Of Weeds, Madness, Sheep, Shoes, and other Bullshit

Ahh, the time has come for another season of Penn and Teller's Bullshit! on Showtime.  Brilliant show.  With Weeds and Mad Men just a few weeks away, things are starting to gear up for the TV favorites of yours truly.  I pretty much missed most of the network season recently put into mothballs for that anachronism of yore known as "summer hiatus."  None of that means much in our world of 1000 channels of tube action and virtually infinite choices online but the networks like to pretend the past 15 years never happened, I guess.

In other news, apparently there's a Joan Rivers documentary (you know her: that brilliant director of 1978's Rabbit Test).  Meanwhile, sadly buried in this week's news, the world's oldest pair of shoes was discovered in a layer of Sheep's dung: 5500 years and just like new, thanks to the natural preservatives found in Ba Ba's Poo Poo.  And just where Joan Rivers left them as a child. Ba-dum.

My head's been filled with Mr. Yuk

Whatever happened to Mr. Yuk?  I recall him clearly from my childhood and he's apparently still out and about, but keeping a mighty low profile since his glory days in the early 70's.   Not sure why: there's far more poisons to strike fear into the hearts of parents today (or at least we recognize more of them as such now).

I hadn't had a conscious thought of the poster boy for the dangers of poison since his hey day until earlier this week when I inexplicably dropped his name in a discussion on new process adoption ("old way, bad like Mr. Yuk; new way, good like Mr. Pibb").  Never mind that Mr. Pibb doesn't conger up visions of wonderful, I don't have an explanation of why Mr. Yuk slipped from my lips.



Ahh, is there nothing better than 70's TV Commercials?  They just don't make 'em like that anymore.

Though I must admit I'm quite fond of the Halls Refresh Commercial making the rounds, if only for its high octane creep factor taken to a degree I'm sure its makers did not intend.  Or maybe they did.  Either way, it has an effect.  It's certainly nowhere near as creepy as those horrid Charles Schwab commercials (I blame them for the collapse of the financial industry).



This post is obviously going nowhere - at least I'm consistent in that regard.  When I was churning this garbage out daily, it didn't matter as much; however, seeing as though I'm only getting around to it on the weekends, I outta try a bit harder.  I just don't have the energy.

I'm enjoying the umpteenth viewing of Unforgiven, one of my very favorite flicks.  I never liked most of Eastwood's 70's and 80's Dirty Harry-centric action flicks (though they were sort of entertaining in a 'B' movie, guilty pleasure kind of way).  His spaghetti western stuff was classic, though not my cup of tea (and his follow-on cowboy movies through the 70's followed suit, albeit without Leone's style or the cheesy dubbing).  I love the work he's done over the last twenty years, though.  Both in front of but especially behind the camera.

Unforgiven is my top pick of Eastwood's fine 90's/00's litter (fighting neck and neck with Million Dollar Baby and Mystic River).  I'm not a big Western aficionado but Unforgiven turns the genre on its head, mocking all the stereotypes with a jaundiced eye biting on a raw nerve.  And the music's perfect. If you ever shied away because you don't dig Westerns and/or disliked Eastwood's earlier work, do yourself a favor and give it a go.

But now it's over and that means Bedtime for Bonzo, drifting off to a re-run of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (my favorite of the Bill flicks, though most who like them at all seem to opt for Vol 2).  Not Tarantino's best in my view but entertaining, funny and great tunes all the same.  A glorious mess.  Volume 3 was recently announced for release around 2014.  That's certainly planning ahead (or maybe wishful thinking).

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.  I won't have to go to work, so that already makes it a step up from every day of the past three weeks.  But I probably shouldn't jump the gun on that (I think I thought the same thing each of the past two Friday nights).

And finally ... I'm looking forward to the season finale of Mad Men on Sunday, as well as the final episode of the "Seinfeld" story arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

After all, I dare to dream big.

'No future for you' - J. Lydon, 1977

Mad Men marathon! Ah, but it's just the 3rd season stuff.  Dr. G marathon! It's Sunday - what's new?  I'm torn between watching these and the Eagles game (the latter only in anticipation of someone taking a cheap shot at Michael Vick and rooting on Kansas City - thus far it's not working in my favor).  
The thought of these choices is depressing on a level I didn't think possible.

Miserable rain, a goddamn cold - I already had the flu over the summer for crying out loud - and here comes another fucking Charles Schwab commercial to further rattle my brain. Why didn't 'Chuck' go under with the financial industry collapse? A clear sign there is no God; if there is, he's surely a sadist. 

I think it's time to get it over with: pass me the Plum Smart flavored Activia, cover me with a Snuggie and hand me the number of a good nursing home (time to check myself in).  That or hit me upside the head with a wet sock full of dogshit. Whichever is easier.  Is there some irony in the fact that I have the TV sound off and the Sex Pistols on the stereo?  Probably not irony, just a bit of pathetic sadness. Meanwhile, somewhere in the world, John Lydon's prostate is acting up and the self proclaimed anti-christ is cleaning his dentures in a glass while watching a Madlock marathon.  Or maybe he's enjoying Dr. G like me.

Back in the real world, apparently our long national nightmare may finally be over as I see the crafty Swiss have snared international super villain Roman Polanski in a 'career retrospective film festival' sting.  He fell for that old chestnut?  I recall it failing miserably when the CIA tried it with Bin Laden a couple years back:
"The Tora Bora Terrorism Follies featuring the works of Osama and the Not-Ready-for-72-Virgins Players" was quite an embarrassment to the boys in Langley when only Momar, Oliver Stone and then-Senator Obama bothered to show up, though Bin Laden did send Glenn Beck to accept the lifetime achievement award on his behalf. (Who would have thunk that last one? I would have.)

BTW, the CIA really shouldn't have advertised a 'Saturday mini-retrospective on Kenyan Terrorist Romantic Comedies' for this 'festival' if they wanted to keep the audience clear of American officials for a clean bust (they had to have known of Barack's Muslim Socialist Fascist Kenyan inclinations).  However, that Obama not only attended but kept breaking out into Arsenio Hall "Woof Woof" gestures during the Kenyan flicks should have at least raised a red flag with regard to the nefarious intentions of our future dear leader. That'll teach the CIA: now they have to translate the daily presidential briefings into Swahili and soon all agents not otherwise in the field will have to attend the four week government-grade medical school and do double duty as federal healthcare physicians.

Tonight is a busy evening for tube watching, what with 60 Minutes, Dexter and Californication kicking off new seasons + Curb and Mad Men.  Thank god for DVRs.

Now I need to stop typing garbage into this infernal blog and start studying (the alarm went off a month or so ago on what seems to be a recurring every-two-years new job itch and I'm in serious talks with a couple doctors who can treat this outbreak for me but only if I prepare).

[Postscript: The Sex Pistols gave way to Groovelily on the stereo and Dr. G/Mad Men/Football gave way to the Wizard of Oz (all the other shows will just have to cool their heels in my DVR until I finish this journey down the yellow brick road).  I haven't taken this trip for a long, long time.  It was my very favorite movie as a young boy and perhaps the most anticipated television day of the year for me when they replayed it annually on ... well, whichever one of the three networks that had the rights - I could google it if I wasn't so lazy.  Oz was, to me as a kid, a world apart from the shitty one I was living in.  

Little did I know Judy Garland's life was hell and she had already long since undertaken a daily regiment of booze, pills and tobacco that would have put Janis Joplin and Billy Holiday to shame by the time she filmed Oz at age 17.  Still, that knowledge doesn't hurt the movie one lick; in fact, it adds some poignancy to the mix.]

'Sunday's best, Sunday's finest. When your money's in the minus.' - Declan MacManus, 1979

I must admit I'm pretty pumped for the new Curb Your Enthusiasm kicking off tonight. Sunday evening is most definitely the cable "must see TV" night (has been for a while now for a lot of folks).

My past love affairs with the Sopranos and Six Feet Under cemented the night for me personally. Add in the Simpsons (at least through the 90s), Family Guy today, and Sixty Minutes since time began. That all makes for a tough act to follow.

For others, it's also the night of True Blood and Entourage. I didn't get into either show, though I admire both. For Blood, maybe it's a genre thing. Other than Lost Boys, I've never been much into vampire lore, though it's obviously in vogue what with the HBO show and the Twilight flick. For Entourage, I like the cast and the premise, but just couldn't get up for it. Dunno why.

For me now, Curb and Mad Men represent two of my top four currently running TV series (30 Rock and Weeds round out this holy quartet). I also dig Dexter, another Sunday night staple, and am looking forward to new stuff there coming soon.  As an aside, I'm going to give the new Bored to Death a spin. It's on HBO right after Curb and I'm lazy - also it looks like it might be pretty funny.

But Larry David, with his Seinfeld "reunion" the central conceit looming in the season ahead, and the continuing trials and tribulations of the gang at Sterling Cooper, as they flaunt their dashing brand of sixties cool, will keep my Sunday evenings percolating for the next little while for sure.

I only wish I could say as much for the remainder of the week.  Speaking of which, I'll likely be slowing down my production of swill here as I take a plunge back into the deep end of the asylum swimming pool at work tomorrow. It's usually mad this time of year for our kind  (retail-centric e-commerce providers).  Lots of features to get ready in time for the holiday season ahead. 

I'd been mostly wading in the kiddie pool this summer, deliberately trying to keep to the shallows and careful to take my Clozapine. Well, that time has past, school's back in session and my pills have been flushed down the drain. In other words, hand me a snorkel and flippers and make way for a big fuckin' splash into the deep, dark world of corporate IT insanity!

Seriously, I still plan to put the brakes on any blatantly excessive workaholic behavior, but some things are easier said than done.

'I was born in a pool, they made my mother stand. And I spat on that surgeon and his trembling hand. When I felt the light I was worse than bored. I stole the doctor's scalpel and I slit the cord'

"A good fuck is much better than TV!"

Oh, Spam, is there nothing you can't teach us?

Words as wise as any fortune cookie just waiting to be cracked open and pulled out of my email filters.  This truism is just the latest in a long line of tidbits, parables and proverbs I regularly receive from the great spam slicer in the sky.  Many are wise in ways the sender likely didn't intend.

Often it's hard to tell exactly what the author's original intent might have been.  For example, the sex/television comparison promised in the subject line of the aforementioned email was in fact not provided: neither sex nor TV is mentioned in the message body (from what I can tell, it's an excerpt from a badly written sci-fi short story parsed from somebody's livejournal entry).

That spells disappointment for this television addict, with so many questions unanswered. Better how?  Better than Mad Men?  Better than Weeds?  Better than the mid-90s-era Simpsons?!? What defines a 'good' fuck? Is there a 'bad' variety?  Sadly, I got a no-such-address bounce-back when replying with these follow up questions to the originator, one 'Candice Farrell '.  Oh well. Pity.

Even as I was pondering all this, a friend let me know that Jim Carroll died on Friday.

The news hit me harder than I would have thought.  After all, I hadn't heard from the man regarding new material in quite awhile (to the point where I'd been re-re-reading his earlier work for lack of the fresh stuff). When did he last release an album?  A book? I couldn't tell you (though I could look on his Catholic Boy website, had I been of a mind to).  And frankly he'd been admittedly living on borrowed time since his first days as a prepubescent junky.  Making it to the ripe old age of 60 was quite an achievement, given the appetites he was loath to deny over the long term (he was, as he put it, more inclined toward shadows).

But as I said, Jim's passing hit me hard.  I read Basketball Diaries when it was first published in 1978 and it ignited this Seattle boy's love affair with New York City, along with my latent discovery of Mean Streets, Ramones and Velvet Underground that same year.

Jim's prose had an immediacy and sly intelligence to it that spoke to me like nothing I'd read to that point (I hadn't yet discovered Hunter Thompson or Lester Bangs).  It was Carroll's 16 year old voice coming at me from those pages, remember. It felt like he was talking to this 16 year old as though 1965 was 1978, instantly obliterating the 13 year gap from pen to publication.

It took Jim's death to bring back my adolescent memories of a lasting epiphany: a realization that words themselves were pure joy when you put them down to paper in interesting ways.  Paper might have given way to bits and bytes, but the feeling remains. 

Why had Mr. Carroll slipped off my radar in ways that Thompson and Bangs hadn't?  I guess the fact that he wasn't the most prolific writer had something to do with it. Working on a novel since at least 1991 (the year he first performed public readings of material from it), it was finally due to roll off the presses this year, at least as reported by Catholic Boy back in Feburary. Boy, that was fast! :-)  I'm crossing my fingers that it was truly 'done' enough to be published posthumously. And that's the thing too: this is his first novel. Apart from Basketball Dairies and Forced Entries, Jim's output was pretty much exclusively poetry with maybe the odd short story, while I've tended to prefer the narrative form.  But still, he's right there on my literary Mount Rushmore beside Thompson, Bangs and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It took his passing for me to climb back up there and kick the dust off his likeness to recognize the face again.

Oh, yeah - let's not forget: Jim also put out some pretty good music with the Jim Carroll Band.  Catholic Boy is still one of my favorite records.   When the City Drops Into the Night and the title tune - songs rarely get better than that.

Rest in Peace, Jim.

Madmen Drummers Bummers and Indians in the Summer

One week away from another season with the boys and girls at Sterling Cooper.

Rolling into 1963, just a little less than a year from the Kennedy assassination. Not far then to the Beatles arrival, Dylan gone electric and the beginnings of the birth of "The 60s." One last season to bathe in the glow of fading innocence and bid adieu to its numbing viciousness as a black and white world turns to color (on a number of different levels).

For me, an excuse to lust after Betty Draper on Sunday evenings. All pastels and skirts and smokes, suits and booze at the office and beatniks on the fringes. Not yet for the avocado kitchen appliances and living room shag carpets.

I was going on three months of age at the dawn of 1963, so first-hand memories are a hazy shade of nothing. But then again I can say the same for most of the 60s and 70s. I seem to have clear memories from that period only of the Brady Bunch, Land of the Lost, the Watergate Trial and the day my Dad died (just couple days before Elvis kicked, 32 years ago this Tuesday).

Speaking of Dad, he wasn't exactly a 'Mad Man' (though going by the show, he drank like one). He sold plumbing supplies when he worked. Not quite Don Draper. More Don Birnam. And Mom wasn't Betty Draper. She was closer to Norma Desmond. They attempted every once in a while to Be The Drapers. But the Drapers out, not the Drapers in. We were at the core a Salvation Army family living in a JC Penney neighborhood and didn't do a lot of entertaining (at least not of the Draper variety).

Still, with Mad Men there is something oddly familiar. About the setting, the clothes, the mannerisms. Not exactly comforting, but ... contemporary. The present day by comparison seems dated.

So, Betty on Sunday and Nancy Botwin on Monday. In my own private Idaho ('get outta that state you're in!' - thanks, Fred, but I think I'll stick around).