New and gloriously stupid project: 100 Buddy Hollys

Ten of the proposed 100 Buddy Hollys.

What is life without its pointless projects? As I look back on my own half century of existence, I see that I have always been the most productive when the work I am doing has no practical application in the real world. If it's completely and utterly useless, I'm all in. Often, the work only has "meaning" because it brings me some strange, indefinable enjoyment or satisfaction. I suppose this entire blog (which has been running since October 2009) is my ultimate boondoggle. I have faithfully maintained this madman's journal largely for my own amusement and at the expense of more noble or profitable pursuits. But it's far from my only folly.

Lately, for instance, I have embarked upon what might be my single-dumbest endeavor: a project called 100 Buddy Hollys. The idea is to create 100 different parodies and remixes of the 1994 Weezer song "Buddy Holly" and post these to my YouTube account, mostly as shorts. Why this song? Why now? I don't know and I don't know. But the project is already moving forward at a furious pace. I started on October 19 with a video called "Buddy Holly but Rivers fired the rest of the band and replaced them with The Moog Cookbook." I have since created several dozen sequels, combining "Buddy Holly" with numerous other pop culture properties and rearranging the song in various ways.

The most popular of these videos has garnered about 1,800 views -- not even a blip on the YouTube radar. The least popular currently sits at a miserable 23 views. I have no idea why some of them perform better than others, and I don't really care. All I know is that, at some point, I decided I'd make a hundred of these things and then stop. Will I make it? Will I lose interest or run out of ideas? Stay tuned, true believers.

My Month of Bowie, day 27: So what did I learn from all this?

This month, David took me from crayons to perfume and then back to crayons again.

I've had a lot of jobs over the years: middle school Spanish teacher, customer service representative, freelance writer, etc., etc. Some of these I've liked better than others, but they all eventually ended for one reason or another. I've quit a few of them and have been fired or laid off from a few more. One thing they all had in common, though, is that I didn't really understand them until they were over. Every time I've walked away from a job (or been kicked out of one), I've thought, "If I were just starting now, I'd know better what to do."

Does this thing count?

And so it is with this foolish David Bowie project of mine. I decided to do this series of articles at the end of August, pretty much on a whim. My "research" was looking up David's name on Wikipedia and scrolling down to the list of studio albums at the bottom of his page. If you're wondering why I covered certain albums and not others, it's because I was following that list. That helped keep the project to a manageable size. (I'm still deciding whether or not to cover the posthumously released album Toy from 2021. This month isn't quite over yet.)

Apart from knowing a few of his more popular songs (like "Life on Mars?" and "Ashes to Ashes"), I was largely unfamiliar with Bowie's vast and varied career before embarking on this monthlong journey. As a result, I didn't really know what to pay attention to or what to focus on when I reviewed his albums. Having now listened to 26 of them in a row, I think (or hope) I have a clearer idea of what David Robert Jones was capable of.

What, then, are my main takeaways from this strange month? What did I learn from all this? Well, above all, I've learned that the cult surrounding Bowie is more than justified. He was an enormously talented, complicated, and endlessly odd and inscrutable man. He made albums you could get lost in. Not all of his ideas were to my liking, at least not on first listening, but I appreciate that his mind and his music went in many different directions. It is very difficult to categorize or summarize David Bowie because he didn't stay in any one place long enough for you to pin a label on him. If someone asks if you like Bowie, the only sensible response is: "Which Bowie do you mean?"

The 26 studio albums David made between 1967 and 2016 cannot be adequately appreciated in a rapid-fire series like this one. All I can really do is get a general sense of what each LP is like and then move on. Before I started writing these articles, I toyed with the idea of giving each of David's albums a letter grade. But there was no way to summarize my feelings in a single letter, so I gave up on that idea almost instantaneously. And I can't really give you a list of my "favorite" Bowie albums either, since I haven't lived with them long enough to develop that kind of relationship with them. What I can do is divide these 26 albums into some broad categories. Think of this as musical triage.

Albums to listen to first: Hunky Dory (1971), The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust (1972), Aladdin Sane (1973), Young Americans (1975), Let's Dance (1983), Blackstar (2016)

Here's your Bowie starter pack. Six albums. That's not too many. Why these six? Well, I wanted to include four of the albums from the period (early-to-mid-1970s) that I feel was David's pinnacle of creativity and innovation. This was the music that I enjoyed most while exploring his discography. After that, I'm including Let's Dance because I think it's a good indicator of how Bowie's career and image evolved after the '70s were over. And I'm ending the list with Blackstar because, if you've come this far, you'll want to know how the story ends.

Albums to listen to next : David Bowie (1967), The Man Who Sold the World (1970), Pin Ups (1973), Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977), Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters (1980), Earthling (1997), Heathen (2002), Reality (2003), The Next Day (2013)

Ready to continue along the path? Honestly, it was difficult to avoid putting several of these albums in the previous category. The entire Berlin trilogy (1977-1979), for instance, should really be up there. But I feel that those albums would be best appreciated by listeners who had already become acclimated to Bowie's music, so I put them here. Then, there's Pin Ups, an album I really liked but one that is generally dismissed by Bowie experts and rock critics as a footnote at best. What do I do with that one? I put it here. My advice remains the same: forget it's a covers album and just enjoy it as a half hour of (great-sounding) music.

Albums I didn't really get: Space Oddity (1969), Diamond Dogs (1974), The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), Outside (1995)

All this month, I've felt a bit like an old-timey detective in a movie. My assignment was to follow this David Bowie guy around for four weeks and see where he went and what he did. A few times along the way, I lost the trail. These were those times. I do not say that these are bad or unsatisfying albums, just that I'd have to spend more time getting used to them before I could say anything intelligent about them. Outside, especially, would benefit from further study. I never even figured out who killed Baby Grace.

Albums that didn't really affect me one way or the other: Tonight (1984), Never Let Me Down (1987), Black Tie White Noise (1993), Hours (1999)

There were no albums that I out-and-out hated this month. There were, however, a few that I listened to and just said, "Meh. What else you got, Bowie?" Is it a coincidence that these records are all from the '80s and '90s? No, it is not. You might be surprised to see the well-regarded Black Tie White Noise in this category. That album did very little for me, I'm sorry to say. 

This series is called My Month of Bowie, and the last time I checked, September hath thirty days. That means I have three days left to tie up some loose ends. So that's just what I'll do. I hope you'll stick with me for the last three bonus articles. Otherwise, see ya 'round like a record.

Next: Iggy Pop's The Idiot (1977)

I wish that I knew what I was supposed to know now when I was my current age

"Poor old Granddad, I laughed at all his words."

I keep hearing the Faces' song "Ooh La La" in movies, TV shows, and commercials. Why? What is it about this particular track that's allowed it to stick around for decades? As I see it, the song's main appeal is that it takes a near-universal sentiment—"I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger"—and sets it to catchy music. This is a thought many of us have had at some point in our lives, and "Ooh La La" allows us to sing it out loud instead of just ponder it. And so, "Ooh La La" has become a song about the hard-won wisdom that only comes with age.

But I don't think the song, written in 1973 by Ronnie Wood and Ronnie Lane (both 26 years old at the time), is as heartwarming as people seem to think it is. The lyrics of the first verse add some necessary context to the song's famous refrain.

Poor old Granddad, I laughed at all his words
I thought he was a bitter man
He spoke of women's ways
"They trap you, then they use you
Before you even know
For love is blind and you're far too kind
Don't ever let it show"

Try making a heartwarming insurance commercial out of that. Sounds like Granddad is working through some serious issues with women. And his smartaleck grandson does not take him seriously whatsoever. So much for hard-won wisdom.

Still in all, we have that indelible chorus: "I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger." It's a comforting thought. Everything would have turned out better, we tell ourselves, if we'd just been given the necessary information at a young age. Forewarned is forearmed.

As I think about the current, unsatisfactory state of my life, I've occasionally asked myself the question: what do I wish I had known as a child that would have helped me avoid this fate? And, frankly, I've come up short. The problem with the line "I wish that I knew what I know now" is that it assumes you actually know something now! I don't. Nothing good at least. I've only learned how rotten the world can be. I know which choices of mine didn't work, but I don't know of any better ones I could have made or should have made.

And so, despite what the song says, I can't think of any advice I'd give to my younger self that would have helped him or any wisdom that would have prepared him for adulthood. In fact, if it hadn't been for ignorance—the total, blissful stupidity we only tolerate in children—I'd never have gotten any fun out of life at all. The more I learned of this world, the less I liked. So my version of "Ooh La La" would probably go something like: "I wish I knew as little now as I did when I was younger."

Life update: A cry for HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel in The Producers.

There's a moment, early in Mel Brooks' The Producers (1967), when meek accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) finds a serious discrepancy while auditing the books of failing Broadway producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel). Max raised $60,000 from his backers for his last flop but only spent $58,000 on the show; the other $2,000 he kept for himself. This is fraud, Leo reminds Max, and could send the producer to prison. Max responds with a soliloquy:

Bloom, look at me. (more forcefully) LOOK AT ME, BLOOM! Bloom, I'm drowning. Other men sail through life. Bialystock has struck a reef. Bloom, I'm going under. I'm being sunk by a society that demands success when all I can offer is failure. Bloom, I'm reaching out to you. Don't send me to prison. (getting very close to Leo's ear) HEEEEEEEEELP!!!!!!!!

I've reached a stage in my life when I can relate to both men in this scene. Like Leo, I go to a dull, unrewarding office job every day. It's how I'm able to pay my rent and my bills and have medical insurance. At night and on the weekends, I pursue various creative enterprises. Unfortunately, like Max, I have largely met with failure. Despite producing a great deal of work over the course of several decades, nothing I have done has reached beyond a very small audience. Sometimes, the only audience is myself.

REPOST: A day spent (vicariously) with Tom Lehrer

Mathematician turned singer-songwriter turned mathematician Tom Lehrer.

NOTE: Today, we received the sad news that singer, songwriter, and mathematician Tom Lehrer had died at the age of 97. In light of that, I would like to repost an article about Tom that I wrote back in 2012.

Tom Lehrer would scoff at the idea of being anyone's hero. This is part of the reason why he's one of mine.

A native New Yorker born way back in 1928 (one shudders to do the grim calculations here), Lehrer was a child prodigy who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19. Since that time, he has spent most of his career either teaching or lecturing about mathematics at some of America's finest academic institutions, including MIT and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He formally retired in 2001, but he's still listed at the Rate My Professors website with a student review as recent as 2005.

Latter-day Lehrer

What sets Tom Lehrer apart from other mathematicians, apart from his claim of inventing the Jell-O shot, is that he devoted much of his time in the 1950s and 1960s to writing and performing some of the darkest, funniest songs I've ever heard -- deceptively joyous musical theater-type ditties with droll, sardonic lyrics about such topics as sex ("I Got It From Agnes"), drugs ("The Old Dope Peddler"), violence ("The Masochism Tango"), religion ("The Vatican Rag"), death ("I Hold Your Hand in Mine") and war ("So Long, Mom") with a candor that set him far apart from both the singers and the comedians of that era. Today, comedians can joke openly about pornography, incest, cannibalism, bestiality, and necrophilia on prime time network television, but this wasn't true 60 years ago when Tom's records couldn't even be played on the radio during respectable hours.

As with much of the music that now clutters up my brain, the bizarre and sometimes brutal song stylings of Tom Lehrer first entered my life through The Dr. Demento Show. This was back in the 1990s, before the internet was any damned good, and it was difficult to come by information about Tom's life or career back then. I couldn't even find a picture of the guy! I knew instinctively, though, that he wore glasses. Somehow, that was obvious to me. His myopia was audible. 

Despite the apparent rudeness of his lyrics, Mr. Lehrer conducted himself with the utmost decorum onstage, using impeccable Ivy League diction, eclectic and impressive vocabulary, and carefully-curated grammar. On his records, he comes across as man far too smart to take life the least bit seriously. Lerher's musical career occurred during the Cold War when it seemed ever-more-likely that mankind would annihilate itself with increasingly-deadly weapons. This looming apocalypse is the topic of several Lehrer songs, and he treats it the way he treats all other subjects: with an air of detached amusement at the absurdity of it all.

Tom Lehrer's 1953 debut

Today, almost two decades after I first heard "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," (the song that made me a fan) I spent some quality time listening to virtually every Tom Lehrer recording available to the public. That's not a great investment of time, honestly. There are roughly three hours of Lehrer audio in total, nearly all of it consisting of Tom singing solo and accompanying himself on piano. 

His musical output boils down to two brief studio albums (Songs by Tom Lehrer and More of Tom Lehrer), three live albums (Revisited [a.k.a. Tom Lehrer in Concert], An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer, and That Was the Week That Was), plus a handful of miscellaneous recordings. He recorded a handful of his most famous songs with a full orchestra, for instance, plus he did a few well-remembered educational songs (like "Silent E") for a PBS children's program called The Electric Company. There are a few good CD compilations out there of Lehrer's work, but buyers should know in advance that the same exact songs from the two studio albums are heard on his first two live LPs as well. And I mean, they're note-for-note the same. If you buy the boxed set with his "complete" recordings, be prepared to sit through the same songs two or even three times.

WATCH! The Candy Land commercial that haunted me for years! (Updated for 2024!)

This is what Milton Bradley's Candy Land looked like in 1978.

The game board as it looked in '78.

It's funny how an utterly ephemeral piece of music will become firmly lodged in one's brain for decades. Take, for instance, the instrumental music in an early '80s ad for the Milton Bradley board game Candy Land. There was a particular 30-second spot for this product that I must have seen dozens of times while watching Popeye and Andy Panda cartoons as a kid. Obviously, Milton Bradley bought up a lot of advertising time on children's TV shows, and I was smack dab in the middle of the target demographic.

The commercial itself is typical of the era. In a sunshine-yellow suburban kitchen somewhere, a young brother (played by a pre-Christmas Story Peter Billingsley) and sister play the game with their mom, while a gentle-voiced male announcer explains how it all works.

But underneath the narration is a jaunty, repetitive little melody with a whistle-like sound. To this day, I remember that insidious little ditty by heart. I will likely never forget it. As for the narrator's spiel, I didn't commit every word of it to memory, but there are certain passages that stick out: "You'll discover the Gingerbread Plum Tree, a Rainbow Pass, and Gumdrop Mountain! But be careful of the Cherry Pit Falls, and don't get stuck in Molasses Swamp!" The way he weirdly emphasizes "Rainbow Pass," as if it's a major selling point, is rather memorable.

Incidentally, one thing I learned in the course of researching this article is that there is no "definitive" version of the classic game. The internet can't even decide whether it's called Candy Land or Candyland. Under either spelling, the game goes back to 1949. The gameboard itself and the box it comes in have been redesigned and revamped many times since then. What was once merely "Molasses Swamp," for instance, is now a sentient creature unappealingly named "Gloppy." Other characters, like "main antagonist" Lord Licorice, have been added to Candy Land since the days of my youth. (In my day, bad luck was the only antagonist in Candy Land.)

Through trial and error, I learned that the version of the game seen in the famous ad dates back to 1978. Most sources say the commercial first appeared in the early 1980s, possibly 1983.

The indelible Candy Land jingle played a minor yet arguably-significant role in my life. I can remember humming it over and over to annoy my older sister during a long car trip. She must have identified the song, too, because she said, "Mom, tell Joey to stop singing the Candy Land song!"

A few years later, when I joined the school band, a few of my fellow musicians-in-training and I would try to learn as many pop songs, TV and movie themes, and advertising jingles as possible on our respective instruments. Then as now, I played the euphonium—a little-understood and much-neglected instrument to which I was dutifully assigned after failing to make the grade on the cornet. 

Being relegated to the low brass section was moderately more fun if I could play a reasonable facsimile of '"Black Dog" by Led Zeppelin or "The Ballad of Jed Clampett." I remember it was a major victory (in my own mind) when I learned the familiar seven-note "Miss Gulch" theme from The Wizard of Oz. But there was this one kid, Marc Wojtowicz, who played the saxophone and had a dizzying range of tunes at his command. And one of them was—you guessed it—the Candy Land jingle. That may not impress you, but it impressed the hell out of me.

Anyway, here's the commercial. If the song takes up permanent residence in your subconscious, remember that I tried to warn you.

UPDATE FOR 2024: Reader Dan Mahoney informs me that the jingle used in the Candy Land commercial is actually a piece of stock music called "Whistling Robot" by British composer and organist Harold Smart (1921-1980). In more recent years, Harold's music has turned up on SpongeBob SquarePants and its various spinoffs. Thanks for setting the record straight, Dan!

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 146: Is there such a thing as TOO MUCH Ed Wood?

This reminds me, I need to catch up on my reading.

Ladies and gentleman, I might need to take a month off from work just to catch up on all the Ed Wood-related chores I have to do. I am so far behind on my Ed Wood homework, it's ridiculous. The trouble is, my day  job actually pays me money and this blog doesn't, so the blog inevitably loses. And, believe me, I've tried to monetize my misadventures in Woodology numerous times, but it's never been a success.

Soon to be reviewed by me? Maybe.

It's not that I'm burned out on Eddie. Far from it. Just watch my recent appearance on The Ed Wood Summit Podcast for proof. I think that's the most enthused I've been about anything in a while. Luckily, that video was recorded the day after Presidents' Day, so I had plenty of time to prepare. It was great delving into one of Ed's most unhinged "nonfiction" texts, the infamous Black Myth (1971), with two other dedicated Woodoholics. 

But there's so much more I need to get to. For instance, Edwin Lee Canfield recently published Fact, Fictions, and the Forbidden Predictions of the Amazing Criswell, the first-ever biography of the famed futurist and Ed Wood repertory player. I've gotta review that, right? And speaking of books, after seeing Greg Dziawer and Rob Huffman interview author Jean Marie Stine, I had to snag a copy of Jean's book, Ed Wood: The Early Years (2001). So throw that one on the pile, too, along with a couple of Wood-based manuscripts I'm supposed to look at.

Oh, god, I just realized I've never written much about the two Ed Wood Scripts from the Crypt books by Gary D. Rhodes and Tom Weaver. I mean, I've mentioned them from time to time, but I've never actually reviewed either one, and those books are several years old by now. Shame on me.

And for some reason, I must've felt I didn't have enough Ed Wood-adjacent text to plow through, so I had my local library track down a copy of Joanna Lee's out-of-print autobiography, A Difficult Woman in Hollywood. It includes a few absolutely scathing pages about Ed Wood, so I felt it merited at least a response from me. I've started writing a review of that in my head, but I haven't actually typed anything. Sorry, Joanna, you'll have to wait. That article should be a doozy, though, if it ever happens.

I'm still sticking to my promise to deliver a new Ed Wood Wednesdays each week in 2023, either by me or by Greg. But the last few that I've written have been articles that required virtually zero research and could therefore be completed very quickly. Last week, for instance, I wrote about watching a livestream of Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff (aka The Mads) commenting on Night of the Ghouls (1959). I have an update about that, by the way. Trace and Frank's version of Ghouls is now available on its own or as a three-movie collection with Glen or Glenda (1953) and Bride of the Monster (1955). Check it out if you're so inclined.

For right now, I just need you to be patient with me as I figure out how to get to at least some of these projects. Who knows? I might just get lucky and be horribly injured on the job. Then, I could go on disability and spend my days writing articles for this blog. A man can dream, huh? 

A weird, sad, true story about me and the Old Spice guy

For very personal reasons, the Old Spice ads make me feel sad.

Not an actual Nazi.

The actor in the goofy, over-the-top Old Spice ads is Isaiah Mustafa. That name is branded into my memory for the weirdest, saddest reason ever. 

You see, a few years ago, I was a regular member of an online movie discussion forum where that actor's brother was also a frequent participant, much more active than I was. He was very proud of his brother's career and would occasionally post updates about what Isaiah was up to. All very nice and positive stuff. No problem there. 

Unfortunately, one day there was a thread on the forum about the use of terms like "grammar nazi" and whether they were offensive and should be avoided or banned. I argued that history was full of infamous, real-life people whose names eventually became figures of speech. I cited, I believe, Attila the Hun as an example. As events recede further into the past, I argued, they become more and more abstract, so it is inevitable that they will take on symbolic meaning. A character like the "Soup Nazi" on Seinfeld is not intended as a literal member of the National Socialist Party, and there is no implication of antisemitism in his portrayal. The epithet merely means that he is very focused on rules, neatness, and absolute control. Banning terms like "grammar nazi," then, is ultimately futile. It's just how language works. Eventually, the "n'" in "Nazi" will be lower case. I still feel that way. You may not.

One person who definitely disagreed with me on this point was the Old Spice guy's brother. He accused me of being, in essence, a Nazi sympathizer or Nazi enabler, if not an actual Nazi myself. It was, unequivocally, the nastiest thing anyone has ever said about me, online or offline, in my entire life. (And I was once a customer service rep for a major automobile manufacturer, so I've been called plenty of nasty names.) 

I was shell-shocked. At the time, I still felt that online forums actually mattered, so I responded to this attack with a lengthy, heated post in which I accused the Old Spice guy's brother of being blinkered and dogmatic to the point of being unreasonable. I refrained from implicating him in the deaths of 6 million  Jews, however, a kindness he did not extend to me. I don't believe the dust-up between us ever came to any sort of agreement or peace accord. We both just kind of gave up on it and never directly interacted again on that now-dormant forum. To this day, I cannot sit through the Old Spice ads without feeling an awful mixture of embarrassment, anger, shame, and regret.

And that's my story about the Old Spice guy.

Pointless nostalgia time: 'Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World' (1979)

I didn't hallucinate it. This movie really existed.

The way you can remember the difference between latitude and longitude is that latitude lines are like the rungs on a ladder, while longitude lines look like long telephone poles. Got it? That's a little detail I stored away from a 1979 educational film called Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World, a lighthearted, 17-minute primer on basic geography hosted by a member of the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters. Though I never attended one of their games in person, the 'trotters were nevertheless a vital part of my couch potato youth, what with their two (count 'em!) Hanna Barbera series and innumerable appearances on talk shows and specials, not to mention their utterly ridiculous and unmotivated crossovers with Gilligan's Island and Scooby-Doo. Who can hear "Sweet Georgia Brown" without feeling the urge to spin a basketball on one's index finger? Yeah, the clown princes of the court were everywhere in the 1970s and 1980s, including, it seems the classroom.

I was lucky enough to be around for the last few years of educational films being actual reels of film being threaded through a projector. The transition to VHS and those omnipresent rolling TV carts did not occur until my middle school years. No, if a teacher wanted to kill some time with a movie, he or she actually had to have some rudimentary AV skills. My parents were both teachers, and I can still remember going with my dad to the Flint Public Library when he wanted to check out an educational film. (This was before video stores.) The movies -- 16mm, I guess -- came in these big, flat, grayish-brown boxes, about the size of a small pizza, and they were held shut with straps. I don't know why, but I thought that was neat. You had to go to a special room on the second floor of the library to get them. I thought that was neat, too.

But, anyway, back to the movie at hand. Somewhere around the third or fourth grade, a teacher must have shown our class Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World as part of a unit on how to read maps or something. It was the kind of weird, fun, little movie that just might take up residence in a person's subconscious forever. It certainly did in mine. Interestingly (to me), Presents the World was made by the same group of amiable zanies who did the fondly-remembered Close Encounters parody film Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind in 1980, just a year later: director Rick Harper, writer Bob Rogers, and actors Stan Greiwe and Sandy Stotzer. I imagine they had fun with this assignment. Also in the cast is Mike Jittlov, director, writer, and star of the (unseen by me) cult classic The Wizard of Speed and Time (1988).

Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World, sadly, is not to be found in its entirety on the Internet. A company called Pyramid Media markets a DVD of it, but it'll cost ya: thirty bucks for personal use, ninety bucks for instructional use. If you're planning on buying me a copy for my birthday next month, please choose the $30 option. Happily, there are some clips available online, like this one featuring Stan Greiwe as a detective-turned-superhero and Mike Jittlov as a sinister, black-hatted villain. Enjoy:



What's really weird is the complicated, nesting-doll structure of Meadowlark Lemon Presents the World. It starts out as a film-within-a-film, and before long it becomes a film-within-a-film-within-a-film. You see, the introduction involves a hapless grade school teacher (also Greiwe) showing this movie to his unruly students. Then Meadowlark takes over and shows even more films, like the one above. It's like Inception for eight year olds.

Sometimes, I just need to be openly miserable, okay?

I want you to study this graph very closely. Commit it to memory.

This blog has sucked lately, but I don't apologize for that because it has sucked for a valid, legitimate reason. As anyone who has read Dead 2 Rights or who has known me for any amount of time should be aware by now, I suffer from depression and anxiety. (You should know this because I won't shut up about it.) And we're talking medically-diagnosed, clinical depression and anxiety here. I take antidepressants and attend weekly therapy sessions, and these things help somewhat, but they are not magic by any means. They are not a cure-all. Treatment of mental health issues can be complicated and frustrating. The best, quickest way to illustrate this is to direct you to a recent BuzzFeed article by Anna Borges entitled "13 Graphs Anyone Who's Ever Been Depressed Will Understand." Please read it. It's an excellent summary both of what depression is truly like (read: mostly boring) and of the various misconceptions people have about the condition. Of particular interest is Borges' keen observation that "sometimes, you relapse." That's very true for me.

Since my hospitalization in late 2012, I have made slow, sometimes barely-perceptible progress in my quest to become a happier, healthier person. But I have my share of bad days, too, and sometimes those can turn into bad weeks or even bad months. Lately, I will admit that I have been relapsing somewhat. My high-stress, low-satisfaction job is a constant source of both depression and anxiety, and some recent changes there have had a significant negative effect on me. Part of the fault is my own. As an anxious person, I am liable to take minor, inconsequential issues and magnify them until they are huge, life-threatening crises. And as a depressed person, I am liable to fall into a state of helplessness and lethargy. Combine the two and you've got a real mess on your hands.

One thing which really helps -- and this can be difficult for people to accept or understand -- is to vent my negativity. I do that in therapy, sure, but I also occasionally do that on this blog and in private conversations, too. There are some posts on Dead 2 Rights which are strictly excuses for me to be negative and complain about everything which is going wrong in my life. If those articles don't interest you, by all means skip right over them. There's plenty of other stuff here to read. But if you do choose to read those articles, please try to understand that I just need to be a total downer sometimes. I don't want these articles to worry you or upset you. Believe it or not, these articles help me to feel better. Please just let me be miserable sometimes. It's important to me.

Okay, I'm glad we had this little talk. You may go in peace to love and serve yourself.

Ed Wood Wednesdays is going on hiatus (and other disappointing blog news)

Yup. That about covers it.

"If I could not earn a penny from my writing, I would earn my livelihood at something else and continue to write at night."

-Irving Wallace (via Michael O'Donoghue)

Yesterday, I went into my Blogger "Draft Posts" folder, where all my unfinished articles and stories reside, and deleted everything in it. It was a sad and profound moment. I knew I was never going to finish these posts, so why should they taunt me? Among the casualties: a very high-concept short story about cartoon characters (specifically, cartoon nephews) getting together in Hollywood; a far-reaching and history-minded analysis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one which connects it with such films as Easy Rider, The Big Chill, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and a half-kidding, half-serious editorial about how Jim Henson's Muppet Babies was the beginning of the end of everything. They all bit the dust, along with a number of never-to-be-completed reviews of certain movies, including (yes) some titles from my Mill Creek Comedy Classics box set. (I haven't forgotten about it.) I honestly thought I could live like Irving Wallce suggested: earning my livelihood by day and writing at night. Kafka did it. "The Night Writer," some have called him, though that nickname brings to mind talking cars more than talking cockroaches.

Folks, I've tried, but I just can't be Kafka. Not right now, anyway.

Between working and commuting, I have only about two hours every weekday between when I finally get back home and when I have to be in bed. During that two hours, I have to eat dinner, make my daily phone call to my father and patiently listen to every detail of his event-free day, check my e-mail and social media accounts, and maybe try to watch a little TV or part of a movie. That leaves very, very little time for writing. Today, I'm using part of my two hours to write this little update. Was it worth it? You tell me. I suppose I could write on the weekends, and I try to do so, but those are my only days to catch up on laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping. and (oh, yeah) something called sleep. While it's still warm outside, it would be nice to get some fresh air occasionally, too, if possible.

Ed Wood Wednesdays is going to have to go on an indefinite hiatus for the time being, at least until my mind and body adjust to my new work schedule. All other writing projects I may have had are hereby cancelled. As always, I will probably post some brief, informal articles here from time to time, as I have always done. But I don't see myself writing anything research-heavy or complicated in the foreseeable future. This is a very troubling and disheartening time in my life. It feels like I'm putting a well-loved pet to sleep. The creative/silly side of my personality is dying. Maybe it's already dead. I just know that I'm tired all the time now. Tired of mind. Tired of body. Tired of spirit. As Lili Von Shtupp once succinctly put it, "Goddamnit, I'm exhausted."

On the bright side, I discovered a neat little obscure R&B number from the late 1950s, lurking on a compilation I've owned for years. It's called "King of Fools," and it's credited to a singer named Sam Hawkins, who currently does not even merit a Wikipedia entry. Give it a spin.

Let us ponder the riddle that is Orson Bean

Orson Bean admits to having eaten the baloney.

Orson Bean on Match Game.

Orson Bean. It's very possible that this name will mean little to you if you're under 40. Cinephiles may remember him as dotty old Dr. Lester, the lecherous, carrot-juice-drinking boss from 1999's Being John Malkovich. ("My spunk is to you manna from heaven.") He was also the voice of Bilbo Baggins in the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit.

Connoisseurs of TV reruns may recall Orson from his appearances on The Twilight Zone, The Love Boat, or The Facts of Life. He did 146 episodes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman back in the '90s, too, if that's what you're into. (Hey, there's no shame in it. My sister loved that show.)

If you watched Game Show Network back when they showed many of the old panel-style game shows from the 1960s and 1970s, Orson Bean should be a familiar face to you. He logged countless appearances on Match Game, To Tell the Truth, What's My Line, and more. In fact, I think of Orson Bean as a sterling example of a now-dying breed: the all-purpose professional celebrity with no particular specialty.

Bean was an actor of stage and screen as well as a comedian and author, but his real claim to fame was as a "personality." Need a familiar face for your talk or game show? Just call Orson! He possessed numerous traits that made him ideal for television: an impish sense of humor, a vast storehouse of jokes and stories, a winning smile, impeccable diction, and a flair for accents and dialects. The man was born to talk into a microphone.

The Orson Bean discography.

Like most stand-up comics of his generation, Orson Bean put his act down on wax a couple of times for posterity. He released At the Hungry I, recorded at the legendarily-hip San Francisco nightclub, in 1959. A decade later, however, Orson released the album that concerns us today: a collection of songs, poems, and "street jokes" entitled I Ate the Baloney. I first heard the title track, an irreverent religious-themed anecdote set to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel," on The Dr. Demento Show in the 1990s. Just this year, I found the entire LP had been uploaded to Archive.org.

For reasons I cannot adequately explain to you, I have listened to I Ate the Baloney in its entirety at least 20 times in the last few months, almost becoming able to lip sync the jokes as Bean tells them. I just like the sound of his practiced voice, especially when he slips into an Irish brogue. There's a vaudevillian old-fashionedness to the entire affair I find comforting and satisfying.

Since this LP comes to us from the 1960s, Bean can still openly acknowledge ethnicity in ways that would draw tremendous fire today. Take a conceptual bit called "The American Restaurant," in which Bean affects a broad, almost caroonish Chinese accent. One might be tempted to call the bit racist because of this, but in fact, Bean is poking fun at racism and stereotypes in a clever, insightful, and even subversive fashion. The Chinese characters in Bean's story talk about Americans in the bigoted, reductive way we Americans too often talk about the Chinese. It's a classic role reversal, as when the speaker ponders an infamous urban legend about sex. "Not look now," the man says to his giggling buddies. "American girl sit a-next table. Ooh, that's a nice lookin' girl! Built like a bamboo house! I don't know... American girl... I always wonder. I don't think so either. That's old Army story!"

But the track from I Ate the Baloney which has really captured my attention has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. Instead, it's a brief bit of comedic doggerel about the plight of an urban commuter. The poem describes a man's experience aboard the IRT, which is what New Yorkers used to call the subway because it was run by a private operator called the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. I don't have much experience with the IRT, not being a New Yorker, but I do commute by train to and from work each day and can thus sympathize with the hero of Bean's poem. Some of the humor and pathos come from Bean's performance, but I think the words are worthy of study, too. In that spirit, the entire text of the poem is included below:

Last week, I'm ridin' in the IRT,
And this poor slob is sittin' right across from me.
So he's sittin' in the subway, kinda slumped in his seat,
Like a tired old dog, so dead, so beat.
His clothes, his face, everything looks sad,
And I'm thinking what a rotten life he must've had.
So I look in his face, and what do I see?
He looks like he's feelin' sorry for me!
But you don't know the IRT!
The windows are filthy. The lights are dim.
It was my own reflection, and I am him!

On the LP, this actually leads into entire bit about whiskey ads on the New York subways.  But I will leave that one for you to discover on your own. Bean is so convincing in delivering this particular hard-luck story that he elicited actual sympathy from the audience. Periodically throughout the recording, you can hear a tender-hearted woman in the audience say, "Awwww." Incidentally, Orson Bean is still alive at the age of 86, thanks to all that carrot juice. He worked as recently as 2014 in a parody of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman entitled Dr. Quinn, Morphine Woman. More intriguingly, back in 2008, he recorded a delightful little 10-part series of YouTube videos called "The Art of Joke Telling." Here is possibly my favorite of the ten:

Incidentally, that patch on Orson's shirt commemorates the Flying Goose Brew Pub & Grille in New London, NH. Sounds like a nice place.

Homework! Homework! Give me a break!

This dude wears a vest just to study! That's fancy!

Memory's a funny thing. There are now long, long stretches of my life that are little more than a blur in my mind. But, come what may, I will in all likelihood never forget the opening line of a 1981 television commercial for an unsuccessful candy bar.

In the oft-replayed ad, a bespectacled, curly-haired young man sits at his desk, slaving over a stack of books, a pencil clutched in his hand. It must be fairly late, because he is working by lamplight, and the cluttered room is otherwise dark and shadowy. In frustration, unable to cope, the fatigued scholar sets down his pencil, takes off his glasses, and addresses the camera in an anguished fashion: "Homework! Homework! Give me a break!" The voice-of-God announcer then suggests that what the lad needs is a Summit candy bar. A few "candy porn" shots later, the young man takes, eats, and is satisfied.

This little-remembered confectionery was a product of the Mars candy bar company during the early years of the Reagan administration. Essentially Twix with peanuts, the ironically-lowly Summit bar lasted only a few years, including a half-assed 1983 makeover, before being yanked from store shelves.

But the iconic Summit TV commercial survives on YouTube, fortunately. That inimitable opening salvo -- "Homework! Homework! Give me a break!" -- became something of a catchphrase in the Blevins household. We'd say it well into the late 1980s, long after the Summit bar itself vanished from the American scene. The color has badly faded from this print, but the famous lament is intact.

In reviewing the 30-second spot, I realized I had forgotten the commercial's delirious second half, in which a young woman, also a student, finds herself utterly overwhelmed by hormone-crazed male suitors, all of whom accost her in the school hallway to ask her to "the game." She, too, begs to be given "a break," at which point the boys produce -- seemingly from thin air -- a barrage of Summit bars, all of which they point directly at her face. A greedy, ravenous look overtakes our heroine.

The moment fairly drips with sexual suggestion. The screenshot below looks like a behind-the-scenes shot from a porno film in which all the dicks had to be CGI'd in during post-production because the leading lady had a "no dicks near my face" clause in her contract.

And she grew up to be Lady Gaga... so that's interesting.

Thought I'd erase Garfield from this 'Garfield' before 'Garfield Minus Garfield' does it.

A homemade Garfield Minus Garfield.

Just got home yesterday from Indiana, o my brothers and only friends. I was there visiting my sister and her family for the Memorial Day weekend. My dad came down from Michigan, so I got to see him, too. There's not much to do in this portion of Indiana, so we watched many hours of television and consumed mass quantities of starches, sugars, and fats. That helped pass the time. 

We also got out to the movies a couple of times. Finally caught up with The Avengers: Age of Ultron (a solid, if by-the-book superhero flick; a little more self-serious and hence maybe not as fun as the first one) and Mad Max: Fury Road (an expectation-shattering revelation; I may have to see it again before it leaves theaters). 

One of my favorite rituals of these family get-togethers is reading the comics with my niece and nephews. This time, I was able to introduce them to the pleasures of Garfield Minus Garfield, the Dadaist experimental comic which takes normal Garfield dailies and simply removes the title character, thus revealing the fat orange cat's pitiful owner, Jon Arbuckle, as the sad, twitchy lunatic he's always been. We read the original Garfield, too, and I found one that would make a perfect candidate for Garfield Minus Garfield. So before those guys could get their paws on it, I did my own version. You can see it above. Enjoy, and I'll catch you further along down the trail.

UPDATE: Garfield Minus Garfield did, in fact, publish its own version of this strip, several days after I posted mine. But they dropped Jon's third-panel word balloon, which to me makes it less funny. Better that he desperately plead to nobody. Advantage: Joe.

You might be the new Jesus and not even know it

Lookin' good, Mr. J! Lookin' good.

I heard this theory once that you should treat everyone you meet as if he or she were the Messiah. I don't believe in the Messiah, but it's an interesting idea anyway, even if it's hopelessly impractical. And, hey, I'm wrong about a lot of shit. I might be wrong on the "Messiah" thing, too. Maybe another one's just around the corner, waiting to fix everything that's wrong with the world. Think of all the people you encounter on a daily basis. Think, furthermore, of all the people you've ever encountered in your whole life. That fat kid in your third grade glass. The barista who served you coffee yesterday. The homeless guy you pretend not to see on your way to work. Any of these folks could be the Messiah. Imagine if one of them turned out to be the Savior of All Mankind, and you were shitty to them, as if they didn't even matter. Then wouldn't you feel like a dope?

Perfect example: In the train station parking lot today, there was this woman -- Caucasian, late middle-age, dark hair, sort of dressed up, if you're trying to picture her --  who walked in front of my car as I was leaving. Not directly in front, I should point out, but close enough that we could see each other's faces. I slowed down, of course, but the woman must have thought I was still going to run her over because she kept waving at me with a distressed look as if I didn't see her. A guy I'm presuming was her husband was with her, and I'm sure she complained about me to him immediately afterward. ("Harry, did you see that? That guy was a maniac! He almost killed me! Good thing I waved!") In truth, I was burned out at the end of another unsatisfying work week and just wanted this lady to get the fuck out of my way so I could get out of that goddamned parking lot and go home. She got to wherever she was going, and I left, cursing her under my breath because she delayed me getting back to my shitty apartment by five seconds. What if this woman were the Messiah? Maybe she is.

But, then again, maybe I'm the Messiah and just don't know it. Wouldn't that be wild? The real Joe Christ. (Much respect to the late filmmaker who went by that name.) I don't have any magic powers, though, and I haven't as yet been inclined toward any world-saving activities. If I'm the new Jesus, I'm a crappy one. Sorry about that.

A pantry full of hate

This is a picture of clutter, in case you don't know what clutter looks like.

The kitchen in my apartment has a pantry, but I don't cook so I use it as a storage closet instead. Being the lazy, indolent sumbitch that I am, I have allowed this pantry to become laughably, even shamefully cluttered. Recently, I was trying to fill out my 1040 EZ for the benefit of good old Uncle Sam and thus went rummaging through the aforementioned closet in search of a large manila envelope upon which the fateful words "TAX SHIT" are scrawled in Sharpie. It took me a while to find, and so I resolved to finally sort through all the useless stuff in there and throw out or recycle anything I didn't actually use or want anymore. Last weekend, I actually went through with this plan, and it felt kind of good for a while. The pantry is still pretty much a mess, but now at least it's a somewhat more manageable mess.

The reason I bring all this up is that my mind is a lot like that pantry. It's cluttered up with a lot of useless junk. You know what takes up an inordinate amount of room? Grudges. Man, I am the king of grudges. I have grudges going back decades. I'm still mad over shit that happened before I was even in kindergarten. There are slights and injustices I can still remember from every phase of my life, and with only a little effort, I can still dredge up the hurt they caused me at the time and make those incidents seem freshly painful again, as if they just happened yesterday. I'm sure lots of good things have happened to me over the years, but my memories of the bad things are so much more vivid in my mind. Four long decades of birthdays and Christmases blend together into one big, blurry blob of indistinct experience. But if you teased me at recess even once in the third grade, you can bet I still hold onto that memory with a vice-like grip.

If you're one of the very few people reading this, it's likely that you're someone I have known for years. And if you're someone I've known for years, it's almost certain that you have caused me some real (or imagined) grief and that I'm still angry about it. I don't like that about myself. I never meant to become so bitter. It just sort of happened, failure by failure, disappointment by disappointment. I don't know what to do with all this bitterness. It's never done me a bit of good, and yet I can't bear to get rid of it.

Strangers on a train... platform

"So... do you utilize public transportation around here often much?"

Can I tell you about my morning? Don't get your hopes up. The story I'm about to tell you would not even qualify as a story in most people's lives. It barely qualifies as one in mine, but it was something out of the ordinary which happened to me, and I wanted to write it down for posterity's sake. Okay? Here goes. Be forewarned: I'll probably tell you way more than you wanted to know... which I'll assume is nothing. You can skim the first few paragraphs if that helps.

Good night, Lesley

It was her party. Lesley Gore (1946-2015)

"Can you relate to Lesley Gore's music?"
-dialogue from John Waters' Hairspray (1988)

I feel I should say something about Lesley Gore, who passed away today from lung cancer at the age of only 68. It's not a topic to which I have given a great deal of thought, but I suppose it's fair to say that I've been a fan of Ms. Gore for most of my life, from the time when I first started hearing her songs on the radio until today. Due to laziness on my part, I don't claim to be familiar with much of the music she wrote or recorded after that initial burst of hits in the 1960s, but those hit records from the JFK/LBJ era still resonate with me. 

Everyone remembers "It's My Party" and its soundalike sequel, "Judy's Turn to Cry." But don't forget "Maybe I Know," which was covered decades later by They Might Be Giants, the chilly and dramatic "You Don't Own Me," which turned up in John Waters' Hairspray (1988),  and the ridiculously cheerful "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows," which was used to hilarious effect on The Simpsons once and which I semi-jokingly, semi-sincerely named as my "recovery anthem" when I was hospitalized for depression in 2012. I actually listened to that song dozens of times back then. Yes, I could relate to Lesley Gore's music. She had a clean, strong, solid voice and sounded like she really meant everything she said. When she told her boyfriend he didn't "own" her, brother, she wasn't kidding! I like emotional directness in music, and Lesley had it to spare.

If you want to remember Lesley Gore today, please watch her (typically stellar) set from the best concert film ever made, 1965's The T.A.M.I. Show. Study it, and see how female pop singers used to be able to comport themselves. Fifty years later, Lesley's still a great role model. Johnny wasn't good enough for you, honey.

Rod McKuen was a childhood hero of mine... only I didn't know it

Man with a turtleneck: Rod McKuen on the cover of one of his many, many, many albums.

Rod McKuen died this week at the age of 81. He is mostly remembered as the creator of very popular, very corny poetry that was loved by the general public in the 1960s and 1970s but mocked and hated by literary critics. As a songwriter, his tunes were covered by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra to Madonna. But he's best known for Terry Jacks' "Seasons in the Sun," a maudlin but catchy tune about death that occasionally turns up on lists of the worst and most detested hit songs of all time. (Once, on a long car trip, that song came on the radio, and I improvised my own alternate lyrics: "We had joy, we had fun, we had fingers up our bums.")

John Waters made sure to include McKuen's name in his article "Hatchet Piece (101 Things I Hate)." In its obituary, NPR somewhat uncharitably called Rod McKuen "the cheeseburger to poetry's haute cuisine." Clearly, for such a gentle and easygoing guy, McKuen attracted a lot of vitriol. Personally, I don't really care one way or the other about McKuen's hippy dippy poetry. It has had no real effect on my life, and if others have derived comfort from his words, well, more power to 'em. What I learned as an adult, however, is that Rod wrote and recorded two of my favorite songs of all time. And they were on opposite sides of the same 45 RPM record, no less!

I've written about this before, but my real introduction to popular music came through a stack of very worn-out vinyl records my mother had owned as a child. Her own parents had operated some bars and restaurants in northern Michigan, and she got the records from the jukeboxes when her folks were done with them. Those same 45s were eventually passed down to me and my sister. I still have them -- or most of them (kids are tough on records) -- neatly alphabetized in a shoebox in my bedroom closet.

Anyway, one of my favorite platters was a novelty number from 1959 called "The Mummy," credited to "Bob McFadden and Dor." McFadden (1923-2000) was a cartoon voice man. You may know him as Snarf from Thundercats. Dor, naturally, was the backwards-running pseudonym of Rod McKuen. "The Mummy" is a weird damn record -- not quite a song, not exactly a skit. McFadden plays a meek, neurotic mummy ("I was born one-thousand, nine-hundred, and fifty-nine years ago!") who terrifies everyone he meets... until he encounters McKuen, who portrays an unflappable and utterly unimpressed beatnik. I can still recite every word of their strangely low-key conversation. ("Aren't you afraid of me? Aren't you gonna scream?!" "Oh, yeah. Like, help.") In retrospect, this record also serves as a snapshot to late-'50s culture, with references to Dave Brubeck, George Shearing, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and "Kookie, Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb."



The flip side of "The Mummy" is maybe even better. It's called "The Beat Generation," and it's a musical manifesto for beatniks everywhere. Like the A-side, it's written by Rod McKuen and credited to Bob McFadden and Dor, but this time I can't hear McFadden anywhere. It's all Rod, man. I honestly don't know how sincere this song is. For all I know, it's meant as satire, intentionally playing up every negative stereotype about beatniks in order to exploit "square" people's fears about them. But when I was a kid, I took it 100% literally, that's for sure.

When I was four or five, this song seemed very adult to me and more than a little dangerous. Suave, confident McKuen coolly expresses disdain for everything Americans are supposed to want: a wife, a nice house, and a good nine-to-five job. I still don't want any of that stuff either, and maybe this record is to blame for my lack of material success. I certainly listened to "The Beat Generation" enough during my formative years to have it permanently affect my thinking. Give it a listen and make up your own mind.

Nick Cannon escapes from Shawshank

Marriage, madness, and Mariah: a bunny-suited Nick Cannon asks for help. With his eyes.

Look at those eyes.

The marriage of pop superdiva Mariah Carey and (actor? rapper?) public figure Nick Cannon appears to be over. They've filed for the big D after months of living separately.

I know, I know. You're devastated. After all, if the star of Glitter and the guy who stands off to the side of the stage on America's Got Talent can't make it work, what chance do the rest of us have? We should probably just intentionally steer the entire planet directly into the sun right now.

But let us not judge these two exemplars of amour too harshly for shattering our romantic illusions. They're just human, like you and me. Well, Mariah's not. I'm pretty sure she was hatched from some sort of pod deep within the Monsanto Experimental Testing Labs.

But Nick, he's just flesh and blood, the poor dope. He probably got into this Mariah Carey marriage business for all the reasons you'd guess, only to realize he'd just purchased a one-way ticket to hell. I mean, look at this photo of Nick, Mariah, and their two children at Easter. Nick is in a bunny costume, which I can say with 400% certainty was Mariah's idea. Does he look happy? No. No, he does not look happy. He looks like a man who's seriously considering either drinking bleach or throwing himself in front of the path of a Greyhound bus, anything to get out of this situation.

I want you to look deep into Nick Cannon's eyes and try to find the human being in there. 'Cause he's in there, hidden away in that bunny costume, which manages to be somehow even more demoralizing than the one in A Christmas Story. Stare into those eyes, and you'll see why Nick had to get the hell out of Shawshank, even if it meant crawling through a river of unicorn shit.