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February 5, 2012

Tag: wife

January 29, 2012

Really funny jokes-Struggling actor

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After a difficult day a struggling actor returns to his neighborhood and is shocked to find a cadre of police and fire trucks surrounding the smoldering remains of his house. Explaining who he was he asks “What happened?”

“Well,” one of the officer’s says, “It seems that your agent came by your house earlier today and while he was here he attacked your wife, assaulted your children, beat your dog and burned your house to the ground.”

The actor is struck speechless, his jaw hanging open in disbelief,“My agent came to my house?”

January 21, 2012

Diabolical Codyism

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REGRESSION crisis currently bedeviling the western democracies, a mass and now multi-generational stagnation in adolescence largely engineered and sustained by a culture industry that needs all of us to remain fixated on the products and fantasies we consumed when we were fourteen.  The promo art for Young Adult announces this crisis as its central theme: “Everyone grows old. Not everyone grows up.”
Before unpacking Young Adult, however, we must first revisit Juno.  Below, the semiotic square illustrates how the four main characters embody positions derived from the film’s structuring opposition of ADULT – CHILD. 
JUNO (2007)

Before proceeding with the individual characters, it should be noted that the “semiotic square” typically does not have a baby at its center.  I have added one, however, because it is the precious, precious baby that provides the bedrock of the Codyverse.  Indeed, one could argue that both Juno and Young Adult are primarily concerned with arriving at the appropriate answer for Question 3 above: “Who shall and shall not be granted proximity to the precious baby?” 
Juno herself, of course, assumes the “contrary” position at the top of the square, a wise-cracking teen who, though she seems mature beyond her years, must learn important lessons on the path to true adulthood.  As the only fully functional “adult” in the story, Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) will assume the Adult/Non-child position.  I will assign Paulie (Micheal Cerra) the “neutral” term at the bottom of the square as he is caught in a limbo between adulthood and childhood and is thus neither (as opposed to Juno’s more forceful transition from Child to Adult). But the crucial term here is on the right side of the square: Mark (Jason Bateman) in the position of Child–Not Adult.  While Juno is about “Juno,” obviously, its main ideological task is to punish Mark for his transgressive regression so that he might be expelled from the text and kept as far away as possible from the precious baby. 
Mark’s transgressions are these: 1). he still enjoys “punk rock” and “horror movies;” 2). he shares his expertise in these forms with a teenage girl; 3). he verbalizes his attraction to this same teenage girl, probably because she also likes punk rock and horror movies; 4). he bitches about how marriage forced him to renounce his ambitions to be a “rock star”; 5). he expresses a desire to live in a loft downtown; 6). he expresses some degree of hesitation over coming into proximity with the precious Juno-baby.   It’s very straightforward, really.  Mark is the regressed male who, unlike Steve Carrell in The 40 Year Old Virgin, does not have a hip and patient Catherine Keener to save him from wallowing in perpetual adolescence.  Juno ends “happily” to the extent that Mark is exposed as a creep and must leave the world of wholesome suburban reproduction. 
Now, let us move on to the even more diabolical case of  Young Adult:
YOUNG ADULT (2011)

In this case, we will put Mark (Patton Oswald) at the top of the square.  Taking a page from Planet Apatow, Cody uses the narrative shorthand of a superhero figurine collection to signify Matt’s regressed status.  And yet, Matt remains the only adult “conscience” in the film, consistently trying to talk Mavis (Charlize Theron) out of her ridiculous scheme to win back her old boyfriend, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson).  Buddy is for the most part a cipher, but as a seemingly committed husband and enthusiastic father, he fills out the necessary position of Adult–Non-Child.   
Now, you might think Cody was somewhat harsh with Mark in Juno for punishing him so excessively just for enjoying the rock ‘n’ roll music and finding a witty teenager attractive.  Thus the genius of Nipple Confusion.   By placing Buddy’s wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), in a cover band made up entirely of new moms, Cody finds a more nuanced strategy for engaging question #2: “What is the proper relationship for a “normal adult” to have with popular culture?”  While Juno addresses this question in its most general form, Young Adult provides a much more focused analysis of the spectrum of regression by asking, “What is the appropriate relationship for a ‘normal adult’ to have with Teenage Bandwagon?”
Recall that during the opening sequence, we witness Mavis obsessively rewinding and re-listening to the first verse of Teenage Bandwagon’s song, “the Concept”–included on a now 17 year old mix-tape that Buddy made for Mavis when they were dating.  Mavis’ fixation on repeating a moment of pop epiphany (crucially, she only wants to listen to the first verse/chorus over and over again) suggests that her relationship with Teenage Bandwagon is profoundly regressed and thus wholly dysfunctional.  Mavis’ rewinding of the tape is offered, initially at least, as a playfully regressive memory for any audience member old enough to remember the courtship and technical protocols attending analog “mix-tapes”–but as the story proceeds, her fixation on “The Concept” retroactively becomes a sonic marker of Mavis having become “stuck” in the past.  She therefore has an “inappropriate” relationship with Teenage Fanclub.
As the drummer in Nipple Confusion, however, Buddy’s wife Beth demonstrates a healthy and non-regressed relationship to Teenage Bandwagon.  This is because Beth, unlike Mavis, enjoys Teenage Bandwagon within the context of successful marriage and reproduction.  Indeed, Nipple Confusion is “cool” precisely because they have the “proper” perspective on life by virtue of their marriages and collective motherhood.  Single and without children, Mavis foolishly regards “The Concept” as a powerful anthem of romantic affect and possibility; Beth has the higher knowledge that the song is simply a quaint curio of their generation’s heritage in ’90s indie-rock culture.  Thus Mavis’ profound horror when she discovers that Buddy has shared “their song” with obstacle-wife.
Which brings us to Mavis, who we see occupies the same position as Mark in Juno: CHILD–NOT ADULT.  And, also like Mark, the ideological work of Young Adult is to ensure that Mavis be kept as far away as possible from the precious, precious baby.  Taken together, the two films demonstrate just how profoundly invested the Codyverse is in maintaining rigorous moral parameters related to proper suburban breeding.
Young Adult, however, is a much more mean and nasty film.  Consider that in Juno Mark must leave in shame because he questions the centrality of breeding and parenthood in adult life.  This is a harsh judgment, perhaps, but at least Mark has some agency in his own fate.  He chooses to end his marriage and go live in a loft where he can spend more time listening to punk rock and watching horror movies.
Young Adult, on the other hand, makes the following division:

Successful Breeders                                                          “Crippled” Breeders
Buddy (functional penis and sperm)                             Matt (crooked penis)Beth (functional uterus and ovum)                                Mavis (had a miscarriage)
Thus, Matt and Mavis’ “regressions” are explained by a physical inability to assume the role of an adult breeder.  Unlike Mark, they are denied even the opportunity of questioning the breeder position–it is simply assumed that both desperately want a marriage and family (especially Mavis), but have “regressed” to a non-adult position as an effect of their reproductive failure.   Matt and Mavis are doomed because, in their cases at least, biology is destiny.  
I would submit this is a fairly loathsome position to take on these issues.
Okay, I’m done. 


January 21, 2012

The Annotated Ann Coulter: Volume I

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Concerned citizens have debated the Ann Coulter question for many years now.  Does Coulter sincerely believe in the often ridiculous positions she champions in print, on Fox news, and during her campus lecture tours?  Or, as many have suggested, is Coulter an ongoing “performance” project of some kind, a hyperbolic parody of conservative anger and illogic dreamed up by a conceptualist collective somewhere in the Village?  Rachel Maddow has recently attempted to make this same “art school” argument about GOP pizza magnate and freelance genital inspector Herman Cain, but in truth, it is Coulter who first compelled left-leaning cultural elites to contend with the enigmatic posturing of feckless fascism.  So, for example, when Coulter claimed after the meltdown of the nuclear reactors in Fukushima that there now exists “burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine,” baffled bystanders could only wonder at her motivation.  Regardless of one’s position on nuclear energy, no one would really take a “pro-meltdown” position, would they? Talk about seeing the glowing silver lining around a hazy cloud of Cesium-137– this has to be a stunt, right?  Ultimately, however, Coulter’s “intent” in her books and punditry is not all that important.  Be it sincere or a sham, the effect on American culture and politics remains the same.  If you want to drink from a mountain stream, after all, it matters little if a horse up river pissed in the water by design or by accident; either way, you still have a mouth full of horse piss.

On the other hand, if Coulter’s act really is a bluff, and she in fact spends all her free time in Manhattan clinking cocktails with book editors, gallery curators, and a few cynical but discrete Ivy League professors, laughing about the endless gullibility of the stupid hayseeds who are paying for her new walk-in jacuzzi–then don’t we owe it to her miserable captives to set them free?  If, back in 1964, I had been struggling to sit through all 8 hours of Warhol’s Empire, I know I would certainly have appreciated it if someone had come into the theater to let me know it was okay to leave, that I was just a prop in the execution of someone else’s conceptual stunt.

Perhaps those of us who identify with progressive causes would benefit by digging a bit deeper, by subjecting Coulter’s oeuvre to a more sustained and probing form of textual explication.  By “deconstructing,” if you will, the logic of the Coulterian universe, there is a chance–a slim one, I will concede–that we might better understand, a). what she professes to believe; b). whether or not she really believes what she professes to believe; and c). the sensibility of a readership that truly believes that she believes in things that she may or may not actually believe.

The only way to do this, I propose, is through a line-by-line examination of the work itself–what we in the academic game sometimes call a “close reading.”  As a slanderous, treasonous, godless, guilty, and demonic member of the professorial class, I hope that I might be well-suited to such a task. In the interest of critical self-reflexivity, I will admit up front that I think she’s probably faking it, that she doesn’t really believe most of the positions she advocates (like carrying heavy water for the “pro-meltdown” community).  But I am willing to keep an open mind, and if somehow Coulter can win me over with the strength of her arguments, I will be more than happy to concede that she is correct and that my “liberal” ass deserves immediate incarceration for crimes against the state, at least until it arrives at its final destination in hell where Coulter and other heavenly conservatives can pelt me and my fellow damned with burning copies of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche.

Let us begin with Coulter’s fourth book, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must).  Though the title remains confrontational (it implies, you see, that talking to a liberal is so unpleasant that one would do everything in his or her power to avoid such a fate), I begin here because this book suggests, at least implicitly, that some type of dialogue might still take place (at least as of 2004, the date of the book’s original publication).  Admittedly, in Coulter’s ideal form, this “dialogue” would be a Thanksgiving dinner wherein a witty “conservative” systematically decimates the sophistry of her uptight liberal relations by demonstrating that there is no problem in the 21st century that can not be answered by some creative combination of Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, and Jesus.  To put a positive spin on this otherwise depressing scenario, let us emphasis that this scene at least has us all sitting at the same table, as it were, and that if Coulter’s woefully naive young cousin doing an Anthro degree at Smith began choking to death on the ceremonial wishbone, she still might have enough empathy to get up and administer the Heimlich maneuver (then again, perhaps Coulter really does have the courage to commit an unparalleled act of pure Objectivism:  No one help her!  It is not in our interest to prevent this lazy, under-achieving masticator from choking, for her death shall leave more turkey and stuffing for the rest of us!  Turn the highchairs this way so that the babies might also learn this lesson well!)

So let us begin (Coulter’s prose will be in bold black, my annotations in red).
 
A special note to conservative readers: Given that modern American conservatism has now become indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia, there will be no attempt made here to “persuade” or “convince” you of anything.  Rather, much as one might address a co-worker who suddenly professes a belief that extraterrestrials are filling his head with voices telling him to kill the neighbor’s dog, the following will proceed from the assumption that logic and reason are of little use in convincing you of anything, and that your best hope resides in a carefully monitored regimen of Haldol or Thorazine. I’m so sorry.  If somehow appeals to cooperative reason and socio-economic justice prevail in the future, we will try to send a time machine back to rescue the rest of you from yourselves.  Until then, good luck.  Also, I think someone on your local public access station just suggested adding a penny in sales tax to help clean up that toxic dump site that’s been festering out by the Johnson place and breeding all them mutant super-raccoons—your time might be better spent writing a letter about how the free market is the only way to deal with the mutant super-raccoon problem, and that you’ll shoot any city animal control officer who comes on your property to implement a socialist “one-size-fits-all” campaign of mutant super-raccoon eradication. 

1How to Talk to a Liberal
(1) Historically, the best way to convert liberals is to have them move out of their parents’ home, get a job, and start paying taxes.

Coulter begins here with a touch of folk wisdom, essentially adapting Churchill’s bromide, “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain,” so that it might better appeal to her most loyal readers (crucially, however, Coulter is not willing to concede the 20 year-old part of the equation.  Even deciding to share your toys in preschool would be counted as a moronic flirtation with wealth redistribution).  Conservatives love using this quotation because they believe it imbues the speaker with a type of practical philosophy born of hard-won experience and incontrovertible common sense.  By dropping it into everyday conversation, the conservative signals that he or she possesses the necessary intellectual depth to reflect on life’s big questions, but still has not been swayed by the more “complicated” book-learned philosophies favored by liberal elites. 
Unpacking the sentence, we see three interlinking assumptions:
1. Liberals are children.2. Liberals are unemployed.3. Liberals do not pay taxes.
By casting the liberal as a child who will, under ideal circumstances, be “cured” by confronting the more sober truths of adulthood, Coulter endorses the rather sad but protoypically conservative position that the world is what it is and nothing will ever change it.   Only children believe that the world’s inequalities and injustices might be productively challenged.  The “adult” conservative, on the other hand, knows how the world “really works,” and that the child-liberal will eventually understand that s/he must give up the ridiculous aspiration for a world that is less horrifying.   Most often, this “adult” perspective is the product of having been worn down by age, fear, and fatigue so that no other possibilities remain imaginable.  A mortgaged and mirthless 40 sees what carefree 20 cannot–life is an endless struggle to acquire shit and protect it from other people who want to take your shit, all so that when you get really old you don’t end up dying penniless in a ditch.  Thus it has been since Thog the caveman first suckered-punched Grunda the hill person so that he might steal his woman, jaguar paw, and pointed stick.
By choosing to open her 2004 book with a generational mapping of right and left, Coulter gives us some insight into her core readership.  While I have no empirical data to back this claim up, I am willing to follow Coulter’s lead here in baseless speculation to suggest that her books are most avidly consumed by white men who are married, middle-aged, and fairly well-off (given that this is the key constituency of the Republican party, this would not be surprising).  Why this particular demographic?  Because Coulter “gets” them, she understands the frustration of being a “wealth-producer” surrounded by parasitical sucklings–the wife, the kids, an idiot brother, the city, the state, public education, tollways, welfare deadbeats, the chronically ill, and so on.  Thus the appeal of the regressive Randian fantasy of holding one’s breath and refusing to “produce” so as to teach all the ungrateful morons around you a lesson (much as the toddler will withhold feces during toilet training as a way of protesting the oppressive discipline of the parents).  
Yes, Coulter–or at this point, “Ann”–truly understands the middle-class white guy’s pain.  She arrived on the national scene during the dark days of the Clinton presidency, a Godsend as the most vocal in a new battalion of younger, blonder, female Republicans who at last showed the world that not every right-winger had to look and talk like Robert Novak.  Prominently unattached, Ann is the kind of gal you fantasize about while putting on your cleats to play the back nine at the country-club.  Unlike your mollycoddling wife, Ann would understand the horror of having your oldest son come home from college to announce his plans to be a professional “graphic novelist,” or seeing your daughter go out every weekend with a trio of pierced weirdos who are most obviously homosexuals.  Ann knows what it’s like to have your hard-earned pay taxed by an evil bureaucracy that wants to throw that money away on the prostitutes and drug dealers you sometimes think you see loitering around as you drive to the baseball stadium downtown. And with Ann by my side, I would never lose an argument ever again.  Next time that wise ass liberal neighbor of mine points out that I’m much more likely to get shot by my own gun than to shoot a burglar, Ann would be right there to call him out for the dickless coward he really is!  In fact, I wouldn’t mind if she called me a few names as well.  Don’t get me wrong–I still think it is the man’s role to take the lead in any relationship.  But when I see Ann in that tight, little leather vest…I don’t know, suddenly I want her to get mad at me.  Really, really mad.  I want her to tell me what a worthless weakling I am.  I want her to yell at me for nicking the upholstery in the Beamer.  I want her to lock me in the bathroom with just bread and water until I work up the courage to go tell off those pricks at the Sanitation department for cracking our new trash bins, just because they’re too lazy to put them back down gently (and I pay there goddamn salaries with my taxes!).  And then I want Ann to hold me as I cry and cry.  Why has the world become so scary and why don’t I understand anything anymore?  How could anyone be against a flat tax, Ann, I just don’t get it–it’s so obviously and objectively fair to everyone.  What do you mean you found a picture of Ashley’s vagina on her cell phone?  Why would she do that?  I don’t care what anyone says, Ann, this democracy will only really work as long as white people are in the majority. 

And so on.
It would seem explicating the first line of Coulter’s book has taken more time and space than I anticipated, so perhaps this is a good place to stop for now.  See you next time…maybe.  I can’t decide if it’s really worth it or not.
Editor’s Note: I would also like to note that in googling the phrase “annotated Ann Coulter,” I discovered another site that had this idea long before me.  You might want to visit them as well (here).





 

January 21, 2012

Toward the Final Beatle

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Confronted with the prospects of watching yet another Beatles documentary, there are many who would understandably prefer a ticket to ride—some place where no one has ever even heard of the Beatles.  Well good luck, mean Mr. Mustard, because that octopus’ garden doesn’t exist.  You may have never given them your money, dear Prudence, but you can no more escape the Beatles than you can throw an old brown shoe across the universe.  “And your bird can sing” is another great title.
So Martin Scorsese had his work cut out for him in producing a 208-minute opus that once again revisits the single most perverse fame eruption of the twentieth-century–Beatlemania.  Even more remarkable, Scorsese’s Living in the Material World (currently playing in two 90-or-so minute chunks on HBO) is really only about 25% of the Beatles; namely, George Harrison…the “third” Beatle, the “quiet” Beatle, the Beatle who forced millions of pop fans to contend with the sitar and songs that occasionally strayed from 4/4 time.  
Fifty years after the Beatles began playing for beer and lodging in Reeperbahn (Hamburg’s notorious red light district, brought to screen here courtesy of contemporaneous footage culled from Mondo Cane), what is there left to say about this collective psychosis that defined a generation, a fixation on the music, biography–and most importantly–the mythos of the Beatles that will continue to enshroud the planet until someone pulls the plug on the last baby-boomer clutching the faders at the final classic rock station?  Even those who have only a casual Beatles habit will be familiar with most of the territory covered in part one—the lads meet in Liverpool, gig in Germany, get signed to Parlophone and George Martin, ignite a mass adolescent sexual frenzy, come to America, become bigger than Jesus, drop acid, push the confines of the recording studio, and so on.   

There are a few new details for the truly obsessed.  We meet George Harrison’s brothers, for example, who rather refreshingly seem to have remained non-fab Liverpudlians unfazed by a having a little brother who, in some improbable cosmic lottery, turned a fascination with skiffle riffs into a billion dollar empire.  Studio geeks, meanwhile, get to hear a few new tales about the recording of Harrison’s tracks on the Beatles’ records, including the story of an Abbey Road engineer working tirelessly to mix properly the saxophones on “Savoy Truffle” only to have Harrison request they be more distorted and bright (and truly, that track remains a treble endurance test to this very day—very “toppy” as George Martin pops in to opine).  Ringo also informs us that if it wasn’t for Paul, the other 3 Beatles would have spent most of the late 60’s in their respective Surrey mansions smoking pot and just hanging out.  Perhaps the oddest detail: the Beatles actually commuted into work each day at Abbey Road in Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls Royce (somehow the idea of the Beatles as working stiffs commuting on the A3 is a winning image—especially given that today even the most abject reality star flotsam expect to be driven everywhere by limo). 
In part two, Harrison’s commitment to embracing the non-material world experiences some obstacles.  There is the notorious triangle with Eric Clapton and Harrison’s first wife, Patty Boyd (speaking of burdens—imagine being the woman who inspired both “Something” and “Layla”—truly she is the face that launched a thousand tracks on Ampex tape).  Scorsese rather delicately handles Harrison’s apparently bad cocaine problem in the mid-70s (footage of a rail-thin Harrison, his voice absolutely decimated, chugging through a truly awful live arrangement of “What is Life?” is one of the documentary’s more cringe-worthy moments).  Wholly absent, no doubt by demand of second-wife/producer Olivia Harrison, is the foundational copyright lawsuit fought between Harrison and the Chiffons over the melody of  “My Sweet Lord.”  Also hanging like a dark cloud over part two is the knowledge that Harrison’s spiritual journey will eventually culminate in getting stabbed in his own home by a schizophrenic and then dying shortly thereafter from cancer. 
This might make Living in the Material World sound like a total bummer.  And in some respects, part two is often melancholic to the point of being downright depressing.  There are bright spots, of course, as in Harrison’s support and patronage of Monty Python (Harrison produced Life of Brian and Time Bandits…as well as Shanghai Surprise, which Scorsese understandably ignores).  Mostly, though, Scorsese’s portrait of Harrison casts him as someone who genuinely wanted to be a better person in a better world, and who ultimately preferred to stay at home and garden rather than do the obligatory record tour every year (at the time of Harrison’s death in 2001, Ringo had put out more albums than his former bandmate—Ringo, for Vishnu’s sake!).  Toward the end of part two, Olivia Harrison recounts how, toward the end of his life, George was invited to various award ceremonies to honor his many achievements, invitations invariably declined by the Beatle who really no longer wanted to have anything to do with the Beatles.  His widow offers this as evidence of her husband’s incredible humbleness—but there is also a sense that his reclusiveness had a touch of bitterness in it as well.
The Traveling Wilburys.  And then a “come-back” solo album that Harrison claims wasn’t really a “come-back” because, by that point, he had long stopped considering himself to be a pop star/public performer anymore. 
And then the stabbing at his home in England.  Given the unprecedented mass cathexis on the Beatles, it’s a miracle all four of them didn’t end up murdered by various crazy people.  Olivia Harrison narrates the events of that particular evening, leaving us to wonder why someone didn’t simply pick up a phone and call the police (Harrison’s initial strategy for dealing with this intruder, we are told, was to “chant” at him from the upstairs window.  A few moments later the guy has broken in, rushed up the stairs, and is wrestling with a wounded Harrison for the knife. So remember, while your mantra may be good for your soul, it remains generally ineffective in warding off the psychotic). 
Harrison survives, of course, only to die two years later from his ongoing bout with lung cancer.  As recounted by Scorsese, Harrison’s death is both more banal and yet, oddly, more profound than the murder of John Lennon.  Assassinated at forty, Lennon died so young and so abruptly that he was able to assume Kennedy-esque stature as a generational icon unimpeded by the embarrassment of continuing to live and thus disappoint everyone (and Lord knows, Double Fantasy was a bad step in that direction).  And besides, getting shot by a nut job outside the Dakota is a freakish tragedy—much like getting hit by an asteroid or falling through a manhole.  But to be someone who ruled the western world at the age of 25, only to then slog on through a failed marriage, some bad investments, a drug habit, and the burdensome expectations of your former greatness, all so that you might then live to be stabbed in your home before dying of cancer two years later—that’s the kind of depressingly common life arc almost any middle-aged boomer can relate to (if, of course, one substitutes the general exhilaration of one’s perceived youthful immortality for Harrison’s time as a Beatle).   And I don’t care how much you think you hate the Beatles, if Ringo’s account of his last meeting with George doesn’t get you misty-eyed than truly you are a soulless monster who deserves to come back in the next life as a latrine-born cockroach (while I understand the counter-distinctual obligations of thinking the Beatles were overrated or even just downright terrible, how anyone who has ever listened to and enjoyed a 3.5 minute guitar-based pop-song in the last 30 years thinks they “hate” the Beatles is beyond me.  It’s like loving spaghetti while claiming to hate Italian cuisine.  Even Kurt Cobain had the self-knowledge and graciousness to acknowledge that nothing much had happened since the Beatles, except perhaps for a general increase in yelling and distortion.    
Ultimately, Living in the Material World, with all its familiar popcult signposts of the past fifty years, is as much about its audience as it is about Harrison himself, artfully beginning the perhaps inevitable process of rewriting Beatles nostalgia into boomer elegy.  Here, too, is where the fascination with meditation, Krishna, and all things eastern finds its ultimate rendez-vous–both for Harrison and a generational audience that once upon a time fancied itself disenchanted with western politics, morality, and religion.  Throughout the documentary, we are told how Harrison’s spiritual quest was to practice “the art of dying,” to be at peace with one’s death so that the universe doesn’t force you to return for another round of frustrated desire and corporeal misery.  Apparently realizing at a freakishly young age that one faces the end alone, no matter what one acquires or achieves in this world, Harrison makes for a compelling index on boomer spirituality in general, an emblem of material success/excess apparently quite sincere (and thus quite conflicted) in his attempt to renounce the trappings of this world. 

This, finally, is the ultimate trick of Scorsese’s documentary–transforming Harrison the counter-cultural icon into just another aging boomer (albeit one of unimaginable wealth and fame—and, technically, not actually a boomer), doing his best to survive the humiliations of mortality with some grace and dignity, all while trying to remain true to a core set of beliefs.  Olivia recounts her husband’s last moments on earth as “glowing.”  I certainly hope so.  If, after his extraordinary ride through the late twentieth-century, George Harrison couldn’t figure out what does and doesn’t ultimately matter, what hope remains for the rest of us still plowing our way through the particularly pernicious maya of western existence, the legions of boomers who–years after their perceived rebellion against the social order–have rather lazily crawled back to the church of their parents more out of habit than belief.  Scorsese ultimately makes the viewer admire George, the quiet Beatle, not so much for being a Beatle, but for fighting so hard (and perhaps so futilely) to escape the absurd cosmic joke that gave birth to the Beatles in the first place.

January 21, 2012

I Saw That Show Where People Travel Back in Time to a Spielberg Movie from the 1980s.

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Conventional wisdom has it that science-fiction doesn’t do well on television, or at least on network television.  Too expensive to produce and too limited in its appeal.  Earth 2. Firefly. The Event. V.  None made it beyond 30 or so episodes.  “But what about Battlestar Galactica?” cries the guy with the phalanx of Cylon Centurions protecting his iMac from the incursion of various snack-related threats, “that was the greatest TV series of all time!”  Cool your jets there, space-boy, that was first-run syndication and a whole other kettle of space-fish.  For the most part, network executives listen to sci-fi pitches with the same enthusiasm that label heads used to reserve for concept albums.  A plucky band of space pirates raiding ships in the Van Allen belt, played for love and laughs but still true to the principles of actual science?  Great…let me clear Thursday night for you.
Meanwhile, over at NBC, the peacock has made the daring decision to program sci-fi during its storied Thursday-night block of comedies.   Taking a nod from the 80s girl-robot oddity, Small Wonder, upcoming episodes of Whitney will reveal that the show’s sassy lead is actually under the brutal cybernetic control of her bionic ass, an implant turned sentient that now demands endless display and tribute.  As seen so prominently in the first two episodes, the imperious buttocks frequently compel their helpless host to wear silly costumes that better accentuate the bio-butt’s perky insouciance.   Will Whitney’s jaunty yet evil ass ultimately demand admiration and tribute from all of the earth?  Just what does Whitney’s ass want of us?  Stay tuned and find out.
But it is Fox that may well be taking the biggest sci-fi gamble, partnering with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin’ productions for Terra Nova, a mind-bending entry into that subgenre of sci-fi typically known as “a real hoot.” The basic premise here involves the standard Spielbergian narrative-focalization family-unit traveling back in time 85 million years to start over in a new human colony, one that seeks to escape the tech noir future so cruelly foisted upon the earth by Arnold Schwarzenegger back in the 1980s.  
We open in the Chicago of 2149, where every cliché of our collective dystopian future must be mobilized in just under twenty minutes in order to motivate Jim and Taylor Shannon’s rather impulsive decision to flee the civilized world so that their children might touch dinosaurs. In this horrible future of 2149, we are told, the air is really bad, oranges are rare, kids have never seen the moon, and the government strictly enforces a two-child limit on breeding.  Worse yet, decent middle-class families with Irish surnames are forced to live in small apartments that, while they would be palaces to most of the world’s population in 2011, are shown here to have the bad taste and abysmal feng shui that comes standard with a galley kitchen. 
Now, I realize I’m supposed to think this is the most horrible fate imaginable, and that any sane person would gladly run blindly into a wormhole for the chance to eat a fresh peach and see the Big Dipper.  Perhaps it’s because I live in the Windy City, but all I could think of was how amazing the Chicago of 2149 looked, as if five Hong Kongs had been smashed together on the shores of Lake Michigan, all interconnected by tubular monorails and reaching up into a perpetually hazy sky.  It looked like a city where a million different adventures were taking place at that very second—an urban paradise where you could eat any cuisine in the world, network on your quad iReality device, solve a perplexing future-crime, and have your scrotum painlessly tattooed… all at the same time.  Why anyone would leave this citadel of wonder is anyone’s guess, especially for little more than an opportunity to repeatedly hammer one’s thumb building some kind of prehistoric hut in which to store a sumptuous harvest of nuts, twigs, and berries, most of which no doubt fished out of the great steaming piles of Apatosaurus shit surrounding the Terra Nova compound.  

If you subscribe to Spielbergian logic, of course, you would do this because nebulous “government” agents represent a hazard to your dear sweet innocent children.  Sure enough, as the Shannons gather at home to savor their precious orange, the police arrive unannounced to investigate a rumor that the family is harboring an illegal third child (which they are).  Not being the sharpest tool in the shed, dad (Jason O’Mara) hides the contraband toddler inside an air vent, thus insuring that the child will start crying from claustrophobia and dust mite infestation in under a minute (which she does).  Jim takes a swing at the cop and ends up in jail, thus initiating a pre-credit action sequence in which dad must escape from the pokey, pick up a suitcase stuffed with child #3, and get to the wormhole in time to meet his wife (Naomi Scott) and other two kids.   Once again, our sympathies are supposed to be with the Shannons, sharing their outrage that the government would be so evil and repressive as to enforce a ban on having more than two children.  Still, you have to think that if ol’ Jim would have just snipped his vas deferens, his family and the world would have been better off, leaving more oranges and kitchen space for everyone else.
Once we get to Terra Nova, both the Shannons and the viewers have a lot to learn in order to make this a functional weekly franchise.  We discover that Terra Nova was founded by Nathanial Taylor (Stephen Lang)—a great white father who was the first to stumble through the wormhole.  There are dinosaurs, of course, and a big fence separating the community from the more interesting narrative possibilities outside.  Then there are “the sixers,” a group of castaways that apparently crashed on the other side of the island—a splinter group of settlers who live near the quarry and continually hassle the Terra Novenians.  There are also lots of boss machine guns and sonic pulse weapons, as well as a motor pool stocked with all kinds of military vehicles.
So, in this effort to “save” the human race and rebuild humanity without “repeating all the same mistakes,” we can see that Terra Nova is already D.O.A. from scene one.  A charismatic patriarch, nuclear families, guns, gasoline, and a mysterious Other living out in the woods—why not call the show Red State Nova instead?  How long until the Shannons are standing in line for a shot of cyanide-flavored Kool-Aid, convinced the mysterious Robamanites are about to raid the compound and take away the colony’s best guns and cutest children? 
I will admit that at this point I took a break to pay the delivery guy and eat some Thai food, so I missed a good 15 minutes or so of the premiere’s first hour.  From what I can surmise, however, this is when we learn that Terra Nova exists in an “alternate time stream,” which is of course the chicken-shit way of explaining oneself out of various time-travel paradoxes (i.e. if Terra Nova “succeeds,” isn’t it inevitable that it produce the very future that allowed the Shannons to go back in time?  Or, wouldn’t the existence of Terra Nova skew history to the extent that the Shannons might never have existed in the first place and thus could not go back in time to follow House?  An “alternative time stream” takes care of all that, space nerd, so just enjoy the ride).
The true highlight of the first episode, however, is the moment when the Shannons are shown to their tasteful bungalow, complete with hardwood floors, a breezy open floor plan, and even a little SoCal landscaping.  Incredibly, though they were just living in a supposedly hellish cube in a Chicago high rise of 2149, everyone seems vaguely disappointed—like they expected better digs in 85 million B.C. Truly, American privilege knows no limits.  Happily, Mom decides they might salvage the space with a rug of some kind…that is, if they have rugs in 85 million B.C.  It is an anxious moment, played for pathos, in which the family realizes–perhaps for the first time–that they now live in a world without the riches and comforts that come from living in proximity to a strip of Big Box stores. 

With some basic exposition out of the way, Terra Nova then chugged into a second hour that was strictly about making work for Spielberg’s old raptor pals from the nineties. The terror begins when the son (Landon Liboiron), like any rebellious high school senior,  ditches his mandatory orientation session to hang with a cute girl and some other teens from the rec center.  Together they sneak outside the fence so they can drink some moonshine they have brewing out in the jungle and play a little G-rated grab ass.  Before you know it, they are at the center of a standard Jurassic era scenario—trapped in a vehicle and getting knocked around by a pack of bloodthirsty dinosaurs!  The producers must think this is a major draw for the series, since this dinosaur evasion sequence ended up eating about thirty minutes of screen time.  Run! Shoot!  Growl!  Scream!  Run some more! But in the end, everyone’s okay, and the son has learned important lessons about obeying dad, respecting the rules of Terra Nova, and following the directorial cues for interacting with CGI beasts that aren’t actually on set. 
The second episode ends with an attempt to get us invested in the mystery of some inscrutable cave scrawling, folding in a bit more Lost folderol to hook the easily hookable into thinking something more profound might be at work here (beyond a table of writers treading water from week to week).  The scribbling, it would appear, is the work of the Great White Father’s missing son, who now lurks the jungle as a primordial Boo Radley.  Given the already pissy relationship between the men in the Shannon clan, this certainly puts Terra Nova in the running for the most Oedipal series of 2011.  
All in all, Terra Nova is just what you’d expect in a craven attempt to travel back in time to the stronger and more certain entertainment franchises of the golden nineties.  Apparently, though, not everyone was pleased with the two-hour premiere spectacular, as evidenced by the following comment at imdb (the very first, no less):
Apparently, the dinosaurs are bullet proof because they wouldn’t take ANY damage! All you saw was a ricochet effect off them, and in some cases they were using a 50 caliber gun mounted on a transport vehicle. This wasn’t a plot point or anything so it comes off as very lazy special effects. This then leaves the problem, if the guns don’t hurt the dinosaurs, why would you take a weapon out to defend yourself from them if it doesn’t work? I mean they had about 6 guys shooting one and it eventually turned and ran. I can see maybe they wanted to tone down the blood and death a bit in the pilot but it came off as a major flaw.
So there you have it, Fox.  You wanted to do science-fiction?  Just remember the type of fans that come with the genre.  This customer won’t be happy until you spend a couple extra million animating some convincing bullet trauma to T-Rex’s face.  And are you ready to withstand the overly long and ridiculously self-righteous letters you will get once you cancel Terra Nova?   Maybe it’s not too late to greenlight that new Gordon Ramsey show where he tears down little kids’ lemonade stands.  Or, given that Terra Nova’s premiere got bested by the second episode of Two and a Half Men, maybe we can look forward to Charlie Sheen emerging from the wormhole at mid-season. That would be Terraterrific!   

UPDATE: Episode 2 (or 3, depending on how you count them) featured a pretty straight forward rip-off of The Birds (1964), with tiny (but deadly!) pterodactyls taking the place of Hitchock’s murderous crows.  Episode 3 (or 4) promises an “amnesia virus” sweeping through the compound. Could Terra Nova signal its fundamental contempt for television any more loudly?

January 21, 2012

Generation X: Still Relentlessly and Hopelessly Screwed

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firing off angry letters to anonymous institutions (like Starbucks), tirades that are to be read as feeble evasions from taking control of his own life.  When his niece arrives and throws a big house party, a coked-up Greenberg (in probably the film’s best scene) delivers an agitated generational rant against “these kids today” and their wholly unearned sense of confidence (a recurring X-er complaint about the young ones).  There is also the age-inappropriate haircut that Stiller gamely endures for the entire film. 
Eventually we learn that the great trauma in Greenberg’s life, as well as among his former circle of friends, was the formation and subsequent break-up of their “next-big-thing” rock band back in the early 90s.  On the verge of making it to the national stage, Greenberg refused to sign a record deal that, he claims, would have sacrificed the band’s artistic freedom and turned them into “sell-outs.”  Such is the central conceit of Gen-X cinema: the only moral compass that really matters in the end is the issue of subcultural authenticity, a divide as old as the celebrated case of Punk v. Part-Time Punk. Everyone else, as it turns out, would have gladly become plastic popsters, and they all still resent Greenberg for screwing everything up.
This premise, it should be noted, speaks to a certain contradiction in this genre.  If, as the film argues so adamantly, Greenberg (and by extension all X-er’s) need to “grow up” and become functional adults, then it would seem he did his band mates a favor by breaking up their adolescent fantasy machine and forcing them into real jobs with real wives and real kids.  Strangely, however, no one sees it that way.
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. 
From this inspired premise (courtesy of Raymond Carver), Everything Must Go doesn’t really know what to do with Ferrell or the situation.  Through movie logic we establish that Nick has five days to get his shit together (literally, by clearing his lawn, and figuratively, by devising a plan for the future).  Nick spends the five days checking off many of the same plot points that occupy Greenberg.  He also revisits an old romantic possibility, showing up unannounced on the doorstep of single-mom Laura Dern. Nick also finds a twenty-something woman (Rebecca Hall) to feel his pain—a new neighbor that seems to have relationship problems of her own.  Nick eventually learns “everything must go” in a giant garage sale, except of course for his impressive collection of vintage and thus authentic vinyl (there’s that Gen-X line in the sand again—it’s all about the good taste of appreciating “real” music, a quality that, in truth, does tend to make every male over 35 basically insufferable).
The strongest link between Greenberg and Everything Must Go, however, is a rather relentlessly heteronormative insistence that the only thing preventing both characters from achieving happiness is successful reproduction.  Greenberg is unmarried and childless at 40, while Nick notes, when asked if he has any kids, that he and his wife “have fish” (a collection of Koi swimming in the back yard).  Drunk and crossing the line with his new and very pregnant neighbor, Nick predicts how her marriage will eventually fall apart just like his (as a salesman, Nick prides himself on “reading people”)—but by the end, when her absentee husband finally arrives, her prodigious baby-bump tells us maybe, just maybe, they’ll be okay. 
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). 
Now, here is what makes Greenberg and Everything Must Go such a diabolical one-two X’er punch.  Nick goes to college, gets married, gets a job, buys a house, and works like a chump for 15 years—only to be end up divorced and miserable on his front lawn.  Greenberg, meanwhile, stays “true to himself,” refusing to join the rat race of marriage, work, and responsibility—only to end up institutionalized, alone, and borderline suicidal.  The generational message for 40-somethings could not be any starker:  work or don’t work, marry or don’t marry, join society or reject society—it doesn’t matter, you’re fucked either way.  Goddamn boomers!
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. 

January 21, 2012

"The Five:" Fox After Beck

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With the untimely institutionalization of Glen Beck, Fox News faced a momentary hiccup in their nightly procession of puffy male blowhards and the icy blonde women who serve them updates at the half-hour breaks.  Beck, you might recall, had set himself the seemingly impossible goal of concocting a theory so horrifying that it might reasonably be considered an insult even to Adolph Hitler.  But, like an Icarus aloft on wings of steaming bullshit, Beck flew too close to the infotainment sun and fell like a great corn-fed turd into the sea of psychosis.  When a Fox intern stumbled upon Beck coating gold bricks with his own semen, network executives knew he had to go. 
How does one replace a legend like Beck?  After a quick tour of bankrupt carnival auctions and compulsory telemarketer retreats yielded no promising leads, Fox decided to reach back into its old playbook and resurrect the classic “Colmes” strategy.  Alan Colmes, you might recall, heroically sat opposite troglodyte Sean Hannity for a number of years, ostensibly to argue the “liberal” side of various political issues, but mainly to serve as the Fox demo’s collective instantiation of mealy-mouthed liberalism.  Bespectacled and obsequious, Colmes got bulldozed pretty much every night, his highbrow philosophizing no match for Hannity’s monobrow “common sense.”  After each pummeling, one imagined him in the Fox commissary—tie dipped in his mashed potatoes—getting jumped and noogied by Brian Kilmeade. 
The origins of the fabled Hannity and Colmes, by the way, remain shrouded in mystery.  Some say Hannity hand-picked Colmes to be his servile adversary.  But there is also the rumor that Colmes once ran a famous bear-baiting act in the Ukraine, and that after unwittingly camping one night in the shadow of Chernobyl, his best working bear, Aleksei, gradually began to shed his fur and—incredibly—develop a limited capacity for human speech.   Shunned by the local community and subsisting on old fish heads tossed from the Kiev Zoo, Colmes and Aleksei were eventually spotted by a Newscorp scout who saw something promising in the talking bear’s gruff taunting and bemused swatting of his former keeper.  Groomed, indoctrinated, and given the Irish-friendly moniker of “Hannity,” “Aleksei the Argumentative Bear” has gone on to enjoy a lucrative career at Fox and on the radio.   Or so some say.
At any rate, Fox is too smart to simply return to such an obvious propaganda vehicle as a nightly pitting of hawk v. sparrow.  So, with Beck gone, the network has debuted a new hour-long punditfest called The Five (five pundits who appear each night at five o’clock EST—hence, the “five.”)  And it may be the most brilliant move by Fox yet.  Knowing that conservatism continues to be associated with the hopes and dreams of old white men looking to crush the hopes and dreams of those who are not old white men, Fox has decided to “flip the script,” as they say, and make The Five a forum in which a quartet of photogenic young conservatives tease and trouble one bedraggled old liberal—in this case, former CNN Crossfirer Bob Beckel.  Much as Colmes excelled at playing the “NYU anthropology professor who is against handguns—until his own wife is mugged in the street” type of liberal, Beckel would be central casting’s first choice for playing a Democratic machine union enforcer, drunk by five on the steps of his Chicago stoop but still ready to pull levers for the dead in the local alderman election. 
I’ve only seen a few minutes of The Five since, like any reasonable person, I don’t want my head to explode from consuming Fox product.  From what I have seen, however, Beckel plays his assigned role perfectly.  While everyone else on set is bright, chipper, and (I’m almost certain) better miked, Beckel slouches, yawns, mumbles, and otherwise puts forward the Democratic position with all the zeal of the last remaining alchemist on staff at DuPont.  The message is clear: liberalism is your father’s or even grandfather’s ideology, and boy is it ever a tired one.  The younger, fresher Foxes, meanwhile, treat Beckel—not with the contempt and sarcasm Hannity employed in trouncing Colmes every night—but with that patronizing kindness the young always use with the elderly and out-of-touch—much like when your grandmother drops the “N-word” at a family gathering and everyone under 40 makes the mental calculus that she’ll be dead before she can be reformed, so let’s just smile and talk to her as if she’s not really there.   Except here they do that whenever Beckel questions the premise that tax cuts for the rich = more jobs.    
As an added bonus, the new format also allows aspiring Fox conservadroids an excellent opportunity to hone their on-air skills before tarrying with more dangerous prey (unlikely, given Fox’s protocols for generally keeping smart lefties off its feed, but you never know when one of these prospects might get trapped in a room, on camera, with someone who might actually rip them a new one.  Plus—Fox must realize they eventually need to turn to their farm system in order to re-staff the media embarrassment and national nightmare that is Fox and Friends).  In this respect, Fox has brought in Beckel in much the same way that a mother lion deposits a wounded wilderbeast before her cubs, letting them find the jugular for themselves so that they might stand a chance if cornered by Rachael Maddow at a midtown media mixer. 
Will it work?  Who knows?  But I am looking forward to the new Fox News Project:  You Kids Get Off My Greedy Entitlements, wherein Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. must defend his twitter and Facebook feeds from a rotating pack of College Young Republicans, each chosen for their skill and dexterity at incendiary texting.    

January 19, 2012

Historys a Bitch: A Dog Walk Through Time: Hound Dog by Robb Fritz

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“Elvis and The Beatles were the death of music.”
— My parents.

- – -

I was always a Beatles man, not Elvis. I remember arguing the Fab Four versus the King with my parochial schoolmate Margaret all the way from St. Joseph’s Elementary to her house, though what the basis for the argument would have been is a mystery to me now. Were we actually arguing the merits of “Here Comes the Sun” versus “Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender” versus “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”? Or was it more along the lines of “Elvis is cute and he knows how to dance!” (with a hip-shaking demonstration) versus “They float through this dreamland in a yellow submarine, and there’s this weird house with Frankenstein, and there’s this funny little Nowhere Man and the Blue Meanies and they get old and turn into babies and stuff!” I was driven in part I’m sure by mom’s tacit approval of The Beatles. Though she was officially opposed to everything they stood for (see the above quote), I know she secretly liked Paul’s lyrical side since as a piano teacher she never had a problem teaching easy piano versions of “Yesterday” and “Lonely People.” Margaret had posters on her wall of the young, smoky-gazed Elvis. Since a similar poster of John, Paul, George and Ringo did not grace my own, on devotion points alone I conceded defeat.

On June 5, 1956, when Elvis was a rising star nearing the height of his power, he made a soon-to-be-notorious second appearance on The Milton Berle Show, introducing his version of “Hound Dog,” a song that had recently become his standard closer. Elvis had been refining his performance of “Hound Dog” for two months, testing the reaction of his audience with every move, and honing his delivery to a science. For the first time ever he would be performing without a guitar, Berle’s having convinced Elvis to leave it backstage in order to “let ’em see you, son.”

Elvis started the song at a fast clip leading into a sharp, short solo by guitarist Scotty Moore, and free of a guitar, danced all over, gliding over the floor as he spun his leg opened and closed like a screen door banging in a crazy wind. He then cut the song off midway and restarted it as something near a bump and grind crawl paired with a slow occasionally hip-thrusting dance to match. From the song’s fast start to its hothouse finish, each trademark Elvis leg flip and every shrugging, almost diffident hip gyration was accompanied by screams and amazed laughter from the audience. Milton Berle, “Mr. Television,” loved it, and raced onto the stage, clapping a pleased Elvis on the back and mussing his hair saying, “How about my boy?”

The initial reviews were mostly positive, but eventually the moral backlash kicked in. It’s hard to imagine on this side of the ’60s the level of hysteria that ensued after his appearance. Ben Gross in the Daily News raged, “Elvis… gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos. What amazes me is that Berle and NBC-TV should have permitted this affront.” The Catholic weekly America published a full-length diatribe titled simply “Beware Elvis Presley.” And Ed Sullivan declared Elvis “unfit for family viewing,” swearing he would never allow Elvis on his show.

Elvis protested his innocence, insisting, “I’m not trying to be sexy, it’s just my way of expressing how I feel when I move around.” Whether this was true or not there wasn’t a post-pubescent individual with eyes in his or her head who didn’t know what Elvis’s brief but poignant hip thrusts were all about. Regardless of the intended thrust of his thrusts, there was no doubt that they fucked mightily with the moral zeitgeist of TV Land circa 1956. He insisted that he wasn’t trying to be a rebel, something about which he was genuinely sensitive because of his real concern for his much-adored mother’s feelings. What Elvis didn’t grasp was that in 1956 his simple desire to keep it real was itself a revolutionary act.

How things have changed. Just this month the Supreme Court was debating whether they should strike down all “indecency” rules for primetime. Chief Justice Roberts, the father of two young children, said (in more of a desperate plea than a constitutionally defensible position), “All we are asking for is for a few channels” where parents can be confident their children will not hear profanity or see sex scenes. In its way, Elvis’s appearance on The Milton Berle Show was TV’s gateway drug, the ‘50s sensimilla to today’s TV heroin. One wonders what would happen to the brains of the same critics were Lady Gaga to take Marty McFly’s DeLorean back to 1956 and do her thing on the same show. They would no doubt think they’d died and entered the ninth ring of hell.

Ironically, despite the moral outrage over the song’s performance, “Hound Dog” really isn’t even a paean to sex. Written in 1952 by Mike Leiber and Jerry Stoller, two young Jewish kids from Los Angeles with a shared obsession with R&B, it was intended as a musical middle finger to some worthless pond scum who’s done the singer wrong. They’d written it for blues legend Big Mama Thornton, who later described them as a couple of kids with the song “written on the back of a paper bag.” She altered it as she saw fit, made the phrasings her own, and had the members of her band howl like dogs behind her. She recorded the song in early 1953, and it was released in March. Within the first week of its release, based on a rave in Billboard, another singer recorded a country version, and by the year’s end a total of six country recordings of the song had been released. By 1964, 24 recorded versions of the song—including Elvis’—would exist. It was the biggest hit of Big Mama Thornton’s career.

Her version could hardly be more different than Elvis’, a growly rhumba blues that would be completely at home on basically any Tom Waits album from Rain Dogs on. The lyrics—Lieber’s originals—are more straightforwardly bluesy and make more narrative sense. To my taste Thornton’s version is much grittier and more soulful, and has the deeply satisfying feel of being sung with full vitriol to one particular scumbag, as opposed to Elvis’s more impersonally tongue-in-cheek version. In a 1987 interview, Lieber said that the chorus was code for “You ain’t nothin’ but a motherfucker,” and with Thornton’s fiery growl it’s not a difficult substitution in the mind to make.

Elvis would have known Thornton’s original, but he found his pop version during his first time performing in Vegas. Despite the ill fit between his style and the adult, sit-down audience for which he and his band were performing—like Spinal Tap playing for the air force officer’s club—Elvis loved Vegas, blissfully unaware of the central place it would eventually have in his life. He and the band spent their free time seeing other musicians perform around town. He and his band’s favorite was the lounge act for the Sands, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.

The Bellboys had had a minor hit with their own pop version of “Hound Dog” the year before in 1955. To turn it into a pop song, they had dropped a verse and changed the lyrics—to Lieber’s great annoyance—so that the hound dog in question is no longer “snoopin’ round my door,” but is now “cryin’ all the time” and the phrase “you can wag your tail/but I ain’t gonna feed you no more” was tossed in favor of the rhythmically nimbler if narratively less sensible phrase “you ain’t never caught a rabbit/ and you ain’t no friend o’ mine.” It now served as the Bellboys’ main showstopper, and Elvis his band, drummer D.J. Fontana, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, decided they had to add it to their act. It would quickly become Elvis’ closer for a long time to come.

Lieber and Stoller, ‘50s hipsters to the core, weren’t pleased with the pop direction Freddie and the Bellboys and then Elvis had taken their song. They were dismissive of Elvis’ ability and assumed he was ignorant of his music’s history, probably in nearly exactly the same way I was once dismissive of Justin Bieber. For my part, I assumed Bieber was just some A&R guy’s bubbly commercial product: take cheesy love song, add cute young singer, and stir. Then I humored my daughter, five years old and suffering from, as she then mispronounced it, “Beaver Fever,” and, together with her and my wife, watched the Bieber documentary Never Say Never. While it’s safe to say I’ll never be listening to "Baby " on my way to work, the movie was genuinely fascinating and watching Bieber as a three-year-old playing on his toy drums and then at five on his real set is pretty much a wonder to behold. For Lieber and Stoller, it would be the summer of ’57 when they were hired—largely against their will—to write the songs for Jailhouse Rock, that they finally befriended Elvis and grew to appreciate both his very real talent and his deep love and knowledge of R&B.

A month after the hip shake heard ‘round the world, Elvis was scheduled for a July 1st appearance on The Steve Allen Show. Allen, for the benefit of the more prudish members of his audience, had made some public noise about possibly canceling Elvis’s appearance, but with Elvis at the top of all three charts that existed at the time—R&B, pop and country—there was little chance of that actually happening.

Instead, Allen devised a plan for cleaning Elvis up. The night of the show, Allen introduced “the new Elvis Presley,” one dressed in white tie and tails. He opened with his current pop hit, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” Then Allen wheeled out an actual female basset hound wearing a small top hat strapped to its head. The hound gazed at the audience with a supremely sad, baleful face, refusing to look at Elvis despite his numerous good-humored attempts to turn her head and sing into her doleful eyes. Elvis remains a good sport, but it’s clear from his body language, from the stunted jerks of his head and shoulders, that he is working fiercely to not burst into his now-notorious hip swivel, like a schoolboy trying to restrain a bobbing knee. In the end, Elvis, a dog lover himself and eventually an owner of many, many dogs as well as a menagerie of other animals, gives the hound a genuine hug, and nuzzles it and kisses it on the neck, probably in sympathy as a fellow sufferer.

That night The Steve Allen Show killed The Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan had repeatedly vowed to never have Elvis on his show, but as J-Biebs would say, never say never. Within two weeks Sullivan caved, eventually signing Presley for not one but three appearances, the first slated for September 9. Sullivan blew off criticisms of his reversal, saying he had been going on hearsay, and about Elvis’s Milton Berle Show appearance he did a complete and unapologetic 180, accusing everyone else of overreacting by saying, “I don’t know why everybody picked on Presley, I thought the whole show was dirty and vulgar.”

On July 2nd, the morning after The Steve Allen Show, Elvis and his band would finally commit “Hound Dog” to vinyl. After 31 takes, they had the full two-minute blast complete with Scotty Moore’s jangly guitar solo (Moore would later refer to it as “ancient psychedelia”) and D.J. Fontana’s trademark machine gun drum attack. That afternoon they recorded “Don’t Be Cruel.” The single of “Hound Dog,” with “Don’t Be Cruel” as the nominal A-side, was released on July 13th and would hit the #1 spot slightly over a month later, on August 18th, where it would remain for a record-breaking 11 weeks, replaced only by his own new single “Love Me Tender” on November 3rd. “Hound Dog” would become Elvis’ best-selling single ever, and in 2004 Rolling Stone would place it as #19 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the highest rank for any of Elvis’ eleven entries on the list.

January 9, 2012

A McSweeneys Books Preview: An Excerpt from Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane Williams

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In Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, Diane Williams lays bare the urgency and weariness that shape our lives in stories honed sharper than ever. With sentences auguring revelation and explosion, Williams’s unsettling stories—a cryptic meeting between neighbors, a woman’s sexual worries, a graveside discussion, a chimney on fire—are narrated with razor-sharp tongues and naked, uproarious irreverence.

These fifty stories hum with tension, each one so taut that it threatens to snap and send the whole thing sprawling—the mess and desire, the absurdity and hilarity, the bruises and bleeding, the blushes and disappointments and secrets. An audacious, unruly tour de force, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty cements Diane Williams’ position as one of the best practitioners of the short form in literature today.

Today we offer a sneak peek at four stories from the book. To purchase it, please visit our store.

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BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND 6 AM

Women were not a major ingredient in my thinking at that time.

She was blonde, very small, and if I remember right she had big breasts. Uh, Arthur was sleeping on a couch in the living room so I can imagine there was traipsing going on. Mother had her bedroom next to the kitchen. The girl had to go through the apartment in order to get to the bathroom.
I spent the night on the stairs, not dozing off.

She was a bankrupt.

As for me, I could have put more into this. Mother wants her sons to get ahead.

It must have been very soon after that that Mother said, “Ohhhh, Ka-a-a-a-a-y!”

We loved Kay better than we loved our mother. But by glancing back, as I approach middle age, the scale of things quite slowly, calmly, becomes a peep-show.

And everybody had to share. And there was a sliding glass door into the breakfast nook—so there was a curtain over it.

I met with some success. I took a job as a chemical mix-man—to store, order, and prepare wet and dry chemicals.

O Kay!

I’m only warming up. Most of my work is routine labor. There’s an element of physical danger. It is not easy to have this job. I’m not the outdoors type.

Today I got the temperature level too high in the chemical levels in the glass plate processing room and had to get buckets of ice.
Sometimes I’m over a barrel—my wife and I agree.

To get anywhere in my life at this time!—rather, to get anywhere near my wife at this time!—that can take days. I have to go through the kitchen, the laundry—I have to go through hell! Not entirely true.

I ate by myself.

I went to our bedroom with a glass of water for her in the hopes of hearing her cheery cry.

She’s so warm—she’s kind and she’ll likely say, “Hi!”

Her hands were folded behind her head. She whispered, modestly.

This will pep me up.

From all outward appearances, there was substantial risk for lack of concentration, overenthusiastic response, unrealistic desires, emotional craving, weak discipline, pettiness, a tendency to show off, and temporary stops to take a breath.

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RELIGIOUS BEHAVIOR

“You think you are a do-gooder,” Mother said, “don’t you? You’re a do-gooder.”

After a minute, no more, a newcomer looked toward me, a toddler with her mother, I’d bet.

“These type of people,” Mother said.

“See that large bird?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Mother said.

The toddler acted as if she knew me.

It’s so interesting when a little person is so clearly distinguished. I can tell—by the superciliary arches above her eyes, the ultra-tiny hands. I regard this visitant as unreal.

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THE NEWLY MADE SUPPER

The guest’s only wish is to see anyone who looks like Betsy, to put his hands around this Betsy’s waist, on her breasts. He’s just lost a Betsy. He followed Betsy.

In front of Betsy, who supports on her knees her dinner dish, you can see the guest approach.

“You got your supper?” he says, “Betsy?”

And Betsy says, “Who’s that in the purple shirt?”

“That’s not purple. You say purple?” says the guest.

“What color would you say that is?” says Betsy.

“That’s magenta.”

“I have to look that up. Magenta!” says Betsy.

“That’s magenta,” says the guest.

“That’s lavender,” says another woman who’s a better Betsy.

- – -

A MAN, AN ANIMAL

At the cinema I watched closely the camels, the horses, the young actor taking his stance for the sexual act.

He started up with a pretty girl we had a general view of.

I felt the girl’s pallor stick into me.

Another girl, in pink swirls alternating with yellow swirls, intruded.

The girls were like the women who will one day have to have round-the-clock duty at weddings, at birthdays, at days for the feasts.

Unaccountably, I hesitated on the last step of the cinema’s escalator when we were on our way out, and several persons bumped into me.

An ugly day today—I didn’t mention that, with fifty mile per hour winds.

But here is one of the more fortunate facts: We were Mr. and Mrs. Gray heading home.

It has been said—the doors of a house should always swing into a room. They should open easily to give the impression to those entering that everything experienced inside will be just as easy.

A servant girl was whipping something up when we arrived, and she carried around the bowl with her head bowed.

We’ve been told not to grab at breasts.

Before leaving for Indiana in the morning—where I had to clean up arrangements for a convention—I stood near my wife to hear her speak. So, who is she and what can I expect further from her?

What she did, what she said in the next days, weeks and years, addresses the questions Americans are insistently, even obsessively asking—but what sorts of pains in the neck have I got?

Please forgive our confusion and our failures. We make our petitions—say our prayers. It’s like our falling against a wall, in a sense.

On a recent day, my wife gave me a new scarf to wear as a present. It’s chrome green. Her mother Della, on that same day, had helped her to adjust to her hatred of me.

I’d have to say, I’ve given my wife a few very pleasant shocks, too.

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To purchase Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty, click here.

January 6, 2012

Hilarious jokes-Updates on Facebook

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The maid did not show up for work so the house wife called her in an angry voice and scolded her.

“What is wrong with you? If you were not to come you should have told me.”

The Maid explained, “Ma’am I had already announced on my facebook page that I was taking a trip to Mexico for a week to see my family. Ma’am you should remain updated on Facebook. If you still had a question then you should have asked.”

Wife: “So you are on Facebook too?”

Maid: “Ma’am who is not? Every time I announce on Facebook your husband sends me well wishes, sympathy and help. This time he said have a nice trip home, enjoy and comeback soon as I will miss you. He pleaded, please save me from my wife’s cooking.”

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