up." Now I'm wondering if Fubar, the Star Wars character name I was given by my childhood friends, had a double meaning.

But let me tell you about a snafu in terms of Philly soul, the subgenre of music I love so much. I recently heard Teddy Pendergrass's "Turn Off the Lights" for the first time in a very long time. It was written by Philadelphia International Records maestros Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, but it's not one of their better songs. I doubt they consider it one of their crowning achievements, either, but it's hard not to wince at the following lyrics:

Let's take a shower, shower together
I'll wash your body and you'll wash mine, yeah
Rub me down in some hot oils, baby
And I'll do the same thing to you

Just turn off the lights, come to me
Girl, I wanna give you a special treat, you're so sweet
Turn off the lights and let's get cozy
See, you're the only one in the world that I need

You can write better lyrics than those for the Teddy Bear, K-Jee and El-H! (Plus the rhyming of "treat" and "sweet" in this sort of R&B number, followed by Teddy making a kissing noise, is too cute—either you talk dirty or you don't.) What the world needs now—and what it needed even in 1979—was subtlety. "Turn Off the Lights" was made for the Quiet Storm, after all, not the Loud 'n' Tacky, Cologne-on-the-Crotch Storm. Some say that kind of storm could signal the end of days, so let's not push it. Teddy, on the other hand, can push it all he wants after he and his special lady "Close the Door," but I don't need to hear about it—or hear the words to "Turn Off the Lights"—ever again.

Oh! Rats!

Tonight as I was walking home from work I saw the following sign next to the sidewalk:

DOG WASTE ATTRACTS AND FEEDS RATS

That's disgusting—calling attention to rats' junk-food preferences in such a public manner. I doubt the rats are proud of themselves for eating dog waste, but to say they're attracted to it? There's no need to bring sexual fetishes into this discussion. No need at all.

Remember that episode of The Love Boat where Gopher and Hitler hatched a crazy scheme?

please dont hate people that are different
i can tell you about some black hitlers that
makes you feel like you are in hell
may god hane [sic] mercy with us all.
this song brings feelings of a love boat, lovely.

That's a comment that was posted on YouTube under a non-video of Teddy Pendergrass singing "Be Sure," from his self-titled 1977 debut solo album. I call it a non-video because, like many songs featured on YouTube that were recorded before the age of music videos, the visuals consist of nothing more than an album cover. The above comment isn't a response to any other comments under the non-video, and no one responds to the comment with "WTF?" or "Hi, this is Idi Amin and I'm getting sick and tired of being called a black Hitler, okay? Seriously, WTF!"

Today on a Soul Train rerun originally broadcast on September 10, 1977, I saw the Whispers perform a disco-fied cover of Bread's "Make It With You." (Don Cornelius introduced it as "one of my all-time favorite songs.") Isaac Hayes and David Porter covering "Baby I'm-a Want You," Telly Savalas covering "If"—bald men of all colors, including myself (I'm purple), love Bread!

And now the Whispers covering "Make It With You." Their version is uptempo but otherwise nothing special, but it would've sounded right at home in the background of an early episode of The Love Boat, which debuted as a series on September 24, 1977, the day before I turned two. You know who was a guest star on the first episode? Genocidal former Ethopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam! He had just started dictating the bejesus out of the heavily populated African nation in 1977 when Love Boat creator Aaron Spelling called him up, told him the Pacific Princess was right off the coast, and offered him a part.

I thought Mengistu's scenes with Bonnie Franklin were very touching: tender yet honest, romantic but real. And when he chopped off her head with a machete right after telling her "May God hane mercy with us all," well, you knew that freckled little pixie from One Day at a Time had made him feel things he'd never felt before. It turns out black Hitlers need love too.

"Rock of Pages: 45 Books for the Literate Music Fan"

You should read this. And this. And then you should read the books that are mentioned. And then you should tell me what you've read in those books since I take too long to read any book I pick up.

I'm also a bad listener, though, so if you tell me what you've read, my mind will start to drift almost immediately. Of course, if you were to actually read to me, my mind would drift immediately, not almost immediately. For some reason I have to see the words. I don't know why that is.

The Lord and David Caruso

Over at Popdose I recently wrote about David Caruso and the similarity of his career and Jack Lord's, not to mention their acting styles when you compare Caruso on CSI: Miami with Lord on Hawaii Five-O. (Unfortunately for me, other people noticed before I did. How dare they.) At Popdose I failed to cover one aspect of those shows that is worth mentioning here: Caruso and Lord both play characters who are single, and if they somehow miraculously find themselves in a relationship, it's often over after a few episodes or even before the first commercial break (see: "Man in a Steel Frame," from Five-O's ninth season). But it's not enough for Horatio Caine (Caruso) or Steve McGarrett (Lord) to break up with their partners or be dumped by them—no, their girlfriends or newlywed wives have to be murdered to make our favorite TV cops understand that work is their wife and solving crimes is their sexual release. If they aren't completely fulfilled when they collar bad guys, then they ain't good supercops!

But maybe the real reason why dedicated detectives like Caine and McGarrett stay single for the majority of their shows' lengthy runs is because they're not written as three-dimensional characters to begin with, and watching these half-man, half-robot creations negotiate the hazards of a long-term committed relationship would unnerve viewers much more than a simulated TV murder or autopsy. We like our emotionless, paradise-patrolling TV cops to have only one gun in their pants, thank you very much. (To be fair, McGarrett's second in command, Dan "Danno" Williams, played by James MacArthur, was more of a robot than McGarrett; if he had two facial expressions, I must've missed the second one. But according to a friend of mine, even Danno fell in love once, only to see his girlfriend be introduced and killed off all in one episode.)

Morgan Freeman has an agenda.

In December of '03 I rented Dreamcatcher, director Lawrence Kasdan's adaptation of the Stephen King novel. It got terrible reviews upon its release in March of that year, but it's worth seeing. 

It starts off strong, with a lot of male-bonding humor and some legitimately creepy scares that involve aliens and toilets, but then the movie goes haywire right around the time Morgan Freeman's character shows up. What started out as an interesting science fiction/horror film becomes a so-bad-it's-almost-good kind of film, but it doesn't work even as unintentional camp. Then again, it's been almost five years, so I'd have to see the movie a second time to give it a fair shake.

From what I remember, Dreamcatcher was the first movie I'd seen in which Freeman gave a less-than-stellar performance. He's been in bad movies just like any other actor, but he's a reliable, graceful performer. In an essay about the 1994 Oscar race in Premiere magazine's March '95 issue, Dreamcatcher cowriter William Goldman wrote, "Morgan Freeman was so moving and so real [in The Shawshank Redemption]. And so still. The hardest thing for an actor is to be still. Just stand there and let the magic happen behind your eyes. There is a belief loose in the land that what's hard is playing the lame, the halt, and the blind. Wrong. Actors kill for those parts. A reason to overact? Heaven."

Shawshank, based on a 1982 novella by Stephen King, moved the shit out of a lot of people, but I wasn't one of them. It was built up too much for me before I saw it, partly by a guy I didn't like at college that year who thought good acting could be measured by how loud an actor yells, and even Freeman has said he gets tired of being cast as the "wise old black man" over and over again. Some men in my age bracket were practically foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Shawshank writer-director Frank Darabont's next adaptation of a Stephen King jailhouse story (everything is based on something Stephen King wrote, even this post), 1999's The Green Mile, but I heard it was a letdown. I never saw it.

Freeman played "Easy Reader" on PBS's The Electric Company in the '70s, but is he also an easy writer? Let me finally get to the point—either Freeman writes some of his own dialogue or he picks scripts with spookily similar philosophies. In Dreamcatcher, Freeman plays Army colonel Abraham Curtis, who says the following in regard to the victims of an alien invasion via the human gastrointestinal tract: "Those poor schmucks. They drive Chevrolets, shop at Wal-Mart, and never miss an episode of Friends. These are Americans."

That line could've been written by Goldman or Kasdan, Dreamcatcher's other credited screenwriter, or it could've been created on the set by Freeman, though it doesn't sound improvised to me. Here's one of his lines from 1995's Seven, in which he played police detective William Somerset: "People don't want a hero. They want to eat cheeseburgers, play the lotto, and watch television." And what do they want to watch in particular? Friends, of course!

Less than a year after Seven came out, Chain Reaction was released. I said earlier that Dreamcatcher was the first less-than-stellar performance I'd seen from Freeman, but it is an interesting train wreck, what with the pasted-on, bushy white eyebrows he sports in the film. Chain Reaction, however, is a sleepwalk of a performance—nothing challenging for Freeman, though at least he's not playing the Wise Old Black Man once again, or at least not a benign one. Here's a line from Chain Reaction, in which he plays industrialist Paul Shannon: "People want to live in their split-level homes, eat microwave dinners, and watch color TV." Because Friends isn't as peppy on a black-and-white set, I guess.

Conclusion: Morgan Freeman hates television and the people who watch it and wants every fat, complacent American to know it.

The Electric Company was a good show, Morgan. Don't be ashamed. I learned something from you when I was little, man! You sound like Sopranos creator David Chase when he talks about his career writing for TV in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. What he really wanted to do was make movies, blah blah blah. But he wrote for The Rockford Files, Northern Exposure, and the short-lived I'll Fly Away, all of which are considered superior examples of what the TV wasteland can produce when its creators are inspired.

Well, at least now I know who to pitch my next screenplay to, the title of which has been changed to Cheeseburger-Eating American Friends Trapped in a Wal-Mart While Missing the Final Episode of Their Favorite Show. Like Dreamcatcher, it's a horror film, in case the title didn't provide enough clues.

Four years later ... I just saw Nurse Betty (2000) for the first time, in which Freeman's character, Charlie, says to his fellow hit man, Wesley (Chris Rock), "There you go again. The same lousy-ass attitude that got us here in the first place. That make-a-statement, do-an-end-zone-dance, shake-your-ass-and-swear-at-everybody-in-sight attitude that's dragging this whole fucking country down the drain!" Wesley, as it turns out, watches too much TV and eats too many fatty foods, much to Charlie's dismay. Long live Morgan Freeman's agenda.

"The pinball that will blow you away!"

Not the pinball game that will blow you away—just "the pinball." That's some industry shorthand I'd never heard before.

I came across this advertisement recently while writing about Wesley Snipes's legal troubles and career (and southern fast-food chains) over at Popdose.com. I didn't grow up playing a lot of pinball—early-'80s video games like Pac-Man and Frogger and the Atari home versions of those games were what excited me, so I would've figured that pinball games had peaked in popularity by the end of the '70s. Not so, according to a 2005 article in the Chicago Reader that focused on Chicago pinball manufacturers Stern Pinball and Williams Electronics, the manufacturer of the Demolition Man pinball ... game:

Sales of pinball machines peaked around 1992, when more than 100,000 were manufactured; among them was Bally's Addams Family game, the best-selling machine ever. But consumers were shifting to home video and computer games, and mall arcades were closing. One after another the remaining manufacturers folded. By 1996 only Williams Electronics—which had absorbed Bally and another legendary company, Midway—and Data East were left.

In 1999 Stern bought Data East's pinball division and renamed it Stern Pinball. A few months later Williams Electronics unveiled a new game that melded video games and traditional pinball, projecting video images onto the playing field. The company marketed it as the "future of pinball." But the machines were expensive to produce, and it was soon clear that a hybrid wasn't going to save pinball. Williams built only two games—Attack From Mars and Star Wars: Episode I—and that fall it decided to get out of pinball and focus on more lucrative slot machines. "I am the last man standing," says Stern.

Dying is easy, comedy is hard. (Why do you think everyone dies?)

The Writers Guild of America's strike ended on Tuesday after more than three months. The previous strike, back in 1988, lasted five months. When that strike was in its final weeks, three Saturday Night Live writers were in Chicago performing a sketch-comedy revue called Happy Happy Good Show at the Victory Gardens Studio Theater. Below is a review of the show by Tom Valeo, from the July 15, 1988, issue of the Chicago Reader:

If any television executives see Happy Happy Good Show, they may decide to let the writers' strike go on forever.

Created with the help of three striking Saturday Night Live writers—Conan O'Brien, Robert Smigel, and Bob Odenkirk—this comedy revue is remarkably unfunny. Almost nothing works. Almost everything is either facile or outlandish—or both.

One prolonged skit, for example, involves two southern crackers who sit outside a gas station making fun of all the big-city types who drive in expecting big-city services. One man wants to pay for his gas with a credit card; a woman needs a part for her Saab. The joke is that these two men are sitting in front of a gas station that has been transformed into a minimart capable of supplying anything—even the kosher pickled herring requested by an Orthodox Jew. That's not a bad premise for a satirical sketch, but the way the sketch is executed here is decidedly unfunny.

But if you want really unfunny stuff, try this: a lawyer described as having a "sharp legal mind" turns out to have a head shaped like a wedge.

After several skits like this, I began to suspect I was witnessing a pioneering experiment in comic minimalism—no jokes, no wit, no surprises. The audience certainly greeted the material with the respectful silence usually reserved for baffling artistic innovations. Maybe we were merely failing to respond to some major advance in the history of humor.

Alas, I'm afraid we were merely failing to respond. Our reaction was reflected in the face of Dave Reynolds, who, in a series of sketches, plays a director auditioning performers who are amazingly untalented. One is a ventriloquist, played by Smigel, whose routine consists of mumbled small talk with his dummy. "Sure is hot out." "Yeah, it's hot." Another is a teacher, played by Debby Jennings, whose twitches, nervous chatter, and momentary trances ("The children say I've gone to Jupiter when I do that") are perfectly mimicked by a student, played by Rose Abdoo. As he beholds these performances, Reynolds's face reveals astonishment, combined with intense politeness, as though he doesn't want the auditioners to know how pointless their stuff is. His expression could be applied just as well to Happy Happy Good Show.

Actually, the performers themselves are pretty skillful. They're just stuck with unfunny material. (Of course, they created the material, but that's another matter.) In one skit, Hugh Callaly, a veteran of the long-running revue All You Can Eat and the Temple of Dooom, does a fine impersonation of Clint Eastwood playing Dirty Harry. The setup just isn't very clever: As Detective Stone, Callaly pushes his way into a restaurant and tries to spoil the dinner of a mobster suspected of murder by showing him photographs of the mutilated victim. When that fails, the detective brings in a decomposing leper for the mobster to stare at. It's an outlandish premise, to be sure, but unfunny.

In one of the audition segments, Bob Odenkirk and Conan O'Brien are wonderfully manic as "bithespians" who team up to give a single performance—O'Brien does the visual aspect, while Odenkirk provides the vocals. Jennings has a great face for a comedian, and Rose Abdoo actually is a wonderful mimic, just like the student she plays. She does a "completely gratuitous" impersonation of Audrey Meadows playing Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners, and she's terrific.

Happy Happy Good Show is a vivid demonstration of how elusive comedy can be. Some of the skits, when described, sound potentially funny. The Dirty Harry segment, for example, has promise, and Callaly returns later as a eunuch who shows up in an office one day intent on protecting "the women of the harem." Such setups invite improvisation, but two skits in the show ridicule that very technique. In one, the Impets, "the world's only improvisational puppets," perform improv games that bring to mind the ImprovOlympic, developed in Chicago by Charna Halpern and Del Close. (The host is a puppet called Delkie who, like Close, has a chronic smoker's cough.) Ironically, the spoof works best when it resembles the ImprovOlympic the most.

The other skit is a savage put-down of Second City, in which O'Brien portrays a performer soliciting the audience's help in developing a character known as Spoon Man, who talks like a pirate and holds a spoon over one eye. He chooses the most prosaic answers imaginable to the questions posed by the audience: "Where did you get your spoon?" "At the Spoon Connection." In between questions he says things like "This is really helping me build my character." When he's finished, he removes the spoon, drops out of character, and thanks the audience sincerely for their help. "I'm going to go backstage now and write some of this down," he says.

Now, Second City is certainly ripe for satire. The revues have lapsed into a predictable formula, and the use of improvisation has become self-conscious and stale. But the bitterness of O'Brien's spoof undercuts the humor, and makes the skit look like the expression of a personal grudge.

Even worse, the skit is unintentional self-satire. The prosaic answers that Spoon Man gives to the questions are as obvious and unfunny as much of the material in Happy Happy Good Show. The revue, like Spoon Man's character, needs a lot more work before it can become even remotely humorous.

The reason I posted that review is because I've written and performed sketch comedy myself in Chicago. It's not easy, and I doubt it's any easier in any other city. But Valeo's review proves that even the best sketch writers struggle—O'Brien made a comment on a Saturday Night Live retrospective last year that no matter how rich or famous you become in comedy, you still feel miserable when one of your ideas bombs—and you're not going to be able to please everyone all the time.

But I have a feeling that because O'Brien, Odenkirk, and Smigel were already SNL writers when they did this show, the audience was less inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. If in fact the audience wasn't laughing, that is—some critics like to project their own opinion onto everyone around them. I know I find a lot of things funny that don't make me laugh out loud, but the goal for any comedian is to get laughs to come out of an audience member's mouth, not stick the thought "That was funny" in his or her brain without converting the thought into a laugh. (Don't deny that analyzing comedy in this fashion is always good for a chuckle or two.)

Comedy nerds will recognize the big names in Valeo's review, but they might not know that Dave Reynolds cowrote Finding Nemo (2003) and The Emperor's New Groove (2000) and has "additional material" credits on other Disney and Pixar movies like A Bug's Life (1998), Tarzan (1999), and Chicken Little (2005). And Rose Abdoo costarred in the short-lived CBS comedy Johnny Bago in the summer of '93. Robert Zemeckis directed the pilot episode, which had the same inventive comic energy of the films he cowrote with Bob Gale (I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, Back to the Future), before he started saying "But seriously, you guys ..." with films like Contact (1997) and Cast Away (2000). But that's another topic for another day, of course.

corporate gossip

Rupert Murdoch is totally making the moves on Yahoo! right now.

See, Yahoo! has been telling anyone who'll listen that its current boy toy, Microsoft, isn't the corporation Yahoo! thought it was. Microsoft said it would make the world Yahoo!'s oyster, but Yahoo! wants some pearls with that oyster, you know what I'm sayin'?

Microsoft was all "What am I, made of money?" and Yahoo! was like "Yeah" and Microsoft was all "Corporate behemoths have feelings too, baby" and Yahoo! was like "Uh-huh, well, my feelings are hurt because you won't provide for me." Then Yahoo! made a sexual joke using the words "micro" and "soft," and that's when Microsoft walked away from the dinner/negotiating table.

Then Rupert Murdoch showed up and Yahoo! was like "Ooh, I like your accent," and Rupert acted like he plays rugby and wrestles alligators in the outback every weekend, but girl, you know that ain't true. Now Microsoft's jealous and Rupert's trying to add one more notch on his billion-dollar bedpost and Yahoo!'s starting to get a reputation as a slut. I'm not saying it's fair, but people will talk.

This panda was just hibernating.

In case any of my 2.4 readers care, Mulberry Panda 96 isn't going to become one of those blogs that used to have new stuff to read every week for a few months but now looks like it'll only be updated on the 12th of never. I started a bunch of drafts last fall that I never finished, but now I'm finally in the process of finishing them as a way of productively procrastinating instead of writing my weekly piece for Popdose, which is always late.

Here are three completed posts that I started writing prior to January:

9/18: Blythe Danner should've married David Gates.
9/25: slow news day
11/21: "Escape from Cleveland"
12/10: These Carpenters never performed any miracles.

I apologize in advance to anyone who was hoping for a reference to Bread in the 9/25 and 11/21 posts. If you can think of a way to sneak one in after the buzzer, please let me know.

Super Tuesday

I voted this morning, even though I probably should've checked to see how Joe Biden's been doing in the presidential race lately before I cast my vote. I've just been so busy ...

Last week I found a discarded campaign flyer in my apartment building for James Byrne, who's running for Cook County judge, eighth subcircuit. The front of the flyer is designed like a movie poster, with Byrne and Cook County commissioner Forrest Claypool standing next to each other and smiling; below them is the tagline "On Feb. 5th, Justice Soars," and underneath that is the title "Legal Eagles."

Legal Eagles, you may remember, is a 1986 romantic comedy starring Robert Redford and Debra Winger. Is Byrne trying to tell voters that he's got a thing for Forrest Claypool? If so, how can I expect him to focus on his duties as a judge when his head is somewhere in the clouds? It'd be okay if I wrote mash notes to a fellow juror while pretending to listen to testimony, but it'd be grossly irresponsible if Byrne were to write them to Claypool while doing the same.

Sorry, James, but you're not getting my vote*. I wish you the best in your pursuit of Forrest's love and affection, but not in your pursuit of justice**.

* I voted for Byrne after all. I'm a sucker for a good love story, and since Legal Eagles was a disappointment 22 years ago, I'm hoping this all-male "reimagining" will be more satisfying. I don't want James and Forrest to reimagine Legal Eagles' theme song, though, no matter what the naysayers still have to say and nay about it all these years later—Rod Stewart's "Love Touch" should remain untouched. But unloved? Oh, it's always been loved by me. (But not while touching.)

** Keith Sweat, please don't come between James and Forrest. I'm serious! Just walk away.

Mica Paris

In the summer of '89 one of my favorite songs was "My One Temptation" by Mica Paris. A jazz-inflected pop-soul number, it didn't burn up the American charts back then, but the song did make its way to Top 40 radio, at least in Georgia, where I grew up. "My One Temptation" was a breezy triumph then, and remains so today.

I didn't know much about Paris at the time, and MTV wasn't playing the video for "My One Temptation," as far as I can remember, but I found it on YouTube the other day. I know I've seen pictures of Paris before, but when I watched the video I couldn't help but think, "Oh, so that's what she looks like."

I wonder if there's a name for that phenomenon—if it can even be called a phenomenon. Maybe it's that I was seeing Mica Paris in motion for the first time, whereas before I'd only seen still photos. 

Or maybe I felt like I was seeing her for the first time because I'm in love.

That's right, Ms. Paris, it's your move now.

Sweat in January

R&B singer Keith Sweat put out a Christmas album back in November called A Christmas of Love. Sweat-y love. Jason Hare and Jeff Giles wrote about it in December, and as silly as a smooth-groove ballad called "Be Your Santa Claus" might sound in theory (translation: Sweat wants to come into your home late at night, taste your milk and pink cookies, and then leave before you wake up) , the execution of it works much better than it has any right to.

On the back of the album, which showed up in the "Free CDs" bin at work earlier this month, is Sweat's Web site address: TheSweatHotel.com. I haven't visited yet, and I doubt I can reserve a room that overlooks the Pool of Sweat, but I am curious as to why the new jack swinger didn't go with "The Sweat Lodge" for his Web site's name. Sounds more natural, right? And he'd probably sell a bunch more CDs in Indian casinos if he made the switch.

Right now my apartment is something of a sweat lodge. Heat is included in the rent, which is a good thing since I live in Chicago and it can get very cold in the winter and heat is expensive, but it's a bad thing when there's no way to turn down the heat. My building has many elderly residents, and it's been less than ten years since people under 60 have been allowed to move in. The management seems to feel that what's good enough for my 96-year-old neighbor is good enough for 32-year-old me, so if I don't like it being 76 degrees or higher 24 hours a day, that's my problem.

Recently I called the management office to (1) complain about the heat again since my winter blanket is complaining that I don't love it anymore, and (2) tell them that a bad smell was coming from the 96-year-old neighbor's apartment and was now drifting into my bathroom in addition to the hallway. My neighbor doesn't come out of her apartment that often, and she doesn't have any regular visitors, and I couldn't remember if I'd heard her TV from the hallway in the past week, so I started to wonder if she'd died. The next morning I heard the building manager and the head of maintenance knock on my neighbor's door. I'm glad to know she's alive. I wasn't glad to hear that their first question was "Are you too cold?"

Too cold?! Even a Kalahari bushman would be asking you to turn the heat down in this place. I called you because I thought my neighbor's corpse was cold, not her apartment, for Christ's sake! (In the management's defense, I certainly wouldn't want to knock on a 96-year-old's door and ask, "Are you still alive? Okay, just checking. Thanks!")

I pray every night that it'll continue to be windy and below 20 in Chicago just so the temperature in my apartment will remain steady around 70 degrees. Please don't let it warm up enough so that it'll snow, Mother Nature, and don't let the temperature rise above 40. It's not that I can't open my windows in the dead of winter. It's that I'm fundamentally opposed to such a thing.

But I expect obstacles like this in January, which is why I'm glad it's almost over. You can read more (of the same) about the cold shoulder I give to the coldest month over at Popdose.com, the new Web site I'm editing with the aforementioned Jason Hare and Jeff Giles. They edit much more than I do, but I hope to maintain this blog, write and edit for Popdose, look for a new job, continue performing improv and sketch comedy, grow a foot taller, and make a fashionably late entrance into the presidential race as a crazy Ross Perot-type independent. Wish me luck!

songs that double back

I love the piped-in music that's played in grocery stores and drug stores. I often get to hear songs I haven't heard on the radio in years, and since I don't have any objections to soft rock, the lighter sounds that are typically played in these stores don't make me want to shoplift out of spite. The other day I heard "Doubleback," ZZ Top's big single featured in 1990's Back to the Future Part III. "The Power of Love" it was not, but just as Huey Lewis made a cameo in the first Back to the Future in '85, the ZZ Top triumvirate showed up in Part III to play Old West musicians who had spinning-guitar straps all the way back in 1885.

When I heard "Doubleback" the other day at the grocery store, it wasn't the first time I'd heard it in that setting; the first time was last month. And last spring I walked into the grocery store and heard the opening boi-oi-oing strains of Bread's "If," then walked in exactly one week later and heard it once again from the very beginning.

I don't think this is a case of the Jewel-Osco supermarket chain having too short of a playlist. I think it means I go to the grocery store more frequently than I realized. (I don't own a car, so it's a lot easier on my arms if I go three or four times a week rather than one. I HAVE WEAK ARMS, OKAY?) I also think Jewel-Osco wants me to buy more bread.

I'm dreaming of a blurry Christmas.

Here's a picture I took on December 4 during Chicago's first big snow of the winter. Happy holidays, 3.6 readers!

These Carpenters never performed any miracles.

I'm listening to the Carpenters' second album, Close to You (1970), right now, which I checked out from the library. (By the by, why isn't the RIAA taking on libraries in court? They're music-pirating enablers. But only if you can get your computer to actually recognize and load their scratched CDs, of course.) You know what? The Carpenters are no Bread.

Bread has songs like "Baby I'm-a Want You," "Make It With You," and "Sweet Surrender" that make me nostalgic for a time I never knew: the early '70s. And Beatlesque songs like "Daughter" make me realize how smart and reliable David Gates, James Griffin, and company were as musical craftsmen, while tracks like "Fancy Dancer" show that Bread could eliminate the soft from soft rock on occasion and deliver on that front as well. It's not their fault the heavier numbers didn't make it onto the radio. They were studio musicians, songwriters for hire, and producers before they came together to form Bread in the late '60s, and their experience and earned confidence come through in their music. You're in good hands with Bread.

Just as the Carpenters are no Bread, Chicago is no Bread, either, although Chicago would probably be offended by that statement, because I bet they think they rock much harder than they actually do. "Hard Habit to Break" almost rocks at one point, but that's because Bill Champlin sounds like he's popping a few capillaries when he sings "I'm addicted to you, baby!!!!" From what I've heard, most of the guys in Chicago were addicted to something that resembles baby powder. But not Peter Cetera. He was too mellow and blond for that. But if he was surrounded by cokeheads on endless tours throughout the late '60s, all of the '70s, and the early '80s, can you blame him for finally leaving after 18 years to pursue "The Glory of Love" and the glory of a paycheck that didn't have to be split a dozen ways? Children generally leave home at 18. Cetera had earned the right to grow up, move away, and pursue an adult (contemporary) education.

The Carpenters didn't do themselves any favors on Close to You covering songs like "Help!" and "Baby It's You" in the most Muzak-y way possible. The songs on the 1994 tribute album If I Were a Carpenter, which my ex-girlfriend had in college, are ten times better than any song on Close to You, especially Matthew Sweet's cover of "Let Me Be the One." Actually, I do like "(They Long to Be) Close to You," but that's partly because singing the waaaaaah-ah-ah-ah-aaaaahs in the song with a complete lack of subtlety is too much fun to pass up.

I'm not going to make an anorexia joke here, but I do think it's safe to say that both Karen and Richard Carpenter would've been wise to add Bread to their musical diet.

why my favorite TV show died

A radio station in Charleston, South Carolina, claimed that Moonlighting, my favorite show when I was younger, never recovered after the writers' strike that delayed the beginning of the 1988 fall season. Or so my friend Beau told me, as his wife, Kristen, had told him. But those Charleston DJs were only half right. Here's what I wrote to Beau and Kristen ...

Moonlighting was hurt by a lot of things. As one person who worked on the show said, the show's slow demise came about because "Cybill Shepherd got pregnant and Bruce Willis got rich." Shepherd got pregnant in early '87, during the show's third season, although her pregnancy wasn't worked into the show until that fall, during the fourth season. Glenn Gordon Caron, the show's creator, said he couldn't see any way around the pregnancy—avoiding the issue would've prevented Shepherd from being shot below chest level, and that would've made scenes with her very static and confined to desks or tables.

Long story short, the first part of the fourth season involved Maddie in Chicago staying with her parents while trying to figure out whether she should go back to David and the detective agency and let him know she was pregnant (the audience, not to mention David, didn't know if it was his baby or third-season guest star Mark Harmon's). Because Maddie was in Chicago, David solved cases with Herbert Viola, a.k.a. "Booger" from Revenge of the Nerds. Not as much fun as Maddie and David solving crimes together, but by that point they'd "done it," which took all of the sexual tension away. It's a slippery slope once the romantic leads on a TV show get together, of course, and unlike Cheers, Moonlighting didn't have a bunch of supporting characters to fall back on in case viewers got sick of the main characters bickering back and forth. All you had were Herbert and Ms. DiPesto, who were funny in small doses, yet they ended up having two episodes to themselves during the fourth season while Shepherd and Willis were indisposed. Two whole episodes—and only 14 were produced that season.

The fourth season was cut short due to the writers' strike, but during the previous season Moonlighting had only produced 15 episodes, and the one before that produced just 18. It was supposed to deliver 22 episodes a season just like any other show, but it never did, partly due to Glenn Gordon Caron being such a perfectionist and delivering script rewrites at the last minute. (I've read that production on his current show, NBC's Medium, is somewhat disorganized, but he's managed to produce 22 episodes per season so far, as he did for the one and only season of his 1999-2000 CBS series, Now and Again.)

I do like Ms. DiPesto and Herbert Viola more now that I'm older. But when I was in grade school I just wanted to see Maddie and David flirt and watch Bruce Willis be cool and funny. He hasn't been all that funny since Moonlighting, and he wasn't even that funny during the last two seasons. He looked a bit bored, to be honest.

By the way, I lied when I said "long story short." 

Willis was in those early fourth-season episodes much more than Shepherd, and he was reportedly angry that he had to carry the show while shooting Die Hard at the same time. By the tail end of the season Maddie had returned to Los Angeles, but she got married to a stranger on a train on her way back from Chicago, which made almost every fan groan (the grade-school ones anyway). She called it off the day of the "official" wedding, realizing she still loved David, and then the season ended one episode later, with the quickie annulment of Maddie's quickie marriage and a comment on the writers' strike in the last segment. Like other Moonlighting episodes, this one had ended up a few minutes short, so an extra scene was filmed with Maddie and David talking to the audience about how the writers were on strike and they didn't know how to fill the extra time. They ended up making Herbert dance to "Wooly Bully."

When the show returned in December of '88 along with other network shows, Maddie had a miscarriage, which made more fans groan, but at least that concluded the show's soap-opera aspects for the most part. Then it was back to Maddie and David solving crimes together, which I was happy to see when I was in seventh grade, but once I got older I realized it was ridiculous—as Willis said in an interview after the show ended, there was no way those two would've continued to work together after having gone through such a long, stormy affair.

Moonlighting was put on hiatus by ABC in February of '89 because its ratings had fallen so far (those ratings probably wouldn't look so bad today, though, compared to what a normal low-ranking network show generates in 2007); it returned two months later, but on Sundays at 8 instead of Tuesdays at 9. The fifth season consisted of 13 episodes, and the last six were cranked out quickly in order to get Moonlighting up to the bare minimum needed for syndication on a cable network—Lifetime showed it in the early '90s, and Bravo aired it earlier this decade, but it never reached regular syndication like, say, Magnum, P.I. or NYPD Blue, which produced more episodes per season over longer runs.

So yeah, the writers' strike didn't help Moonlighting get its momentum back, but it was already in serious trouble before that.

This is only a test dream.

Don't drink a Diet Dr Pepper and eat some chocolate at 10:30 on a Sunday night thinking you'll be up for the next few hours doing some work only to decide an hour and a half later that you want to go to bed because then you'll find that it's hard to get to sleep right away and you'll have dreams about a "71% chance of severe flooding" and this nagging fear that while you're out of town for the weekend your basement apartment will fill up with water.

(Breathe.)

I woke up Monday morning and remembered that I live on the fifth floor of my building, not in a basement apartment. I see you've gotten the better of me once again, Mr. Subconscious. Well played.

But here's something interesting in terms of my anxiety dreams—recently I had one in which it was opening night of a play and I didn't know my lines yet. How could I? I had been cast earlier that day. I have this kind of anxiety dream pretty often, probably because I perform at least once a week in Chicago doing improv and sketch comedy; in every dream I buy the circumstances hook, line, and sinker. Never do I catch myself during the dream and say to myself, "Robert, there's no way anyone would cast you in a play the afternoon before the show opens." Besides, Mr. Subconscious would probably reply, "Exotic dancers get 'cast' the day of their first show all the time, stupid." He's right, you know. I've seen Showgirls. I know the drill.

The plays I do in my dreams are always community theater productions, which is an important point, because just like recurring high school "test dreams," why should any of our various anxiety dreams ever advance past adolescence? I know nothing about psychology beyond the Psychology 101 class I took at UGA in the fall of '95, but scientifically speaking, is adolescence the time of greatest continual anxiety in a person's life? Everything else is certainly heightened during those years.

I'm drifting away from what I wanted to say, but I am talking about dreams, so drifting seems appropriate. Here's the interesting thing about this recent anxiety dream of mine where I didn't know my lines—I wasn't anxious. For some reason I decided in the dream that since I hadn't had any time to learn the lines and since there was nothing I could do about it, I might as well just improvise and see what happens. Listen and react, which is what acting's all about anyway. And don't worry about what you can't control.

So that's what I did in the dream, and although the other actors knew I was screwing up and the audience could tell something wasn't quite right, I got through it. (Come to think of it, all of the actors were in the audience. And the audience was tiny. Wait, were the actors the entire audience? Wow, just like at the improv shows I do every Sunday night!) The dream didn't end with me panicking before I woke up.

Was the dream a sign that I've finally gained some real confidence onstage and that I should now be totally fearless when improvising (no, there are no lines to memorize beforehand when you do improv shows, but you can still end up speechless and afraid onstage in front of a room of strangers, and that doesn't feel any better than forgetting your lines), or was it a confirmation of the confidence already achieved? Is there a difference? And was the dream really about performing, or was it about gaining confidence in every aspect of life? And are all these questions turning this post into a test dream? Please don't be anxious. You didn't have time to study, so there's no need to worry about what you can't control. Especially not something as uncontrollable as a dream.