If you’re like most dolts produced by the American education system, you probably actually believe Adolph Hitler died in his bunker in 1945 when the Russian Army reached Berlin. Such ignorance is understandable, given how important it was, then and now, to protect the world from the terrifying REALITY of the situation, namely this: At the end of WWII, Adolph Hitler’s brain was surgically removed, placed in stasis, and then transplanted into a willing new host! Most likely, “Hitler” is still somewhere on the planet today, scheming, ever scheming, to return and complete his plans for world domination. My money says the brain is now in Rick Perry. Every Texas yahoo talks about secession now and then, but Perry’s recent campaign pledge to annex the Sudetenland is troubling to say the least.
They Saved Hitler’s Brain (aka The Madman of Mandoras) (1963) dared speak this truth in the tortured logic of Z-cinema some fifty years ago. Legend has it that the film began shooting in the late fifties–only to be shut down by Nazi agents in Hollywood looking to suppress its startling revelations. It took the courage of a rag-tag band of UCLA students in the early sixties to shoot some additional framing footage, thereby padding out the original film by ten or fifteen minutes so that it might get distribution and thus see the light of day. But it turns out the Nazis had nothing to worry about. The temporal rift created by grafting together the film stock and styles of the late fifties and early sixties was so jarring that the movie elicited only jeers and ridicule. For years it played in the post-fringe graveyard of late-night television, leaving an astonished few to admire the stamina of the actor forced to kneel for hours at a time behind an old ham radio set and under a bell jar in order to “sell” the illusion of functional decapitation.
Happily for lovers of historical drama, the saga of Hitler’s itinerant brain did not die with that noble, yet failed cinematic experiment. In 1973, novelist Roland Puccetti tried once again to alert the world to the ongoing hazard presented by allowing Hitler’s brain to remain at liberty, giving us the sublime revisionism of The Death of the Führer (Arrow Books-1973).
I have now read Puccetti’s book. Before recounting its alternative history of the years after the Second World War (absolute and total spoiler alert), let me say this: The Death of the Führer MUST be adapted for the screen as soon as possible. How it hasn’t already ended up as a major motion picture is a true mystery, one that makes me suspect Nazi sympathizers are once again pressuring Hollywood to ignore the R-rated bombshells contained in this book. The Death of the Führer is everything Inglourious Basterds hoped to be–but done with such economy and ease that it utterly shames Tarantino’s lumbering attempt to pass off what are essentially five interminably long dialog scenes as some kind of fast-paced caper film. If you want brutal and stunning Nazisploitative action, then Puccetti is your man.
We begin at a Bavarian ski lodge some time in the 1960s. A young man–his name is unimportant, call him Mr. Framing-Device if you like–has twisted his leg and must stay off the slopes. An old man sitting on a bench nearby accurately diagnoses the skier’s condition from afar–for you see, this old man is a doctor: Karl Giesvius. As so often happens when strangers meet in the Bavarian Alps, their conversation soon turns to Hitler. Karl, it turns out, knows the REAL story, which he proceeds to tell us:
Ten or so years after the end of WWII, Karl had been sitting in a Parisian cafe when suddenly a local rushed in and begged him to attend to a dying man elsewhere in the city, a dying man who claimed to have information about the whereabouts of….Hitler! Understandably intrigued, Karl rushed to the man’s bedside to hear a startling confession: “I assisted in the removal and transplantation of Hitler’s brain!” Later, after the man dies, Karl looks through some old photos and verifies that the dying man had indeed been a member of the Führer’s personal medical team. He decides to fly to Berlin and begin his investigation.
First task: get inside the Führerbunker and see if any clues are still there. Now, you might think the Führerbunker would have been picked over for just about any and all items of historical import, and that accessing it would be difficult if not impossible. But this turns out not to the be the case. Consulting a map of the compound, Karl figures out where the ventilation shaft should be, and after moving a few well-placed rocks, he’s unearthed the entrance. After shimmying down the vent, he’s the first person to stand in the Führerbunker since the Russians collapsed the entrances at the end of the war. What’s down there? Junk, mostly. It would also appear a Russian soldier took a retributive shit on Hitler’s bed, an extremely resilient shit considering it somehow survived for a decade before Karl descended into the bunker to witness it. He checks out the conference room. Nothing. Eva Braun’s bedroom. Nothing. He’s just about to give up and/or suffocate from a lack of oxygen when finally Karl discovers a hidden passageway connecting Hitler’s bedroom to… a secret surgical theater!
Looking around the tiled room with his flashlight, Karl discovers a bloody operating table and scalpels that still have hair on them (the hair of Hitler!). Strangely, though the Nazis had apparently pioneered the art of brain transplantation, they still didn’t quite understand that one should shave a surgical area before operating. Karl continues his search for evidence. His flashlight illuminates a strange object on the floor. Bingo! It’s a brain!
Hitler’s brain? Well, no, actually–Karl quickly reasons it is the brain of the poor schmuck who donated his body so that Hitler could have a new ride. This was some particularly good writing, I thought. Here Puccetti captures the urgency of the situation back in 1945. With the allies advancing, Nazi doctors had no time to wash down the operating theater nor throw away the old brain–a point Puccetti emphasizes by revealing that the floor-brain is still in the steely clutches of the forceps used so many years ago to wrench it from its skull! There’s also a bucket of congealed blood nearby, but Puccetti does not speculate as to why the brain didn’t end up there rather than on the floor. Also, we are left to wonder how this brain tissue, much like the enduring pile of Russian infantry crap in the next room, could survive more or less in tact for over a decade.
Karl’s investigation continues. He finds a plaque bearing the name of the surgical genius responsible for all this brain shuffling: Dr. Wilhelm Tager. Karl is flabbergasted. Tager, as it turns out, was his buddy from medical school before the war, his old fencing partner, and a genius of neurology who finished at the top of their class. That just about seals it. Find Tager find Hitler’s brain, he reasons. And then he can kill them both!
After a little more detective work, Karl tracks Tager down to a remote castle somewhere in Spain. Next obstacle: How to infiltrate a well-guarded compound full of evil Nazi scientists? Here Karl decides for an elegantly direct approach–he simply floors his motorcycle and breaks through the front gate (as seen on the action-packed cover above). That might seem crazy, but Karl’s plan is actually a bit more complicated. After taking a few Nazi bullets and wrecking his bike into a tree, it is Karl’s hope that Dr. Tager will attend to him and then recognize him from their college days. And this is precisely what happens. After surgery, Karl wakes up and tells his “old friend” that he just happened to be vacationing in Spain and that the throttle on his motorcycle just happened to get stuck–that’s why he crashed through the gate uncontrollably.
One might think that the Nazi brain trust (those entrusted with the Nazi brain, that is) hiding out in Spain would be the most paranoid gated-community on the planet–but no one seems to question the fact that Karl, unseen by Tager since before the war, has suddenly and seemingly coincidentally arrived on their doorstep. Before you know it, all the Nazis have welcomed Karl into their little clique, probably because Karl wastes no time fishing for Hitler leads by constantly bemoaning the fate of the Third Reich.
Later, once he’s completely healed from his injuries, Karl is invited to a big party hosted by the owner of the castle, the beautiful Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny. The party goes well as Karl learns a few new tidbits by eavesdropping. But still no sign of Hitler’s noodle.
Things really heat up later that night when a guard knocks on Karl’s door. The Baroness has requested a private audience. Well, one thing leads to another, and before you know it Karl and the Baroness are in her bedroom ripping off each other’s clothes. And then this happens:
Her fingers dug into my arms with sharp nails, her back arched spasmodically, she started to pull me down deep into a bottomless pit. Somewhere within my body a train of cold liquid left its station with relentless fury and plunged on to its destination.
Here Puccetti is telling us, as artfully as he can, that Karl is about to ejaculate into the Baroness. The story continues.
Gerda’s eyes opened widely now. The pupils looked dark in the fire glow, much darker than before, and somehow beyond them and behind them there was a deep rustling of Teutonic forests, of shadowy predators roaming in the night…Only then did I raise my trembling, terribly tired fingers to her head, slide them under the golden hair and feel the bony ridge across her skull. Only then did her lips part to give the fateful cry.
‘ICH BIN DER FUHRER.’
Yes, friends, our intrepid hero and narrator has just enjoyed a simultaneous orgasm with Adolph Hitler– a drop-dead gorgeous Hitler, mind you, but Hitler nonetheless (an alternate cover for the book foregrounds this reveal a bit more forcefully). 
Some might be thinking this was surprisingly enlightened on Hitler’s part, this willingness to have his brain transplanted into a woman. Funny thing about that–it was actually a complete surprise for the Führer. Later we learn that Tager and his team had a young, strapping Aryan male all ready to host Hitler’s brain, but the kid died during surgery from an unforeseen complication. The original Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny, a loyalist if ever there was one, stepped right up and volunteered her body. Man, was Hitler ever mad when he woke up. But we are told that the Führer eventually warmed up to and even embraced the idea of being a sexy Baroness. Realizing it made for a good hiding place, the brain decided to stay put.
But back to the post-coital revelation that our narrator just had some manner of queerly heteronormative gay sex with Hitler. “What would I do,” wonders the reader, “under such circumstances?” Given that Karl is dedicated above all else to his mission, he loses no time recovering from this quite literal “mindfuck” and stabs Baroness Hitler-brain straight through the heart, leaving her for dead.
For the next twenty or so pages, Karl is on the run trying to evade capture in the compound. He jumps a guard and steals his uniform, which buys him a little more time to wander around the castle in search of a way out. Eventually he finds another series of hidden passageways leading deeper and deeper into the castle’s foundations. Finally he stumbles upon, wouldn’t you know it, another goddamn secret operating theater! No sooner have you killed Hitler’s host body than his evil surgical team is right back at it putting his brain in yet another body. Actually, Karl probably should have seen this coming. After all, as narrator, he of all people should understand the basic premise of his own story. Caught off guard indulging in some well-deserved self-recrimination, Karl is taken into custody and whisked away to a holding cell.
You’re probably thinking at this point that Karl himself is destined to be the new donor body for Hitler’s brain. Makes sense. Hitler needs the body and the Nazis no longer need Karl–that’s certainly what a lesser writer would settle for here. But Puccetti has other and much more incredible ambitions. Karl is wheeled into surgery alright, but finds that his nemesis Dr. Tager instead plans to implant a type of experimental electrode “harness” in Karl’s brain. In fact, he forces Karl to remain awake as he cuts off the top of his skull and inserts the electrodes one by one. Later, in post-op, we discover that Tager and his assistants can now control Karl’s actions simply by pushing the appropriate buttons: THIRST, HUNGER, LUST, etc. This is the sort of thing Nazi doctors live for, apparently. Bouncing Hitler’s brain from body to body is a neat trick and all, but Tager’s real ambition is to rule the world by implanting electrodes in every human skull! We also discover here that Tager has no real investment in Nazi ideology–he chose to ride Hitler’s coattails only because Hitler seemed–at the time at least– the most likely to make his dream of global brain control come true. He would just as easily have cast his lot with the Americans or Russians, if need be. That’s just how evil Tager is–the pure evil of pure science.
After some pleasure/pain interrogation from Tager and his buttons, Karl is taken back to his cell, which it so happens is a glass cube. There he devises a brilliant plan. He will break the glass by ramming his head into the wall, which will also probably disable the brain-electrode stuff at the top of his brain. At the very least, he reasons, it will interfere with its optimal operation. Gathering his strength and courage, he runs headlong into the glass–so hard that he blacks out. When he comes to, however, he finds the plan has indeed worked–there is nothing but shattered glass all around him (and no guards, apparently). Karl quickly runs back to the lab and pulls all the wiring out of the control-console so that Tager cannot send any more brain signals.
But the console can be quickly repaired, Karl reasons. No, there is simply no way around it, the electrode net in his brain must come out. But how? Who will do the delicate surgery? Karl. Karl will do the surgery. Karl will do the surgery on himself. Brain surgery. Karl will perform brain surgery on his own brain.
Are you beginning to understand why this novel must be committed to film as soon as possible? I already have Scarlett Johansson down for the role of the Baroness. As for Karl…well, who cares really? I just want to see the scene wherein Scarlett Johansson reveals that she is actually a busty receptacle for Hitler’s devious brain. I would trade you any number of Final Destinations and/or Centipede units for such a moment to be captured on film.
Back to the brain surgery. Karl sets up a mirror to see the top of his head. “The scalp was easy,” Karl tells us. Then the skull bone. Then the membrane covering the brain. Underneath are the electrodes. Though delicately inserted only hours earlier by Dr. Tager, Karl finds he is able to simply rip them out of his brain with no real consequences. But the suspense isn’t over:
There I was, nude and exhausted, unarmed and with the whole top of my brain exposed to raw air. If I so much as leaned forward, the cerebrospinal fluid encasing my brain would spill out; I could imagine the sticky liquid dripping over into my face and blinding me.
To make matters worse, a guard suddenly appears and interrupts the operation. Luckily, Karl still has the presence (and fluid) of mind to dispatch him with a nearby bone saw. But there he remains, his brain still exposed to “raw air” and all of his brain juice about to spill out. He decides he has no time to stitch the membrane and just goes for wiring the skull back in place. After that he’s so tired that he just kind of flops his scalp back over the bone, figuring he’ll deal with that after he’s finished killing Tager and finding Hitler’s new cranial hideaway.
Eventually he corners Tager and forces him at gunpoint to the “vault”–the most secret of secret chambers in the bottom floors of the castle. Inside is the requisite vat with Hitler’s pulsating brain floating inside, awaiting its new host. As an incidental detail, we are also told there are two crossed sabers on the wall as part of the castle’s Coat of Arms. Almost immediately, however, this proves not to be incidental as Tager calls Karl’s bluff on the number of bullets in the gun, which leads directly to the two men retrieving those very same sabers and reliving their days as college fencing opponents (remember? I told you about that earlier). Karl is worried, for he never beat Tager in their university matches, but it remains his only hope. Thrust and parry. Thrust and parry. And then Karl spies an “Auto-Destruction” button on the wall. It’s true. He really does. A big red button that will blow everything up. Even if Karl can’t escape, he can blow up the entire castle, Hitler’s brain, and all the remaining Nazis at the same time!
Karl pushes the button. No, you fool! screams Tager. Ten minutes to absolute annihilation. Just then Karl sees that the brain vat has become unmoored and is rolling into the periphery of his vision. Two quick ballet leaps and he is standing over the bubbling vat. He then drives his sword directly into the Fuhrer’s brain! Tager screams in horror, and Karl takes advantage of his shock to stab Tager “in the crotch” all the way back to the pelvis. Tager collapses, and in doing so, knocks over the now pinkish red vat of brain and blood. Hitler’s brain slides across the floor where Karl, not wanting to leave anything to chance, scoops it up. 
Karl must escape–the castle is still going to blow at any second. Miraculously, he discovers another secret door leading to some kind of mining-car contraption below. Still clutching the well-stabbed yet still relatively cohesive Hitler brain, he jumps in and releases the brakes. A bloody Tager crawls along the tracks begging for mercy. But no dice. Karl rides the mining-car out of the castle and out into the open air. There he sees a mighty condor flying through the sky, and considers throwing Hitler’s brain on the grass so that the majestic bird might swoop down and carry it away. For that would be a fitting final indignity for Hitler’s stupid evil brain–snatched up by razor-sharp talons and fed to a nest full of baby condors. Just then the earth rocks with the force of the castle exploding. In the end, Karl simply falls on the brain and “collapses” it good and flat.
Victory!
Back to our Bavarian ski-lodge in the present day. The story over, Mr. Framing-Device doesn’t know what to think. Did this old man really have sex with Hitler in a woman’s body, operate on his own brain, and then almost throw Hitler’s brain to a hungry condor? Just then a nurse appears on scene to retrieve Karl–the sun is setting and it’s time to go back home. Mr. Framing-Device takes the nurse aside and asks if he might visit Karl again some day. “Why not?”the nurse responds, “visiting hours at the sanatorium are open to everyone.”
And there we leave it. Karl might be crazy. Then again, he might just have a bad case of tuberculosis. I guess the next generation of historians will have to make the ultimate determination: did Tager somehow get the brain back and put it in Scarlett Johansson, or did it end up in the bellies of a dozen hungry little condor chicks?
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia just began its seventh season on FX. With any luck, the series will bounce back from a sixth season that, as any objective Phillyphile would agree, was uneven at best. Last week’s premiere, “Frank’s Pretty Woman,” was certainly a good start, returning “the gang” to the moral muck in which they thrive best (Frank decides to marry his favorite prostitute, the gang decides she needs to be “classed up,” hilarity ensues). 
Set primarily in the crappiest bar in Philly’s most dilapidated neighborhood, Sunny also references Cheers, but with an emphasis on capturing more honestly the milieu of the chronic drinker (Paddy’s, or its Boston equivalent, is where Cliff and Norm would eventually end up after drinking away their pensions). The “bar” set (or its displaced cousins like “Central Perk” and the “Peach Pit”) has long been central to TV architecture—public spaces where characters can congregate for jokes and plot points. Typically these sets weave the characters into a larger social world—the cast surrounded by various extras that circulate to signify the characters’ integration with our own reality. True to the wicked inversions of Sunny, however, Paddy’s bar is a bleak and generally empty space. It is occasionally packed on special occasions in service of the plot, but for the most part has no clientele and merely serves as an echo-chamber for the inane bickering of the cast. This isolation is further underscored in the exterior establishing shots that invariably depict the bar as standing alone in a beaten-down warehouse district devoid of all humanity, a place where one expects to see a tumbleweed blow by festooned with used condoms and dirty syringes 
American comedy is frequently concerned with the invisible shell-game of “class,” typically in ways that stylize poverty to make it either a momentary comic irruption in middle-class life or the launching pad for eventual middle-class success. Sunny, on the other hand, is particularly candid in examining the thin line dividing crippling destitution from out-and-out homelessness. Given their location, the gang is constantly mixing with addicts, prostitutes, criminals, and—perhaps most magically—various shady characters that Frank and Charlie meet “under the bridge.” Slightly better off than their neighbors, the gang’s relation to the human misery all around them is like that of most Americans—instrumental indifference (their repeated dealings with “Cricket” come to mind). Building on this bedrock of a permanent underclass with no possibilities or aspirations, individual episodes often focus on the particularly American delusion–cultivated by almost everyone occupying a position other than Fortune 500 CFO or crack whore—that every citizen of the USA is middle-class and rising. Dennis, Dee, and Mac (Rob McElhenney), in particular, are constantly misjudging their positions on the economic, educational, and cultural ladder (Frank and Charlie (Charlie Day), for different reasons, don’t appear to care one way or another).
With one notable exception, perhaps unexpected in the show’s original design. Despite the program’s general commitment to venal nastiness, Frank and Charlie’s warped father-son vibe has become somewhat of a moral anchor for the series. Frank, again, has lived the middle-class “dream” of marriage, kids, and a house in the ‘burbs—but has decided, rather courageously, that he’d rather crash in a horrifying studio apartment and devote his time and energy to getting fucked up and laid as much as possible. Meanwhile, his room and Murphy-bedmate Charlie is the show’s sole remaining innocent, a guy that one could imagine, given the right circumstances, might end up institutionalized either out of injustice, inconvenience, or a simple misunderstanding. Like the rest of them, Charlie has his schemes. But he also seems relatively content to never leave Philadelphia so that he might continue devoting his life to trapping the bar’s prodigious rat population. 
For those who don’t know Kelley’s work, the Kandor series is an ongoing sculptural project based on the “shrunken city” of Kandor featured in the silver-age Superman comics. The capital of Krypton, Kandor was miniaturized and stolen by the evil Brainiac moments before the destruction of Superman’s home planet. At some point, Superman himself came into possession of the tiny city and its citizens, securing them beneath a large bell jar in his fabled Fortress of Solitude until he could find a way to return the Kandorians to their normal size (a task that took some 20 years of comic book time). Fascinated by the fact that Kandor, as inked in the comic book, seemed to mutate into different forms with each new appearance, Kelley has over the past decade translated several of the comic panels into large sculptural form (Kandor 14 is to the left). Like much of Kelley’s work, the Kandor series plays with Freudian exchanges between the popular unconscious and the unconscious popularized, presenting Kandor as an insistent and quite literalized symptom of Superman’s boyhood trauma. In many ways, the sculptural pieces expand upon a reading of the Superman mythos that Kelley first introduced in 1999 with Superman Recites Selections from The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath, a video that 
The Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction project (EAPR) is to be a 365-part video/sculptural series addressing the “repressed” blank zones of Educational Complex. Each EAPR is a promiscuous mix of personal memories, pop culture, and standardized “recovered memory” scenarios. The London show debuts #36 in the series, “Vice Anglais,” which imagines the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti staged as a Hammer horror film. Rossetti, displaced here as “M’Lord,” leads a gang of perverts on a subterranean tour of debauchery, loosely organized around Rossetti’s own famously salacious biography. Particularly stunning is the sudden appearance of M’Lord’s muse, Golden Rod, an ambulatory yet mute corn cob creature apparently visible only to M’Lord. At another point in the video, M’Lord wanders alone into a cavernous chamber and encounters–without explanation–the seemingly abandoned Kandor 10B. 
Will Ferrell’s “Nick Halsey,” meanwhile, has taken a different route in Everything Must Go. When we first meet Nick, a slimy twenty-something is firing him from his job as Assistant Vice President. Halsey, we learn, is a recovering alcoholic, and his termination stems from a relapse at the Denver office that may or may not have led to the sexual harassment of a co-worker. On the way home, Halsey loads up with some 12-packs to make his fall off the wagon official. Arriving at his home, however, he finds that his wife has thrown all of his possessions out on the front lawn, changed the locks, and left a note demanding a divorce. Dealt this double-whammy of adult problems on the same day, Nick takes the one reasonable course of action available—he decides to live on his front lawn for a few days in a drunken stupor until he can figure things out. 
Of course, stepping straight from the “irresponsible” narcissism of childlessness to becoming a dad is not something that can be done in one step. Happily, both films provide their dysfunctional X-er’s with a “training child” so they can get some practice first. Greenberg must care for a suddenly ailing German Shepard, forming a temporary interspecies family with Florence. Nick, meanwhile, temporarily adopts a chubby, fatherless neighborhood kid to help with his garage sale (“Will you teach me to play baseball?,” the kid asks at one point. No, I’m not kidding, he really does say this). As the film ends, we sense Nick is probably only a few months away from acquiring the necessary skills to take over in the Dern household (he’s been invited back, once he gets his life in order). 
I think my favorite of this genre remains Step Brothers (2009), featuring Ferrell once again, this time alongside John C. Reilly. It is a much broader, borderline gross-out comedy that actually seems more intellectually honest than either Greenberg or Everything Must Go. Ferrell and Reilly play two guys in their mid-30s who, having been insulated from the “real world” by virtue of their rich single parents, basically live the dream-lives of 14 year-old boys. When the parents get married, the two must learn to live together as “step brothers,” which they do blissfully until thrown out to fend for themselves. As each takes the first tentative steps toward adulthood, there is a major falling out and ongoing feud. What is their reward for becoming adults? They both become incredibly boring and generally miserable. Courageously, the film finds a way for them to remain “independent” at the end while also allowing them to regress back into their personas of endless adolescence. I haven’t read Judith Halberstam’s new book on 
For those annoyed, finally, that this genre is so obsessively focused on retarded masculinity, you might want to check out The Future (2011), written and directed by Miranda July. Here the specter of adopting a sick cat sends a 30-something couple into a major life crisis, constituted in large part by their realization that by the time the cat dies (in about five years), they’ll both be 40 (“and 40 is the new 60,” they both agree in classic anti-Boomer logic). From here the film becomes an art cinema hallucination with July suddenly and seemingly randomly having an affair with a 50-something man, presumably because he’s an actual adult who owns an actual house. I’d write more about it, but as that would require me accessing a form of subjectivity that I don’t fully understand, I’ll leave it there. Some, I’m told, find July’s movies insufferably cutesy, but I appreciated the fact that the film made at least some attempt to escape the scourge of Hollywood naturalism. And it was nice, for a change, to see a woman as the center of all the generational floundering. 
The fall television season starts soon, and with it, the return of some of our most beloved entertainment franchises. Soon we’ll know the true extent of Chuck Lorre’s rage at Charlie Sheen when he offs him in the most humiliating way possible on A Man + Ashton Kutcher ÷ the Teenage Remainder. I’m pretty sure we left “House” in some kind of interesting scrape at the end of last season, although I am hard pressed to remember what it was. And then there are the shiny new shows, like Whitey, which I think stars the lady from the Progressive Insurance ads shacking up with her boyfriend as they try to save up money to buy him a shaving kit. There’s also the sci-fi show, Terra Nova, which upon cancellation will introduce us to the next generation of futuristic whiners mortally wounded that their series was not allowed to fulfill its destiny, even if that destiny was merely to be the Time Tunnel of 2011. 
Most exciting of all is NBC’s bold new experiment in wasting, as egregiously as possible, the considerable talents of Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph. With little to no shame, Up All Night apparently has no more ambition than to document the hilarity of couples fighting over just who is going to get up and stick a bottle in the puling maw of a baby. Given that these TV couples apparently chose to have these TV babies, I’m not sure why this should be my TV problem. I know young parents secrete an enzyme that makes junior’s inopportune puking on various fabrics and visitors endlessly fascinating, but in the past such banal war stories have typically and mercifully circulated only among fellow parents —how NBC plans to do 22 episodes a year of dirty diaper jokes for those who don’t find little Johnny’s little shits adorable is a true mystery. Unless one of the babies is from Venus or the reincarnation of Albert Fish or something equally edgy, I’ll pass, thank you very much. 
One of the highlights of this summer was undoubtedly ABC’s Wipeout, a show where mobile assemblages of bone and meat subjected themselves to a punishing obstacle course for reasons that apparently had nothing to do with either prizes or fame. In fact, I’m not even sure if Wipeout was actually a game show or just an ongoing X-treme sport product demo featuring recruits from various So-Cal fitness clubs looking to “test themselves” against the challenge of a human pachinko machine. Making it even more stupidly unfair, some off-screen tech-lord apparently had the power to activate various booby-traps at his own discretion, making sure that even the most worthy competitor eventually ended up in the drink with a broken coccyx. If, as a child, you ever wondered what it would be like to be miniaturized so that you could try to outrun the various components of “Mousetrap,” this was the show for you. Wipeout may seem like America’s take on those wacky Japanese game shows that focus on contestant pain and humiliation, but that comparison makes little to no sense given that it is almost impossible to humiliate an American, especially one appearing on television. It would seem these people decided to appear on Wipeout for little more than talking points at various Orange County juice bars; or perhaps because, to have not done so, would be to lead a life slightly less awesome.
Not only is The Picker Sisters irksome for unabashedly trading in fantasies of the bi-coastal tasteful gleefully screwing over clueless rubes, it is also—quite unintentionally, I’m sure–a rather depressing documentary about the precipitous decline of the nation’s once great manufacturing base. In another segment, the gals raid an old Army depot (again, somewhere in the south), now reduced to little more than a rusting collection of obsolescent hardware. They are delighted to find an “Acid Suit” locker, a stand-alone metal closet that apparently once housed an emergency “acid suit” for that lucky soldier called upon to deal with the ominous eruption of an acid emergency in the plant. Rather than ponder the object as silent testimony to the shared dangers and selfless sacrifice of previous generations working difficult jobs for the common good of the nation, the Pickers instead declare that the locker would make a great “wet bar” for some young Hollywood bachelor. On a truck and back to L.A. it goes. With any luck, residual benzene levels will ensure that everyone involved feeds a tumor with each new Mojito. 
