Fang's Forum

Ye Olde Christmas Post, 2009 edition

2009-12-23T05:36:00.000-08:00

2009 has been much too wretched and sad a year to mull it over on the traditional Christmas post. Maybe I’ll save the litany of grief and despair for the New Year’s entry!

Instead, I want to take you back to a better time, a time of optimism. A time when America was only enmeshed in one ill-conceived, unwinnable overseas war. When gas was less than a buck a gallon, maybe way less (to say more would require research, which the proprietors of this site are not paying me enough to do), and when a young Fang was coming to the philosophically sound but ethically questionable conclusion that if everything he did was wrong, then nothing he did was wrong.

The world seemed alive with possibilities.

And the Big Three networks were giving variety shows to absolutely anybody. Glen Campbell had one and so did Flip Wilson and Joey Heatherton. So did Dean Martin, who enjoyed the singular perk of being contractually obligated only to show up for the actual taping of the show. The chaos that ensued from his weekly lack of preparation was the stuff of legend. They were giving variety shows out to anyone who was selling albums and agreed to play by the rules (sorry, Smothers Brothers).

They even gave one to Johnny Cash in 1969 after his massive hit concert album the year before, “Live From Folsom Prison,” catapulted him to mainstream superstar status. And for 58 mostly memorable episodes, Cash brought his unique hybrid of good ol’ boy patriotism and bleeding heart social activism to America’s living rooms.

The show isn’t available on the amazon, but I did find a copy of the full run on the ebay a few years back. Watched them with my boy in the pre-dawn hours from when he was an infant to early toddler-hood. I’ve come to the conclusion that it was an interesting thing Cash was trying to do. There’s no tell-all book out on the show so I’m only guessing, but word is Cash forced one musical guest on the network for every one the network would force on him.

That’s how you’d get shows where Tom T Hall would follow Pat Boone, or Odetta and Roger Miller would have to share screen time with alleged comedian Charlie Callas. Or another episode that included both Bobby Sherman and Burl Ives, or another one where Brenda Lee opened for Pete Seeger (who ended up dominating the at-first skeptical Grand Ol’ Opry crowd—oh hell, I have to imbed that one, from March 4, 1970).

Another thing that was consistent was an 8-10 minute segment called “Ride This Train,” where Cash would talk about the history—and sing the songs of—a featured underclass of American society every week. Or do an episode about Civil War songs, or another about long-haul truckers. Cash knew from “real America” and as long as he had a forum, the people in the big cities, who tuned in for Brenda Lee and Stevie Wonder, would too.

I wish I had watched the show at the time, but as I alluded to earlier, I was just getting ready to go off the rails and thus missed most of the pop culture of the period except that which was televised on weekend mornings. I don’t remember my parents being big TV watchers but maybe I was in bed.

The clip at the top of this piece is from Cash’s Dec. 23, 1970 broadcast. The episode also featured Johnny and June Carter’s infant son John Carter Cash in what amounted to his television debut. That clip is HERE.

In the clip at top, Cash welcomes the episode’s guests into an ersatz living room and passes a guitar around. Don and Phil Everly sing “Kentucky,” followed by Roy Orbison doing a solo acoustic version of “Pretty Paper.” Then Ike Everly plays “Cannonball Rag” before Mother Maybelle Carter joins him on guitar—literally. She does the chords and Ike strums. Someone named Vince Matthews sings “Melva’s Wine;” Johnny’s Dad, Ray Cash, rhapsodizes about meeting President Nixon then Cash’s mother, Carrie Cash, plays piano while the ensemble sings “Silent Night.”

This here is my Christmas gift to anyone who stumbles across this blog, from “real Americans” to the Intellectual Elite. To Johnny Cash, we were all just Americans.

So Merry Christmas, my fellow Americans. May better days be coming for us all.

Brittany Murphy: Done too soon at 32

2009-12-21T00:54:00.000-08:00

Sad, so sad. Of course drugs are suspected, she was too young and pretty and famous for it to be anything else.

This is the first time I’ve been grateful that “King of The Hill” got canceled since the axe fell.

Every year some celebrity dies in the last couple weeks of the year, after all the annual commemorative issues of the entertainment magazines have gone to press. This year it’s Brittany Murphy who fell through the cracks. Apparently, in more ways than one.

If I remember 32 correctly, I’m damned lucky to have made it through alive myself. Thank God I was neither pretty nor famous.

I hope wherever her spirit is now, she’s being better looked-after than she was while she was here.

Seriously, go see this movie right now:

2009-12-18T16:36:00.000-08:00

Jon Stewart had one of Avatar’s stars, Sigourney Weaver, on his show recently and told her that for months this film looked like it was going to be “a giant turd.” I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one who thought so.

When we had dinner with The Last Boy Scout and his family last weekend, I asked them if they were interested in seeing it. They quickly agreed that the film looked like a big stinky turd to them, too, and had no plans to see it. Everyone agreed—everything we’d seen of it smelled like bad cheese.

But, I’ve been a stalwart James Cameron fan since the first Terminator came out. At the time, it was playing at the $2 theater right around the corner from me. An old place with uncomfortable seats that ran movies that weren’t on the major screens anymore but hadn’t been pulled yet. Not like these days where, when a movie disappears from the multiplex, it’s completely gone till its DVD release two months later. I don’t know how many nights I saw it there, but I remember it played for a long time.

I even liked The Abyss, the Cameron film that none of the press for the new movie mentions. It made money but it also earned Cameron a very unflattering reputation as a taskmaster asshole. Hard to work for or with unless you, too, happened to walk on water. Or on that film, breathe underwater, as he repeatedly almost drowned cast members.

And because I didn’t stay to hear the music over the end credits, I even unabashedly loved Titanic. (We also fled before the saccharine bombast swelling up over Avatar’s end credits reached its crescendo.)

So it was only because Jim Cameron made this movie that I would even consider touching it with a ten-foot pole. A CGI fantasy film with fake-looking (but mostly naked and strangely hot, see inset) blue faerie people flitting about on repurposed dinosaurs? Why not throw in some unicorns, too?

But Cameron has never made a dud. He’s never made anything but excellent movies. And I’m a brand-loyalty kind of consumer.

Man am I glad I am. What a great flick! It feels a lot like Aliens and not just because Weaver starred in that one, too. The twist is this time, we’re the aliens who need to be driven out.

It’s a Jim Cameron film all the way, pastel-blue pixies and all. The plot structure at the beginning and end is straight from the Cameron (and Joseph Campbell) playbook and all the weird fantasy stuff in the middle isn’t anywhere near as off-putting as the 90-second clips on talk shows make them appear. The climactic battle sequences easily surpass similar set pieces from any film in the Lord of The Rings trilogy, the former standard-bearer for fantasy action/adventure filmmaking.

I also like Cameron’s use of (what look like American) Marines in this flick. Even though he employs them as The Bad Guys (doing the bidding of future-earth’s skeevy corporate masters), he still crafts characters that demand the audience’s respect. Even as I was rooting against the Marine commander in one of the film’s action set pieces, I was thinking, “Jesus, that guy’s a bad-ass!” instead of “Die, motherfucker, die!”

And his use of 3D is judicious, not promiscuous. Things don’t jump off the screen or get thrown at the camera just to remind you you’re watching a 3D movie, he actually uses the process and technology to more fully immerse the audience in this strange new world he has created from the ground up.

There are simply not enough superlatives to describe the experience of seeing Avatar in the theater, and in 3D. Once again, Cameron has employed bleeding-edge technology, most of which he designed and built himself, to tell a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology used irresponsibly.

I’ve seen Cameron out promoting this flick and he’s still a pompous asshole, even when he’s trying not to be. But in Avatar’s case, it’s the movie not that the man that I’m recommending. Trust me. If you sit this one out, you’ll regret it. Cameron has raised the bar again, way high. It’s gonna be a hard act to follow and I, for one, hope he can’t wait to get started trying.

Preschool is kicking somebody’s ass

2009-12-16T20:21:00.001-08:00

The Boy is in his second week now and the transition has been smooth as silk. None of the “issues” parents are warned about. He doesn’t seem to miss his favorite playmate from daycare and every day when we pick him up, he’s usually playing actively with a bunch of other kids his age. One time he was explaining something to two peers, complete with whiplash facial expressions and explanatory arm gestures.

The thing is, he’s having so much fun, and they don’t force kids his age to take naps, by the time he gets home he pretty much just wants to be fed, watch some TV and fall asleep at 7 p.m. mellowing out to groovy tunes in the easy chair in my office.

Another reason Al Gore should have been elected in 2000:

2009-12-14T08:51:00.001-08:00

That creep Joe Lieberman would have been effectively neutralized as VP for four or eight years and he wouldn’t be fucking things up in Congress today. He’d be some Douschebag Emeritus on a bunch of right-wing non-governmental boards with about as much political clout as Tucker Carlson’s bowtie.

Instead he remains in the Senate, caucusing with the Dems, giving them a pyrrhic 60-vote majority that they can’t do a goddamn thing with because he votes against them every time.

(I’m actually pissed at a co-worker this morning, but since I don’t blog about my job I’m gonna take it all out on this sack of shit I didn’t know they stacked that high.)

What a complete and utter bastard this Lieberman guy is. At the time, when he was the first Dem on the Senate floor to call Bill Clinton out for getting caught with his pants down, I thought it was kind of cool. Somebody on our side had to do it, I figured, and I was glad it was this cuddly, unthreatening white-haired dude from New England.

(In my defense, I also believed Clinton hadn’t diddled the intern until he confessed, so my political naïveté at the time must have been pretty impressive to behold.)

I caught Lieberman’s act on Sunday morning and the headlines today… I love it when politicians dismiss the disenfranchised with a casual “only 4 or 5 million people will be adversely affected…”

Since when did four five MILLION people become a small number?

A city will marshal all its resources and spend scores of thousands of municipal-level dollars to keep a single hard-luck-case from jumping off his roof to become street pizza. One person. Who is statistically likely to try it again and succeed later, but society deems his life important enough to ante up the dollars it takes to get him off the ledge in one piece.

And we have a whole generation of Americans trudging into middle age—myself among them—whom Joe Lieberman (and to be fair, the rest of his ilk) are willing to write off as acceptable losses. Collateral damage. Four or five million. That’s only one or two fewer million than the number of Jews Hitler killed in WWII. And Senator Lieberman is on record as believing that those millions of people, that’s a big number.

Which it is, which is my whole point. One human life is a big number. I get that politics necessarily deals with large numbers, usually involving human lives at some level. So at the same time as it’s killing me to watch the health care bill dying the death of a thousand cuts in Congress, I know that some dancing with the devil is required.

But thanks to Lieberman being the Dems’ 60th vote—which he never gives them—their paper majority is a sham. And even the perfectly reasonable idea of moving Medicare eligibility up to 55 dies aborning.

Guys like Joe Lieberman are making this a shittier country for my son to grow up in and I take that personally.

I am so pissed at my co-worker…

We will be hearing more from this kid...

2009-12-13T20:44:00.000-08:00

I don’t throw around the word “genius” much when I’m not being sarcastic, but I think this young fellow may just be the real deal. He’s Mozart with a ukelele:

“Dad, I want to take a picture of you.”

2009-12-12T19:56:00.000-08:00

My son, the artist:

The Boy continues to surprise me with his aesthetic sophistication.

A little while ago I was listening to a playlist of my most recently purchased tunes while I read (Stephen’s King’s new 1,000-pager) and The Boy played with a car on the floor of my office. After a few sissy guitar folk songs, “I Love It Loud” by KISS comes roaring on. After a few measures he looks up at me and asks “Are these superheroes?” I laughed and said, “Well, kinda, yeah.”

  I jumped up and grabbed the t-shirt I bought at the concert last month and showed him the band graphic on the front, in full makeup and regalia. I asked him, “Do they look like superheroes to you?” After a moment, he said, “...yeah.” I pressed the issue. “Are they Good Guys or Bad Guys?”

He smiled and affirmed without hesitation, “Good Guys!”

Heroes at work...

2009-12-10T07:44:00.001-08:00

Happy 60th birthday to Tom Waits

2009-12-07T06:15:00.000-08:00

Thanks for taking a little bit of the onus off December 7. I will take it as a good sign, then, that The Boy starts pre-school today. Hats off to all the artists in my life!

(Holy crap, I just realized this means Tom is younger than Bruce Springsteen! I just don't understand how that could be possible?!)

George Will on Obama's trip to pick up his Nobel

2009-12-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

From ABC’s Sunday morning politics show:

“He’s going to give a wonderful speech for winning an award for making wonderful speeches.”

Juxtaposition papers

2009-11-29T16:20:00.000-08:00

Am I a bad person for finding comedy in the random pile-up of news and culture magazines laying on the floor of my office pictured above?

“I’m a Big Boy Now”

2009-11-29T14:13:00.000-08:00

What a difference a little (better late than never) potty-training can make.

The Boy walks with a distinct swagger these days, like a young John Travolta showing off his new white suit for the first time.

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk
I’m potty-trained, no time to talk…

He has a running commentary for almost every occasion now and has taken to reminding us that the old rules no longer apply. He helped himself to the refrigerator door yesterday unsupervised – a strict no-no – and when he was reprimanded explained, as if he were addressing a roomful of people with short-term memory disorder, that no, now he’s a Big Boy.

Since my last post on the subject, we haven’t had an accident worth mentioning. We’ve run out of toys to reward him with which led to a serious talk yesterday about how no further toy rewards would be forthcoming. He wasn’t on board with the idea until I explained to him that for Big Boys, hitting the can on time and on target was its own reward.

This Big-Boy bullshit runs both ways.

He still requires assistance and that’s fine. It’s only been a week, ten days, tops.

He’ll come running into my office with a stricken look on his face and blurt, “DaddyI’vegottagopoointhepotty!” So we race into the bathroom and get him seated on his custom throne and then the fun begins. He’s still not completely comfortable with the process yet, and the expressions on his face and his body language — during the process — are hilarious. And when he’s done, by God he’s done. He doesn’t want to sit there one moment longer than necessary and isn’t happy again until the paperwork is completed.

He may be only a few posts away from graduating from The Boy to The Little Man. (Pull yourself together, Fang. Mustn’t exhibit weakness in front of the pack...)

He even picked out the kickin’ pair of shades he’s wearing in the photo above. Previous efforts to get him to wear sunglasses have met with utter failure, but yesterday in the store, he marched up with said spectacles and insisted he needed them. Again with the Big Boy argument. So we bought him the shades and he put them right on. Even wore then for a while, then I got to show him how to hang them off of his t-shirt collar. He looked pretty cool that way, too.

Every inch the Big Boy that he is becoming.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud… this one’s is as follows: The (Big) Boy is about to move from the day care he’s been at since he was 16 months old to a preschool in about a week, and the preschool lady warned us about potty-training regression which is typical when such transitions occur. So I’m a little apprehensive about that. I’m hoping we beat the odds. I am so over potty-training, I swear to gawd…

Plus the transition promises to be tough in other ways, too. The Missus is taking it particularly hard. The lady who runs the day care, Serena, has become almost like family over the years, like a particularly well-compensated local grandmother. On days when The Boy would arrive early, she’d take him from the converted-garage day care room into her comfortably-appointed home and fill him full of home-cooked Indian food. It took us a while to figure out why he was daily eschewing our breakfast (and often lunch) efforts till we learned the day care lady was making him a better offer.

We tried to pull him out once before, maybe a year ago, and she literally wept as she begged us not to remove him. We eventually relented at that time, but he is unquestionably aged-out now. He’s the oldest child there and has taken to calling the younger children “his kids.” At his new school he’ll be a littler fish in a bigger pond, which will be much better preparation for the casual cruelties life serves up on a daily basis than Serena’s oasis of peace and good-will.

He’s got to learn some time that with Big Boy powers come Big Boy responsibilities and I reckon now’s as good a time as any to start. Welcome to real world, son. It oughtta come with a warning label.

(And don’t even get me started on how much we’re already missing our Little Boy, and our Toddler and our Baby… I think this is probably the point where most people go crazy and decide to have another kid. Fortunately for us, I got most of the crazy out of my system long before I decided to breed.)

Children’s Music Hour

2009-11-22T21:08:00.000-08:00

The Boy fell asleep in my lap tonight. The Missus was watching Grey’s Anatomy in the front room and when he got bored with all the gore and romantic intrigue, he wandered back close to his bedtime to see what I was up to in my office.

I was up to the Weekend Update segment on last night’s SNL, but I know topical humor isn’t really his thing, so I asked him if he’d like to watch what I was watching or listen to music. He chose the music option, so I put on a DVD of Leonard Cohen in concert from his tour earlier this year.

The Boy’s face lit up when the opening menu came on and he saw Leonard’s ancient visage. “Oh, I like him! The man with the hat!”

And as he crawled up on my lap in the medium-sized chair in my office, it occurred to me, my son has to have some of the coolest taste in music of any 4-year-old in his pod.

The first year-and-a-half of his life, he woke up every morning to “The Johnny Cash Show” on bootleg DVD. Whenever a guest artist would start to sing, he’d get agitated and point at the TV and demand “Cash! Cash!” – one of his first words.

As soon as he began to walk, we learned he loved dancing to Rush. (There are YouTube clips to attest to this.) He still likes them to this day. Last week I went to see KISS in concert and I played the whole first Rush album in my office beforehand, and he stayed and danced to the whole thing.

Bruce came next. He released, and we purchased, a DVD of his Seeger Sessions tour at an impressionable time in The Boy’s life. Again, the music was great for dancing to, and as an added bonus, it gave me a chance to talk to him about America. And like a Cash tune, he can spot a Bruce tune a mile away now, even an unfamiliar one. “Bruce?” he’ll ask. Except when it’s Cash, he announces it confidently. “That’s Cash!”

I don’t know what kind of crap he’s being exposed to at day care – although the fact that he knows the Barney theme song is suspicious and unsettling – but it’s a thrill to see him groove to the same tunes as I do at such an early age. I just hope he doesn’t break my heart some day and come home with this ‘awesome’ new music he just discovered and slip “Kind of Blue” onto whatever we’re listening to music on by then.

Splashdown!

2009-11-21T16:33:00.000-08:00

[PARENTAL WARNING: This post is full of crap. Not safe for work, or people who haven’t personally raised children.]

After four-plus under-performing years, I’d had it with my mostly hands-off approach to The Boy’s potty-training. I kept relying on all manner of professionals, and The Missus, to solve the problem for me, but once again, at another pivotal juncture in The Boy’s life, I decided I had to put my foot down. It was time for Potty-Training Boot Camp.

He was at the point where he knew perfectly well what we wanted, but was so comfortable with downloading his dumpage directly into his pull-ups that he just wasn’t taking the next step to making in the toilet.

So I kept him home Tuesday to work on the problem. A “neither one of us is leaving this house till we’re both crapping in the toilet instead of our drawers” mindset prevailed. Even though even on a good Tuesday it’s my roughest day of the work week, theoretically, this is exactly the type of opportunity working from home affords me.

And this was not a good work-day Tuesday. [tedious job-related complaints omitted here]

It would have been a huge stress-out/self-pity day except that I had The Boy home too, and he kept me too distracted with both the ridiculous and the sublime to submit to wallowing in feeling sorry for myself.

The Missus came back from her parents with a well-intentioned plan of her Dad’s to gain The Boy’s cooperation by earning poker chips for every poop he made. Turns out, The Boy literally didn’t give a crap about the poker chips (to a 4-year-old it’s just a piece of plastic that doesn’t light up or make noises or do anything), but the Jeep that Transformers® into Captain America that I picked up from Toys R Us, that was a hell of a motivator.

So I coupled my cooler bribe with another idea of her dad’s that I really liked – buy lots of underpants and let him get tired of crapping in them. He even gave us cash with which to do it. So I went to Target Monday night and picked up a score of Pixar character-festooned underpants his size. (Thanks, Pops!)

After a whole morning of fruitless but good faith efforts to produce excreta on the potty, The Boy proceeded to crank out about a quart of the A-quality sludge in his brand-new underpants around noon – in the kitchen – at the exact moment two of the colleagues I’d been desperately waiting to hear back from all morning called me simultaneously. I literally had my hands full of shit, a son who was caked in poopy goo all down his legs and crying to be cleaned and the goddamned dog standing outside the bathroom, waiting for his chance to eat my son’s poopy undrpants.

It was INsane.

But he and I talked about it all day. I whipped out that Captain America toy and let him hold it while he sat on the potty, picking at the packaging, talking about it, about the colors, about heroes, about America… Every time he sat down on the potty that day, he played with the Cap transformer box. I woulda taken a picture but I have to start thinking about his dignity sometime. Anyhow, I don’t think it’s an image I’ll soon forget, even without a photo.

Eventually around 3:30 The Boy wore out and went down for a nap.

Got him up about 5 and we continued to work on The Task. I handed him off briefly to his mother when she got home but placed myself back on the front line the next time he wanted to try again. He was asking me now if he could try again, he wanted that Captain America Transformer so bad. So I sat in the bathroom with him again and talked him through it. Unsuccessfully.

Eventually, at around his bedtime, we went in and tried again and lo and behold, he expelled a miniscule but undeniable amount of defecation into the toilet. The ratio of celebration to quantity of poo was way out of proportion, but we’d all earned a good celebration.

Since it wasn’t a massive dump, he didn’t get the big toy, but he did get a very cool smaller Captain America toy (inset). And since we’d discussed the parameters of the agreement all day, he was very happy to have the little toy. It was hard getting him to get off the toilet, he was so determined to make a big deposit and win the top prize.

Kept him home again the next day to significantly lesser success. He no longer evinced any interest in the big Transformer toy. All day long he resisted any bathroom entreaties and ended the day sans BM.

The next day The Missus stayed home too and we tag-teamed all day to no success. Now two consecutive days without dropping a deuce. There was no way he was gonna last three but he had to go to day care on Friday.

We went to bed Thursday night, The Missus and me, very discouraged. I was worried that the brusque, brutish day care lady was going to be shepherding my son through his next traumatic massive undies-unload.

Friday early afternoon, I get a call from the A-List day care lady (whew!) with the happy news that The Boy had successfully hit the head in time with his smelly load. I grabbed an unopened Batman action figure, ran out of the house and raced through the slushy rain to the day care facility. We had a big celebration and he told me all about it (“It was like a volcano of poo!”).

The big question was, would he perform as well ever again, or was this just a wild, once-in-a-lifetime fluke? Well, I’m happy to report that, after more than four years, potty-training confidence is finally high. He hit the center ring again today, with no mess to clean up and finally earned his kick-ass Captain America Transformer.

The Boy didn’t become a man today, but I think he might have advanced at least as far as Little Man. Congratulations, son. Mommy and Daddy couldn’t be prouder of you. Or more relieved.

Addendum: And now I’m off to Target, to pick up another giant bribe for tomorrow. Thank God weekends only come twice a week or we’d never be able to afford to housetrain him!

Sci-Fi TV Goes Mainstream

2009-11-21T08:50:00.000-08:00

Really, really mainstream. Like, without a paddle… Oh wherefore art thou, Lost? Your imitators are stinking up my new TV season.

Flash-Forward is arguably the best of the freshman bunch. It is literally Lost done by the geniuses who ran the Star Trek TV franchise into the ground, from the producers running the show all the way to casting two Lost actors in principal roles. Its (story) gimmick is that the whole world simultaneously fell asleep for 2+ minutes one day and all woke up having had visions of their lives 6 months from that day. The show follows around the FBI guys and gals tasked with figuring out WTF.

Joseph Fiennes, the brother of the actor who played the Nazi death-camp commander in Schindler’s List is the lead here, a British actor doing a tortured generic American accent. The result being, he comes off terse, monotonal and uninvolving. He’s the wrong lead man for this role. For God’s sake, I’m sure Hollywood is littered with toothsome young domestic actors whose whole performance wouldn’t boil down to nailing the accent every take.

Or hire a Brit who can pull it off like Damian Lewis (inset) from last year’s late, lamented Life, cancelled to make room for Jay Leno’s current 10pm yuch-fest. Or Hugh Laurie on House or Jake Weber from Medium. Or how about the British babe Sonya Walger, Penelope from Lost, also in this new show. She nails the accent effortlessly. The TV landscape is lousy with foreigners convincingly playing Americans, why didn’t Flash-Forward hire one of them for its male lead?

Seriously, little Joey Fiennes’ from-nowhere-in-America American accent takes me out of every scene he’s in, which is most of the scenes every episode.

A number of characters get their own storylines and legitimately interesting fate-vs-free-will questions are posed, mostly dealing with “can we change the future?” (I’m guessing if this show survives long enough to answer the question, it will come back ‘No.’) But it also features almost exclusively boring, stock characters like the suicidal terminal cancer patient (ooh, who’s also a doctor and looks good in scrubs!), the pair of recovering alcoholics whose sobriety is tested weekly, etc.… yawn.

The storyline moves quickly but feels slow, even though it serves up lots of pay-offs per episode. And most of the ‘reveals’ it throws at the audience every week are more likely to elicit shoulder shrugs than Lost’s “Holy shits”s. The whole show seems desperate to please and desperation is never the classy affair the show’s production values seek to instill in it. With every episode I grow less keen to continue watching.

The Hobbit Charlie from Lost also has a role and he’s the most interesting, convincing thing about this program. I’m very close to bailing altogether but I may stick around if his role is enlarged.

Also new this year is V, a retooling of the cheesey 80s TV show of the same name. File this one also under “why bother?” It’s still a cool idea, still lamely executed.

‘V’ stands for ‘Visitor,’ as in extraterrestrial. In this case, bi-ped lizards in human suits.

I kid you not.

Juliette from Lost is the lead here and makes an unconvincing FBI agent. Again, all the TV tropes are trotted out: Juliette has a rebellious teenage son who defies her by hanging out with the highly-placed hot blonde ‘V’ chick… a priest suffering a crisis of faith brought on by a UFO development his Bible never warned him about, they-look-just-like-us-so-no-one-can-be-trusted angst across the board… it’s the new cookie cutter.

And I have to mention the actor playing the priest, Joel Gretsch, formerly of basic cable’s late 4400 show. He looks and seems less like a priest than any Hollywood interpretation I’ve seen before. An unshaven Edward G. Robinson would have been more convincing in this role except he’d dead. As a recovering Catholic I can assure you, this guy just isn’t pulling off the parish-priest vibe. He seems less like the conflicted man of God he’s supposed to be and more like the B-List actor who can’t believe he’s in the A-List production that he is.

After re-reading this mini-review, I think I may have already watched my last V episode. If you’re not convinced yet of the mundanity of this show, here’s a line of dialog I wrote down from this week’s episode that encapsulates it perfectly: “Visitors walking around everywhere, angry protesters are getting pissed off!”

It’s Heroes-level writing. Need I say more? Speaking of non-freshmen efforts…

Fringe debuted last year, aiming to be this generation’s X-Files, and in its sophomore season is beginning to move closer to that goal. (Full disclosure, I was never a big X-Files fan. I saw a few that I liked but I arrived late to the party and never got into the show’s mythology.)

I sampled a few first-season episodes of Fringe last year and was casually intrigued but not necessarily impressed. This season has been much more consistent. Without abandoning their overarching mythology, they’ve crafted a number of compelling individual episodes this season. Cool sci-fi shit can be counted upon to happen in cool ways every week.

The cast is also strong, with the exception of the guy playing the mad scientist’s son. I don’t hate him, but I’m not interested in him either. But the mad scientist guy, John Noble, is terrific, as is the Fringe FBI agents’ boss, Lance Riddick, late of The Wire and, you guessed it, Lost. The head FBI agent is played by Aussie Anna Torv with another only-slightly wandering accent that might be distracting if her acting wasn’t so intense and she wasn’t so easy on the eyes. And the rest of the show so well done.

It’s probably no coincidence that Fringe is exec-produced by JJ Abrams, also of Lost fame, as well as the director responsible for resuscitating the Star Trek movie franchise.

Oh yeah, and Leonard Nimoy occasionally drops in to play a mysterious dude from a parallel earth whose twin towers are still standing. The first shot of Nimoy’s character in his office high in one of the towers was shocking, but not in a way that felt exploitative.

It’s a damned smart show. This week it began to reveal the secret of who the mysterious bald white guy was who kept popping up in the background of episodes last season. SPOLIER ALERT: The bald guy is one of a bunch of bald guys who function, basically, as the Time Police. They’re called Observers and they’ve gotta be an homage to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Watcher character from Marvel comics, Uatu (see inset). He was another bald white dude who showed up at pivitol moments in human history, except he dressed like Caesar, not a stockbroker from Wall Street.

My only complaint is that the actual broadcast is cut up into too many segments. I haven’t done the math, but I’d swear they have more commercial breaks, more frequently, than other prime-time scripted dramas. It’s giving me a bad case of TiVo Thumb. Boy, do I hate those bastards over at Fox.

One final word about sci-fi/fantasy/superhero television, concerning the long-in-the-tooth young-Superman show Smallville.

End it! End it this season! “Young” Clark Kent is now in his thirties. The series has been creatively dormant for at least the last 5 years if not lots longer. It’s time for Clark to slip into his red and blue peejays and Hero the fuck Up! This show has been cynically milked well past its sell-by date.

In the plus column, less TV-time means more time to blog!

My wife keeps blogging about her job

2009-11-20T18:37:00.000-08:00

I never do.

Better 30 years late than never…

2009-11-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

I remember thinking as a kid, in the mid-70s, that all the good music in the world must have already been made and wasn’t being made anymore because all I had access to was AM radio. There was Hall & Oates and Seals & Croft, Michael Murphy and the Starlight Vocal Band, Kenny Rogers… you get the picture. In my little corner of teenage hell, there was shitty music or there was nothing.

Even the albums my kid sister and I had inherited from our older siblings inspired scant confidence, stuff like Herman’s Hermits and The Buckinghams. My Mom played the piano but all the music she played was old, too. Some of it was pretty cool, like the Claire de Lune, but she also favored show tunes.

And even then I knew Johnny Cash was cool (I had the “Boy Named Sue” 45 at the time of its release in the late 60s, but liked the “San Quentin” song on the B-side better. It sounded like genuine trouble rumbling, just waiting to happen); but alas, Cash too was old. And in a career slump — his no-bullshit style did not mesh well either with radio formats at the time or the evolving country/western music scene.

I literally had given up on music till KISS came along. Lord almighty, looking back on it now, I can’t imagine going through the disco era that was to come without KISS.

KISS provided the necessary link from a.m. radio to album rock and led to later Colombia House Record Club-based experimentation with more genuinely dangerous bands like Rush, Zepplin, Pink Floyd, Springsteen, Warren Zevon… you know, the harder stuff.

KISS was I guess what you’d call a gateway band.

(I could name the friend who turned me on to KISS, but he’s a big-shot lawyer in the fetid, blistering hellhole I escaped from and we didn’t part on such great terms. We’ll call him BS Lawyer. Thanks, BS Lawyer. That’s one I owe ya.)

I instantly liked everything about KISS. I knew I was not listening to any kind of musical geniuses (Mom also covered the classics; Beethoven, Bach, complicated church chorale stuff) but they appealed to every part of my teen-aged self. I was into comics, they looked like they’d come out of one. I was angry and lonely and agitated and so was their music and its lyrics. I blew shit up and set fire to it and so did they.

Oh, and my Mom just hated them with a particular vigor. That sealed the deal.

Since then, I’ve been to about a million concerts, but smehow never saw the band that initially turned my head from top-40 despair to AOR ecstacy… until now. On their “Milking It Till Your Wallets Are Empty Tour XXXV,” coming soon to an arena near you, KISS graced Christmas Island with their presence last night and I had tenth-row floor seats with The Last Boy Scout (thanks to a resourceful Mrs. TLBS, wise in the ways of Ticketbastard).

It’s been a long time since I’ve lost both my hearing and my voice at a concert, but I definitely did last night.

TLBS said he especially enjoyed watching me jump like a little girl at all the pyro, which is probably an accurate interpretation, in retrospect. We were very close and it was very loud. And since this was my first KISS show, I didn’t know where to expect the ear-shattering explosions. But TLBS did and he directed my attention in the appropriate direction on a couple of occasions. Did I mention TLBS is KISS Fan Number One? He is. He even loaned me one of his vintage, glow-in-the-dark t-shirts for the event.

Everybody at the show was cool. Lots of face paint and a few folks who really went the distance. Which made for a funny moment about ¾ of the way through the show. One doughty guy completely dressed-out as Gene Simmons, sitting slumped in his crappy almost-obstructed view seat with his frowny face resting on his hands while everyone around him was standing and rocking in place like they should have been.

The opening band Buckcherry exceeded expectations, which in this case could have meant nobody died while onstage. But still... The songs were mostly agreeable arena-ready rock anthems and the band did indeed kick some serious arena-rock ass.

Plus we were close and it was loud.

Their lead singer was tattooed and skinny and lithe and made a great frontman, but was somewhat derivative in terms of style. As I told TLBS after the show, while we searched and searched for our damned missing car, Buckcherry’s singer ought to write Axl Rose a check after every show, except maybe only 50¢ on the dollar as he didn’t have any of Axl’s upper range.

Then came KISS, after more than 30 years of following their career (admittedly not that closely for long stretches at a time), there was Gene Simmons doing his Demon thing, right there in front of me. They played a boat-load of hits, the early stuff, the stuff the mostly post-boomer generation crowd came to hear.

There were a lot of people there younger than me with their kids older than mine. The tall, hefty guy in front of me (I have lots of photos of his blindingly white left arm if anyone needs any) and his maybe 10-year-old son were both wearing face paint, and Dad kept taking cell phone pictures of his kid. It made me so warm and fuzzy on the inside I didn’t actually mind that his massive limb ruined at least 30 percent of the photos I took.

That’s probably also because I got at least one good one of each major player and a few nice ones of the whole stage. Thirty years ago I never would have been able to sneak in a proper camera!

Their set was a tight two hours, but it had everything you go to a KISS concert for; Gene Simmons breathing fire and puking blood, platforms rising and musicians flying, Paul Stanley bitching repeatedly about how poorly attended the evening’s performance was during his between-song banter… even some things I didn’t expect but should have, like Stanley introducing early hit “Cold Gin” with a warning not to drink and drive, apparently sincere.

Anyhow, it was great. I’m glad I didn’t wait too long. These guys have to be pushing 60 now. They can’t keep it up at this pace forever. Stanley has to be dying his trademark chest hair black by now. But they can still kick out the jams and put on a hell of a show. I went expecting a nostalgia show and instead got rocked off my ass.

Plus we were close and it was loud.

Here’s a couple of the few photos that came out well. (My new camera is too fucking smart for my own good. It kept compensating for shit and ruining shots. “Jesus Christ, H.A.L., just stop thinking about it and open the Goddamned pod bay doors”)

Tom Waits and Kool Keith walk into a bar...

2009-11-19T06:45:00.001-08:00

A farewell to Lou Dobbs

2009-11-13T11:59:00.000-08:00

So long, take it easy, go fuck yourself.

Regards,
~fang

In case you missed it, the immigrant-bashing, not-sure-where-Obama-was-born coulda-been rocket scientist Mr. Dobbs bailed on his CNN gig at the top of his eponymous show a couple days back. I’m so happy to see him go, I’m including his entire farewell speech below without any snarky embellishments. This way you know you’re getting it straight from the horse’s ass:

My guess is this douschebag is hoping to ride the wave of xenophobia and fear-mongering he was so helpful in whipping up to political office in some backwater hellhole bastion of hard-right crazies. What state does he live in?

Was he fired? I don’t know how to work the Twitter and I don’t listen to PBS so I’m in the dark here. (Although this story from August seems to suggest he may have been shown the door after all.)

I hope he was fired. I glanced at a Hufington Post opinion piece on Dobbs’ abrupt departure from CNN and it brought up a good point. CNN is supposed to be the middle-of-the-road, straight-news outlet. Not left-wing hollering like MSNBC or the vile crud that pukes forth from Fox News. That’s why it runs on the TVs in the terminals in a lot of America’s airports. For years now, CNN had irresponsibly exposed this captive audience to the deranged ravings of a lunatic mind, with a decidedly race-baiting twist.

I’m sure he quit. He’s gonna hitch his wagon to the same group of goofballs who hold ‘tea parties’ and compare Obama to (sigh) Hitler. Fox News would be his most obvious next gig, but over there he’d just be another nut in the Hallelujah Chorus of right-wing looney-tunes. At least on CNN, he was pretty much the lone voice calling out for intolerance, suspicion and hatred of The Other. At Fox, he’d just be one more off-note in an already sour chord.

Frankly, I don’t care what his Grand Scheme is. He’s just not particularly charismatic or compelling, he’s a born middle-of-the-roader; not as loud or crazy as Rush Limbaugh or as crazy sexy as Michele Malkin. He’s just one more angry, aging white guy who’s yanked his platform out from underneath him. I think he’s just taken the first step on his long, unrewarding path to historical footnote.

CNN, this is your chance to reclaim the middle. We need at least one national news network that only aims to report the news, not make it. Do the right thing and don’t look for some other fringe crank racist to replace the one you just lost. Take it as the omen that it is.

American news consumers need an Honest Broker, now more than ever, and shedding yourself of Lou Dobbs is an excellent first step to reclaiming that mantle.

Pan-Generational Geek Nirvana

2009-11-12T21:17:00.000-08:00

I have an embarrassing moment every week when I go to the comic book store to buy the latest issues. I’m half-way between 45 and 50 years old. When comics books first started, guys were lucky to live to my age; I don’t think very many of them were still buying comics.

And I don’t know how many are now. Because I live in a small town, the two independent comic stores nearby rarely order everything, and if your requirements aren’t already on file at the shop, you’re likely to miss out on getting your hands on the more obscure books if you’re not on-site when the store opens its doors. Consequently, there’s hardly ever anyone there, young or old, when I do my shopping.

Just one harried clerk, peevishly unpacking UPS boxes while I peer over his shoulder and shuffle through the careful stacks he’s trying to make. Who cares? I already have a friend.

And if there are people there, they’re usually youngsters playing some inexplicable fantasy-related card game together at long, thin tables, the kind the parish used to pull out from storage when they had BINGO in the rec center. I lamented to the counter help the other day that comics used to be a refuge from the stress of human, peer-to-peer interaction and that now the industry seemed to promote it. These card-playing kids seemed almost completely lacking any outward evidence of suffering the ill effects of social stigmatization.

What was the point? They might as well have been playing soccer.

I should put a dollar in a drawer ever time I have to type this: But I digress…

Anyhow, even though I look a little younger than I am, I'm still an old fart buying funny books. That’s how I feel and how these kids must be seeing me. I remember being a kid and seeing older guys in the comic stores and feeling sorry for them.

And I swear, I would have quit by now. I would have! If comics had remained the same as when I was growing up, I would have grown right out of them. I look back at most comics from my childhood now and they seem so quaint. Kind of the way episodes of “All In The Family” look precocious next to “Family Guy.”

Times have changed and comics have kept up with them. They have artists now, and drawing and printing tools now, light years more sophisticated than existed even a decade ago. And the characters have become increasingly three-dimensional, with storylines thought-out and cooked up by guys who must be smoking stuff better than Tommy Chong’s private stash. The two main companies, Marvel and DC, are currently locked in an ever-escalating cycle of “Event” mega-series that tie together every piece-of-shit book in the company to a single over-riding storyline, which inevitably leads into the next storyline. It’s like an unbroken string of multiple, rolling orgasms. The fun never ends.

And of course, most of it is driven by financial imperatives. For instance, as soon as the “Iron Man” movie hit big at the box office, the creative team (writer and artist) on his regular book got bumped up to the A-List. It’s been one of the best reads for months now, and it’s all leading up to the un-death of Captain America in a couple months and the reformation of the Holy Trinity of original Avengers, Thor, Captain America and Iron Man.

And that’s just the comic books. In movie theaters, plans are afoot for another “Iron Man” movie next summer, a Kenneth Branagh-helmed “Thor” film in 2011, a “Captain America: The Original Avenger” flick in 2012 (an election year – that could be really cool!) and then an “Avengers” film the summer after, featuring all the onscreen talent from the individual franchises.

Print may be dead, but as long as film thrives, it looks like the four-color versions will continue to exist if only to keep the characters in the public consciousness during the brief windows between the films’ theatrical and video premieres.

And if Chris Nolan makes another “Batman” film… I kind of hope he doesn’t. I can’t imagine topping “The Dark Knight.” I’d hate to see him soil the franchise by milking it past its expiration date. Marvel, on the other hand, has a plan, and if the films on-deck measure up to “Iron Man” and “Spider-Man” levels of quality and box office success, they’ve got a license to print money for the next five years. Money, and comic books!

But I digress.

As a result of the boom in the industry overall, the dream team-ups I fantasized about in my youth are the bread and butter of today’s four-color funny industry. The one pictured at the top of this post came out this week.

It features 1930s-40s pulp hero Doc Savage and Batman. Now, my dad grew up reading the original Doc Savage pulps, and when they were re-issued in paperback form in the 60s and 70s, he introduced me to them. The paperback covers always featured the buff ‘Man Of Bronze’ in a ripped dress shirt in front of some apocalyptic background, prompting derisive howls of alleged homoeroticism from The Missus to this day:

I just don’t see it.

I keep telling her, “No, if it was Doc’s sexy female cousin Pat Savage in peril and a ripped shirt on the cover, surrounded by a bunch of other shirtless guys, that would be sexy. All these covers say to me is ‘Doc’s a lot tougher than his shirts are,’ and isn’t that something you want in an action hero?”

Anyhow, the comic pictured at top – which could have been complete shit and I would have bought it anyhow – turned out to be great! It mixes and matches elements from Doc’s 30s/40s milieu, like the dirigibles in the sky and the auto-gyro on the cover, with more recent tropes like delivering exposition through the use of TV broadcasts. But by not dwelling on the melding of the disparate eras, they get away with it and the new world comes alive, thanks in no small part to the art of Phill Noto, who somehow marries the Art Deco glamour of Doc Savage’s New York with the film noir nihilism of Batman’s Gotham. It’s frankly a brilliant effort.

Now, Doc has been rendered in comic book form before:

...at least one time I can recall in the mid-70s to coincide with the release of a supremely lame movie version at the same time:

But regrettably, the comics were pretty standard-issue stuff at the time. No effort was expended to keep the flavor of the character from the original pulps intact and the whole sorry enterprise was gratefully short-lived and completely forgettable.

[A word of disclaimer: I’ve come across some of the aging 1960s Bantam reprints of the original pulps and the writing is laugh-out-loud bad. Conan should have William Shatner do dramatic readings of them on “The Tonight Show.” I don’t even know how to write a properly constructed sentence myself, but I can spot a howler when I see one. If you want a good laugh, go to powells.com and order yourself up a “Doc Savage” paperback or two.]

But if you want a crackling adventure yarn, well-written and beautifully illustrated (by Brian Azzarello and Phil Noto, respectively) featuring a young Batman still learning the ropes and The Man Of Bronze at the peak of his Man-Of-Broniziest, race down to your local comic book joint today. I haven’t enjoyed such a pleasant four-color surprise in quite a long time.

Longer than some of you young punks playing card games have been alive. Now get off my lawn before I call the police!!

Why it’s more fun to be me than to be around me [example 346.02]

2009-11-02T20:20:00.000-08:00

(And let me assure you, it’s no day at the beach being me, either.)

Sometimes it’s the little things in life…

So we’re having an election tomorrow. No big deal, no celebrity politicians on the bill, mostly measures and propositions and other stuff that turns the paying-attention part of my brain to the “Off” position.

I’m driving through town this afternoon to pick The Boy up at daycare and one of the propositions has sign-bearers on literally every street corner. “No on P!” their giant signs exhort in big red block letters as their bearers attempt to engage passersby.

I didn’t bother to acquaint myself with the details but assume it deals with some NIMBY-type issue – a perhaps well-meaning idea that everybody thinks is great in theory but damned well doesn’t want in their own neighborhood.

I pull up to a curved-off right turn at a busy 4-way intersection. Red light. While I’m waiting for a break in traffic, the protest lady on the corner is waving her big “No on P!” sign and trying to catch my eye.

Since there’s no way to convincingly pretend I don’t see her, I roll down the passenger-side window, lean over, and with a perfectly innocent countenance ask — after a brief pause to make sure I have her undivided attention — “Where do you stand on poo?”

Some days, there is just nothing finer than a little well-placed potty-training humor.

It is accomplished!

2009-10-31T07:34:00.000-07:00

I’ve been working for more than ten years on my first long-form piece of narrative fiction and I just finished it yesterday. Worked on it all morning (mostly on formatting issues), took a break to go to the dentist for yet more compulsory dental calisthenics, then came home and worked till I dropped. By the time I dropped, it was finished.

At least finished enough for me to retire it and think about doing something else with my scant free time. Like learning to play the guitar more good, or speak passable English. Maybe get to know my family...

I’m sure some grammatical, punctuation and formatting mistakes remain but my feeling right now is “fuck them.” It’s all there, just the way I want it, and if somebody wants to edit it into perfection someday, they have my blessing.

Although it took me ten+ years to complete, in the interim I also finished a 3-hour Captain America screenplay and a 16-hour miniseries about the second half of the XVIII Dynasty of ancient Egypt.

But this is the real deal – the thinly-veiled autobiography that most first-time authors start with. Strictly for the purposes of satisfying my own vanity, I will present the prologue below in its entirety then never mention the subject again.

Finally, I’d like to thank Tucson, Arizona, for scarring me so completely and effectively as a child growing up there that I spent more than ten years trying to write my contempt for it out of my system.

And now, the Prologue:

The sun had slipped almost completely behind the Judean mountains to the west, and most of the crowd had gone home. Crucifixions, even of local celebrities, had begun to lose their drawing power by the time the Romans and the city elders sentenced the carpenter-rabbi from Nazareth to hang from a cross.

The Roman crucifixion was not a meticulous affair. Like the Romans themselves, it offered just enough rote and ritual to appear a legitimate bureaucratic function, while its application was often as not sloppy and open to wide-ranging interpretation.

Crucifixion offered its victims a generous array of ways to die, and different victims succumbed to different causes. Blood loss. Internal bleeding. Head trauma. Suffocation. If one withstood everything else, the suffocation took them.

No one walked away from a Roman crucifixion.

That day there were three unfortunates lined up along the crest of the hill overlooking the drab Judean countryside. A light drizzle had begun to fall, and storm clouds were boiling up out of the west. All three condemned hung with their heads down in the thin rain, their long matted hair hugging their purpled, bloody faces. The heads of crude iron nails extruded from their wrists and feet, and all three were fighting for every remaining breath.

The heartiest of the trio croaked out through cracked lips to the man hanging at his side, “I’m Demas. That’s me mate Gestas on the other end. He’s the troublemaker.”

Gestas glanced over but said nothing. It didn’t seem he could spare the effort.

Demas continued, “An honest man can’t earn a living wage, then when he’s forced to nick from the temple granary to feed his family… this is the end of it.”

The stranger in the middle either didn’t hear or was too weak from blood-loss to muster a response.

“Gestas, tell our new mate what they got you for.”

This opportunity proved worth the effort. Gestas spat out, as best he could through swollen lips and missing teeth, “For being a Jew, trying to live peaceably in his own homeland.”

One of the guards noticed that, and with a half-hearted scowl, thrust his spear in and out of Gestas’ shriveled belly.

Gestas screamed in pain but seemed to smile at the same time, as if reveling in this validation of his hatred for his tormentors.

The guard wandered the couple steps back to his post and grumbled to his companion about the rain. He struggled to pull his cowl up over his helmet while his companion laughed at his clumsiness.

Demas turned to the second man.

“Hey. Hey…”

The man in the middle crooked his head slightly toward his inquisitor, but said nothing.

Demas persisted, “What did they get you for?”

The man in the middle seemed to slip even further down on his painful perch. With an effort, he flung his wet mop of hair onto his shoulder, revealing a face so badly beaten that it made Gestas’ wounds look superficial by comparison. He opened his near-toothless mouth to show where the top of his tongue had recently been either chopped or chewed off. His eye that remained, however swollen over it was, was clear and held no self-pity.

In spite of himself, Demas looked away.

After a while of grim silence, Demas turned back to the man and said, “You must be that preacher I heard about. That healer. The vandal. The heretic. You had to have known this would be where you’d wind up, didn’t you?”

The man ignored him this time and concentrated instead on the effort of drawing his next breath.

Demas glanced over at the guards again, then continued in a lower voice, “How come you don’t miracle yourself away off this son of a bitch? And take me with you.” Demas glanced over at Gestas, then back at the man hanging next to him. “The two of us, you and me – we could still make it!”

The man looked over at Demas, searching his face to see if he was being mocked.

Demas averted his eyes and stammered, “I used to watch you preach, whenever I could.” He paused, before deciding to continue. “I saw you cure a cripple once, right there in front of my eyes, a mate of mine the whole of my life. After that, I, uh… guess I followed you at a distance, you know. My career was um, at odds with some of your, uh, ideals – but I never got tired of hearing you speak. I always felt… good listening to you talk.”

The second man stared at him a moment longer, then his head sagged forward.

The rain drizzled on a while longer uninterrupted before Demas mumbled to himself, “Sure wish I could hear you talk now…”

Some thought the carpenter would use his uncanny abilities to rescue himself at the end, but for reasons that were lost with him, he never did.

In the end, he died like any man. Alone. Afraid.

I stood at the foot of the center cross in the drizzling rain, as close as the disinterested guards would allow an ussauming young Jewish boy to approach. Only one other remained in the rain and mud at the foot of Golgotha with me; by any honest account, the man who should have been hanging on that center cross, the criminal Barabbas.

Or Barabbas the patriot – depending upon whom you asked.

The rain, mud-red with the dying man’s blood, ran in rivulets down the sodden earth. I had to step aside to get out of the way. My feet weren’t fit to be washed in it.

Memo to Daddy:

2009-10-27T20:36:00.000-07:00

“Oh, I see you’re standing better today”

2009-10-26T19:45:00.000-07:00

As usual, there is a silver lining of comedy to be found in even the gloomiest stormcloud of misfortune…

So of course by this morning the sutures in my gum are coming loose prematurely and I have to race back to the dentist to get them repaired at a moment’s notice. I hop in the car and haul ass out there and sure enough, the anticipated quickie last-minute patch job ends up requiring multiple applications of The Long Needle. And I was so sure it was going to be a painless affair I totally failed to drug myself up beforehand.

After the repeated stabbings, the actual re-stitching only took about 10 minutes. As I was stepping out of the chair the dental assistant, the same girl who’d been involved in last week’s ordeal, remarked, “Oh, I see you’re standing better today.” Although I have no recollection, they must have had to use a spatula to scoop me out of that chair last Friday.

I am so grateful I have no recollection, I only regret leaving credible witnesses alive. I must have been having a prescient moment when I walked into the office today and told the girl at the desk, “Hi, I seem to have misplaced my dignity and was wondering if I might have left it here last week...”

Dr. Teeth and the electric mayhem acid test

2009-10-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

Let me take a minute to talk about my teeth.

Now, if I was talking about the current state of my teeth, it would qualify as a short story at best. There’s just not very much left to tell. If I was telling the history of them, however, it would have to be published in volumes, like textbooks about the 100-year War.

Let’s just skip to the present-day and I’ll fill in any gaps that come up (no dental pun intended).

A month ago the latest crown dropped out of my mouth. This has been happening to me for more than 20 years and I didn’t think that much about it. When I was in my 20s I was a major meth-head and as a result, have had terrible dental karma ever since. Even while in my 20s, the few times I visited a dentist it was always a credit dentist in the ghetto and my business partner and I would tailgate the dental appointment. We’d arrive early and sit in the car in the parking lot slamming beers, smoking joints and doing rails. None of the dentists spoke English and the place was a warehouse, with sheets between dental chairs instead of walls. One time I got caught adjusting the ratio of laughing gas to oxygen, I remember getting cursed out in Korean by a guy named Kong but was pronounced ‘Kang.’ Or vice versa.

In my defense, there was a lot going on at the time.

So when the latest crown gave up the ghost I sighed but didn’t give it much thought. Having a crown re-attached is like filling up my gas tank to me: Oh geez, is it that time again already?

Brevity, brevity. I still have TV I want to watch tonight.

So anyhow, I quit doing speed 20 or 21 years ago and quit abusing prescription drugs about 10 years after that.

Till today.

When I went to the dentist a couple weeks ago to get my crown reattached, as usual, I encountered a worst-case scenario. I’m embarrassed that I was even surprised.

The dentist, a lovely young lady whom we shall call Dr. Teeth, informed me that there was not enough tooth left to attach anything to. We were going to have to have put in a post. You know, drill a metal stick onto my jawbone and glue a fake tooth to it. Except, because I had already had the tooth root-canaled, first she was going to have to remove the root canal, which of course was installed with the intention of being permanent.

And then we had to wait three to six months for the procedure to heal before I had to go back and she could drill the metal spike into my head. Jesus Christ!

As the date of my appointment approached, I became more and more frightened of the excavation that was going to be required.

Oh wait, let me skip ahead to something irrelevant but fascinating and gross. I heard The Missus on the phone tonight, telling someone that Dr. Teeth (the dentist, remember?) had told her that she had filled the huge hole she scraped in my mouth with bone matter from corpses and cows. I don’t have anything to add at this moment. As you may imagine, I’m still processing that piece of information.

Getting back to this morning’s ordeal, The Missus had already agreed to drive me so I could get as gakked beforehand as my relative sobriety would allow me. I took my full day’s allotment of anti-stress meds for breakfast and before I left the house, I also took the two valium left over from my last oral surgery as well as a couple of OTC sleeping pills. My dentist doesn’t use gas – usually a deal-breaker for me – but she’s so damned good.

To give you an example of my dental karma, I was originally sent to Dr. Teeth after another local dentist had performed a botched root canal on me. So we met when she had to re-root-canal a tooth that had already just endured a horrific trauma. I swear to god, I wouldn’t be surprised if I go home to glory some day straight from the dentist’s chair.

So I was pretty loaded by the time we arrived for my latest punishment. And then I mentioned that I should have called ahead and had her prescribe me a couple of valium for this morning’s procedure. She was surprised that I hadn’t and asked me if I’d like one. I asked for two. She said, “Well, you’re supposed to take them an hour before you come.” I told her not to worry, I’d chew them.

The drugs arrived and I chewed ‘em right up, washing them down with some tepid tap water. She scrunched her face and asked me if it tasted okay. I shrugged and said it tasted like chicken.

Then she hit me with the big needles and I tell you what, I may have been relaxed, but those shots still hurt like a mothfucker. I don’t know if it was new drugs or new places she was poking me, but the pain radiated from the injection point down the inside of my mouth like a thick, burning trickle of lava. But hell, I knew better than to complain. If the shots did their job, it should be the last actual pain I felt.

All that was left was the fear.

Then she gave me my regularly scheduled teeth cleaning while we waited for the shots to take effect. When it came time to get down to brass tacks, she asked me if my mouth felt numb. I was so blasted out of my mind on stress-relieving agents by that time my speech actually slurred. It was embarrassing but I think I convinced her it was the novacaine.

Here’s where I cut to the chase: She ended up having to postpone then cancel her next appointment because my one-hour procedure ended up taking two and a half hours. Of digging and scraping and drilling and more digging and scraping and drilling. And she still didn’t get 100% of the tooth out. She told me there’s a tiny bit of tooth left that is so deep she couldn’t risk further excavation. Presumably, she was at risk of drilling all the way through my bone and out of the bottom of my chin. And that there’s a ‘tiny’ chance it could cause me problems down the road. Which would require a repeat of today’s horrific ordeal except next time I would make damn sure I was unconscious for it.

The saving grace, if there was one, was that I was so twisted on the dope that the whole thing passed for me in a timeless state of constant fear and noise and pressure and discomfort and more fear. If I had to guess, I woulda guessed 90 minutes at best.

Two and half hours of digging and scraping into my skeletal structure, then filling it with the remains of dead cows and people.

The weird thing about that kind of experience is, no matter how badly you try to overdose yourself before the procedure, by the time it’s over and you’re out of that chair your body has dumped so much adrenaline into your system… I would compare it to how fast you sober up when the police car behind you hits his lights and siren. I actually walked out there surprisingly conscious and coherent. And to Dr. Teeth’s credit, as usual, the only pain I feel now that all the drugs have worn off are the poke-points of the needles, which is literally unavoidable.

Still, I have to go back in a week and have the sutures removed and two fillings replaced at the baseline of couple of my front teeth. Last time I went in to have one of those little fillings patched up, I ended up with a surprise root canal. That was just a couple months ago. What do you suppose the odds are with two bum fillings I’ll walk out of there with simple replacements? And my front teeth are extremely sensitive to pain. I always have to have to have her inject me again and again during the procedure. Last time it was so bad, she had to inject the painkiller directly into my jawbone.

It promises to be a lovely time. I can tell you right now that Dr. Teeth will not get out of the office at 1PM the way her receptionist explained to me she had to next Friday. She said that to me so as a joke I said, “Well then, how about noon?” expecting a laugh. Instead she wrote it down and handed me an appointment card.

Does this story have a point? Fuck no. If I had to have a point to every story I wrote, I’d expect to be paid for it. And I don’t see anyone lining up to pay me for writing.

I’ll be sure to drop you a line after next week’s alleged quick in-and-out office visit. A good time – and karma – is guaranteed for none.