My Eric Von Zipper Story

Is this story what it appears to be, a rambling reminiscence of a particular day? Is it a piece of writing inspired by an actual day but then pleasantly embellished? Is it carefully crafted and completely fictional?

One Degree Of Richard Brautigan

In that same era from when I met Del Close, back when I was hanging out with show biz wannabes, one Friday night my friends threw a party in a borrowed apartment just off Sheridan road, right where Chicago turned into Evanston. The idea was to make it easy for both north side people and Northwestern students to come.

Mostly the same people came who always came—show biz wannabes, in my experience, mostly hang out with the same people all the time, commiserating about how hard it is to be “in the business” and compare notes about which part time jobs aren’t as bad as others.

But at this particular party there were three women nobody knew. Although I was only close friends with two or three of the people at the party, I was a wannabe novelist and I always paid attention to people as possible characters so I knew, in passing, who everybody was. But I didn’t know those three women.

They were beautiful. They weren’t just beautiful. They were the kind of really beautiful that normal beautiful women dreamed of being. They were super-model beautiful.

And they spent the party standing by themselves because even the guys with good hair, the wannabe actors, were intimidated by how beautiful the women were. Even the guys who thought they looked like Don Johnson—‘Miami Vice’ was big back then—were intimidated by how beautiful the women were.

I hatched a kind of plan to meet the women.

I worked my way to behind the bar. That got me close enough to the three women so that I could hear what they were saying. As I was passing out cans of beer or pouring vodka and orange juice into glasses, I listened to the women talk.

They were talking about who they thought was the sexiest man on the planet. They very quickly agreed that they thought the sexiest man on the planet was Harvey Keitel.

Now even back then I was a cinema buff so I knew who Harvey Keitel was. He was this guy. A Brooklyn guy who made a lot of European films. Gruff and quiet looking. Tough looking. Always plays cool characters. I knew who he was.

But you know how sometimes in our brain we get a wire crossed? You know how sometimes in our mind we connect one name with another person? You know how sometimes you mistake one person for someone else because something about their names is similar?

Well, that night at the party that happened to me.

When I heard the name “Harvey Keitel” I instantly connected the name with the person of actor “Harvey Lembeck.” The guy in the middle of this picture.

Now, they’re both ‘Harvey’ but that’s about all they in common.

The actor Harvey Lembeck is famous for playing the role of Eric Von Zipper in the old Beach Party movies, famously called the world’s oldest juvenile delinquent. He was a slapstick character who always spoke in a silly Brooklyn accent even though he was leading a motorcycle gang around the beaches of California.

So there I am behind the bar listening to these three magically beautiful women talking about who they think the sexiest guy in the world is and I think they say the actor who played Eric Von Zipper.

So I think to myself, wow, it’s true what they say, really beautiful women do have their own standards for judging men . . .

So I think to myself, well, I know I’m not Clark Gable, I’m not going to win any good looks contests, but I think I can live up to the physical standards set by Eric Von Zipper!

There’s this thing about me—if my thinking is clear about something then I don’t have a lot of worries. If I understand—or think I understand!—a situation then I am very comfortable diving in like an Olympic diver relaxing and testing out a new board.

And that’s what I did.

I just walked around the bar, walked up to the three beautiful women and smiled and said, “Hi. You know, those old beach party movies were pretty cool, weren’t they? They don’t make films like that any more. Fun films. Somebody should make fun films like those beach party movies.”

Then there was a moment. Like you drop a coin that lands on edge and sways as it rolls before deciding whether to fall heads or tails. There was one of those moments.

The three beautiful women looked at me and they kind of glanced at each other then they all smiled and nodded and said, kind of all together, “Yeah, those beach party movies were cool!”

And we all started talking about beaches and movies and vacations and surfing and California and just about any other topic we could derive from beach party movies.

Their names were Shelby, Shelly and Jay-jay. (Yes, I later used their names in the Green Sweater story [pt. 1 and pt. 2 and pt. 3]) Shelby and I would become friends. I got to know Shelly a little. I never got to know Jay-jay much at all.

This is what happened with the Harvey Keitel thing.

About two weeks after that party, Shelby and I were going to spend a Friday night in, renting a movie and making root beer floats. So Shelby and I went to a neighborhood movie rental store—this was in the days before Blockbuster—and as we were walking around looking at tapes, the TVs in the store were showing clips of up-coming releases. One of the clips was of a film starring Nastasha Kinski and Harvey Keitel. As I walked past the screen, I looked up and saw a freeze frame of Harvey Keitel with the text label of ‘Harvey Keitel’ under it.

‘Harvey Keitel,’ I thought.

And then it hit me.

Harvey Keitel was Harvey Keitel, not Harvey Lembeck.

In an instant—like some kind of movie visual effect—in my mind I flashbacked to the party and I realized the three beautiful women had said nothing at all about Harvey Lembeck, nothing at all about beach party movies, and I had walked up to them and started talking about beach party movies . . .

My stomach twisted up into a knot and for an instant I thought I was going to throw up.

But then Shelby walked over to me and took my arm and pulled me over to the new release wall and my brain—all by itself!—somehow said to my terrified, conscious self, “Hey, there’s no reason for the fox to be afraid of the guard dog when the fox is already inside the hen house!”

And instantly my stomach unknotted and don’t think I even thought about my bizarre mix-up again that night.

But I never forgot it, either. And I’ve never forgotten the bizarre, silly-ass farm metaphor [!?] my brain somehow came up with in the clutch to stop me from freaking out about my mix-up.

That night Shelby and I took home a movie called, “The Stunt Man.” It’s a very cool film about how sometimes even when things are exactly what they seem to be, sometimes they are, at the same time, too, nothing at all like what they seem to be.

Just Got Back From Feverville, Kansas

I was sick over the weekend.

I don’t get sick all that often. I have allergies and blood sugar issues, but the last time I remember getting actually ill was back in February, last year. [Why Catching A Cold Makes Some People Cuter ]

Early last week, however, I began to notice a scratchy, sore throat. I didn’t pay much attention to it because I felt okay. Up until late Friday afternoon.

At some point late Friday afternoon it was like—BLAM—it was as if a demented symphonic prog musician slammed me in the back of the head with a hammer and kidnapped me to Feverville, Kansas.

I don’t know what my temperature was Friday because at that time I didn’t have a thermometer, but I started to alternate between being freezing and being hot, with dizzy wrapped around both. So, just before sundown I put a towel around my neck, put on two shirts over that, and crawled under my blankets.

The whole night I tossed and turned, sometimes drifting off to sleep, mostly not, mostly just tossing and turning. And the whole night, in my mind’s ear, I was listening to Kansas, playing “Point of Know Return.”

[sigh]

A couple of weeks ago, I used the word ‘roundabout’ a lot, as in, ‘I sometimes talk in a roundabout way.’ That made me think of the cool old song, “Roundabout,” by Yes. So I looked around the net and I found a very cool site that streams, for free, a lot of old classic rock songs.

Technically, it’s a progressive rock site.

“ProgArchives.com” — You click on the letter of the band you’re looking for, scroll down and select the particular band, and then scroll down past the ads and the chatter to a selection of songs. You just click on the song you want to hear and the site plays it for you.

So, for much of the last couple of weeks I’ve found time every day to listen to “Roundabout” at some point or another.

Toward the end of last week—right before I got really sick—I noticed that the site considered Kansas to be progressive rock as well, and it considered “Point of Know Return” to be symphonic progressive just like “Roundabout.” I’m not sure I agree with either of those assessments, but I kind of like “Point of Know Return” so I listened to that a couple of times.

Then I got sick and the song was kind of, in my mind, stuck on play. So I had to listen to it in my mind’s ear all the time I had the fever.

Friday night was the worst.

Saturday morning I got up—eventually—feeling a little better but still kind of dizzy. I showered and walked to the local grocery story for a lot of fresh vegetables and chicken breasts. I also bought a thermometer.

Most of the day Saturday my temperature stayed around 99.7 and 99.9. I never broke a hundred on the thermometer, but I sure would have liked to have had the thing to measure my temperature during that weird Friday night.

Saturday night I slept more soundly.

Sunday morning I woke up feeling much better, feeling almost normal. I took my temperature and it was smack on 98.6.

So Sunday I took things easily and ate mostly healthy meals.

My temperature has stayed down and I’m feeling even better today. I’m still coughing now and then, still sneezing now and then, but no more chills or hot flashes, no more dizzy.

And, as I type this, I’m listening to “Roundabout,” not “Point of Know Return.” I am back from Kansas!


I feel like I’ve been away for a week!

If Beethoven Were A Fish

If Beethoven were a fish
and he lived in a fishbowl
would he play a piano
in a ceramic castle
by a plant in the gravel
at the bottom of the bowl?

If Beethoven were a cloud
drifting right above my house
would the thunder make music
and would I stop and listen
to the rumbling melody
the cloud was playing for me?

If Beethoven were my heart
would you lean against my chest,
press your ear against my skin,
and listen to the rhythm
of the symphony my blood
pumping through me played for you?

If Beethoven were us both
would our comings and goings,
our meeting and not meeting,
be the music he composed,
would we know we were dancing
to music he played for us?

If Beethoven were a fish
and he lived in a fishbowl
would he play a piano
in a ceramic castle
by a plant in the gravel
at the bottom of the bowl?

One Degree Of Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan killed himself in 1984. I was twenty-four and had never met him. However, in a six degrees of Kevin Bacon way I did once get to one degree away from Brautigan.

*

When I was in my very early twenties I had a job doing general office work for a company on Wells street in Old Town.

One day at lunch I was standing in a bookstore (I think it was a Barbara’s bookstore, but I don’t think they’re there anymore ) reading a new release Richard Brautigan book. Yes, in those days not only could you find Brautigan books in bookstores but they were often stacked up in the front. I don’t remember which book I was reading, but I think it may have been the already released “The Tokyo-Montana Express.” (If it was, it fits today’s post nicely, but I have no memory at all of which book it was.)

The bell over the bookstore’s front door jangled and I glanced up without really caring and looked back to my reading. But then I looked up again. Del Close was walking into the bookstore.

I and all my friends were entertainment business wannabes so I recognized him instantly. My first thought was, “Whoa, I’m in the same bookstore as Del Close.”

I wanted to be a novelist so it wasn’t a big deal to me personally, but all my friends were performance types so for me to be in the same bookstore with Close gave me a story that would trump any of their stories for a while, even if my story didn’t have a hook or any content or a cool ending.

So I just went back to my reading.

A few moments later a shadow fell across what I was reading. I looked up and Del Close was standing in front of me pointing to the book in my hand.

“Richard Brautigan. Are you a fan?” Close asked.

I said I was.

“Did you ever meet him?” Close asked. “Do you know what he’s like in real life?”

I said I’d never met him, but from reading interviews with Brautigan and from what other writers have said about him, my impression was that Brautigan was pretty much exactly the way he portrays himself in his poetry and stories.

Close took a long pause and told me that it was dangerous to try and judge writers by what they write. He told me that anyone who is good with words can present any kind of image of themselves that they want, even in interviews.

“Have you ever met Brautigan?” I asked.

Close said he’d met Brautigan once, at a party in California.

“You’ve met him,” I said. “What’s he like in real life?”

Close took another long pause, then shrugged. “Brautigan was impossible to figure out,” Close said. He said he’d talked to him for quite a while, but said he couldn’t get any kind of handle on him at all. “Normally when you talk to someone at the very least you can get a feel for whether they’re straight or gay. But with Brautigan I couldn’t even get any indication of his sexuality.”

I pointed out that I didn’t think Brautigan had ever written a gay love scene and that even the odd heterosexual scenes in “Willard and His Bowling Trophies” were driven by the odd story and the characters themselves were uncomfortable in the scenes.

Close shrugged again and told me again that you can’t really judge anyone by anything they write.

“Well, you’ve met him,” I said, again. “If you had to guess, what would you guess Brautigan was like in real life? Like what he portrays, or different?”

Close took another long pause—he was a very satisfying person to talk to because he really seemed to be into the conversation. “If I had to guess,” Close said, “I’d guess Brautigan was exactly as he portrayed himself. But then I wouldn’t take my guess very seriously.”

*

Other people have said similar things about writers. John Gardner someplace or another explicitly told readers his writing voice was nothing like his real life persona. And Harlan Ellison was reasonably close friends with writer Philip K. Dick (they were close enough once or twice to go to a garbage dump together and shoot rats) but after Dick’s death Ellison said someplace or another that he’d never figured out if Dick’s esoteric personality was the real deal or a writer posturing.

*

In the decades since Brautigan’s death, I haven’t read of anybody “setting the record straight” and publishing any tell-all revealing Brautigan to be anything other than the way he described himself.

I assume Brautigan was pretty much the way he portrayed himself.

But every now and then I have some doubts.

For instance, the novel “Sombrero Fallout” never explicitly mentions chaos theory but the content could be construed to be quite allegorical. And Brautigan was once writer-in-residence at MIT when such research was getting talked about. [Correction: He spent some time at CalTech when such research was getting talked about. Sorry! -- Mark, 04/18/08] And although the novel never really explains its own title, a ‘sombrero filter’ is an engineering term for a type of transformation or processing that changes at a distance from a center, just as the violence did in the novel.

It is possible that Brautigan’s writing—which appears so simple, so minimal, so much like the literary equivalent of a Gwen John painting—may in fact have been carefully thought out and very carefully crafted.

I don’t know. But now and then over the decades I’ve wondered.

*

Today I’m going to post a whole story from “The Tokyo-Montana Express.”

Now, I first read this story something like twenty-five years ago. But hardly two or three days go by when I don’t think about one or another aspect of this story. Of all the things Brautigan has written, I’m not sure why this story has sort of taken up residence in my brain, but it has.

People who know me probably could come up with one or two reasons, but that would only be guessing!

I’m not going to analyze this story because that spoils the fun for people reading it for the first time. However, this story is interesting to read more than once in light of Del Close’s warning about judging writers based on their writing. The more times you read this story, the easier it is to suspect that there might be more going on than meets the eye.

Is this story what it appears to be, a rambling reminiscence of a particular day? Is it a piece of writing inspired by an actual day but then pleasantly embellished? Is it carefully crafted and completely fictional?

If I were guessing I’d say this story is exactly what it appears to be, a rambling reminiscence of a particular day. But I’m a writer, too. I don’t take my guess all that seriously.

Anyway, here is my favorite passage written by my favorite author:

No Hunting Without Permission
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


October 21, 1978: Yesterday I didn’t do anything. It was like a play written for a weedy vacant lot where a theater would be built one hundred years after I am dead performed by actors whose great grandparents haven’t even been born yet. If I were keeping a diary, yesterday’s entry would have gone something like this:

    Dear Diary: I put up a no hunting sign today because tomorrow is the first day of hunting season and I don’t want some out of state hunters driving a station wagon with Louisiana license plates to stop and shoot a moose in my back yard.

I also went to a party. I was in a shitty off-angle wrong mood and said the same five boring sentences to forty different, totally unsuspecting and innocent people. It took me three hours to get around to everybody and there were very long pauses between sentences.

One sentence was an incoherent comment about the State of the Union. I substituted an obscure California weather pattern in place of a traditional Montana weather pattern to use as a metaphor about inflation.

What I said made absolutely no sense whatsoever and when I finished nobody asked me to elaborate. A few people said that they needed some more wine and excused themselves to go get some, though I could see that they still had plenty of wine in their glasses.

I also told everybody that I had seen a moose in my back yard, right outside the kitchen window. Then I did not give any more details. I just stood there staring at them while they waited patiently for me to continue talking about the moose, but that was it.

A man I told my moose story to said, “Was that the same moose you told me about yesterday?” I looked a little shocked and then said, “Yes.” The shocked expression slowly changed into one of serene bewilderment.

I think my mind is going. It is changing into a cranial junkyard. I have a huge pile of rusty tin cans the size of Mount Everest and about a million old cars that are going nowhere except between my ears.

I stayed at the party for three hours, though it seemed closer to a light-year of one-sentence moose stories.

Then I went home and watched Fantasy Island on television. As a sort of last stand spiritual pickup, I called a friend in California on the telephone during a commercial. We had a very low-keyed conversation during the commercial. He was not really that interested in talking to me. He was more interested in doing something else.

As we struggled through the conversation, like quicksand, I wondered what the first thing he would do after I hung up. Maybe he would pour himself a stiff drink or he would call somebody interesting on the telephone and tell them how boring I had become.

At one point toward the end of our thousand-mile little chat, I said, “Well, I’ve just been fishing and writing. I’ve written seven little short stories this week.”

“Nobody cares,” my friend said. And he was right.

I started to tell him that I had seen a moose in my back yard but I changed my mind. I would save it for another time. I did not want to use up my best material right away. You’ve got to think of the future.

Something Strange Here, Something Almost Magical

Today’s post and tomorrow’s post will make up a kind of free-form, disconnected diptych.

I say disconnected because I’ve been feeling kind of unhinged lately . . .

Today is the last day of my first two years of blogging. Tomorrow will be the first day of my next two years of blogging.

These two days will be long excerpts from writers I like a lot.

In fact, tomorrow will be my favorite passage from my favorite author. People who know me [‘People who know me’ ?! ] probably can guess what author appears tomorrow. But I bet they can’t guess what book my favorite passage comes from.

Today’s post will be an excerpt from an obscure novel by science fiction great Arthur C. Clarke.

Clarke died last month. I wanted to do a post about Clarke last month, but back then I had Other Things on my mind. (I still have those same Other Things on my mind but I’m forcing myself to work around them.) I’m glad I waited because this post fits perfectly as my last post of two years of Impossible Kisses.

When I was very young, like in fifth or sixth grade, for a while I only read three fiction writers, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

Even back then I realized Heinlein was a little odd and wrote with a kind of restrained madness. Nobody who read a lot of Heinlein was shocked when the rumor got around that Charles Manson was a big fan of “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

Asimov in many ways was the opposite of Heinlein. Asimov wrote with an odd kind of detachment and his characters all lived with a strange kind of detachment. This made for a kind of warm, human sweetness in such novels as “The Robots of Dawn,” but it was still an odd way of writing about odd characters.

Arthur C. Clarke was always the most balanced of the three.

Clarke certainly had his own oddities. I think it was even clear to kids reading him that he wasn’t, so to speak, as fond of women as was, say, Robert Heinlein. Clarke’s...um...proclivities (okay, the rumors always were that he lived in Sri Lanka because over there nobody cared if a grown man lived with young teenage boys) lead to some unusual novels written with an unusual combination of enthusiasm and cynicism.

The excerpt today comes from a science fiction novel that isn’t so much about science as it is about lost friendship, lost love and the bittersweet moments and bittersweet memories that shape a person’s whole life as that life goes on . . .

But today’s quote isn’t about any of that.

Today’s quote is Impossible Kisses material.

One of the young boys in the novel (this is Clarke writing, after all) begins a hobby with pentominoes. These are very real things and all the stuff Clarke writes about them is true.


I’ve never been a pentomino buff myself, but I’ve seen them and once I wrote some programs about them. People who know me [them again!] know I can sometimes be a little obsessive [okay, I’m going to pause for a second to let those people who know me roll their eyes and say ‘sometimes’? ‘a little’?] and pentominoes are things that people can get obsessive about so I was always on my guard.

But the young boy in the novel witnesses a bit of real world magic as a friend of his dives into the very deep waters of the amazing shapes:

For a long time, Duncan stared at the collection of twelve deceptively simply figures. As he slowly assimilated what Grandma had told him, he had the first genuine mathematical revelation of his life. What had at first seemed merely a childish game had opened endless vistas and horizons—though even the brightest of ten-year-olds could not begin to guess the full extent of the universe now opening up before him.

This moment of dawning wonder and awe was purely passive; a far more intense explosion of intellectual delight occurred when he found his first very own solution to the problem. For weeks he carried around with him the set of twelve pentominoes in their plastic box, playing with them at every odd moment. He got to know each of the dozen shapes as personal friends, calling them by the letters which they most resembled, though in some cases with a good deal of imaginative distortion: the odd group, F, I, L, P, N and the ultimate alphabetical sequence T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

And once in a sort of geometrical trance or ecstasy which he was never able to repeat, he discovered five solutions in less than an hour. Newton and Einstein and Chen-tsu could have felt no greater kinship with the gods of mathematics in their own moments of truth.

It did not take him long to realize, without any prompting from Grandma, that it might also be possible to arrange the pieces in other shapes besides the six-by-ten rectangle. In theory, at least, the twelve pentominoes could exactly cover rectangles with sides of five-by-twelve units, four-by-fifteen units, and even the narrow strip only three units wide and twenty long.

Without too much effort, he found several examples of the five-by-twelve and four-by-fifteen rectangles. Then he spent a frustrating week, trying to align the dozen pieces into a perfect three-by-twenty strip. Again and again he produced shorter rectangles, but always there were a few pieces left over, and at last he decided that this shape was impossible.

Defeated, he went back to Grandma—and received another surprise.

“I’m glad you made the effort,” she said. “Generalizing—exploring every possibility—is what mathematics is all about. But you’re wrong. It can be done. There are just two solutions; and if you find one, you’ll also have the other.”

Encouraged, Duncan continued the hunt with renewed vigor. After another week, he began to realize the magnitude of the problem. The number of distinct ways in which a mere twelve objects could be laid out essentially in a straight line, when one also allowed for the fact that most of them could assume at least four different orientations, was staggering.

Once again, he appealed to Grandma, pointing out the unfairness of the odds. If there were only two solutions, how long would it take to find them?

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “If you were a brainless computer, and put down the pieces at a rate of one a second in every possible way, you could run through the whole set in”—she paused for effect—“rather more than six million, million years.”

Earth years or Titan years? thought the appalled Duncan. Not that it really mattered...

“But you aren’t a brainless computer,” continued Grandma. “You can see at a glance whole categories that won’t fit into the pattern, so you don’t have to bother about them. Try again.”

Duncan obeyed, although without much enthusiasm or success. And then he had a brilliant idea.

Karl was interested, and accepted the challenge at once. He took the set of pentominoes, and that was the last Duncan heard of him for several hours.

Then he called back, looking a little flustered.

“Are you sure it can be done?” he demanded.

“Absolutely. In fact, there are two solutions. Haven’t you found even one? I thought you were good at mathematics.”

“So I am. That’s why I know how tough the job is. There are over a quadrillion possible arrangements to be checked.”

“How do you work that out?” asked Duncan, delighted to discover something that had baffled his friend.

Karl looked at a piece of paper covered with sketches and numbers.

“Well, excluding forbidden positions, and allowing for symmetry and rotation, it comes to factorial twelve times two to the twenty-first—you wouldn’t understand why! That’s quite a number; here it is.”

He held up a sheet on which he had written, in large figures, the imposing array of digits:

      1 004 539 160 000 000

Duncan looked at the number with satisfaction; he did not doubt Karl’s arithmetic.

“So you’ve given up.”

“NO! I’m just telling you how hard it is.” And Karl, looking grimly determined, switched off.

The next day, Duncan had one of the biggest surprises of his young life. A bleary-eyed Karl, who had obviously not slept since their last conversation, appeared on his screen.

“Here it is,” he said, exhaustion and triumph competing in his voice.

Duncan could hardly believe his eyes; he had been convinced that the odds against success were impossibly great. But there was the narrow rectangular strip, only three squares wide and twenty long, formed from the complete set of twelve pieces.

With fingers that trembled slightly from fatigue, Karl took the two end sections and switched them around, leaving the center portion of the puzzle untouched.

“And here’s the second solution,” he said. “Now I’m going to bed. Good night—or good morning, if that’s what it is.”

For a long time, a very chastened Duncan sat staring at the blank screen. He did not yet understand what had happened. He only knew that Karl had won against all reasonable expectations.

It was not that Duncan minded; he loved Karl too much to resent his little victory, and indeed was capable of rejoicing in his friend’s triumphs even when they were at his own expense. But there was something strange here, something almost magical.

It was Duncan’s first glimpse of the power of intuition, and the mind’s mysterious ability to go beyond the available facts and to short-circuit the process of logic. In a few hours, Karl had completed a search that should have required trillions of operations, and would have tied up the fastest computer in existence for an appreciable number of seconds.

One day, Duncan would realize all men had such powers, but might use them only once in a lifetime. In Karl, the gift was exceptionally well developed; from that moment onward, Duncan had learned to take seriously even his most outrageous speculations.

Arthur C. Clarke

Alone In The Dark

“Did you have a nightmare? My mommy says that there’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark.”

“Your mother’s wrong, kid. Being afraid of the dark is what keeps most of us alive.”

So, maybe you’re thinking I’m an asshole, scaring that kid for no reason. But I’m just trying to protect him. You see, there’s a world around you that you’ve trained yourself not to see. Call it paranormal, supernatural, occult, whatever. But inside all of us is an uncontrollable fear of the dark. Kids are told it’s irrational but it’s not. Fear is what protects you from the things you don’t believe in. I learned the truth a long time ago. Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it can’t kill you.

‘Edward Carnby’

I love stuff like that.

I love movies that have a premise that may be very silly but the filmmakers treat the premise very seriously. “Alone in the Dark” has a pretty darn silly premise but everyone making the movie took it pretty darn seriously—even the flubs and weird behind-the-scene bits. More on those later.

“Alone in the Dark” is loosely based on a videogame. I’d never played the game—or even heard of it—when I saw the movie so I had no idea what to expect when I sat down in the theater.

Now, this movie often appears on lists of the worst movies ever made. And Wikipedia reports some net review site gives this movie the second worst rating ever. I wouldn’t argue with any of those negative reviews.

But I watch the movie two or three times a year and have fun. I’m not exactly sure why, but today I’m going to take a guess.


I think I enjoy this movie because of what it could have been . . .

“Alone in the Dark” starts out as a kind of X-Files type thing. The hero is an agent or ex-agent for some government agency that investigates unusual happenings. Very quickly, however, the movie introduces its own kind of zombies. Then there’s a beautiful, smart woman scientist. Then there are monsters that look like fierce little dinosaurs. Then there’s an evil mad scientist. Then there are high-tech soldiers always rappelling down from helicopters and bursting in through ceilings with their guns blazing . . .

This movie—for a monster movie buff like me—is like one of those boxes of assorted chocolates where you lift the top and see a mixture of every kind of candy you like. This movie has it all.

The trouble, however, is that the movie doesn’t do much with any of what it has!

It’s got the building blocks of a great story, but no great story. And not a lot of great moments, even. There are almost no scenes of the mad scientist confronting people and engaging in monologues about his plan. The hero and the beautiful, smart woman scientist have only one quick love scene and then share almost no quiet moments looking longingly at each other. The monsters almost always appear in quick cuts killing minor characters.

Strangely, almost bizarrely, the movie is full of long, long scenes of guns blazing away with glow-in-the-dark bullets.

The net discussions I’ve seen resolved that the director built the movie around the long, long gunfight scenes because they give the film the ‘look and feel’ of a videogame.

Watching the DVD, I just fast-forward through the gun battles.

So, “Alone in the Dark” has lots of great elements, it has the building blocks of a movie I would love, but there’s no real pay-off. The building blocks are never built into anything.

But I think I enjoy watching the movie, still, because I can imagine cools scenes, I can imagine cool side stories that never appear but could have. The mad scientist scenes. The hero and the beautiful, smart woman scientist scenes. The hero confronting the monsters scenes.

*

Beyond the actual content of the film—or lack of content, as the case may be—“Alone in the Dark” is famous among monster movie fans for a couple of absurd production details.

The beautiful, smart woman scientist is played by actress Tara Reid. Now, in real life Tara Reid is not famous for being particularly bright or for being a particularly good actress. The production team on “Alone in the Dark” didn’t give Tara much help. For her role as a beautiful, smart scientist they just gave her a white lab coat and a pair of glasses and left her on her own.

Tara Reid goes through the film giving people what appear to be intended as ‘significant’ looks that come off as almost awesomely empty, blank stares. And, very noticeably, she is at one point supposed to say “Newfoundland” and instead of pronouncing it “new'funland” she pronounces it “new found' land.” Even though the director and editor didn’t catch it and re-dub it, Tara Reid gets all the blame.

Perhaps most bizarrely, on the director’s commentary track the director—a German guy named Uwe Boll—spends about five minutes ridiculing Tara Reid for not taking off her bra during the film’s love scene. He calls her an American prude and eventually gets around to saying she is ‘idiotic’ for taking off her clothes in bars but disappointing her fans by keeping on her clothes in the movie. Now, anyone who even glances at the celebrity news shows knows that not long before the movie went into production—if I have my celebrity gossip correct—Tara Reid suffered a horribly botched cosmetic surgery session that disfigured her breasts. So, this director had such poor relations with his cast, he was so disconnected during filming, that he never spoke with his lead actress enough to discover her serious, personal reason for wanting to not get naked on the big screen.

*

So, that’s my post about “Alone in the Dark.”

I can watch this film again again—regardless of how bad it is—because it has all the elements of a great film. For me it becomes a participatory movie experience—I imagine good scenes, good side stories, good moments . . .

That’s not much. But it’s better than nothing. And it’s better than most of the new films that come out these days!

Three Recent Monster Movies (Plus One)

Last Tuesday I rented the new remake of “Day of the Dead.” Random people bickering pointlessly and lots of high angle shots looking down on a small Colorado town being over-run by rampaging zombies. Last Friday I watched a pre-release DVD of “Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem.” Random people bickering pointlessly and lots of high angle shots looking down on a small Colorado town being over-run by rampaging monsters from outer space. Also last Friday one of the high, digital channels on our cable system was playing the movie, “30 Days of Night.” Random people bickering pointlessly and lots of high angle shots looking down on a small Alaska town being over-run by rampaging vampires.

Yech! Talk about cookie-cutter movie making. I suspect next week a movie called “Laundromat Shadows” will be opening up. It will be about random people bickering pointlessly and have lots of high angle shots looking down on a small Kansas town being over-run by rampaging mutant washing machines that can only complete their wash-rinse-spin cycle if their mechanisms are pumping fresh human blood . . .

Listening to the commentary track on “Day of the Dead” we learn there is a pre-existing (that is, already paid for!) set of a typical small US town available at some Bulgarian studio where production costs are very low. So, there you go, we get lots of movies filmed cheaply in Bulgaria and set in small town America . . .

Yech.

I don’t recommend any of those three movies.

I only saw a few minutes of “30 Days of Night” but what I saw looked so dumb and ill-conceived that I switched off the TV and read a Crichton novel.

“Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem” was also without any redeeming features. I did watch it all the way through, but I fast forwarded through a lot. No good monsters. No good characters. No good anything.

Steve Miner’s remake of “Day of the Dead,” however, did have some redeeming things about it. Some of the acting wasn’t too bad. Some of the action wasn’t too bad. But it had none of the interesting conflict and drama (and art?) of George Romero’s original. And it had none of the stunning visuals of Zack Snyder’s pretty good remake of “Dawn of the Dead.” Steve Miner has a long history of making reasonably stupid films that have odd, sometimes intriguing performances. “Lake Placid” was awful but the acting was weirdly interesting. And “Deepstar Six” had some of the stupidest scenes ever in an ocean monster film, but it had really great stuff from actor Miguel Ferrer slowly freaking out until his head, literally, blows up.

*

But all these bad movies got me thinking about bad movies in general and bad zombie films in particular and there is one really bad zombie film I want to recommend even though every other review I’ve seen says it is worthless.

After Zack Snyder’s remake of “Dawn of the Dead” made some money, some production company that owns the rights to Romero’s titles released an amazingly low budget movie called “Day of the Dead 2 – Contagium.” This movie has no connection to Romero and no connection to Romero’s “Day of the Dead” and no connection to the current remake of “Day of the Dead.” (Zombie movie titles and their sequences and relative worth can drive a monster movie buff batty.)

However, “Day of the Dead 2 – Contagium” has some redeeming things to it. Enough, in fact, to make me remember the movie fondly. The special effects were pretty awful, there was basically one set and almost no action, but the actors seemed to really put out a little effort to bring their characters—so to speak—alive.

The movie presents itself not really as a typical monster movie. The movie presents itself as telling the story of how the original zombie outbreak occurred within the classic Romero zombie mythos.

The whole movie takes place within a mental institution and the whole story is simply about half a dozen patients talking about why they’re there, what they’re thinking and feeling and what their hopes for the future are. One of the patients randomly finds a thermos that contains secret government gunk that turns people into zombies and, of course, the gunk gets out and slowly, one by one, the mental patients become zombies and start infecting others.

But the movie—as low budget and obscure as it was—gets a little ambitious and tries to add to the Romero zombie mythos, suggesting there is an ‘original generation’ of zombies, those first half dozen or so mental patients, who became zombies but retained their rationality and ability to speak. Some reacted to their new zombie state by, well, embracing it and becoming mad zombies while others tried to fight the ‘infection’ and may have come up with a treatment. The movie ends in classic zombie fashion with the infection getting out of hand and spreading before anybody can do anything about it.

In many ways, this is my favorite kind of movie. It was made with virtually no money. It was probably shot in just a few weeks. But someone on the production team cared enough about what they were doing to try and create something a little different, something with a little value to it mixed in with the low budget schlock.

It’s very easy to give up on movies completely and stop watching all of them. I know a lot of people who have done that. After watching the three movies that I mentioned at the top of this post—well, two movies plus a couple of scenes from a third—I was very tempted to swear off movies for a while. But then I remembered “Day of the Dead 2 – Contagium” and I sighed, and then I remembered another awful monster movie that didn’t even have the redeeming features of “Day of the Dead 2 – Contagium” but which I still had fun watching and I sighed again and I didn’t swear off all movies.

It would be easier to do that, to just give up on movies. But there are some oddly good things getting made, and there are some bad things getting made that are—almost magically—still fun to watch.

I’ll talk about that other movie, the one that is bad with no redeeming features but is still fun to watch, tomorrow or later in the week.

Where’s Polonius? — And ‘Trixie’

CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 3

Yeah, I sometimes talk in a roundabout way, too, but I almost always prefer to say things in the simplest, most straightforward way possible. First, because that’s in keeping with the whole minimalist and unaffected Gwen John kind of approach to entertainment and art that I like. Second, because I am almost always trying to make people smile and people are more likely to smile if they understand what I’m saying.

*

Today’s post will complete a set.

Last week Friday’s post was the long, roundabout version of today’s post:

    Rocks And Mirrors: Scenes That Never Return


Yesterday’s post explained how I got from today’s post to last Friday’s post:

    Where’s Polonius? — And Jasper Johns


Today’s post is the original idea, the short, direct, initial imperative/initial response poem that I wrote last Thursday.

There were at least four personal reasons why I didn’t post this version last Friday. All those reasons still nag at me, but I’ve thought of a reasonably silly thing that kinda/sorta touches on all my concerns in one way or another.

And in my mind silly always wins.

Wednesday morning it occurred to me that if I just changed the name of the person I was writing about to a replacement name that I picked carefully, then I could go ahead and post this with something of the affection and humor I’d intended when I wrote it.

So here we go:

 
Rocks and Mirrors
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


My friend Trixie is a kaleidoscope.

She has rocks in her head. They’re beautiful

rocks, always tumbling, and when they reflect

off the fragmented mirrors of her self

they make beautiful, hypnotic patterns.


My friend Trixie is a kaleidoscope.

She doesn’t lie. She doesn’t tell the truth.

She is rocks and mirrors making patterns

that beguile and completely befuddle

anybody who gazes into her.

Where’s Polonius? — And Jasper Johns

CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 3

Yeah, I sometimes talk in a roundabout way, too. In fact, I probably have two or three different ways of speaking roundabout. Today I’m going to talk about one of them.

Today and tomorrow I’m going to finish up what I started talking about in the aside of Monday’s post.

Tomorrow I will put up the short, direct version of last week Friday’s post. (I haven’t gotten anybody’s permission to post it, but I think I’ve worked out a way to do it that won’t cause an international incident. But I’ve been wrong about such things before! Tune in tomorrow.)

Today I’m going to talk about the process of getting from the first poem, the short, direct version I’m going to post tomorrow, to the longer, roundabout version that I posted last Friday.

*

This blogging sequence is strange, starting with the final form from last Friday and talking, today, about what I’ll post tomorrow. But this seems kind of well-suited to a blog. You don’t hear the word “hypertext” much these days, but it used to be a very big buzz word. The whole idea of text on the net is that sequence can be defined by links and links can arrange different sequences in any order imaginable. The whole notion of ‘chronology’ becomes a kind of incidental condition, a variable condition . . .

*

Last week Thursday I wrote a short, direct poem. It was ten lines long and although I liked it, for various personal reasons I didn’t want to post it Friday.

So I thought of what Jasper Johns once wrote to himself about the process of creating art:

Take an object,
do something with it,
and then do something else with it.

Jasper Johns
from his notebooks
but quoted all over,
for instance, at the end
of this article

Thursday afternoon and evening, I did that with the short, direct poem.

I took it as the original object, and I did something with it. I wrote a second draft that removed one or two aspects of the poem that raised posting issues for me. I didn’t much like that second draft, but I knew it was only an intermediary stage. I then took that second draft and applied the second part of Johns’ advice, I did something else with it. I eliminated things, added things, and created a new version that I liked.

That’s the version that I posted Friday morning.

However, although I liked that post, it was quite different in many ways from the short, direct little poem that I’d started with. The original said something about a person. The original said something about my feelings. The original had—I hope!—a bit of humor to it.

The longer, roundabout version juxtaposed some of the original, person-oriented language with a mechanical subject. I thought that made for an interesting effect that would evoke different meanings for everyone who read it.

But it was completely different from what I’d started with.

This is an interesting issue that entertainers and artists have struggled with in many different media.

The painter Andrew Wyeth once said (quoted in, “The Helga Pictures”) that he’d like to get the spontaneity of a watercolor painted in twenty minutes in the solidarity of a finished painting. I’ve known musicians who would only buy live recordings because they felt studio work never captured the spark of a spontaneous performance.

Is it ever possible to keep the original spark and life of something you create from deep within yourself, responding to the particular, instantaneous realities of a moment—any moment!—while at the same time working over that creation consciously, systematically, adding and subtracting things based on conscious and external issues?

I don’t know. I suspect the answer is no. I suspect that’s why painters like Berthe Morisot remain true to Impressionist ideals their whole life—they become entranced by the primacy—and magic!—of the initial imperative and initial response.

But a very cool thing about the modern world, with the seemingly limitless quantities of digital storage available with easy indexing, is that everybody nowadays can have the best of both worlds.

Entertainers and artists can—somewhere—save their original creation and preserve the spark, the possibly idiosyncratic, possibly troublesome version of an idea. And they can—possibly somewhere else—save the more conscious, more crafted, possibly more presentable version of an idea.

Entertainers and artists win because they get to express all aspects of themselves.

Audiences and consumers win because they get—or can sometimes get—access to every manner of aesthetic experience imaginable. Art is food for the soul, and nowadays people have access to every manner of—so to speak—aesthetic protein, carbs and fats entertainers and artists can whip up.

*

Tomorrow will be a first for me and the blog. I’ll have two versions up of the same idea, one direct, straight from the heart. One more crafted and thoughtful.

I’m going to paraphrase Monty Python about this: If people reading these two versions enjoy themselves half as much as I did writing these two versions, then I’ll have enjoyed myself twice as much as they did!

Memories As Sacred As Stained Glass

In a curious way, and more than any other single thing, Thiebaud challenges us to be true to the real sources of our happiness, to the way that in a haphazard commercial culture, small areas of order appear—a San Francisco hill caught in a corridor of skyscrapers that look as inevitable as Monument Valley, a shop window seemingly laid out by the hand of God—and become in our memories as sacred as stained glass and at times as sad. What sustains his art is not so much how shadowed or complex his view of that happiness is, but how confidently he knows that getting the happiness down right will convey the sadness, too. He proposes that the American subject is the self-evidence of happiness, and . . . “The self-evidence of happiness!” (the little cakes seem to cry out at last, even as the pronouncer takes a breath for his last bite of the rhetorical apple). The self-evidence of happiness! Three bites and it’s gone.

Adam Gopnik
writing in —






The Weird Fact And The Big Romance


Dear Angie: Get Well Soon!


Wayne Thiebaud Where You Least Expect Him

Beard Talk

Right now I’m wearing a beard so my blog photo is a little out of date. However, my tentative plan is to shave off my beard next week, so I’m not going to update the photo.

I’m not wearing the beard as any kind of fashion statement.

A few weeks ago I cleaned out my closet and I found some old photographs of myself from when I went tandem skydiving with my friend Sandy. I was a bearded young man, back then, and I looked pretty happy. I remember feeling kind of happy back then, too. So I thought, what the heck, I’ll re-grow a beard and see if the look brings back a little cheerfulness.

The results have been equivocal.

Since nothing magical has happened—at least, nothing I know about as I type this—I might be going back to my more-or-less clean shaven look soon.

Next week Thursday will be my two year anniversary here at Impossible Kisses. I’m planning on updating my template and I might as well take the opportunity of updating my face as well. (Although the face bit will be going back to normal . . .)

*

I’m not really a snapshot kind of guy, but in the spirit of being wildly unusual (the theme of the blog is Forteana, after all) I’m going to put up three of the photos that inspired me to re-grow my beard.

One note: I’ve actually blogged about this particular day once before. My post “Magic, The Elder Gods, Fall Festivals” took place as my friend Sandy and I were driving home from our tandem skydiving adventure. (Or maybe we drove into town for lunch while waiting for the wind to die down.)

Anyway, on with the snapshots—


One cool thing about rural airfields—this was at Hinckley Field, Illinois—is that the whole place feels more like somebody’s backyard than like a real airport like Midway or O’Hare. This kind of stuff, old wrecks along the runway, frightened my friend Sandy, but I liked it. I wish I’d been drawing back then, because there was a lot that would have made cool pictures. This is me still in my street clothes.




This is me suiting up. My head, typically, is in the clouds. If you look carefully above the clouds over my left shoulder you can see one of the experienced skydivers coming down.


Here I am completely suited up, thinking. This isn’t me having second thoughts. This isn’t me nervous. This is me being envious. The skydiving club had two planes back then. One was a rickety, old single engine thing that looked like it was held together by duct tape and kind thoughts. My friend Sandy and I went up in that. The second plane—I’m looking at the second plane in this photo—was a big, beautiful, twin engine plane that looked like it had just flown out of an Indiana Jones adventure. Since Sandy and I went up on the same flight, I don’t have any photos of me actually coming down.

Where’s Polonius? —And The Real Emma Peel

CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 3

Yeah, I sometimes say things in a roundabout way, too. And I’m always on the lookout for other people saying interesting and unexpected things in odd ways. A few weeks ago—

I’m interrupting the regularly scheduled content of this post before it gets really silly for a completely unrelated behind-the-scenes aside:

Yes, I do sometimes say things in a roundabout way. In fact, last Friday’s post, “Rocks And Mirrors: Scenes That Never Return,” was a 27-line, roundabout version of a direct, 10-line poem I wrote last Thursday. For personal reasons I didn’t want to post the short, direct version. I still don’t. (Well, part of me does. But other parts of me do not.) However, I still have the short, direct version. And it is possible (well, it’s conceivable ) that someday I’ll speak again with the person both versions are about. If that ever happens, and if I get the chance, I’ll show her the short, direct version of last Friday’s post and see if she’ll give me her permission to post it. Then people can see and compare me speaking in a roundabout way to me speaking directly.

I now return this post to its regularly scheduled content. It gets silly fast . . .

— A few weeks ago I read a book from 1998 written by Patrick Macnee. He played John Steed on the TV show “The Avengers.” The book was, “The Avengers and Me.” It was a generally interesting book, but what stood out to me were a couple of stories Macnee told about Diana Rigg, the real Mrs. Peel.

The first story didn’t have any tricky language at all, but introduces Diana Rigg, right off, as not quite the same character as Mrs. Peel. Macnee allows one of the show’s directors to introduce Rigg:

“One of the girls I’d met about a year earlier, at Julian’s home, curiously enough, during a New Year’s party. It was one of those things where it was very crowded and someone knocked a plate of sandwiches from my hand. As I bent down to pick them up, I noticed a young girl lying under the piano and this wonderful voice said, “Hello. Who are you?” It was Diana Rigg.”

The second story is by Macnee himself and has a sentence that has stuck with me. I’ll put the sentence in bold:

“So Diana was kitted out, and given some lessons by Ray on how to tumble and fall. Not that she needed it, as she could move beautifully already. She had a gorgeous, direct carriage, a wonderful voice, stunning auburn hair and a look of flashing insolence.

“I thought, “My God. I’ve got to get to know her!” So I took her to dinner at the Connaught Hotel.

“We were both perfectly outrageous, obviously trying to test each other’s limits of what we liked and didn’t like, and naturally everything gravitated to sex. Di said she only made exceptions for men of intellect, and gave me a withering look which suggested that I didn’t fit the bill. I realized then that we had this strange communion.

“The very next day we went to work!”

“… only made exceptions for men of intellect …” What the heck does that mean?

Is Macnee saying—without saying it—that Diana Rigg preferred women but ‘made exceptions’ for guys she considered smart?

If that’s what Macnee is saying, then it’s a pretty British and tricky and roundabout way of saying someone is gay . . .

Rocks And Mirrors: Scenes That Never Return

I don’t know how they’re made now, but years back
a kaleidoscope was made with mirrors
and colored rocks arranged inside a tube.

When you rotated the tube the rocks fell
into colorful, random positions
and segments of mirror in a circle
made tricky scenes when you looked through the tube.

All of the scenes inside the tube were real
but any movement of the tube changed them
so you never could know what you would see.

And you couldn’t show someone what you saw
because the slightest movement changed the scene
so nobody else could see what you saw.

All of the scenes inside the tube were real.
All of the scenes were unique, interesting.
The scenes once observed, changed, never returned.
The scenes in the tube could be hypnotic.
Sometimes it could be hard to look away.
Sometimes you wanted to see more, more, more . . .

All of the scenes inside the tube were real.
The scenes inside the tube were never lies.

They were pretty rocks doing what rocks do,
shiny mirrors doing what mirrors do.

And everything you saw would go away
at the slightest movement, the slightest touch.

Kaleidoscopes. Sometimes you want to see
more, more, more of scenes that never return.

Looking Back At Butterflies From Atlantis

At the Oak Lawn Public Library where
homeless people cool down in the summer
and warm up in the winter, if you do
a computer search of their catalogue
for “Paris Hilton” you will get two hits,
a horror DVD called “House Of Wax,”
and the book, “Confessions Of An Heiress,”
which Paris Hilton wrote with Merle Ginsberg.

If you venture into the stacks you’ll find
Paris Hilton’s book on a shelf in the
seven-nineties. In fact, you will find it
on a shelf right below another book,
“Price Guide To Plastic Collectibles,” by
Lindi McNulty. Paris Hilton’s book,
written with Merle Ginsberg, tells a person
how to live as if they were an heiress.

If you sit down at one of the public
access computers and do a Google
internet search for “Paris Hilton,” you
will get more than eighty-three million hits.
If you venture into those stacks you might
be wandering around for quite some time.





Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #5: The Butterflies From Atlantis

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #4: Atlantis

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #3: Fons Et Origo

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #2: Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #1: Et In Arcadia Ego

I wrote that more than a year ago. It’s one of my favorite five-day themes.

Those five days were pretty content-heavy. I mentioned a lot of books that are important to me. I talked about an oddball Pangea theory that I find very interesting. And of all the metaphors I’ve come up with for this blog over the last two years, the notion of books as ‘butterflies from Atlantis’ might be my favorite.

However, of all the stuff contained in those five posts, I think the line that caused me the most concern was when I mentioned that a Google search for Paris Hilton returns more than 83 million hits.

First of all, that was true.

On the day I wrote that section, I sat down at a computer, did a Google search for Paris Hilton and got more than 83 million hits. I incorporated the number into my post and moved on. Early the next day I did another Paris Hilton search and got a different number, something like 72 million hits. A day later I got more than 85 million hits.

Since I was taking a lot of care making sure all the titles I used were real, making sure all the references I made were real, it bugged me that a person doing a Google search on their computer would come up with a different number than I’d used in my post.

I considered changing my phrasing to something ambiguous, like ‘dozens of millions’ but once I’ve written a little ahead it makes me nervous changing earlier words because everything, to my eyes and ears, goes together and a change just looks and sounds out of place.

So I left in the 83 million number. But it’s more than a year later and it still bugs me.

Now, back here in the present, I did a Google search this morning for Paris Hilton and got only about 65 million hits.

That’s way less than any of the numbers I got when I was writing those five posts.

On one hand, I hope people clicking through my index page and re-reading those five posts realize that I used a real number there, I didn’t just grab a big number out of the air.

On the other hand, I guess it’s kind of good news: The Paris Hilton obsession among netizens has died down by something like 20 million hits.

If Paris Hilton continues to lose about 10 million hits per year, in less than a decade she will disappear from the internet!

Politics, Philosophy And Hilary Duff

It occurs to me that some people might be wondering why a forty-seven year old guy like me even knows who Alyson Michalka is. It also occurs to me that some people might suspect they know why a forty-seven year old guy like me knows who Alyson Michalka is. The actual, real reason has a little politics in it, a little philosophy in it and a little Hilary Duff in it. I’ll talk in Wednesday’s post about why I started watching some shows on the Disney Channel.

My Alyson Michalka / Giant Clown Hammer Fantasy

Introduction

I am not by my nature a fan of anything Disney. I think there are real monsters in Disney creations. [The Monsters In Disney’s ‘Mulan’] But life takes us on expeditions and half the fun of an expedition is discovering things you never expected.

My expedition to the Disney Channel started about five or six years ago at a political website called “Free Republic.”


Politics and Philosophy

Five or six years ago most of the time I spent on the internet was at Free Republic. I’m not a very political guy and I’m certainly not a libertarian, but back then Free Republic was a wildly diverse, wildly smart and wildly fun site. A great many Freepers were the kind of people who were interesting to talk to about anything. [La Belle Dame Sans Merci]

One day I was going on and on about a great book called “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” and I was singling out TV violence, saying violence on TV was not only omnipresent, but it wasn’t operatic and it wasn’t realistic, it was just insane and almost always depicted with bizarre and unreal consequences. A Freeper agreed with me, but then suggested I might enjoy a TV show on the Disney Channel called “Lizzie McGuire.”

Now, normally if someone recommends something to me I just make a mental note and then move on, waiting until I hear a similar recommendation from two or three other people. However Freepers are a breed unto themselves and when a cool Freeper recommends something I generally check it out.

Free Republic is not the same today as it was back then. Many of the people I was close to have been banned in one or another purge at the site. Political groups do such things. Of course, many people return using a new screen name, but the general social tone of Free Republic isn’t as fun as it used to be. There are still wildly interesting people there, but the ratio of cool-to-mundane (or even cool-to-lunatic) has changed drastically.

The social scene at Free Republic seems to be following the basic laws of human stupidity as discovered by economist Carlo Cipolla.

Whether one considers classical, or medieval, or modern or contemporary times one is impressed by the fact that any country moving uphill has its unavoidable X fraction of stupid people. However the country moving uphill also has an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who manage to keep the X fraction at bay and at the same time produce enough gains for themselves and the other members of the community to make progress a certainty.

In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people is still equal to X; however in the remaining population one notices among those in power an alarming proliferation of the bandits with overtones of stupidity and among those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals. Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the destructive power of the X fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the country goes to Hell.

The Laws are not as easy to find as they once were, but right now they are here: THE BASIC LAWS OF HUMAN STUPIDITY

Hilary Duff

So a Freeper recommended a Disney Channel TV show called “Lizzie McGuire” and I checked it out.

And I discovered what very quickly became one of my favorite TV shows of all time.

“Lizzie McGuire” was (it only filmed 65 episodes) ostensibly a kids’ show about a young girl and her friends making the transition from junior high to high school. But the creators and producers actually patterned the look-and-feel of the show after a reasonably adult and very odd film, “Run Lola Run.” The result was a “kids’ show” with almost always interesting stories almost always told in interesting ways. In a nutshell, it was like “Seinfeld” but without the adult, New York ethos.

It’s always a very good sign when a live action TV show involves animators, and “Lizzie McGuire” not only featured cartoon interludes by animator Debra Solomon, but some episodes were directed by the always funny Savage Steve Holland.

“Lizzie McGuire” stared then unknown Hilary Duff and the show became so popular that the young star was able to—or rather her parents were able to—leverage her success into manipulation of the show’s content. So, the final few episodes of the show were not as good as the bulk of the episodes.

Those years—just after the turn of the century—were a kind of golden era for the Disney Channel. In addition to “Lizzie McGuire” there were three other shows that have become justifiable famous. Oddly—almost predictably—Disney allowed all these good shows to run out their contracts and did not negotiate reasonable terms to keep the shows in production. (The partial exception was “Kim Possible.”)

“Even Stevens” was another family show about kids in high school. But like “Lizzie McGuire” the creators and producers kept their eyes on the stories rather than just on “kids’ issues” and most episodes were fun to watch.

“Kim Possible” was an animated series and, again, the creators and producers focused on action and entertainment and avoided cookie-cutter silliness that seems to infect normal cartoon shows. “Kim Possible” won so many awards and became so popular that even Disney buckled and negotiated reasonable terms for a fourth season after production halted.

“Phil of the Future” was another family show about a family from the future struggling to get by in the present world. (Alyson Michalka played the young man-from-the-future’s present-day girl friend.) The show wasn’t always as independent-minded as the three other shows I’ve singled out, but it was usually pretty darn good.


The Disney Channel of the present day is pretty lame compared to what it used to be. (I don’t watch anything in their current lineup.) It could be the basic laws of human stupidity at work, or it could be the simple ebb-and-flow of behind-the-scenes talent in the TV business.

But a few years back, the Disney Channel, amazingly, was really fun to watch.

2008 1st Quarter Index

March Archive


Monday, March 31, 2008 -- My Alyson Michalka / Giant Clown Hammer Fantasy


Friday, March 28, 2008 -- Expeditions (500th post!)

Thursday, March 27, 2008 -- Today, Tomorrow And Yesterday

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 -- Jeffery Camp On Gwen John

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 -- My Two Favorite Monster Snake Movies

Monday, March 24, 2008 -- Me As A Supervillain Without A Supervillain Fortune


Friday, March 21, 2008 -- The Abandonment Of Meaning

Thursday, March 20, 2008 -- Fine Art, Pop Art And Andy Warhol

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 -- Big Reductions At The MCA’s Karen Kilimnik Exhibit

Tuesday, March 18, 2008 -- Closed Until Further Notice

Monday, March 17, 2008 -- Thoughtful, Troubled, Terrified Of Myself


Friday, March 14, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (5 of 5)

Thursday, March 13, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (4 of 5)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (3 of 5)

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (2 of 5)

Monday, March 10, 2008 -- Diane And The Can Of Squid (1 of 5)


Friday, March 07, 2008 -- Water Soluble Oils On Plain Unprimed Paper

Thursday, March 06, 2008 -- “Lizard Man” Returns?

Wednesday, March 05, 2008 -- A Typical Day On The Road To Utopia

Tuesday, March 04, 2008 -- I The Titanic Strike A Neon Iceberg

Monday, March 03, 2008 -- How To Tally A Sorted List



February Archive


Friday, February 29, 2008 -- I’m Looking At A Photo On A Page

Thursday, February 28, 2008 -- If I Could

Wednesday, February 27, 2008 -- Confused And Weary

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 -- Rose Serf

Monday, February 25, 2008 -- The Difference Between Flowers And People


Friday, February 22, 2008 -- Three Oldies But Goodies (Annotated)

Thursday, February 21, 2008 -- Marisa Pretended She Didn’t Notice The Cartoonist

Wednesday, February 20, 2008 -- A Woman Always Knows

Tuesday, February 19, 2008 -- Stacy Wanted To Cry

Monday, February 18, 2008 -- Keira Knightley Is Hiring


Friday, February 15, 2008 -- A Paddy Chayefsky Valentine (Part 3 of 3)

Thursday, February 14, 2008 -- A Paddy Chayefsky Valentine (Part 2 of 3)

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 -- A Paddy Chayefsky Valentine (Part 1 of 3)

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 -- Goblin Universe Love (2 of 2): Christians

Monday, February 11, 2008 -- Goblin Universe Love (1 of 2): Clouds


Friday, February 08, 2008 -- The Muse Ship

Thursday, February 07, 2008 -- There’s Nothing Beethoven Could Do To Help

Wednesday, February 06, 2008 -- Ellison’s “Shattered Like A Glass Goblin”

Tuesday, February 05, 2008 -- Polaris In The News And Out

Monday, February 04, 2008 -- Susan Always Tries (Pencil Cartoon & Bonus Cartoon!)


Friday, February 01, 2008 -- Snow Day!



January Archive


Thursday, January 31, 2008 -- Pluto And Beyond #3: The Golden Age of Outer Solar System Studies

Wednesday, January 30, 2008 -- Pluto And Beyond #2: The Ecliptic

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 -- Pluto And Beyond #1: Clyde Tombaugh

Monday, January 28, 2008 -- Lost Pieces


Friday, January 25, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #5

Thursday, January 24, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #4

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #3

Tuesday, January 22, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #2

Monday, January 21, 2008 -- The Landscapes With Figures Of Berthe Morisot #1


Friday, January 18, 2008 -- “Liefde Baart Kunst”

Thursday, January 17, 2008 -- The Curse Of Loch Ness #2 — Heidi

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 -- The Curse Of Loch Ness #1 — Tess

Tuesday, January 15, 2008 -- My Five Celebrity Pencil Cartoons (Annotated)

Monday, January 14, 2008 -- Women And Captions


Friday, January 11, 2008 -- Why I’d Make A Terrible Rock Star

Thursday, January 10, 2008 -- Eagle Inn: Top Ten Nonsense Anagrams

Wednesday, January 09, 2008 -- Chiaroscuro Poses

Tuesday, January 08, 2008 -- Something Magic, Unknown, Daring Me To Know

Monday, January 07, 2008 -- Faux Mischa Dreams


Friday, January 04, 2008 -- He Drew Her, Then . . .

Thursday, January 03, 2008 -- Noli Me Tangere

Wednesday, January 02, 2008 -- 2007 Complete Index