"South Park" Season 1

Season 1 of "South Park" worked a lot like Hallucina, in that it was one of the few places where Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier and Robert Smith of the Cure were likely to fight it out in a parody of Mechanime. Back in the glorious year of 1997 we met Stan Marsh, lone Jew Kyle Broflovski, death-defying Kenny McCormick, and irrepressible Eric Cartman. Who else? Lascivious Chef, Puppet-phile Mr. Garrison, Wendy Testaburger, Big Gay Al, and Mr. Hankey the Christmas poo. Cartman got anally probed, there was a Starvin' Marvin, and genetically engineered four-assed creatures.
Definitely a strong beginning.

"GRANMA"- THE OFFICIAL MOUTHPIECE OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF CUBA'S COMMUNIST PARTY

One of the biggest ironies of Fidel Castro's successful hijacking of the Central American island called Cuba is that the average Cuban citizen has no clue that the name of the ONE AND ONLY newspaper in the Worker's Paradise comes from a YANKEE word that means GRANDMOTHER. (The "Granma" was a yatch in which a youthful Fidel Castro once got seasick and vomited all over; he got emotionally attached to it, and decided to name his kingdom's newspaper after it.) So, yeah, the propaganda comes out of the mouth of a DECREPIT GRANDMOTHER.
As in TU ABUELA, ("your granma!") which is the worst insult one Cuban can give to another. When a confrontation occurs and a Cuban shouts: "Tu Abuela!" the general implication is that your grandmother has frequently fornicated with roaming pigs and is even more of a whore than your MOTHER is.
So, when the Communist Party daily delivers Granma to the people, (as it has for 45 uninterrupted years of "journalism" that makes the average American middle school newspaper look like "The New York Times") it's offering an insult. An insult to intelligence, sanity, and thinking skills. The Granma is basically snapped down on a Cuban's snout: "Bad Cuban, bad Cuban!"


Today I got some goodies sent from Cuba. Not the famed cigars! Random crap from our old house that a cousin had kept and brought back memories- like, the Saint Lazarus icons we used to keep on top of our misshapen Russian television set in the hopes that it would somehow work as an antenna and allow us to catch random American television signals. You have NO idea how much of the average Cuban worker's energies are spent in desperate efforts to somehow watch American television. Anyway, one of these random trinkets from my old house was wrapped in the August 8th, 2009 Granma.

And I stared at the thing and laughed really hard and I want to share its stories with you. Although I'm abridging and emphasizing, and I know it's unbelievable, but I promise I am NOT making shit up. These were actual stories from the newspaper. If you've ever stumbled across Granma, you've got all the journalistic LOLZ you will ever need.

This is how the Cuban newspaper routinely goes:
FRONT PAGE!

MAIN STORY: MACHADO VENTURA, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL OF IMPORTANT STATE STUFF, went to visit significant economic targets in the village of Santa Clara. And he looked around, and he saw that the people's will was still good to rise against the most disastrous of economic conditions, although he clarified that one can always sacrifice even more to rise up to what the Party has asked of us.

SIDE STORY: THERE IS A LOW REPORT OF INFANT MORTALITY IN THE SANCTI-SPIRITUS COMMUNITY: "Only two babies have died in our hospital in the last month," says comrade doctor Maria Elena Babiuska. "All the other babies seemed to have an impetus to support the advance of Communism that kept them hanging on. These babies are an example to all of us."

BOTTOM OF THE PAGE: (TWO STORIES)
1-AMERICANS WILL NOT ACCEPT VACATIONS FOR FEAR OF GETTING FIRED.
While all the Communist world is on vacation and frolicking in the tropical summer, we have direct news that in the American city of San Francisco workers are asking their bossmen not to give them vacations. "No, mister Bossman," said John Smith, according to the AP Press, "please don't let me out of of my cubicle! You're only doing that so you can fire me!" "That's right, boy," says the bossman, as reported by CNN News. "I don't mean any harm, it's just the way capitalism works."

2- ALMOST 900,000,000 PEOPLE HAVE TO LIVE WITHOUT COMMUNIST EDUCATION
The President of the U.N. revealed today that most black and brown people are not allowed to go to schools all over the world. The U.N. speaker said it's all because of poverty, hunger and racism. He also said that if people have to choose between eating and sending their kids to school, eating always wins! It must be horrible to live outside of Cuba, judging by these numbers.


On to Page 2- Really, look it up online! It's kind of bilingual, of course!

CUBAN YOUTH WILL BE HAPPY AT MEETING ON AUGUST 12
While the whole world is dying with AIDS and recession, Cuban youth will meet to celebrate the fact that we're the healthiest and smartest group of young people in the world, thanks to Fidel Castro. We will celebrate out greatness at the Anti-Imperialist Rally on March 12, where people will jump and down and scream at pictures of Obama, the Dark Lord. "It is a healthy habit to jump up and down and scream," said Giovanni Barrueta, a high-ranking member of the Union of Communist Youth (UJC).

WE HAVE ADDED WORKERS TO CHECK FOR COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY SABOTAGE
The Granma offices is proposing to hire five new supervisors to ensure that our printing offices in the town of Manzanillo isn't just wasting the day on cock-fights, which are not in any way conductive to the advance of Marxist-Leninist societal ideals


CRIME STILL UNPUNISHED BY THE WORMS THAT LIVE IN MIAMI
It's been almost fifteen years after Juan Jose Rey killed Enrique Cuandarillo and then left for Miami, where the Exile community of evil has greeted him and made him rich. We're still grieving by this barbaric crime that could only have been commited by a defector. In the town of Guantanamo, a tear falls from every decent person who seeks justice.

COMPUTER FUN!
Adventurous techie types can sign up to go on-line this summer at the Palace of Computers, where they will be allowed to sign on to the World Wide Web for thirty minutes and read Jose Marti's works at www.Cubaisgreat.Com/

THIRD PAGE:
The third page is entirely dedicated to statistics about how not enough new Communists are being produced in the island, and women need to have babies at a younger age. Again, I'M BEING SERIOUS! LOOK IT UP!

FOURTH PAGE:
The fourth page has a side bar of sensationalistic world news. Everything is going wrong everywhere else! Not in Cuba, though! German suicide rates triple from May to June! Radiation from the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombing still detected! Mel Martinez, a belligerent alcoholic anti-Cuban senator, is retiring. Mexican people are killing each other over DRUGS.

ALSO:
Alice Walker, the wonderful African-American writer who has long denounced the sins of her country, gave a lecture at Berkeley University in support of the art of Antonio Guerrero, one of the five heroic Communist information-gatherers who have been imprisoned in the United States for trying to stop American terrorist agencies. "How can we live in a country that allows these kind of injustices to happen?" said Walker. Good question! It's beyond us why all Americans don't just kill themselves.

THE FIFTH PAGE WAS TOO BORING TO READ, right until the story about AMERICA'S CONTINUING HEALTHCARE FIGHT!

ABOVE: Typical American Hospital.

(I have to translate some of this literally, it's just too funny. No editorializing there!)
"While the fatcats at the Capitol roll around in gold coins and plan to castrate the health care reform in the corrupt Yankee nation, a few miles away, outside a Virginia hospital, the beaten American worker begged for their salvation. "We have come here to receive dental benefits," said Jane Johnson, a nice secretary. At that moment, a fat Jewish doctor came out and said: "I don't think so! A tooth for a tooth! If you want to be healthy, you have to be RICH!" This is typical of American retrogressive politics. Mostly the Republicans are the ones that are evil demons, but most of the so-called Democrats are also conspiring against reform. They are known as the "blue ball dogs." The sad fact is that corruption is at the core of everyone not born in the soothing cradle of Communism. Latins in the United States are always shot down on the streets, like the recently raped judge Sonia Sotomayor, of course, and they should not migrate there."

PAGE 6: POP CULTURE!
Benny More is the greatest musical genius the world has ever known, and this year marks the 46th year since his death. In reminiscence of the year-long celebration we had for his 45th birthday, we will be playing his ten favorite cha-cha-chas, guaguancos, and boleros all year round on the Radio Revolutionaria.


PAGE 7: SPORTS
Cubans are the best at all sports obviously, but there are some things that Cubans don't do, like golf and rugby and hockey. Should those sports be considered aberrations of the idea of sporting, the proud demonstration of how Communism makes a body strong and free of money-hungry toxins, or are they simply homosexual indulgences by counterrevolutionaries? As usual, the Cuban public is invited to send in its thoughts and any poems praising the progress of our Nation's teams.

PAGE 8:
THE LAST PAGE.
The last page is all dedicated to a guy that is considered the country's best mango picker, and he thinks mangoes are super, and there have to be even better strategies to get more mangoes, and he thanks God every day for allowing him to dedicate his mangoes to Fidel.




I AM NOT EVEN KIDDING!!!

Sidney Lumet's "Network"

"We're mad as hell and we're not gonna take it anymore!"

A cry so iconic, it should drive me to suicide that I hadn't seen Sidney Lumet's "Network" until now. A sardonic tale of what just might happen to you if your ratings run low enough, "Network" is still prescient- indeed will be as long as television is swayed by the eyes of an increasingly vulgar public. With Peter Finch as the anchor who threatens to off himself on camera, and great acting by Robert Duvall, stately William Holden, and the Faye Dunaway who, once upon a time, seemed set to give Meryl Streep a run for her money.

Carlos Reygadas' "Battle in Heaven"

"Battle in Heaven" begins and ends with a tearful blowjob. Good metaphor! The whole thing is a tearful blowjob to "artsiness". You don't have to be Japanese or French to load up your movie with artsiness. Mexicans caught on too. All you need is lengthy shots that mock the viewer's patience. Just like the key to a Michael Bay movie is to make things happen twice as fast as your synapses can register, the key to an artsy movie is to make everything happen so slow that you start to wonder whether the Chihuahua the camera lingers on for ten minutes is supposed to stand in for Cerberus, or if it's the idea of male/canine predation, or maybe it's just that the director (Carlos Reygadas, behind the equally numbing "Japon") forgot to say "Cut", lost as he was in his barbiturate limbo.

The concept behind "Battle in Heaven" is interesting enough that when I tell you, it will make the movie sound twice as good as it is. Money-straggled chauffeur Marcos (Marcos Hernandez) kidnaps a kid which dies quickly and off-scene. Actually, that all happens before the movie even begins. Marcus is mopey about his crime, and then gets a full on blowjob from the beautiful prostitute Ana (Anapola Mushkadiz). Why she gives him the time of the day, let alone a blowjob, is entirely unclear. Why he kills her (ooops, spoiler!) is unclear too. Then he goes through some sort of Catholic flagellation ritual. Then the movie ends. In the meantime, we're treated to "Lazy-God's-Eye" shot (the camera strolling down a street, say), and the soothing realization that movies don't have to be all Hollywood and mass-marketed to suck.

CRITERION: Nagisa Oshima's "Empire of Passion"

Or "The Rickshaw Driver Always Rings Twice."



It's 1895 in Japan and Seki (Kazuko Yoshijuki) is a rural housewife in her mid-to-late 40s. Her husband, Gisaburo (Takahiro Tamura) is kind of a drunkard but he's alright and all. Toyoji (Tatsuya Fuji) is the hot gun ex-soldier loose in town, he kind of rapes the lady. But she, well, sort of likes it! Hell, wouldn't you, if you're in your late 40s and this sweet young firebrand is energetically giving it to you? So what comes next, logically? MURDER. You gotta kill the the old Gisaburo man ruining things. So they drop him down the well. But it's Japan, so ghosts are as common as pachinko parlors! Gisaburo's ghost starts popping up and even though this gruesome twosome tells everyone Gisaburo is taking a really long time in the bathroom, eventually a nosy detective figures out that the well over yonder smells really bad!

So, guilt, remorse, repressed eroticism, beautiful cinematography, and a truly gripping ghost story- what the Japanese call a "Kaidan"- this movie is so darned good and surprising that I could only give it a brief review on my way to discovering Oshima's international breakthrough, "In The Realm of the Senses".

The Antlers and Passion Pit

All right,
recently in Indie Land we've had
Deerhunter
Deerhoof
Deer Tick
Do we really need THE ANTLERS???
What is it with this fixation?

That said, this album is about as much fun as visiting a cancer patient. But we ALL have a cancer patient in the family, I'm realizing. So it does fit that one mood beautifully.
The trick about surviving Indie Land is that you need to balance downers like "Hospice" with falsetto-discoids like Passion Pit's "Manners".

But I want to talk to you about about an even bigger PIT of PASSION in the next entry.

Bill Pronzini's "Boobytrap"

Benoit Peeters posits that Tintin's global appeal is on his blankness: the round face, the dots-for-eyes, really, only the tangerine quiff makes him something other than a smiley. The Nameless Detective in Bill Pronzini's loooooong running series is similarly Everymanish, except one sees him age as the series progresses. I was so taken in by Pronzini's clear handling of the plot in "Boobytrap" that I kind of felt silly for not having guzzled all these novels in order ages ago. I have read Pronzini's work in anthologies through the years, was always pleased, and now I believe this merits closer inspection. If you want to read neat clean words being used correctly in the service of crime, Pronzini is the man.

Michael Farr's "The Adventures of Herge, Creator of Tintin" and Benoit Peeters' "Tintin and the World of Herge"

I recently had my Tintin cherry stabbed with a screwdriver by a mean person.
Me approaching a Connoiseur: "I've always appreciated Herge's simple designs and I love old-timey adventures in exotic lands so I'm surprised it's taken me so long to get to Tintin."
I got the coldest stare, the stare you give a retarded one-winged sea gull trying to mimick human speech before you kick it off the dock-post.
Connoiseur: "What did you just say?"
Me: "...I'm surprised it's taken me so long to get to Tintin?"
Connoiseur: "You mean Tahn-Tahn, right?"
Hmmm. I GUESS. I always said Tin-Tin. Like the metal. I never actually heard anyone bring up the lovable quiffed fellow in conversation. I SUPPOSE it's French so yeah, it might be pronounced Tahn-Tahn. But I grew up thinking of him in Spanish. Tin Tin!
This is kind of like being 30 and having your Disney mind torn by learning that, hmmm, it's actually pronounced MACK-KAY-MOOSE after all. World? Turned upside down.

But I've been wanting to learn more about Tahn-Tahn. These books were a good place to start- one is more about Herge's life, the other more about Herge's work. Neither is all that satisfactory. Just reverential teases.

Louise Erdrich's "The Plague of Doves"

ABOVE: Aaaah, a woman who writes! Hottest thing on Earth. After El Azizia desert in Lybia.


Native Americans have long needed to have a Gabriel Garcia Marquez of their own; Louise Erdrich might just be it, and "The Plague of Doves", about a lynching that shapes a town's entire century, is her "One Hundred Years of Solitude". It's not just that titular plague of doves, pummeling the North Dakotan town of Pluto as inexplicably as any of Marquez' South American Biblical rains. It's also Erdrich's ability to stand right on the hazy borderline between reservation magic and deadly small town pragmatism. I found the apparently disjointed segments absorbing. Erdrich is a careful assembler and finds new meaning on previously published pieces for the New Yorker, so that love stories and landscapes and character studies are quilted into a mystery that, like the best mysteries, is equal parts surprise and inevitability.

Read the original short story at the New Yorker's site.

Gene Wolfe's "The Wizard": Book 2 of "The Wizard Knight"

My reaction to "The Wizard" is sort of complex. Not the enthusiastic fantasy dork greeting "The Knight" got from me. I expected questions answered, a duality of tone, wizardry as opposed to chivalry. Instead it's exactly the same oblique narration as this is not a sequel but further chapters in a story that ends as mysteriously as it begins. For something billed as a duology, why would Sir Able let drop, two pages away from the book's conclusion, that many more exciting things hapenned then, but it's too much to write about, so he might get to it later?

One thing it does have, courtesy of Wolfe's Catholic faith: more direct, appetizing pictures of an afterlife (in Wolfe's Skai) than the evasive parables from the New Testament.

The Work of Mark Romanek in the Director's Label

It seems that Mark Romanek is the only music video director who's never dealt with Bjork! What gives?

ABOVE: "You will pay for that, Romanek!"

The man has had only mild success in long-range directorial efforts: "One Hour Photo" was not terrible, but subsequent Hollywood rumors have had him tied to (and sinking with) a series of go-nowhere films like James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces", or else dropping out of the director's chair. See "The Wolfman".
Still, Romanek gets a little candle in my director's pantheon for a series of attention grabbing images that deformed me during my teenage years.
Naturally, I must start with the way he pandered to my nascent prurient interests with Fiona Apple's twisting, emaciated hotness in "Criminal". I'm not sure what the big deal is now that the Internet desensitized me to anything short of elephant-on-antelope sex, but let me tell you, back in 1997, I would stay up late and wake up early to try and catch Fiona on MTV, just like a hormonal hawk eyeing a crazy, skinny bunny.

Fiona Apple - Criminal
Uploaded by hushhush112. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

Even earlier in my traumatic youth, I had freaked out to his Joel Peter Witkin-"inspired" video for Nine Inch Nail's "Closer". That whistling heart, the dried-up homunculus, the nippled microphone, the antlered skulls swinging like an Edgar Allan Poe pendulum, the rumors that in the unedited version there was SCARY NUDITY! That was ROCK, not these modern "musicians" with the identical "cool" hair-dos one can only tell apart by the Simpson sister they're dating. In my day, a band had to walk in the snow for three hours on their way to a gig, and it was mandatory that they get arrested TWICE before getting there!


But I digress.

Romanek would turn to Trent Reznor again, (the vampire-lord imagery of "The Perfect Drug"), and obliquely in this celebrated, imitated classic: Johnny Cash's last pang-to-the-heart cover of NIN's "Hurt".


Even more than the other suspects on the Directors Label series, Romanek works as a repository of classic photography books, one of his trademarks being black and white captures. In this category fall the videos for k.d. Lang's "Constant Craving", R.E.M.'s "Strange Currencies", No Doubt's "Hella Good", and my favorite, Jay-Z's "99 Problems", with its mysognistic rephrain I feel bad for loving:

"If you got girl problems/ I feel bad for you, son
I've got 99 problems/ but a bitch ain't one."



Marky's OTHER trademark is that he's the guy to go to if you have three million dollars to throw at three minutes of video. Take Madonna's expensive fantasies in "Bedtime Stories", or else his bid at money-wasting fame: the 7 million dollar video for Michael Jackson's "Scream."
Which you know, could have been made for 50 bucks by a savvy You Tube kid with a white room, a big TV screen, an "Akira" video, a tennis racket, and an old game of Pong. Ah, but those were the days of wine and roses and spaceships and a slightly smaller national deficit!

michael jackson & janet jackson scream
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May I Tell You About Karl May?

Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" is full of little popping moments of rewarding obscurity that do not detract from an audience's enjoyment. No way of saying this witout seeming arrogant, but I'm pretty sure I was the only person in my particular audience who got the Winnetou reference during the "King Kong" scene- the only person who not only knew who Karl May was, but had actually read a few Karl May novels in Spanish. I was actually amused and surprised that Tarantino knew. There aren't many May translations on major bookstores (to dust off his books now would be profitless and politically incorrect) so I wouldn't blame anyone of my generation for not knowing that he's one of the best-selling German writers of all time, a counterpart in American obscurity to the Italian Emilio Salgari. They were both crafters of exciting, exotic, barely researched stories about the Far West and the Far East that you should read when you're 13 and never after that. A German boy would have grown up with May's stories about the unlikely friendship between the proud Apache Winnetou and the pale-face Old Shatterhand, and would have been fascinated by May's description of Native raids and Kodyak bear attacks and convoluted weaponry (a revolver lover, May even designed weird-ass triple barreled shooters and the such).

Ammendment: Actually, there are some independent efforts to translate May's work online after all. Check it out, if intrigued by old Western tales. Yes, I know you're a Dear Imaginary Reader, Cormac McCarthy, who else would care?

Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds"

Who needed "Valkyrie" when we could just have "Inglourious Basterds"?


Quentin Tarantino knows that Jewish-centered conversational line about how if you had killed Hitler early on you would have saved six million people (How about a hell of a lot more than that? I would count German lives, French lives, Italian lives, American lives, Russian lives, Japanese lives). It's a hypothetical we pussy-foot around but Tarantino has never been one to pussy-foot, although the combination of the words "pussy" and "foot" would probably have him salivating a Niagara. If we take a masterpiece for its original definition, (the art work that you present as the summit of all you've learned as an artist, which crystalizes your ticks and oddities and influences while also being clearly in your own unique voice) this is QT's masterpiece.

It's ALL here:
The humorous, novelistic playing with fonts/ chapters/ subtitles.
The powerful eclectic score, here drawing from Western-spaghettis, there propelling us with a music video wonderfully timed to David Bowie's "Cat People."
REVENGE SERVED ICY COLD.
The extended, tensile, pop-savvy decoy dialogues that finally snap into violence.
Samuel L. Jackson's voice over!
And the foot fetishism wiggles its toes in our faces.

It's not that "IB" is unflawed: some of the talky scenes are indulgent, (although never uninteresting- the "King Kong" moment is priceless). It's also in look and content Tarantino's least "cool" movie, because he's finally opened up his world to a large multiplex audience that should GO WATCH THIS RIGHT NOW! It's populist, it's practically propaganda, but weird and dialogue-led as it is, it's a blockbuster at its core.
QT gives us a waif with a righteous grievance, (Melanie Laurent).

He gives us a comical action hero in Brad Pitt's scalp-for-a-scalp Jewish Avenger.

And, triumphantly, he gives us Hans Landa, the scene-stealing Nazi we HEART to hate (Christopher Waltz could have stolen the Vatican from under the Pope's nose if he had been born at a certain time.)

And then he gives to the citizens of the world the cathartic Grand Guignol revenge that they had been waiting for more than 60 years. That's about as much as one can expect to get from a movie, no?

CHAPTER 73: A LESSON ON BOTANY, or ALL ABOUT WEEDS

What just happened, happened on a Friday night, and we all know crazy things happen on Friday nights.
Now we move on to a Sunday, the day Jean Jacques Rousseau (played by George Carlin) has been psyched for, because his friend Jussieu is stopping by and they're going out to collect weeds. The role of Jussieu will be played by sitcom familiar Bob Newhart!

Rousseau has been blackening his shoes, and sweeping off random dust motes from his fancy gray coat, which annoys his wife Therese (played by Rhea Pearlman). It's just a botanist's holiday, why does everyone in the household have to dress up? Even Gilbert has been given new shoes and is dressed up to look almost arresting. He's a philosopher and not overly interested in appearances, but he wishes Andree could see him like this. Rousseau keeps on checking his hair, it's almost like he's on a date. Big time philosophers seldom get to encounter kindred minds: Rousseau is having a bromance with Jussieu.
"Look," he says, "there's Jussieu's carriage, isn't it pretty?"
His wife snorts: "If you knew how to schmooze like Voltaire your carriage would look good too!"
"Oh hush!"
Therese hisses: "You know it! Voltaire got the wits and you got the genital warts!"
Rousseau spits: "I hate Voltaire!"
Gilbert coughs awkwardly, and Monsieur Jussieu enters. He's also slicked up for his afternoon with Rousseau, wearing an Indian satin coat, a pale lilac vest and a big golden belt.
JUISSEU: "You, eh, you clean up good, old man."
ROUSSEAU: "Hey, I, you know, when we go out in the woods, it's a good time, you know? Away from the wives."
J: "Aren't you worried about the heat with that coat? And the falling leaves?"
R: "I know! And your Indian satin coat, the woods are damp, your stockings are going to get ruined."
J: "But we must look our gayest best when we commune with Mother Nature!"
THERESE: "Will you two knock it off and go bond in the woods or whatever! The estrogen is too strong around here!" She sweeps them onto Jussieu's carriage, which takes a mere hour or so to deposit them at the beautiful woods of Bougival. There's a nature trail built by kings for philosophers.
Rousseau and Juisseu arrive at this beautiful museum of nature where gigantic oaks and chestnut trees convolute themselves in fantastic forms. Sometimes branches strangle their own trees like pythons. Sometimes a leaning trunk looks like a bull dripping leaves on a butcher's block. And there's fruits descending from trees, apples and walnuts that are glossed over by the dark shade of summer.
Amidst nature's banquet, Gilbert is thinking: "Soooo. Andree is moving to the Trianon palace. Now I'll never see her showering."
Jussieu leads Rousseau and Gilbert through to a summit of a hill; from there Gilbert catches a glimpse of the tower of Luciennes Castle, where once Madame Dubarry, Chon and Viscount Jean hosted him. (He split unceremoniously.) There's a little shaking feeling flowing through his frame at the sight. He definitely doesn't want to go back to that pretty prison. A sudden suspicious feeling settles on him. Why are they here?
He looks ahead at Rousseau and Juisseu, but they're all like: "Isn't that the best Lepopodium ever? But of course, it doesn't hold a candle to this brilliant specimen of lysimachia fenella. Oh, and look at that planlago monanthos! Pluck it, please, pluck it once for me!"
"I'm getting hungry," Gilbert says. "What exactly am I doing here again?"
Rousseau says: "Why, you're accompanying me, as Jussieu insisted you should!"
Jussieu says: "Yes, and it's well that we should come together, because I see yonder a small little kiosk! With sodas and refreshments and the such! We HAVE to go there! It's part of the plan!"
"The plan?" Says Gilbert.
"There's a plan?" Says Rousseau.
Jussieu blushes: "Well, no, this has not been planned by Monsieur De Sartines the Commisioner of Police at ALL! HOWEVER, isn't it convenient that there is a beautiful little kiosk in the middle of the woods? It's almost as if it's waiting for us!"

Gilbert squints. There is indeed a beautiful, recently created little house in the middle of the woods advertising all sorts of wonderful smelling pastries and fruits and no one knows what it's doing there. It might as well be made of gingerbread. Out on the front there's a banner: "50% discount for Botanists and Philosophers!"

Juisseu says: "Well, isn't that fortuitous? We definitely have to go in there! And you, Gilbert. You too. Step right in. It's going to be FUN."

Terry Goodkind's "The Law of Nines"

ABOVE: Terry Goodkind. Yes, remember ponytails?

Terry Goodkind's "The Law of Nines" is an annoying book not only because it is overlong, badly written and painfully didactic (ALL Terry Goodkind books are overlong, badly written and painfully didactic) but this one adds deceptive advertising to the list of sins. "The Law of Nines" trumpets itself as an entity away from Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" series. There is no mention of any previous books in blurbs or jackets, and it's wrapped to seem like a "Da Vinci Code"-meets-"The Matrix" type thriller.
Lies! It's a mundane extension of Goodkind's allegedly concluded series. If you were a fantasy nerd at some point in the early 2000s (not me!) you've stumbled across "The Sword of Truth", (it's now turned into a decent-looking Sam Raimi-produced TV series called "The Legend of the Seeker".) Goodkind is the Marquis de Sade of epic fiction, adding leather, whips and genital torture to the dungeons and dragons, but after some decent initial efforts he ran his franchise to the ground with books that were big enough to keep doors open but took you nowhere.
That's "The Law of the Nines" in a nutshell. It's an average chase thriller where the bad guys aren't Nazi/Commie/Terrorists but instead come from "some other world"- a world merely hinted at. Now, fans KNOW this world is the one extensively described elsewhere, but here it's just a frustrating reference. It's almost like being told that your novel is tangential to much more exciting novels you're not ready to know about. THANKS, dude. Here's the plot: On his 27th birthday Alex Rahl meets a beautiful kickass angel called Jax sent to protect him from assassins; they run and kill, run and kill, run and kill. Interspersed throughout are Goodkind's trademark libertarian lectures. (I'll spare you: "Religion and art are for pussies, science is okay, military science is best because we must have guns to protect outselves against marauding guerrillas... or to start marauding guerrillas. Whichever." Enlightened yet?)
One thing I will say for Goodkind, redundant cliche-lover as he is: he makes 500 pages go down faster and smoother than most people. I wondered why it was I could finish this in two or three sittings, while better books of similar length can hold me back for three or four days. The answer is that thick as it is, "The Law of Nines" is pretty void of THINGS that can slow you down; it's a novella bloated with "magic" air.

John Hamburg's "I Love You, Man"

As a guy with lots of female friends but without a raping-pillaging-and-beer-chugging best buddy, I couldn't relate more to "I Love You, Man". Nothing's amiss in this Apatow product- I don't even know if Judd Apatow had anything to do with this one and at this point it doesn't even matter. Paul Rudd is still wearing the same shirt from "Role Models", Jason Segel has the same Rush obsession (and drum-kit) his character Nick drooled over in "Freaks and Geeks". The problem, as it is, is that there's no problem. It's a comfortable movie, it feels lived-in. These people do this so well because they have done it many, many times before.
In other words: The bromance thing? It's getting broring.

The Vaselines' "Enter the Vaselines"

Most people of my generation come to the Vaselines...

Wait, hold on, hahaha, I said "come" and "Vaseline" in the same sentence! *ROFLMAO like I'm 12*
That pretty much honors the sense of humor that permeated the Vaselines' small body of gloriously melodic pop-rock. They had a silly sense of sexuality and an innocent knack for outraging disarmingly- they're the kind of band that will trap you in a happy chorus for a sentiment like: "Sexy Jesus does it good/ Sexy Jesus has some wood." (Not an actual lyric by the Vaselines, but it could have been.) Let me start again.


Most people of my generation come to the Vaselines, as they do to the Meat Puppets, via Kurt Cobain's selfless proselitizing. Just because he couldn't handle his heroin doesn't mean the man didn't know music, and he paid homage through Nirvana's covers of "Son of a Gun", "Molly's Lips" and the Unplugged version of "Jesus Wants me for a Sunbeam". (Detour: Listen to that cover- as usual when confronted with Cobain's work I get that inexplicable feeling of awe, of being in the presence of THE LAST ACTUAL ROCK STAR. I can't tell you what IT is, but he had IT, and no personality in rock music has come since to thrill me in the same larger-than-life key. I'm not rushing to read Chris Martin's biography or take a look at his diaries, you know?)

From 1986 to 1990 the Vaselines lubricated the aural orifices of a lucky few...
Hahahaha, *giggles giggles* I'm sorry, I just can't help it! They turn me into a giddy teenager discovering sex and rock! You know that Flaming Lips song, right? "She Don't Use Jelly"... she uses Vaseline!

One last try:
From 1986 to 1990 the Vaselines lubricated the aural orifices of a lucky few. The interplay between Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee made for lots of joyful memorable fun ditties that you need to go discover now. "Enter the Vaselines" is all you need to get both the great singles (all the above noted plus "You Think You're a Man", "Rory Rides Me Raw", "Monster Pussy", "Teenage Superstars", "Sex Sux", "The Day I Was a Horse") and the meandering experiments of a smart lo-fi band that owed much to the Velvet Underground and was somehow capable of leaving a sonic imprint on bands as diverse as Nirvana, The Cranberries, and Belle and Sebastian. Go get/ buy/ download/steal "Enter the Vaselines" now, thank me never, don't worry, and do it on your way to see "Ponyo". (I know you already saw "District 9", that movie needs no further hype. From a general consensus, it looks pretty darned good.)
Ok, you Son of a Gun Dear Imaginary Reader, hear this one:

Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo"

Hayao Miyazaki is another one of those people who, if they came up to me with violent intentions, I would be all like: "Oh, please, sir, not in the face! Punch me in the stomach so you don't bruise your marvelous hands!" Can do no wrong.

"Ponyo" isn't one of his best movies, which is to say it's merely great. Thematically simple, and with a deliberately pastelish, child-like simplicity, "Ponyo" re-tells the story of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid", putting more of an emphasis in innocent child-like love than in the supressed sexual politics of the original. I've brought my HCA obsession up before, but I recently had a conversation with my brilliant cousin about "The Little Mermaid". She understandably thinks "The Little Mermaid" is so much fairy-tale, glitter-in-the-eyes bull about girls falling in love with statue-like but moneyed handsome princess and killing themselves over it, but if I read my Hans Christian Andersen correctly, (and if Brian Weiss is right, I do), she's got it all wrong. The writer is clearly in the gender-reversed role of the mermaid himself: Hans was an artsy, weird-looking broke-ass writer type who probably tried real hard to impress a beautiful, statuesque, classy gal who was totally not "part of his world", and he felt like a fish out of water at her fancy parties, probably couldn't even talk around her, she ignored him, he felt like he'd died, and wrote a cathartic story about it. C'est tout. I wouldn't know anything about that, I always get high score marks from the girlies.
"The Little Mermaid" is a great tale in that, like many great tales, you can see what you want in it. Miyazaki, as usual, sees elemental ecological conflict, earth and water out of balance, and love and understanding as the only possible way out. He loads all that on a CUUUUUUTE story about a fish-girl, Ponyo, who falls in love with a little boy called Sosuke. Ponyo struggles to be like Sosuke and Sosuke must pass the test of love, which is, quite simply, having the courage to accept the responsibility of loving ALL of the evolving and dissolving Ponyos: the little tad-pole-like thing in his bowl, the fat blob that stumbles on chicken legs towards him while the storm threatens outside, and, yes, Ponyo as the real pretty girl he's been able to see all along.
It's fucking cute, ok??? That's what love is. Loving through it all. Even if your beloved is presently gasping for air and looking like a little fishy-face in your hands, you have to lean over and kiss them and let them know you know you still can see what nobody else can.

I love how the chick who preludes this trailer mispronounces every single Japanese word; makes me feel worldly for being able to pronounce "Sosuke" correctly.

The Work of Stephane Sednaouie in the Directors Label

If there has been a constant in my exploration of the Directors Label, it's Bjork.
It's amazing how she is a sort of central muse to people eager to work with artists and visuals, and I think it's because there's no one as pixie-ishly eager to discard, or I suppose "stretch", her humanity. Watch Stephane Sednaouie's take on Bjork's writhing body in the video for "Big Time Sensuality".

Sednaouie actually DATED Bjork, whatever that means, I can no more imagine "dating Bjork" than "boxing with a hummingbird". Their video for "Possibly Maybe" gives you plenty of clues as to why they broke up.

Beaumont and Fletcher's "The Maid Tragedy"

Yo, yo, yo, Beaumont and Fletcher coming through with some original Baby Mama Drama! It's like, there's going to be a wedding in Rhodes, a'ight? But the guy, Amintor, has to drop his shorty, Aspatia, right before the wedding and instead they hook him up with a new wifey, Evadne. Why? Because the King be like: "No, my underling, trust, this Evadne here is the one you gotta marry." Now, Amintor is all cool with the switch-a-bitch 'cause he don't wanna mess with the King, you know, you gotta respect, and besides Evadne is a bangin' honey, and her brother Melantius is his homey from way back when they were both tiny thugs. But Aspatia is all trippin' 'cause she got dumped, and her pops Calianax hates Melantius 'cause he thinks Melantius ain't paying props to the O.G.s, and Melantius is like: "Old man, you ain't got a pimp cane, that's a walker. You better back it up to the nursing home and take your crazy daughter Aspatia with you."
Now, here's where it gets all knotty-knotty: what Amintor don't know is that the King has already been all up on his new wife's coochie coochie and left a little baby-sized gift there for him, know what I mean? That's why he was trying to get the ho located, so this subject gonna raise the King's child unwittingly. So on his honeymoon Amintor's all playin' the fool and being like: "Oh baby baby let me get some," and his girly Evadne is all like: "Nuh-uh, you ain't getting none tonight or ever!" And he's like: "I know it's your first time and all, sweet thang, so I'm gonna slide in smooth." Evadne: "My first time? Fool, I'm PREGNANT with the King's baby! He just dropped this hot potato on your dumb ass! And you better pretend like we ARE doing it and all's copacetic, 'cause otherwise I'll tell everyone in court about your baby dick!"
That's some tough stuff, right? But WAIT, 'cause things ain't even cranked up yet. See, even though the King signed away his favorite poonany, he's all like 'roid-rage and jealous and don't like it that Evadne married someone else, so Evadne's brother Melantius is all like: "Sistah, you gotta come clean and do right and stab that punk-ass King in the kidney." But then remember how Aspatia got dumped? She went all tranny and dressed up like Melantius and tries to shiv Amintor, but Amintor knives her Aspatian ass good thinking she be a man, so she's dead, just while Evadne is off slicing at the King, and then Evadne ODs on pills, and then Amintor busts a cap on his own thick skull, and then Melantius is about to eat a grenade when someone off the stage is like: "Holy shit we're running out of body bags", and Melantius is all of a sudden like: "Nah." 'Cuz he's figuring: "WTF... Why didn't the King just admit he knocked up the bitch? He could afford the alimony! Now everyone's dead for NOTHING! FUCKING DRAMA!"

Lucio Fulci's "Zombie"

Lucio Fulci is a great Italian director whose name you should hurl into any conversation about Italian "cinema" if you want things to get fun. Seriously, if for some reason anyone mentions the "Italian filmmaking industry"- hahahahaha, that's a funny combination of words- just be like: "Oh, I love Italian directors! Fellini! Bertolucci! Visconti! Sergio Leone! And, of course, his banner waving at the top of that evolutionary ladder, Lucio Fulci!"

If you want to know Italian horror you have to make it past a roomful of Dario Argento's vividly colored barb-wire, through a monk's cell decorated with Mario Bava's tormented Catholic imagery, and you'll emerge on the maggot-speckled courtyard of Lucio Fulci's "Zombie". (Or, technically, "Zombi 2", as the movie was titled upon release to suggest an association with George A. Romero's "Dawn of the Dead"). If you were ever drawn to the horror section of your disreputable local VHS store at some point in the past, I know you've seen this horrifying cover:

It's a horrible movie, I mean what kind of a world could have produced such haphazard editing, cornea-insulting cinematography, and sub-porn acting?!? The touted gory scenes are few and far between and the zombies seem to have died of loneliness 'cause there's maybe three of them. It does have one ridiculously random scene in which a topless diver does the lambada with a shark. The shark is not a zombie, and despite the heroin-induced vacant stare, neither is the actress, so I have no clue why this is here. It should be noted the movie stars "Tisa Farrow" who I'm guessing is Mia Farrow's defective Italian cousin.

so sowwy for apparent slackness!

Dear Imaginary Reader:
My laptop has diarrhea, hence the slow posting. I have lots of new thing to tell you about, about zombies, virgins, mermaids and other mythical creatures. Bear with me.

John Hughes' "Uncle Buck"

"We need boys so they can grow up, get married, and turn into shadows."

The ghost of absent suburban parenthood hangs over John Hughes' script for "Uncle Buck". Hahaha, no, really, it's about a loutish fat guy (John Candy) getting into funny messes while handling a bratty teenage girl who feels neglected, (Jean Louisa Kelly, late, embarrassingly, from the shitcom "Yes, Dear") as well as two cute kids who cuss for effect (one of them being Gabby Hoffman, the girl from "Sleepless in Seattle", and the other being Hughes' blond familiar Macaulay Culkin).

I've been aching to watch a John Hughes movie ever since his death as a tribute, but maybe I'm too familiar with the really good ones, ("Pretty in Pink", "Sixteen Candles", "The Breakfast Club", "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", "Planes, Trains and Automobiles", and "Home Alone", all required American viewing) And "Curly Sue" is not necessarily giving me the siren call. Luckily, Netflix Instant Watching made the decision for me, their only available choices being "Dennis the Menace" and "Uncle Buck". "Uncle Buck" it was.
Future anthropologists could construct a mythical '80s America solely out of the blueprint provided by Hughes' oeuvre. Like many a Hughes movie, "Uncle Buck" is not exactly well directed or even technically "good", many a moment is shoddy and badly timed, but it's GREAT in that it offers a safely crass, funny, Candy-fueled trip into the last century, a far-off time when American wealth was taken for granted and a 40-year old fat, middle class man could BE fat and middle class without actually having a steady job.
*sigh*
May people be allowed to direct popular comedies for Heaven's big cinemaplex.

What Makes "Mad Men" great.

Dear Imaginary Reader:
I've been more than a bit stressed with family situations and less pop-culture absorbent than usual. Be patient, flee not this magical ship that is "Hallucina"- (yes, I looked at the counter and there IS at a noticeable drop in the insomniacs and tranny truckers from Minesotta that constitute my main readership, but let those inconstant fools do what they will! You won't abandon me, don't you?)
A small little comment on why specifically I love "Mad Men", other than thinking that January Jones is the third most adorable woman named ever after a month (after Spiderman's Aunt May, and this chick at my strip club called November Rain). Take this line from episode 10 of Season 2. A character has to go to Pasadena, and someone else mockingly derides: "What's in Pasadena?" "It has jet propulsion labs. And Ray Bradbury." Someone else chuckles. That's that.

Ok. What's so very awesome about this?
I love Ray Bradbury, and even *I* don't entirely get it. Ray Bradbury is famously tied to his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. At the time, he WAS living in Los Angeles. So he must have been there giving book readings, probably for "Something Wicked Way This Comes". Never mind that a shockingly large number of new watchers wouldn't know who Ray Bradbury is, what is the semi-informed viewer going to conclude from the whole exchange? The Ray Bradbury fan is excited to stop by, and the others think he's probably pretty dorky, but not in a hopeless way.
Still, WHAT'S SO AWESOME ABOUT THIS?
Do you KNOW how many shows would have handled the same moment and gone like:
1: "I get to go to Pasadena, California!"
2: "What's there that's so exciting?"
1: "Oh, nothing."
3: "He's probably going to stop to see Ray Bradbury!"
2: "Who, the flash-in-the-pan science fiction author who's living there? Paul, you're such a dork! Five years from now no one's going to be reading that "Fahrenheit 451" book or whatever it's called!" *wink at the camera*

Terry Moore's "Strangers in Paradise" Pocketbook Volume 3

Well, it's the third volume. By now I really really REALLY care about Katchoo and Francine and even David, hopeless doof that he is, and OH MY GOD it's so ridiculous they're just little ink drawings but I just want them all to be happy? Please... Terry? Paradise?

You Can Just Call it An Interruption.

YOU CAN JUST CALL IT AN INTERRUPTION
By Hansel Castro

1
Finally my girlfriend said: “You have to get rid of it. You just have to. Because it’s going to kill us, John. But it can’t be because I say so. It has to come from you. I have to feel like it’s coming from YOU.”

“Ok, ok, ok,” I said. “If you want.”

Her face was persistent, too close to mine: “No, no, don’t make me out to be the bitch here. I’ve been the one working her ass off, and yeah, you know what, it IS about money, do you want me to lie? It’s run out, and you can’t just sit there and cash unemployment forever and I’m going crazy doing overtime, and baby, we cannot afford this. Not now. Not together. You have to get rid of it.”

I guess my knees were rattling a little against hers. I tried not to look at her face too much: “How do I do it?”

She hugged me, relieved, almost pulled me off my chair. “It doesn’t have to be a big scary thing. You know my friend Mary from college? Don’t get mad, but I’ve been talking to her about our problem. She went through the same thing. I had to ask, because she knows a place, and she went there, and she says they’re experts and it’s all clean and not as horrible as they make it sound in the news. And look at her now she’s fine, and happy. She says that now she never even thinks about it, that most of the time it’s just an embarrassing little thing, like a bad haircut that you just had to get FIXED. She went back to school right after, she’s even talking about starting a business, John. Imagine, Mary running anything! And you remember what a mess she was before!”

“A mess like me?”

“I love you, baby,” she said. “You’re my mess. But…”

“But you want me to clean up or something.”

She allowed herself a shy smile, she’d made all her points: “I’ll drive you there?”

I said I just needed the phone and the address. I would make the appointment myself. Something like that, a man has to go through it alone.

2

The building itself sat squat and orange like a brick turd on the sun. I walked the perimeter twice, told myself it was just a matter of stretching my ankles, I wasn’t scared. This is still America, the land of choice and freedom and harsh decisions and redemption. It was my right. I saw a girl walk out of the clinic, early 20s, maybe a Sylvia Plath perv. Her hair had a pink stripe she was already regretting. We made eye contact. We are not murderers, not exactly, but there’s camaraderie in guilt. She dropped her cigarette: “You going in?”

“Yeah. How was it?”

“Oh, she’s good, the doctor. Nina. She talks you through the thing, so you understand that it’s the best decision, and really who the fuck was I kidding? I’m not the type. Why bring this thing out into the world if you know it’s going to come out all wrong and retarded and not go anywhere? I mean, maybe someday I can go through with it. But I’m too young. I can’t deal. And I was so worried about it looking all deformed and having no conclusion, but it’s best to not even think about it, you know? Now I can be like, an Internet investor or something! I’m thinking about finances for the first time in my life!”

I coughed , meaning to interrupt: “So, it was painless for you?”

The Sylvia Plath type shook her head, then nodded, then looked at the door of the clinic: “It doesn’t hurt that much. It’s different for everyone. You’re killing a part of you, you know? But if you can face that, it’s all good. It’s between you and God. He understands.”

Maybe she was more like the Emily Dickinson type after all. Hopeful. I don’t know. I was stressing out.

3

Inside, the clinic looked antiseptic, littered with pamphlets. What you would expect, condescending tales about how bad parenting and seductive MFA programs sometimes put you in a rough place, nothing leaning too much to the left or the right. The doctor, Nina Eldman, was nordically beautiful, a reassuring blonde gal in a white coat, and she had a diagnostician’s gift for omniscience. I was instantly in love. God, she knew me better than my girlfriend ever could, looked me up and down, bit her lower lip and said:

“Seven months?”

“Something around there.”

“And the characters started feeling wrong around the sixth month?”

“No, I…” I sighed. “It’s the way things are out there, it’s like the world is full of vampires, and me and my girlfriend, well, ok, it was her, more than me, she just made me realize we can’t compete against that. It just wasn’t going to happen for us. I was wasting my time. I was writing a gentle story about a man who ‘s trying to reconnect with his dying grandfather in Key West…”

Nina cut in: “Oh my God, you didn’t have a chance. What were you thinking? Yes, there’s so many vampires out there, Jesus Christ, it’s so depressing, it’s like everyone collectively gave up on imagination. Or else it’s wizards. Well, doesn’t it make you realize it’s all worthless? All that WRITING? CREATING?.”

I sighed: “Of course. Like every novelist, I’ve had my doubts. I mean, that dying grandfather in Key West….”

“BORING! Who cares? How many characters were in your novel?”

I said: “Well, at first it was going to be just two, Jimmy the Second and his grandfather James the Elder, and they were out on a yacht on Key West for a fishing weekend, and the grandfather would tell great tall tales to his grandson and they would all be very nostalgic and although the two generations would have all sorts of conflict eventually they would realize that all along they... What?”

Nina put an index to her temple: “Look! My finger! A gun! Bang! Suicide would be more amusing than this aborted attempt at cashing in on… what… Jimmy Buffet fans who can read? Reading books is over. Face it. No one wants to talk about it, but it’s the ugly truth. Here we’re just nipping things at the bud. Did you bring the disc like you were told?”

“The file? Yeah,” I handed her the disc. “I have like 125 pages so far. It’s all there.”

She inspected the disc like it was a pastry. “This is the only copy, right? You deleted all others.”

“Yes.”

“Seven months and only 125 pages?”

“I’m a perfectionist. Or I mean, I thought I was. Lots of re-writing. But well, obviously, I just want to move on, and accept that I’m not ready to be a writer, and maybe the market…”

“There is no market! And you have nothing to say! God, ANOTHER story about how human beings are flawed and yet magical and how life is full of beauty and/or ugliness and it all concludes in death but little bits of love and actual human connections might somehow save us all… BULLSHIT. Let’s face it, John. You were just going to make your poor girlfriend sacrifice the best years of her life on your retrograde masturbatory dream of “being a writer”. So last century! Can you imagine the suffering that girl is going through? Do you know how embarrassing it is to have you there all bulging with your pregnant little fantasies of characters and worlds and stupid things that never happened? When you should be a MAN and get a real JOB.”

I started crying: “I know! I know! That’s why I came here! I want to get it over with! I just want this novel to die! I want it off my head! But it’s all I can think about! I have dreams about it! The stupid grandfather and the stupid grandson and I just feel it’s important somehow but it’s not going to happen and no one cares and I’m worthless and…” Yes, sobbing sobbing sobbing, and she hugged me against the whiteness of her Alpine breasts.

I felt so close to Doctor Eldman then, like she had understood even more about me than there was to understand, like she had thrown open doors into rooms I had never acknowledged. I smiled bravely: “So. This is how it’s done. I give you that defective, inert, erratic half attempt at a first novel, and you talk me down, and then you put the file away in a folder with all the other abortions. Do you browse through them? Is there an archive where you keep them? I mean, is there a way to retrieve them should someone reconsider?”

“No,” she said. She brought the disc up between us, and smiled, and cracked it with a flick of the wrist, and threw the two halves on a garbage bin. “Ooops!”

“What the fuck! My novel!”

“It’s gone! Forever!”

“Oh my God, I thought you would keep the file..!”

“Naaaaah,” she smiled impishly. “Like a band-aid, rip it off, right? It’s gone, hon. You’re free. Fuck the novel. New horizon. Be a doctor, a lawyer, a janitor, recover your MANHOOD for God’s sakes, stop making up imaginary situations. Deal with REALITY and LIFE!”

I felt so free as she said, I smiled, and chuckled, and then I laughed. It was true. I mean, I was like a new person, Jimmy the Second and James the Elder seemed like the stupidest things to rub my fingerprints away on. God, typing on a keyboard, like some sort of automaton, pecking at letters, dreaming up people that didn’t exist, Jesus Christ, how could I have spent so much time devoted to making something up, when I could have been just reaching out to this beautiful blonde doctor who grinned at me.

“You saved me, Nina!”

She winked at me: “I know, I’m good at what I do. I love my job. You know, I receive death threats everyday, people say I’m killing imagination, I’m stopping literacy, but that’s not what I’m about. AT ALL. I like books. I just think it takes a special kind of person to make them, someone who’s actually ready, you know, a GOOD WRITER! I’m just saying some things are not meant to be.”

“You are a genius,” I said. “ You really saw through to me and understood me like no one else ever has. No, not even my girlfriend, and this is why, I know it might seem inappropriate and I don’t even know what the clinic’s policy is on this, but I really felt a connection between us… Can I ask you out?”

I could see a sadness descend upon her: “Hmmm. No, I don’t think so. You misunderstood something. Oh no. You’re one of those, aren’t you? Can’t keep your brain shut. I should have known. You’ll be back here six months from now with some new half-baked novel. John. I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to date patients.”

“Of course not,” I said.

4

The girl with the pink-striped hair was still there as I ran out of the clinic and she yelled at me: “I lied! It hurts like a motherfucker!"

Gene Wolfe's "The Knight": Book 1 of "The Wizard Knight"

"The best detective is a child detective"
The Go-Betweens, "I Need Two Heads"

Sir Able of the High Heart is a child living inside the powerful body of a Knight, and it is with the eyes of a child caught in a double life that we must uncover the wonderful alternate world that Gene Wolfe has given us in "The Knight". "Wonderful" is not here one of those reviewer's adjectives we keep in bulging bags by the side of the keyboard (are we going for "staggering", "eye-opening", or "devastating" this time?) Nah, I MEAN wonderful, like a chest full of magical objects. Here be dragons and giants and aelfs and dryads and all the fantasy tropes renewed by the curious voice of a boy faking it as a man, observing and enduring plenty, but not always UNDERSTANDING. "The Knight" is not as disorienting as, say, "The Sound and the Fury", (this IS still rip-roaring fantasy) but Sir Able's dips into unreliable narration force the reader into clue-seeking and detection, so that what could have been a familiar Arthurian world becomes unique, one you investigate as much as enjoy. It can seem an obtuse tale of knighthood and chivalry built to seduce a Quixote into madness, but it's also a mysterious, singular book.
WELL, not THAT singular, since it has a sequel/ completion, "The Wizard." Jumping right into that.

Spider Manga

I flipped through this for the novelty factor. "Spiderman and Family" (reprinted in the U.S. as "Spiderman J: Japanese Knights") gives your friendly neighborhood Spiderman a home close to Godzilla's, turns his beloved Mary Jane into a punky tween called Jane-Marie, throws in a trench-coated detective known as Flynn, and gives the whole mess a childish look reminiscent of Osamu Tezuka's "Astroboy" mixed in with "Yugi-Oh!". Lest that entice any otaku, I can't help but address the fact that Spider-man himself now looks like... someone else... and I couldn't quite conjure who until I recalled Spidey's origins as a wrestler. Then it all came clear. Spiderman J? Looks suspiciously like Strongbad.

"Mad Men" Season 2

I know you don't read Reader's Digest, any more than you would the Saturday Evening Post, (and you shouldn't), but I'm fond of its quaint coziness and its elderly-enhanced stories. Here's the wherefore of my nostalgia: Growing up in Cuba, I found a stash of pre-Castro Reader's Digest magazines that my grandfather, a proud subscriber, held onto despite the fact that they "endorsed a counterrevolutionary life-style." He kept them in boxes until the 1980s- when time was ripe for my grubby hands to discover the wonders of Madison Avenue Advertising Circa 1958. Pan-Am! Maytag! Westinghouse! Maidenform! Buick! Smith-Corona! The names, detached from the things I couldn't actually purchase, seemed to me inchantations, passwords to some severed, magical past. If those idealized images were a strain on the American psyche, imagine the sci-fi tinge they took on for little Cuban me! Did this awesome civilization ever exist? Did they eat those yummy roasted ducks right out of their new General Electric ovens in a recession-less Wonderland? Did they follow their banquets with a fresh, life-saving Coca-Cola or did they opt for Alka-Seltzer?

The second season of AMC's "Mad Men" has the same nostalgic, transporting effect on me as those magazines I masochistically ogled as a kid, ("If McDonald's served so many millions, why couldn't I have one?!?"). Never mind that "Mad Men" is one of the best-written TV shows EVER. My fascination with it can be reduced to a simple: "I Like How It Looks." Like Todd Haynes' "Far From Heaven" (and dealing with the same issues, without winking as much), "Mad Men" is fetishistic about every tie, hair-style, lamp, chair, and every lipstick shade on Christina Hendricks' face. It's 1962 the way 1962 wished it could be.

Like those darling families in the ads, these people are cracking under the weight of perfection. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) only LOOKS like the perfect man this time around; his wife Betsy (January Jones) stops combing her hair and starts destroying kitchen chairs; Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) has to deal with pressure from the local priest(Colin Hanks), who's after her advertising know-how (or is that what they called it in the '60s?). Assorted other members of Sterling Cooper are peeing themselves, divorcing their wives, or breaking down over Marilyn Monroe's death. Joan, my favorite character this season, is particularly shocked by Marilyn's sudden exit: she understands how a woman can be trapped by good looks, and we watch as her fierce intelligence is put down again and again by men who stare lecherously at her but somehow fail to see her at all.

GO WATCH THIS!


ABOVE: There! It's me, made a Mad Man, between Joan and Peggy! Ok, it looks nothing like me, what did you think this was, Sim 3?

Jean Pierre Melville (and Jean Cocteau's) "Les Enfants Terribles"

ABOVE: It's less sexy in the movie.

French people of a certain generation still refer to Jean Cocteau as THE Poet. I can only think of Walt Whitman receiving an equally reverent reception in the U.S.. Cocteau's secret was not only that he could turn a nifty epigram, but that he knew how to, in advertising parlance, "diversify": his line drawings rivaled Picasso's, his novels were scandalous best-sellers, and no other poet before or since left as big a mark on cinema, not just with his own movies, but with scripts that helped launch the careers of other directors, like Robert Bresson's with "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" and Jean Pierre Melville's with "Les Enfants Terribles."
Both those movies are plenty flawed, although "Les Enfants Terribles" is far superior as a sort of perverse reversion of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet": the lovers are starcrossed not because they belong to warring families, but because they belong to the same family. Still the tragic denouement is similarly full of poison and suicide and all the other ridiculous outbursts of desire whenever it meets with "things that must not be said."

ABOVE: It's a HELL of a lot less sexy in the movie.

The problem with siblings Lisbeth (a movie-bearing Nicole Stephane) and Paul (ridiculous-in-little-boy-shorts Edouard Dermithe) is that they're equally horrid and perfect for each other, but because they can't get it on, they must torture each other (and the viewer) with little macabre games of who-can-brow-beat-best. If ever a movie endorsed incest this side of "Star Wars", it was this little cloisterfuck of French desire. You just want them to get it on, because the suppressed hinting seems like a far worse sin. The room in wich the siblings are confined after an androgynous schoolboy sends a Cupid-like snowball into frail Paul's chest is sort of like the one in Bernardo Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris", except that desire is NOT expressed here, but rather diverted and condensed into a black hole of nastiness, while Bach and Vivaldi punctuate things like there's suspense afoot. Lisbeth and Paul pounce at each other and the unlucky people who gravitate into their misery, but what might have been taboo-fun is weighed down by the fact that the movie will end in the melodrama we know Cocteau favored. It's almost more interesting to imagine Melville and Cocteau conflicting over lines and casting and staging- Melville must have felt more than a little chained by The Poet's nudging drawings.

This is one of those movies that's far more important for its contextual influence than for how interesting it is to today's audiences. Or at least me, who never had a sister about whom I could repress naughty thoughts.

It Really All Does Come Together.

The Go-Betweens didn't always go for love pop; they could be quite somber, and I have long suspected that the mini-chamber drama of "The Clarke Sisters" is a tribute to David Bowie's "The Bewlay Brothers". If you ever so desire I can guide you through the sonic and structural similarities. Interestingly, it took that Bowie song to make me realize that Neil Gaiman's nihilistic "Sandman" character "The Corinthian" is an homage to Alan Moore's similarly nihilistic "Watchmen" character "The Comedian." How so? This "Bewlay Brothers" line:
"He's Chameleon, Comedian, Corinthian and Caricature."
See?
My theory, not endorsed by Gaiman, but I think he might like it.

Whatever I Have is Yours and It's Right Here- The Go-Betweens

"Don't believe what you've heard/
Faithful's not a bad word."
The Go-Betweens, "Bachelor Kisses"



Ah, mourned be the Go-Betweens! In a world in which all things were correct and none had the misfortune of being upside down, (like Australia), Grant McLennan's death in 2006 would have achieved at least a third of the press attention granted to Michael Jackson's. Co-writing with Robert Forster, McLennan turned out dozens of fantastic songs that skewed close to pop bliss. More melodic than the Pixies, less mopey than the Cure, less experimental than the Talking Heads, The Go-Betweens are bitter-sweetness in the 3 minute range, and if they're relatively unknown to you, that just means today you've discovered a batch of musical accompaniment for your rainy days of dejection and rejection.



Another song with Ponies!!! The video is UBER-GOOFY, but "Right Here" is wired to the nervous system- if you don't smile a little, you don't deserve pop music.
"It rains for days
So you stay inside
And lock your door.
Crying all the time
Crying for ...
You don’t know what for.

You say your’re undone by his kiss,
But don’t you think
That for once in your life
It should be like this?

CHORUS:
Your hands are tired,
Your eyes are blue.
I’m keeping you right here, right here, right here.
Whatever I have is yours
And it’s right here.

Climb aboard my pony
Now you’ve been thrown.
Get back in the saddle
And let it be known
That you’re made of steel.
Don’t you think that
For once in your life
You should be made to feel?

CHORUS

I know you’re 32
But you look 55.
You walk around with your eyes wide open
But you’re barely alive.
You say you’ve lost your touch
But don’t you think
That for once in your life
You could walk without a crutch?"



"But I didn't know someone could be so lonesome
I didn't know a heart could be tied up and held for ransom."
"Bye Bye Pride"

I meant to write so much more to convey to you how great they are, but I just <3 too much for elaborate, distanced critiques. I just bow to the music. Seek out the inexplicably discontinued "Best Of: 1978-1990"- no risk of filler there- and while not everything may quite reach Lennon-MCartney status, if you do not immediately react with pleasure to "Bachelor Kisses," "Streets of Your Town", and "Bye-Bye Pride," I suggest you bring it up to your psychiatrist, and may God help you.


"Don't the sun look good today?
But the rain is on its way...
"Streets of Your Town"

Yelp is On the Way

Ooooh, my friend Maria was just profiled in the Miami Herald for the excellent, demi-goddess work she does running the Yelp website, where I ocassionally post reviews. (It's hilarious to hear her described as "Brickell Woman" in the headline.) Everything it says is true, Maria is Miami's 411 in girl form. Tip of the hat, mademoiselle- and until the next glorious Yelp event.

Frank Miller's "The Spirit"

An obvious whodunit. Who killed "The Spirit"? It was writer/director Frank Miller, on the big screen, with a movie that has absolutely no intention of honoring Will Eisner's comic books. These are scenes deleted from "Sin City", that's all. There is no interest whatsoever in bringing Will Eisner's colors or style or plots or dialogue or even characters to the big screen. It's befuddling, it's like someone decided to "honor" "Calvin and Hobbes" by making a movie that looks like "Dilbert". Makes no sense whatsoever. Miller kept the Spirit (Gabriel Macht), but there's no Ebony White, or Silk Satin, or the clever splash pages/shots Zack Snyder would have known to thrown in. Intact is Commissioner Dolan, except he looks nothing like the Dolan in the books. The archvillain, the Octopus, is played by Samuel L. Jackson as a black Nazi (?) The Octopus' gimmick in the series, if I haven't mentioned it, is that we never get to see his face! Eisner had fun just drawing his menacing gloves! This is like doing a Batman movie with a "Joker" who has a normal face, dresses like a ballerina, and has the superpower to transform into a car when he wants to. IT'S ANOTHER CHARACTER! Thank God Eisner is dead and doesn't have to watch this crap.

On the pro side: Paz Vega is cute as "Plaster of Paris"- as far as Iberian imports go, she's hotter than Penelope Cruz.