tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77199793371971436152024-02-18T23:09:17.010-05:00Elias Nebula What He SaysClick on the cuckoo-clock for the latest entry.Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-80348912787902935002021-02-28T17:42:00.000-05:002021-02-28T17:42:19.005-05:00Xuriosa Nine, #s 7 & 8. Out Today.As with the previous volume, copies are free by contacting this office. Editions of 8 copies of each issue. Once the erratum slip for #12 has been printed, and the volume is complete, the price of a volume rises immediately to £100.
COpies of Xuriosa Volume 8 still available at £100 per volume.
Also copies of Hegelians #s 44–46, £30 a set.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8xCRJYscBErqi36ja12BXAHTMwkRBwIHkiMOMWpr2rTyZ7fxu5bmMn2-JMssRR50hQTlgLwxnGuYyyRwXnkK0YID5G2ydyGT8xFdeDBrFI43kWpK1XJGKm4B7F0-RWVcMEcE98TdzTwEj/s2048/IMG_3635.jpeg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8xCRJYscBErqi36ja12BXAHTMwkRBwIHkiMOMWpr2rTyZ7fxu5bmMn2-JMssRR50hQTlgLwxnGuYyyRwXnkK0YID5G2ydyGT8xFdeDBrFI43kWpK1XJGKm4B7F0-RWVcMEcE98TdzTwEj/s400/IMG_3635.jpeg"/></a></div>Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-78234312844370282552020-06-11T17:44:00.004-04:002020-06-11T17:45:28.486-04:00"Curiosa Eight Exists But No One Knows."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYN4TdhfzqD1uly0gnmd5OQOSQNLMjdwMrRVD20RAn_7sCmFxZ8z3YD-pvJT1zmjJjNUMrD1B1Ztn5izGZrLLvPrxgVmahzxDvJxLBhxOruwFK7AXv_9IwEn8oQpT0OQDLqSRhKTUyF8Oj/s1600/IMG_3424.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYN4TdhfzqD1uly0gnmd5OQOSQNLMjdwMrRVD20RAn_7sCmFxZ8z3YD-pvJT1zmjJjNUMrD1B1Ztn5izGZrLLvPrxgVmahzxDvJxLBhxOruwFK7AXv_9IwEn8oQpT0OQDLqSRhKTUyF8Oj/s400/IMG_3424.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-35847102040971640542020-04-21T14:48:00.002-04:002020-05-07T09:20:12.978-04:00"Got Curiosa Rubberlineana Volume Eight If You Want It!"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"> "Do YOU have a Curiosa Rubberlineana Volume Eight in your attic?"</span><br />
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NO! YOU DON'T!<br />
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Know why? Because they have only just been issued from the same press that brought you so many smiles, half-smiles and outright non-smiles –– the opposite of smiling which is to say a miserable expression. </div>
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Eight copies of four lime–green issues –– already called "The Jade Quartet" by the <i>collector scum</i>, the <i>doomscrolling trolls</i>, the<i> fratres ignorantes </i>and the <i>chatroom wits</i>–– only were produced. </div>
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8 x 4 = 32</div>
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Two go to the author's own "private stash," one to the British Library –– a pathetic vanity BTW –– which leaves only five more available.<br />
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"And to the Deuce the hindmost."<br />
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There is only one way to get it.<br />
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There is only one way to receive enlightenment.<br />
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There is only one way to get into Heaven.<br />
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Put on dem silver slippers.<br />
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You must ask Rubberline ("Eloise Nebula") directly by whatever means are at hand.<br />
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Electronic mail, telephone, carrier pigeon or you may try sending a goose, a pelican, a spoonbill or a shoebill.<br />
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You might refer to it and he will blank you<br />
he will claim to not understand you<br />
he will claim to be another than who he is<br />
he will not receive you<br />
he will not allow entry to his door<br />
he will shun you in your steps<br />
he will leave you hanging in the most desolate streets<br />
he will take an alternative bridleway to evade you.<br />
<br />
The author is they say a solitary man.<br />
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In many ways he is socially unsophisticated.<br />
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In other ways he is quite adroit.<br />
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It depends on when you catch him.<br />
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That's true of many people though.<br />
<br />
Some people are <i>only</i> unsophisticated.<br />
<br />
So it could be worse.<br />
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* * * * * * * * </div>
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See Elias Nebula's "Youtube channel" for more infomration about the only way to get YOUR copy.</div>
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That's right, I said "infomration".</div>
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On purpose. </div>
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(Or as I originally wrote "On pirpose.")</div>
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Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-35573756906726386052017-12-03T09:37:00.004-05:002018-04-19T14:35:14.532-04:00"Leonardo Was Overrated."<br />
Talk about <i>hataz</i>. I was idling in Sainsbury's –– by the way, why is everybody suddenly calling Sainsbury's "Sainsbury"? –– and when I was finished looking at the Lego and the crisps multi-packs I wandered to the magazine racks. Why are there about twenty magazines about "coarse" carp fishing?<br />
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A real impulse buy –– don't <u>you</u> want</div>
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to read about "perch on worms"?</div>
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When we were moving our stuff into my current residence, I was talking to the movers. I had boxes marked "statuary" and "brickettes" –– and I very sheepishly admitted that they actually contained Star Wars figures and Lego kits. One of the movers was just eighteen and had only started tentatively watching the Star Wars films. I was counseling him about navigating the prequels ("the one with the long scene in the library is good") without going into slagging off Jar Jar Binks too harshly. Why bother after all. And the "gaffer" of the bunch said, "I hate Star Wars." Then unprompted, and defiantly, he added, "I also hate football."</div>
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"Whaddaya like then," I asked. </div>
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I willed him to say "<i>S</i>ilver age <i>Phantom Stranger</i> comics."</div>
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He said, "<i>Angling</i>."</div>
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I guess there is an underground of this –– like Trump voters and neo-Nazis. You never meet them maybe, except in Didcot car parks, but they are out there and they are multiplying. </div>
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Is this already a joke?</div>
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Should I even be commenting?</div>
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That is not my subject. My subject –– as I started to say –– is those <i>hataz</i> who do everybody down out of bitterness and self-disgust at their own awful failure at the game of life. Like the readers of <i>All About History</i> magazine, who take some solace in the suggestion that Leonardo was "not all that":<br />
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Fuck Leonardo, his flawed inventions and his abandoned art! </div>
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So what if he invented helicopters in the sixteenth century.</div>
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I wonder what appetite this cover article serves: "There's a real demand out there to see the Western canon dragged down and beaten up by mediocrities and hacks."</div>
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"Next issue: <i>Was Shakespeare a total dunce?</i>"</div>
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<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-62117503840190919272017-01-24T14:01:00.004-05:002017-01-31T21:15:37.356-05:00 "I Am Not Curious, Orange." Or, "Trump L'Oeil."I get the feeling Trump has been stung more than a <i>leetle</i> by the harsh words of the "Press" –– the "Media" –– that amorphous awful hydra that of one mind crawls across the Republic like a many–armed leech.<br />
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Poor guy! I say this because he was on TV yesterday and I said to my wife, "Is there something wrong with the TV? Or am I dreaming? Trump isn't orange."<br />
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I started thumping the TV in time–honored fashion, even though it is a flatscreen. I sort of batted at it.<br />
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Trump was pink with almost white hair. He was the colour of a heart attack waiting to happen.<br />
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He looked like the brother in <i>Trading Places</i> that is not Don Ameche.<br />
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Yeah –– <i>Randolph Duke</i>.<br />
Remember how he ended up?<br />
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"I don't think Hillary's fit for office!"</div>
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Trump looked like a classic old Republican!<br />
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He'd had a do–over.<br />
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"He must have really been stung by those Cheetos placards on the marches," I mused. "Trump is no longer the new orange." <br />
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Poor guy's awfully thin–skinned. Unlike an orange!<br />
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He's more like a nectarine.<br />
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His hair remains a foul four-dimensional enigma.<br />
His hair is an M.C. Escher <i>trompe l'oeil</i>, pun <u>intended</u>.<br />
Has this pun been used yet? Can I copyright it?<br />
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All the criticisms leveled at him, all the awful things they have said about him, all true, and the worst one for him was that he looks like a Cheeto. "They can call me a steaming turd and a Nazi, but when <span style="text-align: center;">they say I look like a Cheeto it's too much."</span></div>
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MELANIA: Donaldt, dolink, come on back to der sunbed Gott in Himmel vey ist meir.</div>
Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-58659237329147542862015-12-02T11:56:00.003-05:002015-12-02T11:57:03.298-05:00"Grapefruit."Recommend to me the man who can get any pleasure –– or sense –– out of a grapefruit.<br />
<br />
Preparing (or assembling) a grapefruit is like hard time done in the salt mines.<br />
<br />
<i>Eating</i> it is like thirty years in the gulag archipelago!Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-52200063472766226482012-11-10T21:55:00.001-05:002013-08-20T11:53:01.659-04:00"Two Score of Jests" / "Vale"<br />
<u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My Final "Jests"</span></u><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
1. <u>"Entertainment Crackers"</u></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
Crackers that are so nice they are called "entertainment crackers." </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Perhaps you have heard of them. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I think that their reputation rather proceeds them. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">They are opposed to their <i>confreres</i> in the biscuit tin, the miserable "water cracker" -- so named because it tastes like water. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Bread and water." </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">They should call them prisonhouse crackers. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Poorhouse crackers.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Penitentiary crackers. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
2. I misremembered the name of the dog from <i>Downton Abbey</i>. I called her "Ibis" ("Ibex") when her name is "Isis". </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
________________________________________________</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
Here endeth my excellent run of jests, which ran rather like that peculiar figure Emerson describes in "Experience" - that "train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I do not believe I am being grandiloquent when I make the comparison.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I do not believe I am being pretentious when I make the allusion.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The better-loved, more beautiful <i>beads</i>, it seems, were the least-loved among ye. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You my readers who it seems pine for chintz and paste trinkets!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ye came to me to read of <i>Storage Wars</i>, of <i>Market Warriors</i>, even of <i>Dog the Bounty Hunter</i>. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My own humble prattle about the daily goings-on in my days when I reflected amicably on life in a district of Brooklyn town seem to have amused few among ye. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Shall you recoil from me once more if I draw on another figure from the American Renaissance, now recalling the words of Longfellow as I describe my actions?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
And the night shall be filled with music,</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> And the cares, that infest the day,<br />Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,<br /> And as silently steal away.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
When I published my squibs exclusively in pamphlet form, <i>in the previous century</i>, I used to round off each volume with a vow that the next volume should not be offered to the former subscription list; that I would leave copies only in hedgerows, in huckleberry bushes, in ditches, in dead letter boxes, in drop-points, secreted in the almshouses of Abingdon and the charity shops of Norwich's St. Benedict's Street. The municipal hutches for cats at the top of Long Island; Commercial Street between Box and Clay?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
These threats were empty vessels and I'd routinely return, like a drinker from LETHE's waters, to the fray of publishing my own jokes and tirades.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">These days I have had the petulance scoured out of me, and instead withdraw my gaming pieces with that sort of playful misanthropy that has become my signature on this site. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I <i>say</i>, I -- who so gamely threw myself into the "great game" -- I withdraw my dies and counters respectfully from that humiliated bandshell the <i>public arena</i>, and fold myself up, mummy-like, in the shroud of my former showman's tent.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Got metaphors if you want 'em. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The next time I feel compelled to write a new rumination on the subject of <i>Market Warriors</i> or <i>Top Chef</i> or <i>Chef Race</i>, I might conceivably resume posting my findings somewhere "online" where the mysterious hundreds who read those posts will easily find me again. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Under what name I shall discourse, I do not say. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I prefer to ask, what name did Achilles travel under when he went among the women? </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As for the more personal ("bitter, dreary") entries, these shall return to the printed page eventually (sold on the streets of Brooklyn) or they shall perish - as they should - in an old-fashioned diary I have.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
That said, I might equally exit, <i>folding my puptent like the Arabs as I goe</i>, with the winking recommendation that you regularly check your local lychgate for chapbooks and "little magazines". </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
<u>You never know what you might find in the hawthorn among the huckleberries!</u></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><u><br /></u></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPC0nOmcHCzeGDr8HRurZ1M1hm4nxc9dWFLBBIixbWMx5jNjgFDQmkJ-O28qicEySwK52G084rsZoQOAHz808L-X7gNprAd0OmSSH25gGXnpcfbFAXPUPrnlCjRTTcMIoVtgtTW4aht3Nz/s1600/Horns+of+Satan+05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPC0nOmcHCzeGDr8HRurZ1M1hm4nxc9dWFLBBIixbWMx5jNjgFDQmkJ-O28qicEySwK52G084rsZoQOAHz808L-X7gNprAd0OmSSH25gGXnpcfbFAXPUPrnlCjRTTcMIoVtgtTW4aht3Nz/s320/Horns+of+Satan+05.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">[<i>Unctuous smile. </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Exeunt</i>.]</span>Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-62069283418096771992012-11-06T13:51:00.002-05:002012-11-07T22:32:19.114-05:00"George Lucas Says He's Retiring."<br />
George Lucas has announced that he is retiring.<br />
<br />
Retiring from <i>what?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
"I am retiring from golf and scuba diving and the cocktail hour and thumb-twiddling and also from orchestrating pointless, mindless, endless orgies. I am going to take up the cello."<br />
<br />
________________________________________<br />
<br />
Maybe George Lucas should retire from trimming his beard in his wonted eccentric style. The combination of the fat multiple chins with that precisely-kept beard creates a dispiriting effect.Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-59303560550386830062012-11-06T12:56:00.000-05:002012-11-06T13:34:55.444-05:00"Other People's Favourite TV Shows."<br />
I was watching an old episode of <i>Parking Wars</i> as I ate my lunch. It was an episode I'd seen before but that's okay because <i>Parking Wars </i>rewards the repeat viewer. It's like re-reading Herman Melville.<br />
<br />
In the commercial break they had an advert for <i>CSI Miami</i> on DVD. <br />
<br />
I thought, "Hard to believe some people sit around like schmucks watching old episodes of <i>CSI Miami</i> -- and yet they do!"<br />
<br />
It is quite incredible what people sit around watching on TV after hours.<br />
<br />
_______________________________________<br />
<br />
Speaking of <i>Parking Wars</i>, I asked <i>wife</i> last night, "What do you think the lyrics are to the <i>Parking Wars</i> theme song?" It's an unusual choice for a theme song, but a good one.<br />
<br />
I think the lyrics are, "That ain't gonna make it right / That ain't gonna make it all right / That ain't gonna make it all right now." These are the sum of the lyrics. It is also the only song I can think of that manages to credibly incorporate a "large van or truck-reversing" alarm into the music itself.<br />
<br />
The new episodes of <i>Parking Wars</i> have mysteriously moved away from Philadelphia and are now featuring scenes in Staten Island and the Bronx.<br />
<br />
The guy from the Bronx who drives a tow-truck that removes cars from private car parks. He said: "Dis tha hood so people think they can park where they like. They wrong today."<br />
<br />
He stopped off at his toddler's pre-school and went over to peer into the playground to look for his son. When his son scrambled over, dad started baby-talking at him, "You gonna play Playstation tonight?, gonna play Batman Lego tonight?" He kissed his son through the mesh fencing. Then he turned away and said to the camera cold-blooded: "Next generation of car-towing right there."<br />
<br />
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Cody on <i>Chef Race</i>: "I am literally walking into a lion's den."</div>
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Another episode Cody became tearful and said to his team-mates: "I'm really impressed. Right now you</div>
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guys have got so much respect for me." </div>
<br />
<br />
<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-7226529230480459272012-10-19T19:53:00.000-04:002015-09-01T16:42:43.656-04:00Fast And Expensive Comments Last night, on <i>Person of Interest</i>, John Rees dispatched the perp by driving his car into the guy's SUV & knocking it into him.<br />
<br />
On <i>Jeopardy</i>, the two new contestants were named Walkenhorst and Lowmaster. Both females. The blonde woman who had dominated for the last week was toppled from her throne. There wasn't anything offensive about her <i>per se</i>, but I was greatly relieved that she was deposed. She seemed to get cockier every day in her little interviews with Alex, after the first break. She was getting to sort of like being on the television. She was kind of adapting horribly to it. Alex, of course, hates it when the contestants try to outshine him and he jealously, peevishly squashes their repartee when it sprouts. He tries to kill their jokes in the very act of birth. It's in his professional interest for the contestants to be stammering dullards with nothing worth saying. Usually they are. So he was happy to see the blonde go too I think.<br />
<br />
Lowmaster won. How her reign shall be remembered by future generations, we cannot say.<br />
<br />
On<i> <u>Life After Top Chef</u></i> Mike Isabella shows up each week even though he is not one of the four featured chefs. I presume he was "put out" that he wasn't invited to be one of the featured chefs, so he furiously contrives to turn up at the filming of every episode as if by happenstance, and perfectly naturally wanders into shot.<br />
This week he happened to turn up at Spike Mendelsohn's place on his moped while the cameras were there. "Oh, are you filming? I'll come back. I can go. You want me to stay? Okay I'll stay."<br />
By the way, the title to this show must be ironic, because the overriding message behind this show is that there <i>is</i> no life after<i> Top Chef</i>. These fuckers are just diddling about while life goes past!<br />
One day they'll be dead!<br />
<br />
<u>Idea for TV Show</u>. <i>Colicchio Versus Colameco: Who'd Win.</i><br />
<br />
The pitch: "Who'd win in the crude, ugly slugfest that would obviously ensue when these two eminent chefs met."<br />
<br />
On <u style="font-style: italic;">Chef Race: UK Versus US</u><i> </i>Johnnie Mountain continues his inevitable apotheosis into Walter White.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, did I not make the point several months ago that Mitt Romney looks like Don Draper? "Katty Kay" made the same point, belatedly, on Charlie Rose the other night, after the debate. I wish you could copyright little super-recognitions like that. There must be a way to make money out of super-recognition but I haven't figured it out yet if there is.<br />
<br />
<u>Boring Comics</u>. Anything with the Savage Land or the Shi'Ar in it. That is to say, the X-Men. When Sauron (half-man, half-<i>pteranosaur</i>) flies into the shot it is time for us to retire discreetly. When the Starjammers come running dynamically into a room pointing their ray-guns (as they invariably do) it is time to respectfully retire from that same room -- by a different door -- methinks.<br />
<br />
I was re-reading some old issues of <i>Uncanny X-Men </i>from about 1990 and you could almost see, as if in "real time," the collapse and utter demise of Chris Claremont's writing style into incoherence. It's shocking to behold. He developed this sort of be-bopping free-association stream-of-consciousness that was alarming to the sensitive reader. By the end of his run, when I presume he was forcibly removed from the Marvel offices, he was writing sheer gibberish, talking in tongues. Like Pound with the so-called "China Cantos."<br />
<br />
I was listening to Bonny Prince Billy's last album the other day, <i>Wolfroy Goes to Town</i>, hearing it meander blandly into little pockets of awfulness, and I remember thinking, "He's another one." Like Emerson to the Sphinx.<br />
<br />
Also boring, the Wolverine story, "Weapon X." What actually happens in this story? It's a protracted surgical procedure with, so far as I can tell, bickering staff. I'd as lief watch <i>Grey's Anatomy</i>. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-77286017236264756312012-10-09T22:40:00.000-04:002012-10-10T22:48:32.647-04:00"Chef Races Are Here, Who Will Join?"... "Snoopy Tennis"... "Unused Jokers"<u>"Chef Races Are Here, Who Will Join?"</u><br />
<br />
BBC America has graced us with an "exclusive" show that is on here before it is on in England (or at the same time) (or it ain't even on in England). The program is <i>Chef Race</i>. It has two magic words in it. "Chef" and "Race". How can a TV show with these two words in it fail?<br />
<br />
Hard to say -- but they are doing their level best to test the question.<br />
<br />
One character on it is Rebecca. Her infectious catchphrase that she says with conviction and undaunted regularity is this: "My name's Rebecca and I'm nineteen years old. There's so many people that fink I'm nineteen and I don't know what I'm doing."<br />
They "fink" she is nineteen -- and they are apparently right.<br />
She is nineteen.<br />
<br />
Another character is Johnnie Mountain who you might remember disgraced himself so manfully on <i>The Great British Menu</i>. He has distinguished himself as a madman here already. He seems to be delicately balanced and yet he has thrown himself wholesale into this crass, crude scramble across the United States. I wonder why they don't call it "Authentic Meltdown of a Madman" instead. I wonder why they don't call it "Egg and Spoon Race Across This Fine Republic Of Ours Where The Egg Is a Man And His Head Is Going To Get Hard-Boiled and Cracked Quite Asunder." Suppose Mister MOUNTAIN aims to out-Gordon Gordon in this, the country where Gordon is on television almost constantly.<br />
<br />
When Gordon is not on TV it is only because <i>Top Gear</i> or <i>Doctor Who</i> is on instead.<br />
<br />
<i>Doctor Who</i>, or as I know it, <i>What The Fuck?</i><br />
<br />
I have known two men in my travels who actually wrote <i>Doctor Who</i> novels. Neither man impressed me with their, let us say, <i>Goethe-like genius</i>.<br />
<br />
I must point out that I am not tediously following British reality shows from New York. I am not yet quite that pathetic. I saw <i>Great British Menu</i> while I was in England earlier this year.<br />
<br />
(Incidentally read an online review of this show where the reviewer explained his sole reason for watching the show: "It's on after <i>Eggheads</i> and I watch <i>Eggheads </i>while I have tea. Dreadful admission I know." This says more about the British psyche than perhaps any single sentence yet written.)<br />
<br />
Nevertheless there <i>is</i> a peculiar specimen of humanoid in the world that indeed does do this strange thing -- following foreign reality shows by tedious often illegal means. People watch TV shows from across the world (or indeed they don't even watch them, just "follow" and "like" them) and enter into heated discussions of those shows with pen-pals abroad in "chatroom threads".<br />
<br />
I was looking online to see what the <i>vox populi</i> said about <i>Gallery Girls</i> one time and I was astonished to find, among the hundreds of vituperative statements calling for the destruction by hanging of the odious CHANTAL CHADWICK, people from Australia were pitching in saying "I haven't actually seen the show but I know the type and I hate them. We have them in the Bungle Bungles too." A mad world, my masters, when people take the time out of their day to pitch in on a television program they haven't even seen.<br />
<br />
Similarly there are people from all over the world pitching in their "two penn'orth" on the minutiae of <i>The Amazing Race</i> -- and they live in the unsullied magnificence of rural England. Nevertheless they seem to love to be accepted in the worldwide community.<br />
<br />
These people are unusual and unwell and should go far.<br />
_________________________________________<br />
<br />
"Words With Friends" -- or as I know it, "Mind-Games Against My Enemies."<br />
<br />
"Vicious, Conniving Machinations In Abject Opposition to My Foemen"<br />
<br />
__________________________________________<br />
<br />
"Snoopy Tennis"<br />
<br />
After the Paralympics ("The Paranormal Laff-A-Lympics") ("Paranoid Olympics"), what is to follow from the English, those champions of the challenged? The English have enjoyed expressing their benevolence as a nation and they don't want to let up now the "Games" are done with. Perhaps now can come a contest between middling and indifferent sportsmen and women. Perhaps I can humbly throw my hat in the ring and enter the Games.<br />
<br />
I would like to play Olympic tennis please.<br />
My tennis "game" is poor, even abhorrent, but I want to play Olympic tennis.<br />
Can I please do it.<br />
<br />
After this, what.<br />
A sexual tournament in which unpleasant, unattractive men are allowed by the beneficent English public to get laid, with the beautiful women of their choice. The English after all love to be seen to cheer on those who have been shall we say compromised by the Fates who in their cruelty are said to be undaunted.<br />
<br />
It's funny because it is said that I grew up in this country England and in my day I don't quite remember it being that way.<br />
_________________________________________________<br />
<br />
"Latest Annoying Trend"<br />
<br />
I have noticed recently a worrying trend in etiquette. People are ostentatiously being <i>thankful</i> and <i>humble</i> by clasping their hands together as if in prayer and waving the praying hands up and down to denote gratitude, heads lowered the while.<br />
<br />
I saw cheftestants on <i>Top Chef Masters</i> doing it a lot. Then when GUS FRENG from <i>Breaking Bad</i> was on the Emmys he did it and in an instant ruined a stellar career. (He has only compounded this loathsome gesture and this headlong decline by appearing in the risible new show <i>Revolution</i>). Designers are doing it on the catwalk ("A Comeback Jil Sander's Way," <i>New York Times</i>, 27 September 2012).<br />
<br />
Reading it semiotically, it looks as if they are saying "Like me. Accept me in your inner heart as a benevolent person. Let me goe through the tabernacle of your Christianly inner sanctum as an one untrammeled. I love the Paralymoics [<i>sic</i>] and flashmobs and I am humble. Please 'like' and 'follow' me in all my banal misadventures." <br />
<br />
This is a new generation for whom <i>Facebook</i> and <i>Twitter</i> are <i>de rigeur</i> -- my generation I regretfully suppose -- and for whom it is perfectly natural and not in the least bit pathetic to actually plead with strangers (or whole communities) to <i>like</i> them. People are concerned with being above all <i>well-liked</i>. They beg: "Like me. Be nice to me. Please don't hit me."<br />
<br />
That will be the next thing you can do in social networking. Click a button that says "Please don't hurt me."<br />
<br />
"Don't be mean to me."<br />
"Honour my frailties and let me bide in my shortcomings on this day called the Feast of St. Crispian."<br />
<br />
FOOLS THEY MAKE ME LIKE TO LAUGH. I for my part have four "followers" and I am quite confident that not one of those four is actually "following" a blessed thing I say.<br />
<br />
<u>Me neither.</u><br />
<br />
__________________________________________________<br />
<br />
"Unused Jokers"<br />
<br />
A humiliating feature of the host site to this mess ("Blogger") is that it allows me to see the statistics of this weblog. That is, to gauge in ungentle figures just how <i>well-liked</i> I am. Vexing. Humiliating. How many people have looked at which entry. Demoralizing. I feel like the characters on Market Warriors: why don't the public (-- like the uncultured, cheap attendees at an auction in Columbus, Ohio --) appreciate the deserving squibs? Why do so many people read that one entry about <i>Storage Wars </i>which is read by the hundreds? Why are certain Dog the Bounty Hunter entries so popular when others are completely neglected? And why does that flip entry about <i>Sleepy Eyes of Death </i>fare so well?<br />
<br />
I shall say nothing here of the poverty of the online criticism of <i>chanbara</i> <i>jidai-geki</i>.<br />
<br />
Nobody has looked at the following entries -- or only one or two people, which is pathetic when you see that I ostensibly have a full four people "following" my <i>feuilletons</i>.<br />
<br />
FINDINGS OF THE ACADEMY FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 2012-2013. The texts listed below are underrated and need reevaluation ("reinvigoration") by future scholars. Get 'em while you can because I might just remove them and ritually delete them in a childish purple snit:<br />
<br />
"Mysterious Can" (2 September)<br />
"Alain De Boton is Not James Franco" (2 September)<br />
"Stay-At-Home Moms -- And Corpse Mutilation" (30 July)<br />
"Samberg" (30 July)<br />
"Twelve Against Thebes" (25 July)<br />
"Knee Jerk" (15 August 2010).<br />
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__________________<br />
<br />
My new <strike>single</strike> album. To be sung in the inimitable style of Lou Barlow:<br />
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"I Am Not Going to Share My Mac and Cheese With You."<br />
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_________________________<br />
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<u>"TV Show Review -- Including a Good Insult To One's Wife"</u><br />
<br />
Wife and I were watching the new crop of shows, trying them out. This required Christianly good patience and right Christly tolerance hitherto unseen. But you see I went among ye as a penitent this day. I had been wrong before; I had written off <i>Hell On Wheels</i> prematurely after seeing one episode of the first season only to discover that the second season was a beaut. So as penance I was trying out the new shows <i>Vegas</i> and <i>Revolution</i>. <br />
<br />
<i>Vegas</i> is silly and fatuous and poor but it's okay viewing. "I'd watch it if it was on after <i>Eggheads</i>." Vic Mackey is back, playing himself. (Who else can he play, after all? <i>Hamlet</i>?!) Vic is not convincing as an Italian-American gangster however, which is somewhat regrettable because that's what he is meant to be in this program. Almost as poor as -- well -- almost as poor as casting poor <i>Steve Buscemi</i> as a cut-throat gangster kingpin!<br />
<br />
<i>Revolution</i>, meanwhile, is ill-conceived post-apocalyptic <i>cobblers</i> and simply <i>can't be done</i>. The actors are generic (Gus Freng excepted) and the story is cribbed from any number of Marvel or DC titles (<i>Kamandi</i>... <i>Hex</i>...) and from David Mamet's <i>Wilson</i> (<i>id est</i>, my own favourite fantasy: that the internet would crash and the power go out and never be regained.) If this show makes it to the end of the first season without its being pulled, then <i>Pan-Am</i> was Shakespearean <i>must-watch teevee</i>. I was watching it in misery with wife. I said "It's so bad it's revolutionary."<br />
<br />
I was perversely insisting on seeing it through to its natural terminus.<br />
Wife goes, "Come on, turn it off. It's an insult to your intelligence."<br />
I shot back, "It's so bad it's an insult to <i>your</i> intelligence."<br />
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<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-50976618016347042232012-09-25T23:05:00.001-04:002015-04-19T19:07:28.216-04:00"Werner Herzog Comes Through."<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We went back to the scene of our last auto-da-fe, Bryant Park, to once again witness Werner Herzog in fevered conversation with an unknown property, this time a so-called geographer and artist name of Trevor Paglen.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I'd been in the library since before two, working in the Jewish Division. It was freezing in there, since they had the AC cranked up high as it'd go. I emerged into what was probably a balmy evening shivering. Met wife on the steps -- in fact, by the lion who is called "Patience" - and shrilly remarked "Christ - let's go to H&M and buy a jumper."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We went to get a seat in Bryant Park for this free event "under the stars" and there were no good seats close to the stage, although there was everywhere evidence of that dastardly practice of <i>seat saving</i>.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here is a sight of humanity <i>as it really is</i> rather than how it loves to think it is; craven , vicious, sneaking, conniving. In a word: <i>seat-saving</i>. It is like this when you alight on a bus and everybody it seems is sat on the aisle seat, jealously keeping the window seat vacant. And these are nominally "grown adults". There used to be one bloke on the coach to college, the Wallingford to Henley route, who did this every morning . We made fun of him.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This day I got in protracted arguments with two people on the subject of seat-saving. I said, "It can't be done." They said, "It can. It is." My first combatant was a leering, jaundiced-looking Spanish female to whom I said, "You cannot save seats in these United States. This land is your land; this land is my land. From California to the New York islands. From the redwood forests--" She laid out across the seats and defied me to move her. She was full of Zuccotti Park green bile and defiance. I had a great urge to tip her off the seat. She would have me call the police. Shouldn't leave unless it were in chains. I said I would find a friendly <i>gendarme</i> presently and went off, fuming, looking for a higher authority with whom to plead my case.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In Bryant Park you might as well plead with the granite face of the squatting statue of Gertrude Stein for all the good it'll do you.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I shall say little of this undignified to and fro that after all diminishes me. I got into a further, more protracted ruck with a liberal-arts wealthy hip grandmother-type, Blythe Danner with a colourless pencil-line moustache and bobby-soxer's pony-tail, who was sitting with pursed lips (sucking pensively on her <i>bleached moustache</i>) tapping away at her laptop as I berated her. Pretending to ignore me as I hectored her, sounding for all the world like my father.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"I almost hate to interrupt your blogging," I said. "It seems a genuine shame. It's a loss to the Western Canon. But I know you," I said. "I know you of old." (I resisted the urge here to sing "You Jack of Diamonds") "I say that I know you and I do. You pledge faithfully to NPR and Channel Thirteen. It's sort of a principle with you. You subscribe to the <i>New Yorker</i> and you are a regular at the 92nd Street Y. You simply cannot wait to see Zadie Smith in conversation with Chris Ware. You really are the life-blood of the arts in New York City, and I say that without exaggeration." I don't think I could have been much crueler if I tried (short of mentioning her <i>moustache</i>.) I saw that I was nevertheless veering off my subject by broadening the critique somewhat. I ended up perching like a leprechaun on top of the paperback that she had pedantically laid down to save the seat. I said, "There I have sat on your little paperback; now what for us, you and I, grandmother?"</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ha. It all worked out because the person she was saving the seat for phoned her even while I was sitting on the book that stood in so manfully for that person, and said they couldn't make it. There is a moral lesson embedded in this somewhere but it escapes me.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">After a while of that gig-goer's delight, the sight of roadies bumbling about the stage while the pre-show tape blares loudly (this time playing Harry Smith-style old-timey backwater plunder), and after an award-winning female poet suffered us to sit through her humdrum Weltanschauung, Trevor Paglen mounted the stage and explained to us with humility and brio and unctuous charm how he was sending a sort of platinum-plated Viewmaster reel of photos up into the satellite ring around the earth, where it is supposed it will represent the Earth's culture to anybody who chances upon it for the rest of eternity.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It was interesting, if inevitably rather willfully Quixotic, but then Werner Herzog loped onto stage and disabused this man Trevor of all confidence he might have ever had in his project.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Treffor, I don't believe in it," he rumbled, seconds after beginning. "It will never be discovered by aliens." With Teutonic logic he quite briskly proved conclusively that Trevor's project, years in the making, was folly. "It would take a spacecraft from the nearest galaxy hondreds of thousandts hoff yeahrs to penetrate our solar system; they would have to have generation after generation continuing the flight through space, inbreeding each time to produce a new generation of idiots..."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It was a convincing argument, even if I was meekly thinking (a keen reader of<i> Fantastic Four </i>comics) "What if the aliens can teleport by the use of an elementary wormhole?" (Herzog dealt with wormholes later.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Herzog was on form. I was chary, not only after my last <i>set-to</i> with him at the Library (see previous post), but also having recently seen the extras on the <i>Grizzly Man </i>DVD which includes a deadly-dull documentary about the making of the film's soundtrack, which has such exciting figures as Richard Thompson, Henry Kaiser and Jim O'Rourke twiddling and noodling in a studio.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We see Herzog "sitting in" on the session, getting all sentimental over the female cello player. It even has Herzog wishing aloud that he could play the cello: "I vould giff ten years off my life to master the cello."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">"Has this man never read Turgenev's <i>Fathers and Sons</i>?" I thought, in which excellent novel the nihilist Bazarov sneers at "a paterfamilias learning the cello."</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
On this evening in Bryant Park, however, Herzog was in a refreshingly pithy frame of mind. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
They were having problems with the microphones. As much as they talked, street hubbub from the restaurant nearby and the streets beyond us kept carrying on to the microphones. Herzog had a microphone on his lapel which he could only be heard on if he held his lapel up and lowered his head to it. Moderator Paul <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;">Holdengräber</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"> kept fretting about Werner's microphone, but Herzog was pithy about it. "I am fine in this strange position, Paul."</span></span><br />
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After freewheeling through an array of whimsical images that said next to nothing about life on this planet they showed a slide of a Paul Klee daub of an angel which had been ridiculously over-interpreted in purple prose by Walter Benjamin. When Herzog quite rightly laughed savagely at the Benjamin paean ( -- such laughter a blasphemy in Old New York --), the moderator, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"><span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Paul Holdengräber, blurted out with weird animation that he had spent ten years of his life in the study of Walter Benjamin and his works, during which years he was an active participant in a <i>menage a trois</i>.</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"><span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"><span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">I couldn't see the relevance of this unprovoked revelation at all. </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"><span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;">Didn't want to picture the squalor in my young mind. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"><span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"><span style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px;">Indeed, the audience could be heard to recoil as one, at this unnecessary nugget of "T.M.I.". </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The audience could be heard to think it would be a very good thing if the future alien visitors (but they can never exist!) are spared this particular piece of information about the sex life of <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;"> "The Libertine </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 23px;">Holdengräber".</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Then it was, I think, that we all thought as one: "Isn't it time for this night beneath the stars to pack up and go home? Isn't it time for the stars to go out and the universe to discreetly end?"</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">On the way home my wife said to me, "Do you think the<i> menage a trois</i> was with two men or two women?"</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I said, "I think it was him, the cat and a <i>houseplant</i>."</span><br />
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<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-90363782707147547892012-09-05T13:15:00.001-04:002012-09-20T06:54:41.536-04:00"Righteous Chagrin of the Market Warriors"; Or, "Miller Gaffney Is Unimpressed."Of all the colourless range of emotions visible everywhere on the many-headed Hydra that is the TEE-VEE, the one perhaps least often evidenced is that of chagrin. This is too refined, too classical, too <i>ubi sunt</i> a feeling for the age.<br />
<br />
Shall we see Bruce Jenner or Kim Kardashian look back in sorrowful chagrin before "our" cameras any time soon? Shall we see that ruefulness, that bitter yet intelligent <i>regret</i> pass across the faces of the conniving characters on <i>Gallery Girls</i>? No, chagrin, neo-classical regret and ruefulness are antithetical to the usual crop of reality-teevee shows, whether they are documentary in intent or competitive. Even when the characters on <i>The Amazing Race</i> lose out on the million dollars, when they are cheated and betrayed and fucked over and humiliated at a "detour", they do not show chagrin. They froth and they seethe and rally their online offensives.<br />
<br />
I saw some rare chagrin once on an episode of <i>Dog the Bounty Hunter</i>, when Dog was saying "I have fathered lo these my many children and God said it was right good and I have had to me in my times all these sons, and verily God took me down a notch or several." He was regretting, in Biblical tones, the loss of several of his children.<br />
<br />
Dog is a bit like a nineteenth-century rural minister, or even a Colonial type, the Cotton Mather sort for whom the loss of six or seven of your children is simply the norm. That said, Dog's chagrin was sentimental in root, and it inevitably tipped over into broad <i>bathos</i> almost as quickly as it materialised.<br />
<br />
An intellectual chagrin, however, of the type expressed by the last cultured denizens of a ransacked culture, I rarely see. This is funny, because the present culture is pretty fucking ransacked! However, on last night's episode of <i>Market Warriors</i>, there was a beautiful and quite stunning record of the culture in pieces and of a modest yet elevated coterie among the ruins, staring gloomily and in awe at the shards about them.<br />
<br />
"These my fragments which I have shored against my ruin..."<br />
<br />
<i>Market Warriors</i> is a superior (in both senses) reality show along the lines of<i> Storage Wars</i>. You will note the passing resemblance in the titles even. However while <i>Storage Wars</i> in its title and its outlook emphasises the wars themselves, the crude bellicosity, the skirmishing and the cutthroat machinating, the whirr of the axe, the musick of the cudgel, <i>Market Warriors </i>places a more humanistic emphasis on the Warriors themselves -- the mortal participants. It is not a paean to the slavering and unsophisticated god of War. <br />
<br />
Perhaps that's cock and bull. Rather, <i>Market Warriors</i> is on Channel Thirteen, and so naturally has a more refined air and tenor. As my mother-in-law said when I naively asked her if she watches <i>Storage Wars</i>, "My dear dear man, I watch <i>Antiques Roadshow. </i>Pass me my snuffbox for<i> I fain would lie doon.</i>" It is the difference between the Jacksonian log cabin and the hard cider misspelt Davy Crockett culture and the precious, patrician, John Harvard book-larnt culture of John Quincy Adams.<br />
<br />
<i>Market Warriors</i> is made by the same artisanal yeoman-philosopher craftsmen that fashioned the U.S. version of the <i>Antiques Roadshow</i> and so naturally accommodates and indulges the genteel sensiibilities and sensitivities of those patricians who prefer that show. It also features [<i>Antiques Roadshow</i> compere] Mark Walberg as the disembodied voice narrating the goings-on, and in this capacity he gets off some real zingers. I mean boy. His sarcasm, as a disembodied voice, is remarkable to behold. It's as though because he is not visible he can be more cutting and droll than he would be if visible in the throng of an antiques show.<br />
<br />
I should note, for foreign readers, that the Mark Walberg I refer to is not the similar-soundingly-named Hollywood film star and former purveyor of white rap <i>Wahlberg</i>, but another man of, incredibly, virtually the same name.<br />
<br />
How can such things be?<br />
You'll believe a man can fly.<br />
"Which was the lie?"<br />
And--<br />
"Does the race of man love a lord?"<br />
<br />
Mark Walberg nearly made the leap from Channel Thirteen to prime-time teevee ("the very eye of history") a few years back in a show based around members of the public confessing tawdry secrets on live TV to the horror and bemusement of their loved ones. It was a miserable sight to see him crudely whoring for the prime-time greenback. Walberg had betrayed the cause of intellectual television in pursuit of the Hollywood dollar. It was like seeing Thomas Jefferson splayed out in a low bawdy-house. It backfired on him quite badly and the show was cancelled even in these savage times for being too much the inhumane Grand Guignol. Walberg returned, whupped and chastised and neutered and humbled and reformed to the <i>Antiques Roadshow</i>. Yet the disembodied Walberg we hear on <i>Market Warriors</i> happily retains some of that tart, barbed, annihilating negative energy that characterised him on his axed cage-match-hell-show.<br />
<br />
To return to my first subject, which was that emotion seen so rarely on teevee (since it involves reflection and regret and quiet sadness and after all intelligence and remorse and humility), chagrin. On <i>Market Warriors</i> the same four characters go around an antique show or flea market or a bazaar and they have a set time and a set "purse" to acquire objects from the fayre. These, the distinguished objects eventually chosen according to the application of the contestants' superior experience and their celebrated breeding, are then auctioned off in another State. The profit, or the loss, is counted up and the winners derived from this totting-up.<br />
<br />
Every episode I have seen of this show involves the contestants making massive losses. They pay too much in the first antique shop or flea market and then at the auction (in Cleveland, or Cincinnatti, or Madison Wisconsin) their refined tastes are as unto so many pearls before swine as the ignorant pigs of these rural towns bid mere pennies for they know not what. These grubbing swine are the likes of Mark on <i>Baggage Battles</i> or that swaggering, scrabbling grubber Dave on <i>Storage Wars</i>. They are the profiters from chaos. They are the riverboatmen on the Styx. They shall prevail as the <i>old men with delicate manners go down, swept under. </i><br />
<br />
It's a real barbarians-at-the-gate scenario, and it was pronounced this week. They bought in Old Mass and they sold in Ohio. They did fucking poorly. The four contestants are seen in the attached images with this very weblog so you can behold that what I say is verily true. I laughed to see them. There was nothing for them to say; they had complained on previous episodes about the crassness and the obliviousness of the auction attendees. There was no point in repeating themselves. All they could do now was to sit with these unfeigned expressions of despair and wait for Death to come -- as it will.<br />
<br />
I have never seen such expressions on television ever. They are so pure and unadulterated! The soul is still alive and well and can be seen in the faces of these well-named warriors.<br />
<br />
I can't help but love and sympathise with these faces. I spend much of my day with the same expression on my face, and not just when I am trying to sell off some books or CDs or comic books and getting fuck all for them from ignoramuses. The misery of the Market Warriors wasn't just that they had lost -- the money, after all, wasn't even theirs -- nor was it even at the repeated public loss of face they have undergone in the course of this well-meaning program. Their horror and chagrin is, finally, at the decline of a civilization entire.<br />
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______________________________________________________________________<br />
<br />
One funny thing on a recent episode of Market Warriors, which I have to recall, was when the one character - the so-called "Professor," John Bruno - was walking through an antiques fair and he saw one dealer, with a long white beard, and said, "Hey guy" or something to him. The dealer responded with amazing wistfulness, "<i>John... it's me</i>..."<br />
<br />
John Bruno looked closer at the man and recognised, through the cruel masque of reduced circumstances and that rude veil of hoary aging, an old and well-loved old bondsman. He said, in unfeigned shock and horror and yet tenderness too I believe, yes I believe there was tenderness in it, "My God... how long's it been..." or words like those.<br />
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Again, as above, here were real human exchanges and emotions usually too raw and vivid for the televsion to see or allow. Again, at the sheer candour of the showing of the raw human nerve system, I laughed out loud in delight and regret.<br />
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<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-28397954646841258122012-08-06T12:02:00.001-04:002012-08-06T12:02:18.151-04:00<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This was from a Yelp review of Da Kine Bail Bonds Company. I don't know whether it is authentic but it sounds it. After all wouldn't you shoot some dude in the face if he stole your purple drank... <i>brah</i>...? </span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: arial, 'Lucida Grande', 'Bitstream Vera Sans', verdana, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: red;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: white;">I did not have a good bail bonds exp. with this company. I am not sure if they are only worried about their tv show, and not their customers but this seemed to be the case.<br />I had to bail my mother out of jail because she shot some dude in the face for stealing her purple drank.<br />Worst interest rates eva<br />How bout that one, brah?</span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span></span>Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-60413491292367773742012-07-14T11:47:00.000-04:002012-07-30T14:28:36.339-04:00Jor-El: What's Wrong With a Prison?It's very easy to become bored --- disheartened --- actually depressed -- when you are reading about the planet Krypton before it blew up. It's such dull stuff. And at the crux of this energetic maelstrom of dishwater, the eye of this <i>vortex of dullness</i>, is none other than Jor-El, the father of Superman.<br />
<br />
Partially it is because we have read the origin story of Superman so many times that we would <i>as lief eat a pincushion</i> as read it once more. We wish these superficial marionettes conjured up before us like so much trivial vapour would vanish. And this is, indeed, what generation after generation of writers has been striving -- and failing -- to accomplish, and will do so from now til time immemorial -- until, no doubt, the Earth itself blows up in a manner very like the planet Krypton. <br />
<br />
Got to try to re-invest the Superman origin story with intrigue. Doomed to fail miserably.<br />
<br />
That said, I was reading with, if not pleasure, then a sort of <i>degree-zero lack of boredom</i>, the DC limited series, <i>World of Krypton</i> (1979). This has some surprisingly nice art by Howard Chaykin -- nothing like his later, more characteristic style. It's unusual for an artist to wane as he develops, but that's what Howard Chaykin seems to have done. Mr. Damian Morgan of Brixton Town, England, tenderly loves Mr. Chaykin and has all his copies of <i>American Flagg</i> preserved in a shoebox decorated with ribbons and rosettes and Mr. Morgan will probably read these words with tears in his eyes. That is to be regretted.<br />
<br />
In <i>World of Krypto</i><i>n</i>, anyway, all Jor-El's well-trod scientific endeavours and breakthroughs are explored in "loving detail" - the Phantom Zone, anti-gravity thrusters, etc. One of his "brainwaves" however is in the field of shall we say <i>criminal rehabilitation</i>. It doesn't make sense to me.<br />
<br />
Jor-El recommends that criminals should henceforth be placed in suspended animation and launched in bubbles into orbit in the planet Krypton's immediate atmosphere, where they can float above the planet until they have served out their time.<br />
<br />
I fail to see the advantage in this. How exactly does it benefit the <i>polis</i>, sage Socrates? It seems downright eccentric to me -- perverse -- unwholesome. Need I point out what is obvious to the followers of one FRANK CASTLE's many adventures, that the essence of capital punishment is that it is <i>punishing </i>-- even if it is not always capital. If the malfeasant miscreants are in suspended animation (being brainwashed by rehabilitating subliminal <i>mind-control tapes</i>, incidentally -- but I shan't even pursue that rather tedious course of <i>leftist media critique</i> here) then they are not actually awake to appreciate the wrong that they have done. What's the point of time passing if you're asleep? It makes of the prisoners mere <i>Rip Van Winkles</i>. They're put in the bubbles and then they wake up and come out of the bubbles. It's like having your wisdom teeth extracted.<br />
<br />
Also, floating about unconscious in solitary bubbles above Krypton's surface they are under no threat whatsoever from grisly prison rape, which is -- I naively thought -- a cornerstone of civilized society's deterrents against breaking the law. The threat of prison rape is, in fact, the single greatest deterrent against wrongdoing. Without it, the world will be in anarchy.<br />
<br />
The reason why Jor-El's crackpot scheme prevails is because of the alternative that is even more <i>outre</i>. The solution offered by Jor-El's competitor, one "Tron-Et" (his real name, apparently), is the ingenious "Matter-Dissolver". This -- as you might imagine -- succinctly "eliminates the problem of the criminal." If Frank Castle was a denizen of Krypton ( -- idea for a Marvel/DC crossover event -- ) he would be a keen supporter of Tron-Et.<br />
<br />
Or not: unfortunately this canny device is discredited in the end when it turns out that "Tron-Et" is a master criminal himself who wanted to kill all the criminal lackeys who worked for him, before they could be put in Jor-El's rehabilitator-capsules. He was frightened -- reasonably enough -- that they would emerge from Jor-El's bubbles older, wiser and rehabilitated, and that on emerging from the bubbles, and after only a rudimentary snack, they would go directly to the criminal courts and tell the judge that Tron-Et was a criminal kingpin.<br />
<br />
Hence the "Matter-Dissolver."<br />
<br />
Hence the success of Jor-El's prison-capsules.<br />
<br />
I see that I have taken up quite enough of your time. And I can see from your faces, having read this far, that you agree with me entirely -- Krypton and Jor-El are very boring.<br />
<br />
__________________________________________________________<br />
<br />
AFTERTHOUGHT<br />
<br />
[This afterthought is really only for you comics twerps. It occurs to me now, as I write this, that the origin story of Superman has some resemblances to the origin story of Galactus. Superman is the last survivor of a dying planet -- for Galactus it is a dying <i>multiverse</i> -- but the "core myth" (pardon the dreadful pun) is the same. It'd be like that story where it was intimated that the Phantom Stranger is actually the son of Superman and Wonder Woman.<br />
<br />
As I said, dull dry stuff really which I very much regret having to say, but sometimes -- as an academic -- or as a lapsed academic I should say -- I have to "publish" my findings, dry and loathsome as they are, to add them to that infinitely expanding, pulsing pool of knowledge we call HUMAN CIVILIZATION! This pool of knowledge is, as Jor-El would no doubt agree, our only hope for the endurance of a sensitive society.<br />
<br />
That and the vile spectre of the ever-present threat of <i>prison rape</i>.]<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-32256998978451522092012-07-13T21:29:00.004-04:002012-10-29T19:45:53.287-04:00"Storage Wars Redivivus."I feel like Rip Van Winkle.<br />
I got fed up setting the DVR to record every episode of <i>Storage Wars</i> and then having to wade neck-deep through re-runs.<br />
By that I only mean that I grew weary of having to delete episodes from "My Playlist": the plight and plaint of the 21st-Century man.<br />
<br />
Nevertheless I tuned in to a recent episode and Dave is gone and there's some plantpot named JEFF in his stead. I saw JEFF and I naturally thought, "What the funk---?"<br />
Then I thought, "Have they made an unpopular transplant from <i>Storage Wars Texas</i>, that show that literally nobody watches? This guy has all the personality of a character off <i>Storage Wars Texas</i> -- or <i>Duck Dynasty</i>."<br />
<br />
Dave is -- peculiarly -- reduced to "live tweeting" his infantile comments at the bottom of the screen (gems like "I would of bidded more for that locker. I would of. I would of won it.")<br />
<br />
The camera seems to really love "Jeff." It's odd because he can't be accused of exuding charisma. In fact what he seems to exude is the power to make his audience want to die.<br />
<br />
I looked online to try to dig up information on this strange situation, but of course if you want information the last place you should go to is that notorious, scurrilous House of Lies THE INTERNET. You should go to the library. Go to your local library and get out some dusty old bibliographies. Blow the dust off the old Dewey Index drawers and get elbow deep in it. Blow the dust in the librarian's face. Do the research damn you. Get out the microfiches for goodness' sake. Get the <i>New York Times Inde</i>x drat you or <i>Who's Who 2012</i> and look up "FAT JEFF from <i>Storage Wars</i>."<br />
<br />
Is he in there.<br />
<br />
No he's not in there.<br />
<br />
Jeff's not even in the phone book.<br />
<br />
Reason is he lives out of a car.<br />
<br />
So maybe some information ("information about such people as JEFF") is <i>post</i>-library, or that should be <i>sub</i>-library.<br />
<br />
"Sub-librarian."<br />
<br />
[...]<br />
<br />
I looked up the <i>sitch</i> online, anyway, and what I learnt is that the consensus among the <i>Storage Wars</i> fans it seems is that Jeff is a "lying and complaining fool."<br />
<br />
"Jeff is ajerk." [sic]<br />
<br />
"Jeff is a namy pamby waste of valuable human oxygen."[sic]<br />
<br />
Meanwhile Dan Dotson and his wife Laura were really growling unpleasant things at each other in low voices in the drive to the storage facility. It's their new feature in the show, this cockpit-view of the drive to the auction, and it is unsettling. It's quite unusual to see. Quite unseemly. Like witnessing your parents fight -- but only if your father called your mother "a vulgar, brazen high-stepping slattern about town."<br />
<br />
Mine never did.<br />
<br />
It isn't like that sort of tipsy <i>Housewives of Backwater, Wisconsin</i> Andy Cohen-induced sort of "argufying," where they limply throw champagne flutes at each other -- underarm. It is pretty genuine and heartfelt name-calling and low-blowing and flesh-eating.<br />
<br />
Dan Dotson don't say much on that show, when he does he's saying it too fast to be comprehended, and then when he slows down it's to call his wife an unchristian name. It's like he's simmering with rage and the only way he can burn off that rage is by speaking fast.<br />
<br />
This season seems to be darker than the last. They've exhausted all their good will in this game and now they're just getting peevish. It's like the last episodes of the <i>Monkees</i>. Or, it's like the last few games of Words With Friends I played when everyone was obviously sick of playing but they were carrying on for reasons unclear to them.<br />
<br />
In this episode Barry is reduced to prattle. It's like the light has gone out of his eyes. He turned up on the lot riding this big space-age 1950s bus and he stuck around a while, bid half-heartedly on a couple of lockers, and then he said -- audibly -- <i>Fuck this</i> and went home in his bus. He couldn't give a shit.<br />
<br />
When Barry is not buying something asinine like a pair of goggles for chickens or jars for catching flies in then you know the lifeblood has gone out of the dray-horse. Brandi too. She is glazed over. Are they feeding these people horse tranquilizers? Brandon and Darrel seem to be having a father-and-son primal scene in front of the cameras. Darrel berates Brandon mercilessly. It's like an Arthur Miller play with these two. And Dave, as I said, has disappeared after his peculiar confession on the last episode I saw where he said that he had "been in a bad place for a while now and needed to clear his soul of some bad chakras." He retired to a Zen Trappist community in Palo Alto run by Gary Snyder.<br />
<br />
Anyway Jeff, it turns out, is not even "ajerk". He is a dreary boor and worse he's a philosopher to boot. You can imagine him droning on in the postgraduate bar about the nature of <i>reality</i> and <i>truth</i> and <i>Derrida</i> and <i>Wittgenstein</i> til the barstaff want to go home. He said: "Some things, you see them from ten feet away, and you see them from three feet away and it changes the entire complexion of 'em."<br />
<br />
That is true.<br />
<br />
Jeff also said, with a bowling ball in his hand, "Everyone thinks if it's heavy it's better, right?"<br />
<br />
RIGHT.<br />
<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-70896243395031419012012-07-08T14:02:00.005-04:002012-07-28T09:41:37.499-04:00"Schmendricks Anonymous"<br />
<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Jeopardy</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"> Brought Up-To-Date.</span> Alex Trebek had a heart attack recently, which was sad news, and I am sorry about that, but the thing also threw up a puzzling remark from the news agencies. They said that the heart attack "came at the end of the current season of <i>Jeopardy</i>." I thought: <i>Jeopardy</i> is filmed in <i>seasons</i>? It's an unceasing, ineradicable ("inalienable") and eternal flow of intelligent ("meaningless") questions. Seasons are as nothing to this trans-temporal juggernaut.<br />
<br />
You might as well say that life occurs in seasons.<br />
<br />
If that's so, my life must really be close to cancellation by the Network!<br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>_______________________________________________________</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
It's hard to work out when exactly Alex's coronary occurs in the televisual continuity. Alex occasionally drops in hints and allusions for future scholars that place the particular episode you are watching in a specific locus on the time-space continuum ("Thanks, Johnny. Hope you had a good President's Day Weekend") but he has said nothing on air about his recent "episode".<br />
<br />
Guy's that rare thing a professional. He never lets his personality overwhelm him or the audience - keeps it cryptic. I wish that more people on TV -- and in <i>life</i> -- were like Alex Trebek in this respect. Small, light allusions to their private sphere. I hope that you my reader might conceivably insert here the thought, "Well as it happens, M. Nebula, you yourself fit this description almost exactly."<br />
<br />
As a consequence of Alex's willful obscurity, I wasn't sure if I was watching pre- or post-coronary Alex. His references to major United States holidays, as noted above, could after all be pre-recorded. We do not expect <i>veracity</i> from our televisual entertainers.<br />
<br />
The contestants yesterday were full of classic stuff and nonsense. "Susan" said that she had twice withdrawn her application to appear on <i>Jeopardy</i> because she "didn't have an interesting anecdote to tell after the first commercial break."<br />
<br />
Here, on cue, I had the crystal clear thought: "<i>That has never stopped anybody before</i>."<br />
<br />
Alex, meanwhile, was even more caustic. He said, "What kind of a mean, uneventful, humdrum existence must you have had that you couldn't come up with some facile dross for this segment?"<br />
<br />
The next contestant along was a fat man in a suit jacket called Henry. His story really proved conclusively that <i>Jeopardy</i> contestants have nothing to report of a well-lived, eventful existence.<br />
<br />
He prfaced his "story" by rambling on about Andy Warhol's remark about fifteen minutes of fame. He then revealed that he had been sat in a group at a table at a public event when Andy Warhol came and sat at their table and took Polaroid pictures "with his Polaroid camera". This piece of name-dropping of itself wasn't really an anecdote, so Henry rounded it off with a short and expensive comment from the hip on the talent in the room. He said: "After fifteen minutes in Andy Warhol's presence I can report that the man had no personality."<br />
<br />
Alex twinkled wordlessly for a moment and then, crushing his microphone under a curled fist, rumbled: "Then what kind of lower pond-specimen does that make <span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">you?</span>, <i>I merely wonder aloud.</i>"<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">________________________________________________________</span><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Oedipus <i>Schmendrick</i> Rex.</span><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
Across the channel wavelengths, on <i>Hip-Hop Squares</i>, the contestants were waxing even more asinine. <br />
<br />
This "tic-tac-toe"-based show usually features a male and a female competing for surprisingly meagre cash prizes, and nearly every episode you have to side with the girls because the so-called males are such "Summer Break" M.O.R. collegiate gang-rapist bottom-feeders that you have no alternative. Anything else would amount to an alliance with Evil.<br />
<br />
I watch the show chiefly to see what Ghostface Killah will say, but when he appears he is invariably in the bottom middle square (where they also put Biz Markie) which for some reason nobody uses. So he spends the whole episode in stoned silence or hollering something inaudible off-mic. They oftentimes put J.B. Smoove in the middle square and by God he drones on.<br />
<br />
The people in the bottom line always make the same joke, that they are in the "projects." There usually also follows from this a joke essentially about close apartment living when the person upstairs makes too much noise. Lil Duval remarked that he was going to "snitch to the landlord" about the celebrity above him. <br />
<br />
All the collegiate scumbags seem to like DJ Khaled the most. Fat Joe shines as the resident wit more or less by default; as I said in a private letter to an interested party, "the Algonquin Roundtable it ain't."<br />
<br />
This week's contestant, "Kevin," unwisely revealed to the assembled Hip-Hop celebrities and the "studio audience at home" that he had <i>his mother's nickname</i> tattooed on the inside of his bottom lip.<br />
<br />
You could hear everybody in the studio recoil in revulsion. Not only did he say this but this was indeed reckoned by Kevin himself the sum of what was worth knowing about him.<br />
<br />
He should have shown the modesty of Susan on <i>Jeopardy</i>. Instead he actually pulled down his lip and showed his tattoo off to the cameras.<br />
<br />
Potential snappy comebacks abounded and I counted them off in my head:<br />
<br />
1. "You must really get laid a lot after you pull out your bottom lip in clubs."<br />
2. "You must be really well-liked by girls you meet. Do you show them the tattoo before or after you tell them you prefer chicks with dicks?"<br />
3. "Are you by any chance related to that guy on <i>Jeopardy</i> who baked cookies for each first-night date he had?"<br />
4. "In other words, you're gay."<br />
<br />
Even Mariah Carey's househusband-cum-butler, the greazy Nick Cannon, made a crack at Kevin's expense ("<i>You got your mother in your mouth</i>"). Kevin lamely grinned and pointed at him. What the fuck else could he do in those circumstances I suppose.<br />
<br />
The upshot of this moral fable is that Kevin lost and that was that and I suppose he went back to his college dorm and folded up his underwear and put it carefully in the socks drawer and then he quietly committed suicide.<br />
<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-90225805187878375282012-05-03T06:51:00.001-04:002012-06-28T10:27:21.862-04:00"Lost Chef Jokes" Or, "Chef with an Hatchet," Alias "A Figge for my Sous-Chef"; Or, "Crack Me This Nut" Or, "A Countrie Cuffe", etc.<br />
1. Pathetic: Me lying on the couch tapping my leg in time to the <i>Top Chef</i> theme. Then: me realizing that I am doing this. <br />
<div>
<br />
2. Book: <em>We Always Treat Our Chefs Too Well</em>. <br />
<br />
3. The male chefs after Restaurant Wars. They were acting like it had been a real war, as if they were the "combat veterans" of real "campaigns". They staggered bleary-eyed into the green room as if fresh out of My Lai. "One of the hardest parts of your career, ever," said one. "There's nothing like Restaurant Wars that's for God damn sure."<br />
<br />
Chimed in his wingman, "The best thing that we can hope for now is that the girls all blow up at each other and screw up worse than we did."<br />
<br />
<em>Didn't MONTGOMERY say the same exact thing at El Alamein</em>. <br />
<br />
4. The appeal of chef shows. The illusion that chefs are closer to the quick of life, because they handle food. Because everybody has to eat and everybody has to shit and everybody has to piss and somebody around here has to cook so we can eat and shit and piss. <br />
<br />
Hence the popularity of chef shows. </div>Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-89990451819143990842012-05-03T06:31:00.000-04:002012-06-28T10:26:41.703-04:00Blue Cheese.<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This English spy who was curious about the <em>niceties</em> of obscure knots and who was also it seems a cycling enthusiast (a-<em>ha</em>) has been famously described as being like a "Swiss clock". That is meant to indicate his punctuality I assume. <em>Not his resemblance to a clock</em>. I wonder, will somebody close to <em>me</em> come up with a colourful metaphor about me when I am found dead and bound in a duffelbag? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">No matter. When I first heard the "Swiss clock" line on the radio I thought for sure they were going to say, "Now he is more like a Swiss <em>cheese</em>." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">They didn't say it, and this rather elementary and yet highly pleasing joke has been siting there now for weeks waiting to be claimed. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This is me formally claiming it. I am not sure what the satire community has been up to that they missed this delightful yet essentially innocent joke. Perhaps that was the trouble: it was too innocent. They were too distracted by the possibilities of sexual jokes about bondage. They were too busy wracking their brains thinking of jokes about sex. Satirists love blue material. They love to advertise to the world that against <em>extraordinary odds</em> and <em>obvious physical shortcomings</em> they have a throughgoing familiarity with the <em>obscuranta</em> of the <em>boudoir</em>. Perhaps they should think more about innocent things and less about lascivious, salacious stuff because mark me when I say that God hath a pickaxe for the vile crawling snake that crawls on its belly in low places.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Although I suppose that they might not have made the joke because it doesn't strictly make sense. Commercial satirists are wary of humour that doesn't make obvious sense. That's why they always make jokes about sex. Any fucking moron gets a joke about sex. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">People who have been shot with a machine-gun are more apt to be compared to Swiss cheese than people who have been squeezed into a duffel-bag and "expired of natural causes". </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Like you might say, "You lousy fink, called the fuzz on me, now you're so full of lead you look like a Swiss cheese."</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">That could be confusing too, since there are not customarily lead deposits in Swiss cheese either, unless it is some sort of Williamsburg artisanal gimmick. Cheese with bits of lead in it <em>with a gold-leaf garnish and a truffle foam</em>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Of course I took all this into account when I made the joke and again when I claimed the joke legally. My thinking is that Swiss cheese, like all cheeses, has a rich and revolting aroma, as the corpse of the dead English spy had. Also Swiss cheese has holes in it and the dead English spy presumably had holes in his corpse because he had started to decompose. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some of my critics might argue that the decomposition process does not entail the appearance of holes in the corpse. My critics might cite, in their defence, the quite beautifully well-preserved corpses dug out of peat bogs in Scandanavia. These were people who died in the Neolithic era! and they do not have holes in them.</span> <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yes, but those corpses are, for one thing, not typical <em>as </em>corpses. They are an anomaly. That is why they are so infinitely interesting to us. That is why we love to read books about Sutton Hoo. The average corpse, however, will no doubt be leaking pus from sores and the flies and worms will have infiltrated his outer dermis using their drill-like appendages and will have diligently forged many little wormholes and nooks and crannies into his ripening disgusting flesh. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In invoking this imagery of grotesque corpse violation, of the network of holes bored into the corpse's flesh by industrious insects, I apologise of course to the close female friends of the corpse. Of the <em>spy</em>. Neither of these women was apparently his girlfriend, but that is hardly worth noting. He was one of those men whose close friends are all women. That is all. I don't know why I even mention it. I do not say this fact with a crafty smirk on my face and a wink "for the knowing ones". </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is furthermore reported that he had a great fondness for the acquisition of women's clothing, and this eccentric <em>fetisch</em> is regretably the fact that has distracted the satirists from the better joke to be had. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It is to be noted, simply in passing, that transvestism and homosexuality are not by any means one and the same. Apparently there are a number of transvestites who fancy women. Their ways are mysterious and not easily fathomed. I consider these men both brave and unusual. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">My critics might also point out rather pedantically that Swiss cheeses are not famous either for their odour or for their rottenness, unlike say a blue cheese which is in fact in a stage of decay for all to see, even while it sits on your plate all innocent-seeming. I am speaking now about a Stilton or a Gorgonzola. I will concede that this might have been a more apt comparison - that in death he (THE DEAD ENGLISH SPY) more closely resembled a Gorgonzola cheese - but had I said that in my joke, it crucially would not have had any comic resonance with the line about the Swiss clock. </span><br />
<br />
"<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">He was like a Swiss clock. Now he is like some Gorgonzola cheese." No - it can't be done. And it needn't be done. It shan't be done. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">There must be lots of Swiss cheeses after all. There might be some Swiss blue cheeses that have holes in them even. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">After all what do they do in Switzerland all day. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To summarise: Solely in the interests of the public reception my joke, and I cannot stress those words enough, it is to be regretted that the English spy was not shot multiple times with a machine gun before he was placed (or crawled into) his duffel-bag. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, serif;">"There's bread in the oven and cheese on the shelf,<br />So if you want anymore you can sing it yourself."</span><br />
<br />Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-65781119577101126072012-04-18T17:45:00.008-04:002012-04-18T18:31:34.658-04:00"Living It Up at The Cockfights." Or, "Custer's Last Stand."<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH5K6PG-5jFGg-mKV-keNMPqTTnmNfBkw2dilIoM5tZ9OOPNrGd7AmfsJ2EIBrk8ZAqHUuNSxpJmNeUVaAzDpvzeO-JWtrYkb1qWGU0eVOtq6ccF99kUCMZPsJKD5eSxpqMnCXQJuMO75M/s1600/Duane+Lee+Watches+Dave+2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH5K6PG-5jFGg-mKV-keNMPqTTnmNfBkw2dilIoM5tZ9OOPNrGd7AmfsJ2EIBrk8ZAqHUuNSxpJmNeUVaAzDpvzeO-JWtrYkb1qWGU0eVOtq6ccF99kUCMZPsJKD5eSxpqMnCXQJuMO75M/s320/Duane+Lee+Watches+Dave+2.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5732863928150182018" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px; "><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">"He peered sideways up and gave a long low whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos."</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">JAMES JOYCE, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Ulysses</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I was watching a </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Dog the Bounty Hunter </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">episode which I knew I'd already seen, which is - as I said yesterday - not far different from giving up altogether and freely, <i>deliberately</i>, frittering away your God-given life. It is not far different, I say, from cocking a pistol into your lower jaw and spinning the barrel playfully then pulling the trigger just to see <i>what might come of it</i>. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Anyway, that happened and this episode involved the team chasing a slippery character who goes by the colourful name of CHESTER CHRISOSTOMOS ("<i>gold-mouthed</i>," I thought, a good and dutiful scholarly "spalpeen" and remembranceful reader of James Joyce), who had retreated to the deepest darkest wilds of Hawaii. He had, in the idiom of his <i>confreres</i>, "dug in." </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This man CHESTER GOLD-MOUTHED withdrew from society not - like Thoreau - to be closer to his thoughts and God-in-Nature, but to partake in low gambling and cock-fighting. He found a certain rural transcendental calm in bloodletting and mayhem. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The team busted in on one of his associates out way out in the wilds and the guy had dead chickens all over his yard and was actually wearing a baseball cap that said "COCK FIGHTING". The man goes, "I am not involved in cock-fighting." </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">They didn't find Chester. He had a way of disappearing into the night. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">So on day three or four, Dog announced to the camera his revised methodology: "The plan is the boys are riding the motorcycles down in there, Baby Lisa's parked out at his mother's house and Beth and I are going to be up on the ridge." Then, without a trace of irony, he said: "We learned this tactic from Custer." </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Their enterprise was about as successful as Custer's. Baby Lisa abandoned her post to use the toilet and the thing fell apart from there. "We're kind of stuck here," Dog admitted, "so we've got to try to make a possibility out of the impossible." </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">This seemingly involved them browbeating Chester's girl CARLA to no avail, then blundering aimlessly through the brush. At one point Dog picked up a breeze-block and hurled it into a bush. I thought, "What if Chester Chrisostomos <i>had</i> of been in there? He'd of been <i>killed</i>." The methodology further involved Duane Lee and Leland building plank bridges and falling into quicksand. The A&E website amazingly has the transcript of this episode, which includes this wonderful exchange, which since we have the apparatus I simply must quote liberally from:</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: normal; font-family:'Lucida Grande', Calibri, Arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;"><table id="transcript_table" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; display: table; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0px; "><tbody style="display: table-row-group; vertical-align: middle; "><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">00:54:16</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Right now we found this freakin' pig farm, we can't find a way to get around it.</span></td></tr><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a name="943923260" style="color: rgb(64, 141, 251); text-decoration: none; "></a>00:54:20</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">There's a big, huge moat.</span></td></tr><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a name="943923262" style="color: rgb(64, 141, 251); text-decoration: none; "></a>00:54:22</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We got Leland going to go get a plank, and then we're gonna drop it like the military and freakin' attack.</span></td></tr><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a name="943923271" style="color: rgb(64, 141, 251); text-decoration: none; "></a>00:54:31</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Go, just bounce like a rabbit.</span></td></tr><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a name="943923273" style="color: rgb(64, 141, 251); text-decoration: none; "></a>00:54:33</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">I'm right behind you.</span></td></tr><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a name="943923276" style="color: rgb(64, 141, 251); text-decoration: none; "></a>00:54:36</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">( laughing ) Are you going ?</span></td></tr><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a name="943923284" style="color: rgb(64, 141, 251); text-decoration: none; "></a>00:54:44</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">No way, bro.</span></td></tr><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a name="943923288" style="color: rgb(64, 141, 251); text-decoration: none; "></a>00:54:48</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">Okay, you guys, it's getting dark.</span></td></tr><tr style="display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit; "><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;"><a name="943923290" style="color: rgb(64, 141, 251); text-decoration: none; "></a>00:54:50</span></td><td style="display: table-cell; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: inherit; vertical-align: top; height: 20px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">We gotta put this on hold until tomorrow.</span></td></tr></tbody></table></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">As you can plainly see from the transcript, they conclude their "methodology" - as usual - by going home as soon as it gets dark. It's really a pity that they stop at sundown, so they can put the kids to bed. Because as I have established in a previous essay, most criminal enterprise tends to take place <i>after</i> sundown. Maybe this is another tactic cribbed from that master strategist CUSTER. </span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;">In the interests of brutal honesty they really ought to show the scenes at home after a day of bounty-hunting, after the Chapmans have "clocked off," and everybody is sitting in the TV room watching TV. <span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Georgia, serif;font-size:16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:medium;">Like that scene a few weeks ago where they showed Duane Lee dolefully watching </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:medium;">Storage Wars</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-size:medium;">. Gary Boy stuffing his face with too much pasta. They could have ingeniously juxtaposed these scenes of domestic calm with orgiastic, bacchanalian scenes of Chester living it up at the cockfights. Chester with a chicken's head in his mouth, blood around his jaws as he heaves on an ice pipe. </span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;">[...]</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;">As I mentioned, I had seen this episode before, but happily I couldn't seem to remember the ending. How they caught the bad guy and such. Usually I remember some sweet peculiarity from the arrest and the corollary Backseat Redemption Scene. This time I couldn't remember any such thing. It became clear why not in the last minute or so, when it turned out that one night, while the Chapmans were innocently dozing watching TV at home, the police burst in on Chester's rural compound and arrested him. It was one of those episodes, where they lost out to the FILTH. The police, it seems, don't play fair. They have an annoying habit of going after criminals even after the sun has gone down. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;">[...]</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;">I wonder how much they pay per hour for somebody to transcribe the dialogue from an episode. It'd be a lot of fun I expect and you'd certainly improve your written English as you worked. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:sans-serif, serif;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:13px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:sans-serif, serif;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:13px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:sans-serif, serif;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:13px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:sans-serif, serif;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" line-height: 19px;font-size:13px;"><br /></span></span></div>Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-66165223970412342012012-04-17T13:02:00.007-04:002012-09-05T15:59:27.811-04:00"The House Always Wins."<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHA2WLCYzku-YjX7MFeGa6AV9BFj5d1tzZ-8R7YICRZIrE8zwQTB_CV1GCfUciyWpvB_9eQJJ_5kdn6o_XIG0jrWiMd9tvHOuj_B0Ks0yNtt7a4IQ27xSfdxhBYSOQSnBUlh5Ce-GlYQte/s1600/Dog+2.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5732816207583391682" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHA2WLCYzku-YjX7MFeGa6AV9BFj5d1tzZ-8R7YICRZIrE8zwQTB_CV1GCfUciyWpvB_9eQJJ_5kdn6o_XIG0jrWiMd9tvHOuj_B0Ks0yNtt7a4IQ27xSfdxhBYSOQSnBUlh5Ce-GlYQte/s320/Dog+2.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 240px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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Sometimes in your day, in your life, in your <i>soul's reeling arc betwixt the vault and the precipice, </i> you have to simply listen to some good old kkkountry gold on the stereo of your shitkicker flatbed truck. And when you stop, as stop ye must, you have to stroll over to your foeman's front porch, where your foeman lounges in a hammock, and you got to spit a plug of tobacco in your foeman's face and smile as the juice drips down your foeman's chin.</div>
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Other times you have to watch an episode of <i>Dog the Bounty Hunter</i> that you know that you have seen before, even <i>with</i> the <i>knowing</i> that thy term of natural life on this firmament is perishing by the second. </div>
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Why because it's good and it's righteous and it's right and it's goodly and it's kindly and it's not ungood. </div>
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This lunchtime I watched an episode where Dog was going after an inveterate gambler, one Kristine Lau, and this provided the premise and the impetus for round after round of gambling metaphors from Dog. </div>
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"She's a gambler. So are we. We're gamblers. It's gonna be like chasing ourselves. Because bounty-hunters are gamblers. Every time we take on a bond we make a gamble. Right?"</div>
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The camera then shows Leland with his lips parted. You can almost read his mind: </div>
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"...? Whaddid he just say? We're gamblers now?" </div>
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Nothing daunted, Dog kept the thematic zingers coming. "We're <i>The House</i>. She's the <i>gambler</i>. She's <i>bet</i> she can outrun me. A-<i>ha-ha-ha-ha-ha</i>." </div>
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Now Dog had narrowed his focus. He wasn't going to keep making broad gambling metaphors. He was going to refer to himself and the team henceforth as "The House". </div>
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This is not to say he didn't experiment with other, equally confusing figures of speech. At one point, to punctuate a lull in the narrative, he growled "We're here. We're live. This isn't Memorex." </div>
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Bad metaphor for the digital age, Duane. You're making yourself look old - obsolete. </div>
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Then he resorted to that classic trope of American folk rhetoric, willful exaggeration. Speaking of his quarry's dwindling options, he asked facetiously, "Where they gonna go, <i>the</i> <i>ocean</i>? They gonna <i>rent a submarine</i> to get away from us?" </div>
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He was on rare form in this episode. It was, I should note, from maybe six or seven years ago, when the world looked young and hopeful and a bard was inspired to heights inconceivable today. </div>
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Dog's methodology had been typically bewildering. In pursuit of Kristine Lau they had decided to be as blatant and cumbersome as possible, effected by blundering raucously into all the illegal gambling dens and asking the staff bluntly "Ya seen her?" while brandishing her mugshot. Amazingly, when this didn't turn up any results, Dog seemed genuinely surprised. He was at a loss as to how it could've not've worked. </div>
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As time ran out the bounty-hunting team would go to the car parks of these strip malls where the gambling dens were and saunter around like Union Square protesters, ostensibly scaring off custom. I think the quaint idea was to embarrass her into submission. This didn't seem to be working either, especially because come about ten o'clock at night, when most gamblers are still eating breakfast, the Chapmans got tired and went home. </div>
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They were knocking on a gambling den door one evening when they received a call from their own office that Kristine Lau was there and had given herself up. Not one to underplay the moment, Dog still got right flustered and acted like they were in a race against death itself to get back to the office before Kristine Lau changed her mind. He was all animated in the SUV, bouncing up and down on the back seat, one second chiding Beth for her driving then chuckling with glee "The House is gonna win!" </div>
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As usual when they got to the office the arrest was totally mundane and everybody calmed down immediately. </div>
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Nevertheless, Dog had room for one more gambling metaphor in his summing-up segment: "In a gambling perspective you win, lose or draw. This was a draw." </div>
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Here he paused, and I thought he had finally laid his flirtation with the device of <i>The House</i> to rest. No such thing. He grinned his pure kkkountry gold smile and resumed:</div>
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"A draw <i>in favour of The House</i>." </div>
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Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-11636299282869392162012-04-13T15:35:00.007-04:002013-08-20T11:02:47.612-04:00"Unused Jokes" Or, "Backwork".<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0kc1MQSk_zen-NOK6O5bWNlWXWFPJgfOumye6Aq_x0G_HwlbTZ2z87yx_killO0-D3HeF33SxAgsEIqjMyfnXgnYxQceFpt4MYS0S2ccJaZXu-I1-6R3vYZwNqPBB_XoQL2hwqJ1WcOa6/s1600/Duane+Lee+Watches+Dave.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5732814496412393394" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0kc1MQSk_zen-NOK6O5bWNlWXWFPJgfOumye6Aq_x0G_HwlbTZ2z87yx_killO0-D3HeF33SxAgsEIqjMyfnXgnYxQceFpt4MYS0S2ccJaZXu-I1-6R3vYZwNqPBB_XoQL2hwqJ1WcOa6/s320/Duane+Lee+Watches+Dave.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 240px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The "Unused Jokes" envelope is beginning to fill up. These jokes are ready-to-go, but they are (I predict) going to be boring to write out. They might also be boring to read. The convoluted mechanics of realizing the joke, of turning it from an idle rumour in my brain-stem to actual "physical" words on the "page," the actual "real-time" </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">backwork</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> involved, put me off writing these jokes down. I've got a whole new round of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">D</span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">og the Bounty Hunter</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> material around somewhere, unpublished (and so - to the greater world - unsaid), for the same reason: too much bloody backwork. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Still----</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><b>JOKE #1.</b></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><b> Infinity Gauntlet: The Movie</b></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">. Starring Klaus Kinski as Thanos.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><b>JOKE-OID #2.</b> </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><b>Monkees</b></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><b> Season Two Revisite</b><b>d</b>.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">I watched the last two episodes </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">of </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The Monkees</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> and then I watched the 1969 TV Special </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee.</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">The penultimate episode had a commentary by Mike Nesmith, who delivered it in a cool manner. Humility, remorse, chuckling at the excesses of youth. Nice. I was quite pleased because he confirmed some of the aimless ruminations of my previous "postings". For example, he recalled that the Monkees had indeed gotten cocky in the Second Season (he said they "gathered so much </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">unwarranted power</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">") that the character actors were required to carry the shows while the group rolled their eyes at their lines, ad-libbed badly and made their little peace signs. He said, "they would pretty much uniformly despise us or despise the show by the time they left." </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">DVD commentaries are often unintentionally funny. Nesmith was drawling about the show, then he'd get sidetracked on a subject and fall behind what was actually happening onscreen but he really couldn't give a fuck about that, you could tell... Incidentally, everybody on the DVD commentary tracks seemed to be compelled to remark, at some point, about Micky Dolenz's hair. The factoid that he had straightened his hair diligently in the First Season, but let it grow naturally curly in the Second. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Everybody</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> made this comment at some point. As if it were of some urgency that it be communicated to us. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Of all the things you could say... it gives you these sense that life, taken in the long view, is pretty boring, taken all in. As Emerson says, "Not much life in a lifetime." </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Anyway Mike Nesmith was the only one who supported this factoid with some "local color" - he recalled how Micky would sit on the set with a pair of pantyhose on his head to keep his hair static and straight. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif; line-height: 19px;">Nesmith was ruminating as the end credits came up, when you expect the DVD commentator to hush up and let the credits play out, but towards the last seconds he saw a credit for the man who designed the Monkeemobile and he burst out laughing at that: "The guy who designed the Monkeemobile got himself an end credit?"</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Micky Dolenz had the honour of the DVD commentary track on the final episode. Micky puts the ADHD into DVD Commentary. The years since the Monkees have not brought wisdom to the Dolenz noggin. He's still hacking out the old hits. Night after night. Still </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Circus Boy <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">in his mind</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">. He makes Jerry Lewis in his prime sound sober and sagacious. The episode ends with a nice performance by Tim Buckley. Micky mused wistfully, as he watched it over over our shoulders, "I've been thinking of re-recording some Tim Buckley songs."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Yesssssss</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, I thought. </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">That sounds like an excellent, <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">commercially shrewd </span>notion</span></i><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">. Just what the world is crying out for right now in these difficult times: Micky Dolenz Sings Tim Buckley. The time is right. There is the threat of nuclear attack from North Korea. Time to hear Micky Dolenz's version of "Dolphins". </span></i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">At one point, Dolenz was actually saying, "Oh wow. I remember buying that shirt. I liked that shirt. What did I do with that shirt."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Micky also provided the Commentary Track for the diabolically bad </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">33⅓ Revolutions Per Monkee</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">. That is to be regretted because this hour-long special was so confusing that I wanted a lucid explanation of </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">How it came to happen and more particularly Why?</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">, and I obviously wasn't going to get any lucidity from Dolenz. It was like trying to sit through <i>Fata Morgana</i> back-to-back with <i>Even Dwarfs Started Small</i> in one bonanza of boredoom [sic].</span></span></i></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">The alternative to Micky's rhapsodies was a commentary track by Brian Auger, who is a "pivotal" figure in the hour-long special, this inexplicable cock-and-balls story. Brain [sic] was so dull and earnest in his commentary ("the Monkees were splendid chaps... I spent Thanksgiving with Mike Nesmith and his lovely family... hem, here I believe they used a <i>green lens </i>to...") that I ended up sticking with Micky pumping out his fitful bilgewater. Betwixt Scylla and Charybdis, always pick Scylla. After all, it has a girl's name. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">At one point, - from the mouths of babes <i>and Micky Dolenz</i> - our guide, our <i>Virgil</i>, just sighed "This is <i>so boring</i>." The other momentary piece of rare and candid <i>clarity</i> slicing through spiritual materialism on this hour-long paean to self-indulgence and obfuscation came from Julie Driscoll of all people, who archly turned to the camera and observed, somewhat redundantly, that the show had degenerated into an "UTTER BLOODY SHAMBLES."</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><b>JOKE #3. "Worlds Within Worlds, Mad My Masters." Or, "Cinema Studies PhD at UEA</b>": Clip of Duane Lee Chapman watching <i>Storage Wars</i> on TV. It was a scene with Dave talking to the camera. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><b>JOKE #4. </b><i><b>Amazing Race</b></i><b>.</b> The navy vet, newly returned from Afghanistan, who unwisely elected to go on the <i>Amazing Race</i> with his wife, who he hasn't lived with in years, immediately on returning from the War on Terror. They squabble incessantly. They say hurtful things that they can't take back. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">They really went wild. They possessed the much-desired "Express Pass" which they could play at any time in the race and which would automatically get them past any obstacle on one occasion. They were counseled to use it wisely. They totally wasted it on a momentary whim and then compounded their mistake by giving up on the next task (balancing full bottles of wine on their heads) in a fit of pique and facing the two-hour penalty. As H.P. Lovecraft would say, "They went mad." </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><b>JOKE #5. </b>People on <i>Jeopardy</i> really don't think about what they're saying to Alex in the biographical section. They're too nervous. Today, Dave, the reigning champion, actually informed America that his '98 Ford pickup had 140, 000 miles on the clock. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">The woman whose ancestor was a judge at the Salem witch-trials. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">"Did he order the deaths of anyone?" Alex asked, eyes twinkling.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman', serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">"<i>Yes he did</i>," she replied, chuckling helplessly.</span></span></div>
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Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-65469778193623186502012-04-11T15:37:00.008-04:002012-04-11T16:02:27.407-04:00"Impenetrable."I ran into Keith from the No Neck Blues Band the other day in the Village. I had some copies of <i>The Kirby Collector</i> magazine in my hands at the time and he looked disdainfully at me and said "Is that what you're reading these days?" <div><div>My lips reared back from my gums in a defiant sneer and I drawled "Who don't like Jack Kirby? Show me that man. Let him come among us and state his case if he dare." </div><div><br /></div><div>I asked Keith what he'd been doing lately. He'd been acting in Eugene O'Neill he says. </div><div>"Fiddle-de-dee," says I. </div><div>The band he said was sifting through old tapes of live shows, of which they had thousands of hours.</div><div>"Like the Dead." I mused dreamily. "Like Pearl Jam."</div><div>Keith said, "I prefer the comparison to the Dead."</div><div><br /></div><div>We were talking about the interview I'd done with the No Neck Blues Band in 2003. I said, "Yeah we should do an update. A twentieth anniversary <i>Where are they now</i>?"</div><div>Keith goes, Yeah, it must of been a good ten years by now.</div><div>I shot back, shrilly, "<i>Nine</i> years. It was <i>nine</i> years. <i>I</i><i>t's been nine years</i>." </div><div>I am very prickly about matters of time -- every year an indictment.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the subject of dwindling self-expectations, we spoke a bit about David Foster Wallace who was after all the <i>sujet du jou</i><i>r</i> nine years ago. Keith said he'd summoned up a bit of interest in DFW after DFW's suicide. "Like it legitimized his mewling about despair and sorrowfulness," I chuckled. Keith prevaricated a bit then admitted it. "Like reading Sylvia Plath." </div><div>I said I'd read <i>The Pale King</i> twice (happily I got paid by the hour for my trouble) and I was quite content to leave the poor man buried and not to bother his soul further after that last ejaculation. </div><div><br /></div><div>So as we were parting ways, Keith goes, "So are you writing anything now?" </div><div><br /></div><div>Before I could mumble something, eyes averted, about a <i>vast systems novel in progress lo these many years</i>, he corrected himself thus: "Are you writing a blog?" </div><div><br /></div><div>As soon as he said it we both had a queasy sense of <i>deja-vu</i>, only compounded as I tediously spelt out ("spat out") the name ELIAS NEBULA. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Oh yessss," Keith said. (<i>Anagnorisis</i>.) "I remember now. I tried looking it up. It was impenetrable." </div><div>"Impenetrable?" I rejoined, sharply. "<i>You're</i> calling <i>me</i> impenetrable? <i>Have you listened to your group's records lately?!</i>"</div><div><br /></div><div>This is of course the tragedy of the avant-garde in the twenty-first century.</div><div>Infighting, and the regrettable conquest of the mid-cult. </div><div><br /></div><div>AFTERWORD: I remembered, I urged Keith to look at this site and to leave a comment to prove he had done so. Curious readers will note that no such comment has been left. "Curious readers" may have "noted," in fact, that nary a comment has been left since Mark Balelo (an occasional character on the show <i>Storage Wars</i>) wrote his famous "cease and desist" note to this correspondent after I called him a <i>nouveau-riche half-wit with all the grace and intuition of a guinea-fowl </i>some time in the balmy days of last year. Is Mark Balelo really more committed to <i>the life of the mind</i> -- the project of <i>die</i><i> kunstkulturwelt</i> -- than Keith from the No Neck Blues Band? It appears he is. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-84193276869423334452012-04-11T14:57:00.006-04:002012-04-13T16:39:00.020-04:00Asterix Und Der Goths Mit Der Herz Aus Glas Mein Gott LeibchenI just watched Herzog's <i>Heart of Glass</i> after several months of pronounced dawdling and dithering and evasion (watching <i>Monkees</i>, watching <i>Dog the Bounty Hunte</i>r). These Herzog films are forbidding, not in a sense that they will be an <i>intellectual powerball overload</i>, but in the sense that they could conceivably be <i>dull</i>. They almost never are dull, of course (<i>Fata Morgan</i><i>a</i> and <i>Even Dwarfs Started Small</i> notwithstanding); one wonders why the trepidation persists. Maybe it is the humdrum, unwavering nature of the opening German rural settings of his earlier films. The willful, defiant holding of the shot on the static mountaintop or the roiling mists (or the<i> landing aeroplanes</i>) beyond an acceptable point. <div><br /></div><div>Maybe it is the dulness of the flaxen-haired towheaded German peasant in his shit-coloured smock. The image does not <i>draw us in irresistibly</i>.<br /><div><br /></div><div>I wearily work my way through the three Herzog box-sets I bought years ago on Shaftesbury Avenue, like a duty to the god <i>Weltkunstkultur</i>. Like I ploughed through <i>Th</i><i>e Monkees</i> Seasons One and Two. Like I strove like a pit-pony through the Alain Delon box set my wife got me for Christmas. It's absurd; wasn't culture meant to be pleasurable? </div><div><br /></div><div>It is of course a symptom of the times that we are so ADHD that to sit through anything longer than an episode of <i>Justified</i> is considered a <i>travail</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Delon box-set was on my "Wish List" so it's hardly my wife's fault, but still it felt like a purifying mortification for the deity of KUNSTKINEMA, sitting through these less-well-known Delon vehicles. <i>The Widow Couderc</i>. <i>The Swimming Pool</i>. Simone Signoret at every turn, imploring us with her sad eyes to invest our spirits in the project of <i>Kunstkinema weltschmerz</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Nothing ever equals Delon's fine work in the Melville films, of course. Still these films were okay and I liked them and I did my duty by the Lord and I watched them. I mortified my flesh and I am a better upstanding Christian for it. </div><div><br /></div><div>And <i>Herz Aus Glas</i> was a good film too. Not particularly dull. It has a beautiful soundtrack, with Swiss yodelling and medieval music; and when I listened to portions of Herzog's commentary track, and I heard his enduring and unfeigned fannish enthusiasm for the soundtrack, my slight vexation at Herzog as a public man evaporated. Herzog was not posturing here --- he was not feeding his self-ego -- his gaping <i>Cthulhu Mythos</i> -- his shrine to himself as his own hearth deity -- his own skull kept in a cabinet in his Hollywood home -- he was speaking as an unabashed enthusiast, and it was good to hear. A bit of sincere humility Christ Sake. </div><div><br /></div><div>I even felt bad for some of the uncharitable unChristian things I said about him in a previous post.</div><div><br /></div><div>(The fact remains that his attested ignorance of Nick Broomfield is the arrantest bunk.)</div><div><br /></div><div>When I was watching this film I thought, of course, in my <i>chronic comparing wa</i>y, that the film was very similar to the beloved "B.D." <i>Asterix and the Soothsayer</i> (1972). </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Heart of Glass</i> was made the year after the German edition of this book (<i>Der Seher</i>) was published (although it appeared in serial form in <i>MV-Comix</i> from 1972 to 1973). </div><div><br /></div><div>I suppose that M. Herzog will now claim that he has "never heard" of <i>Asterix the Gaul</i>!</div><div><br /></div><div>IT IS TO LAUGH, NICHT WAHR? </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7719979337197143615.post-55085973974668833562012-03-01T10:40:00.013-05:002012-03-02T18:48:35.396-05:00Werner Herzog Says He Don't Know Nick Broomfield<div>THE TWO GREATEST LIVING DOCUMENTARY-MAKERS --- THEIR SECRET LIFELONG ENMITY --- LIKE LINCOLN AND JEFFERSON DAVIS IT IS SAID --- SIMILAR IN SO MANY WAYS AND YET DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED ON THE WORLDWIDE "FIELD".</div><div><br /></div>I was at the Library last night, there for to see Werner Herzog hold forth on the subject of the death sentence. His interrogator on the dais was somewhat of the "Charlie Rose School" of interviewing: he was partial to interrupting mid-sentence, just as the subject was getting going. He coupled this was an uncanny ability to poise, mouth agog, in silence for agonizing seconds on end while Herzog fanned the air with his hands in frustration: he had finished his sentence. <div><br /></div><div>The conversation, somewhat freewheeling, was definitely a "curate's egg" - the good parts of which included Herzog's outspoken endorsement of Vladimir Putin, which you could tell perplexed the liberal arts community of New York City; also his enraptured praise for the library's book deposits under Bryant Park. I liked, and appreciated, Herzog's instinct that this was in its way a "sacred grove." I who have toiled in these groves lo these ten years---<div><br /></div><div>Forgive me if I wax pretentious---!</div><div><br /></div><div>The less noble moments in the evening's entertainments included the peculiar passage of time, irrevocable and alienated to me now, when Herzog tried to discuss the mysteries of Mycenean Greek, aided only by slides showing a book on the subject. I noted with displeasure puerile notes and underlining on the text. I felt like I was attending one of my own university lectures back in the old country, with my various xeroxes on acetate upon the lightbox-- "ah.. this is Thoreau with a beard; now, this is him without." Some of our most intimate passions and pleasures are really untransferable to other humanoids, I must regretfully conclude. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now Herzog fell to reading from one book after another of middling prose which he deemed exceptional. Here was one of those books "brilliantly rediscovered" by the New York Review of Books imprint & resubmitted for the pleasuring and edification of NPR-listening McSweeneys hipsters. Ensues a protracted description of an owl. The audience hushes and warbles reverently because they have been told that this is good prose <i>so it must be</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Then Herzog's interlocutor woke up for a moment to read a fine quotation from <i>il miglior fabbro</i>, Ralph Waldo Emerson, comparing death with the end of summer. Herzog responded: "Yes, that was very beautiful. Now let me read from <i>Cormac McCarthy</i>." Followed a bemusing passage describing a bull on a dusty tract of desert. Red clouds on its flanks &c., --- or some such. </div><div>Bulldust: seems apt.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another score <i>agin</i> was the little old lady behind me whispering "That's right" to certain comments Herzog made. <i>Testifying</i>. Uncannily, every time he earned this lady's endorsement, I felt that he was mouthing commonplaces and platitudes. I also felt like this little old lady -- or her clone -- doppelganger -- or let us say her <i>tanist</i> in the tribe -- let us be mythological since that was the mood of the evening -- has been behind me at every cultural soiree I have attended in this good city New York. She crops up like the proverbial bad shekel at Film Forum -- she is at the Met when ye would goe -- </div><div><br /></div><div>Enough about that jazz. The thing over, I went to get my book signed by Herzog. And since I must be who I am, I of course did not fail to have a brilliant question to put to him as he signed. </div><div><br /></div><div>I should really have learned, over the years, that these exchanges with the admired writers and artists (or, as Herzog says he views himself, "soldiers") never go well. They are too busy signing their names to give my incisive questions the rapt attention and full consideration they deserve. There is a line of dreary drones behind me as I ask it. The situation is awash with potential for misery. But I think it is also the type of question I go in with. I always seem to ask questions of <i>influence</i> or <i>shared characteristics with contemporaries</i>, and these questions tend to irritate the people in question. They fly too close to the petulant ego. </div><div><i>Mein Gott, they fly too close to the sun!!!</i></div><div><br /></div><div>(These questions tend to irritate people <i>in general</i>. At university, I was roundly upbraided by a senior academic for my persistent inquiries into the mysteries of influence. "Why <i>influence</i>?" he cried from his regular booth in the bar, slamming his tankard on the table with emotion. "Why not the clash of the valiant unwashed against the prevailing ideology?" </div><div>"I don't know, I just don't seem much to <i>kyear</i>," I responded [quoting <i>G</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; ">eorge Arnold</span><span class="Apple-style-span">]<span class="Apple-style-span">. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; ">This as I was trying to claim Cotton Mather's influence on --- what --- the </span><span class="Apple-style-span">Uncanny X-Men</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; ">?.)</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div>(Then I was in Rapallo, too, among those who had known Pound on the lawn at Saint Elizabeths --- and I went to them and I was among them and I asked them each of them, Did Poundie ever speak of Artemus Ward? Did he ever speak of Mark Twain?" ["<i>Did he ever mention me</i>?"] )</div><div><br /></div><div>(And again see also my question to Updike, as he signed my copy of <i>Terrorist</i>: "Is this your <i>Catcher in the Rye</i>?"</div><div>"<i>Fuck off home</i>, sonny."</div><div><br /></div><div>I do not win them with these my questions.</div><div>I am always going to be the preppy guy with the horn-rim glasses and the tweed jacket irritating Dylan in <i>Don't Look Back</i> who doesn't know what to do when Dylan hands him a harmonica. </div><div>If I was ever to collect my "celebrity interviews" in a book, each actual interview would consist of one or maybe two lines, with the usual considerable preface and epilogue (or: "flummery") in which I made my excuses. </div><div><br /></div><div>This time, in my defence, I asked the question which I would, after all, have liked answered. It wasn't abstract or arbitrary - I had been wondering it for some time, since seeing Herzog's excellent documentaries <i>The Great Ecstasy of the Sculptor Steiner</i> (1974) and <i>La Soufriere </i>(1977)<i> </i>several years ago and noticing a familiar tone and even methodology. My question was a good one, <i>I maintain it</i>, <i>I say, goddammit</i>, and the answer it got flummoxed me. </div><div><br /></div><div>I asked him: <i>What his opinion of Nick Broomfield was</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>"I do not know who this person is," Herzog replied steelily through his permanently pursed lips. He'd signed one book for me, and, at my request, written <i>To F_____</i> in it. However after this question, he most summarily signed the second book, notably without the gentle dedication. </div><div><br /></div><div>I was slightly taken aback by his denial of Nick Broomfield. I said, "He's an English documentary-maker. He's made films on subjects quite similar to those in some of yours. For example, about the penal system." </div><div><br /></div><div>(Herzog, this evening, was -- in his roundabout way -- promoting a cable TV series [? - it was never made quite clear] of documentaries about the eccentric characters who make "death row" their home. Nick Broomfield, as I thought was well-known, at least in documentary-maker circles, has also made films about people on death row and in jail, and in fact at all the stations and strata within the wider "worldwide world of crime" and criminal prosecution. I give you the superb <i>Juvenile Liaison</i> [1975] and its sequel [1990] about quaint English pre-teen delinquents and their treatment by the authorities. Then here is <i>Tattooed Tears</i> [1978] about a juvenile correctional facility in California. Here is the famed visit to Suge Knight in prison in <i>Biggie and Tupac </i>(2002). Then there are of course, most prominently you would suppose, the documentaries Broomfield made [1994, 2003] about Aileen Wuornos <i>while she was on death row</i>. )</div><div><br /></div><div>I was taken aback, probably visibly, by this unexpected response, anyway. My expression bespoke <i>bullshit</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is well enough known that the worst thing one can say about somebody is that one <i>does not know the cove</i>. People say it and sometimes - perhaps even oftentimes - it is just as they say. But sometimes (perhaps even oftentimes) it is not so. Rather it is the most cutting remark one could make. "I don't know the <i>puppy</i>." "The <i>coxcomb</i> is a stranger to me."</div><div>Woe unto the person who says he<i> don't know a man</i> and he is then caught in the lie and it is shown ("thuswise:") that he knows the man. </div><div><br /></div><div>After I had "explained" to Herzog who Nick Broomfield was, because <i>of course he didn't know</i>, Herzog repeated gravely the fact that <i>he did not know who he was</i>. He was quite at pains to publish the fact that he did not know this Broomfield creature. Even as I was leaving, he was saying for a third time "I do not know who this person you are talking about is, so I am sorry I cannot answer your question." </div><div><br /></div><div>I was inevitably reminded of Herzog's "war-of-words" with Abel Ferrara over Herzog's film <i>Bad Lieutenant New Orleans: Port of Call</i> (a very good film, incidentally, and far superior to Ferrara's earlier film <i>Bad Lieutenant</i>). Or, as Borges described it, "two bald men fighting over a comb." In that instance, too, certain corners of the filmic industry doubted whether Herzog was strictly honest in his public claim that he had "never heard" of Abel Ferrara or the original <i>Bad Lieutenant</i>. But why might Werner dissemble? </div><div>Three words: ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE. </div><div><br /></div><div>Some artists (of whatever variety), however personable and magnanimous and gosh-shucks they may appear in public appearances, can withal be extremely protective of their published selves and souls. One score I had against Herzog I discovered when reading <i>Herzog on Herzog</i>, a book of interviews with the great man. </div><div><br /></div><div>In this book he is interviewed about his filmic career &c. &c. There appear in the text certain anecdotes that he tells which are almost word-for-word identical with his previous tellings of them in his (excellent) documentary about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, <i>My Best Fiend</i> (1999). For instance, there is a good line Herzog uses in that film about Kinski trashing a room so thoroughly that all the fragments of the furniture and contents of the room "could be passed through a tennis racket." This is a novel and illustrative description. He says the exact same thing in <i>Herzog on Herzog </i>(2002) which instantly halves the puissance of the original usage. I thought then, Wasn't the author of the book - who surely had a thoroughgoing familiarity with Harzog's films - vexed at being given second-hand chickenfeed? </div><div><br /></div><div>When I hear somebody repeat themselves, <i>repeat their best lines</i> I should say, <i>jealously</i> <i>devise and then trot out fine words for sundry occasions</i> even, I think to myself: "strictly self-fashioning." People - at least those people we hold in high esteem - should not be caught so flagrantly in self-fashioning. Larry David does the same thing. </div><div>Don't they suppose that parties interested in their work might conceivably come across both usages, as I did, and feel a certain subtle deflation? </div><div>I believe the same egotistical preening is at work in Werner Herzog's insistence that he "don't know Nick Broomfield."</div><div><br /></div><div>In the interest of "transparency," I must declare an interest inasmuch as I have been called egotistical myself, and I believe there may be truth in it. Even so I am perhaps egotistical enough that - were I to be interviewed on the scale Herzog surely is - I would endeavour to be ever-vigilant against repeating the best-loved lines and also the <i>mock-casual-denial-of- recognition</i> motif. Werner, you and Nick Broomfield were both guests in the documentary category of the Toronto International Film Festival in September last year. Did you not perhaps hear tell of him among your colleagues? </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Pull down thy vanity,</i></div><div><i>Paquin pull down!</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Egotistical though I may be, I do, and we must, travail against the tendency, rather like Emerson did. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>I am God in nature; I am a weed by the wall.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>Funnily enough, I can pinpoint in my memory the first time I physically recoiled from somebody because I caught them in the act of egotistical self-fashioning, and that too was a gentleman of Teutonic extract: one J___ M______. </div><div><br /></div><div>This J___ was a charming, excellent, guileful, gregarious, urbane, designing man, who overcame ye with modest charm,-- <i>hooded eyes</i> -- <i>serpentine tongue</i> -- but then would after a while over-egg the mixture and become unctuous - imposing -- and he would slip - his masque would -- and you would mark the chink in his works - the conceit beneath the modesty and the humble handwringing. ("The poor handwriting.") This phenomenon, when a man overplays his hand and exposes his vile, pulsing egotism, -- became known universally as the "J___ M______ Moment", indeed.</div><div><br /></div><div>Since then I find myself more and more apt to recoil when the ego rears up - as it did last night, <i>Mein Herr</i>, in your avowed and over-said denial.</div><div><br /></div><div>I hurtled away from this, yet another peculiar exchange with a cult director (see also: <i>David Lynch</i>, <i>John Waters</i>), and walked headlong into Paul Giamatti, who I grabbed him earnestly by the hand and told him he was "great in <i>John Adams</i>."</div><div><br /></div><div>Only walking home, down at the turnstile in the subway by Bryant Park, did I think "I should have said how much I enjoyed him in <i>Fred Claus</i>!" </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div></div>Edison Naifhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10865284867676341081noreply@blogger.com0